That looks better from your position, but if your proposal was a better deal for port workers, they would probably be asking for it in negotiations.

The port workers are negotiating based on what is best for their careers, not what would be optimum for society broadly.

Almost everyone does this with their own career - we push for more favorable wages, conditions etc simply because we want them and we believe our value to our employer justifies them.

Rarely does anyone else complain about this. The difference is that union workers do it at scale, and are therefore often more effective than the rest of us. So it seems like they're getting an unfair deal, but there's nothing unfair about it - they're just better negotiators.

I just looked up FRED data on productivity and total compensation (including benefits) and they look roughly in line. Actually, compensation seems to have gone up faster.

To be honest, this comment reads like a political campaign statement, and I’d like less of this on Hacker News.

What if the workers are opposing automation?

> how it would be "better for everyone else." 100% automation of cranes means lost jobs

There is a reason it’s faster, simpler and cheaper to ship stuff via air versus ports in cases where it seems to not make sense. (I recently dealt with this in olive oil and glassware.) The idea that we can run inefficient ports so someone can manually pilot a crane without any cost is ridiculous.

Plenty of furriers lost jobs when we moved to cars. Bloodletters lost jobs when modern medicine was adopted.

I’m not sure jobs should be the priority over progress.

No, it means shifted jobs. There's enormous demand for construction employment right now, they would have no trouble finding other employment.

In the entire history of the world automation has never caused employment reduction, only a shift.

The cost of shipping contributes to the cost of every product we export and import. Treating this as a purely zero-sum transfer between longshoreman and shippers is ignoring all the reasons this is interesting & important.

As a hypothetical example, if there was some new method of transport that bypassed ports entirely at 1/10th the cost, would you support an effort to scuttle it to support longshoreman?

This same issue played out with the introduction of the shipping container; if history had played out differently and we were still manually packing ships I don't think you'd choose that world over what we have today.

Automation helps everyone via lower consumer prices. It’s really basic economic theory that capital would not capture all the gains here.

If you live in neoliberal capitalist country, your wellbeing is tied to the profit of the private company that runs the infrastructure…

If they don’t find things profitable, then they would just not run said infrastructure, disrupting the lives of many people.

This is why strikes make people nervous.

> Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture

Of course it isn’t. To make this construct work in the modern world requires amortising past labour across future automation in a way that almost deifies the first work.

Upvoted because I like and agree with much of your answer, though I'd ask you not to assume my worldview just because I'm asking the question. Growing up, the richest relatives I had were union machinists. I appreciate the role of unions even if I'm not always on their side. I'm asking genuinely because I wonder what the specific pro-dockworker argument is here since I don't know much this particular situation.

My worry would be that by making possibly excessive demands that would further benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of the nation, they may accelerate the demise of their positions altogether. I'm not altogether against this (because I do think would benefit the rest of the nation in the medium term) but like you I also worry about the increased chance of societal collapse if inequality keeps increasing. I'd probably prefer the safer choice of two decently paid new jobs for new workers than one soon-to-be-phased out job at a higher rate. I'm asking so I can understand better the opposite preference.

To be clear, the question was explicitly asking what makes these port workers special to demand this. If it’s just, “we want more money and have the collective power to hold the port hostage”, that’s fine. It’s just not spelled out anywhere what the justification is