The economy dosen't exist to provide jobs, it exists to fulfill consumers' needs. You need to remember that the idea of 40 hour-week middle class job fulfilling one's livelihood was only ever an social abstraction that emerged in the last hundred years or so.

On the long run, increased efficiency in economies is what allows massive surplus vlaue to be created, making alot of luxuries once fit for kings now available for the masses. And so living standards improve and everyone benefits. If one is capable of automating an entire sector away, it also stands to reason that the massive surplus value created would make it trivial to restribute gains to those affected. And so forth for automation.

Maybe you think the corporations and rich will not do even that, that they would rather (somehow bypassing the government) keep all the profits, but profits are only realised so long as there are customers capable of affording such goods. And richer median customers produce much larger profits.

The US still has a big manufacturing sector and it has an unemployment rate of 3.5%. It could definitely absorb a small number of displaced workers.

I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.

> I don’t think this is quite as guaranteed as people think.

It is, actually. People have infinite wants. Productivity increases lead to lower prices in the sector where the productivity increases happened.

Lower prices lead people to spend the difference on something else ("private taxi for my burrito" is the meme example.)

Spending the money on something else creates the other jobs.

This is why we have 150 years of unemployment and labor force participation data, and the peaks and valleys have zero correlation with internal-combustion, electrification, or IT.

Now....are those other jobs ones represented by a 100 year old union that is used to having the entire US economy in stranglehold?

No, probably not. The overall economy gets vastly wealthier.

But, if you are a 50 year old longshoreman, that's small comfort.

>the transition isn’t guaranteed to work

we have disability and unemployment insurance. Why not have automated-away-job-insurance with addition of government money to pay for retraining programs. Everybody would be better off - society gets efficiency of automation, and the workers gets new skills and new jobs. My understanding is that there is shortage of various blue collar jobs in particular in construction, green energy, etc. And in general, i think society would be better off sponsoring in major part, if not in full, any retraining a worker wants to take, like with some minimal conditions, say 2-4 years in new job before eligible for retraining. We do see how constant upskilling (even just staying up-to-date with new frameworks) is valuable for everybody in tech, employees as well as employers.

We've had stagnant incomes for the last 50 years. The fruits of automation are not shared with the workers.

The small minority that keeps a country by the balls is not the unions but the owning class. The 2008 crash that put the whole world in a decade recession is collateral damage.

President needs to send in the national guard to maintain flow, because this is a domestic national security issue. I'm surprised he hasn't done it yet.

(You don't need to censor yourself like that on HN. You can say "balls." Heck, you can say "testicles"!)

I'm reading that right now, and it's incredible the amount of rent seeking that went on. It was a system that wasn't great for anyone except those who got the bribes from people looking to work.

(I also had a good laugh when they described "shape up," or the process of choosing workers from those who assembled for the day. It was horribly corrupt. And, of course, the term is now used as a software planning process.)

> the benefits of the automation goes solely to investors and owners

Totally false. The benefits go to anyone who buys or sells goods that pass through the ports.

It is such a paradox in our society that a shortage of work is a problem! Should we then not relax? After automating a job, the burden of work should lessen on the society as a whole. We should all be resting on laurel leaves, surrounded by our magnificent technology.

They went on strike in 1971 over automation.

The outcome was that the ports were forced to accelerate containerisation and automation in order to cover the labour shortage, and many jobs were then lost.

Honestly, if they think the outcome will be different this time, I’d love to understand their rationale.

> I’m Danish, and, left leaning. Which means I’m more “eat the rich” than what most of you will encounter.

LOL. Yeah right. Come back with your "eat the rich" attitude after actually living in an impoverished country. You'll still want to, but you might actually know how.

This is the nuance I wish more people (and especially the articles reporting this info) brought to the table. Not necessarily something everyone would consider at first blush, but very important contextually in contrast to the "why tf would they never want automation ever?" reaction.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is an entirely throw away bargaining chip.

"Ok, Ok, we will give up on the anti-automation demands but we aren't budging on the wage increase demands!"

>but I struggle to come up with something better

Regulation to properly make sure wages scale to be a living wage, and a proper safety net for those who lose jobs, including retraining support. Or even just capping executive pay based on the lowest wages of the labor they pay.

But I live in fairy tales. Unions are indeed the best of the worst.

I dunno, that seems like a pretty easy challenge to overcome. Workers should be trying to invest in capital too. We've had centuries of experience now, we know that capital tends to win vs labour and the answer to that is that everyone should be trying to sign up as a capitalist.

If the workers had banded together and put their efforts into creating a path to become part-owners of the businesses they worked in (and taken on some of the risk involved in that) they'd have made real progress over the last however long. Instead they put their efforts into fighting for wage raises and have basically achieved nothing except, as showcased today, big demonstrations about how they are making everyone worse off.

There are countless models of how workers could be better off that the unions have not explored. They're horrible institutions that strategically lock workers in to being the losing side of a conflict that didn't need to be fought in the first place.

Precision railroading exists because the government enforces a monpoloy on labor in the rail sector.

It isn’t unless you’re an extremist. It’s one thing to shut down an industry for a few weeks while you bargain and that has alternatives and society can absorb a few weeks, it’s another one to shut off all ports and hope to set off a national recession because it gives you bargaining power. There are limits to everything.

I grew up in a union household. My father was a member of an airline pilots union and my mother was a member of (23 years) and president of (17 years) the teachers union in our town. Unions kept my parent's gainfully employed for decades.

As for "I'm not racist but..." I don't need a wiki link. I'm black and well aware of that kind of idiocy. This is not that. Nice try though.

There's a ton of safety issues that can arise with driverless freight trains.

If they get to keep their jobs, then why would they give a shit whether they look like “fucking idiots” or not?

Yeah those stupid dumb dumbs, trying to keep their jobs. Don't they know that the cost saving will go right into someone's third yacht? These driverless trains are very important!

And maybe, if we all bend over hard enough, ticket prices might even go down a cent or two! Those silly people who want to eat, they don't see the big picture like me!

> What problems are you referring to, specifically?

at the end of the day, unions are still ran by people. So it can be corrupted from the inside or out. They could raise dues on a whim and spend it recklessly instead of saving up for a strike or for other resources needed to advertise.

And union means that non-union (aka new workers to the industry like graduates or people making a switch to a new career) have another layer of beauracracy to go through. Beauracracy with their own whims. Elevator workers pay very well thanks to union, but it also basically means you wont be getting into that industry without knowing someone. So, double the nepotism needed.

Then the last ambivalent argument is that unions can indeed hold back technological progress. It's a hard issue to talk about because that's the exact thing opponents will argue when unions strike, but in some industries the workers have the biggest incentive not to use the most efficient means of work. Especially for businesses that can have slow times or simply run out of work to do. Basically your first point.

the second way is ideal, but we've seen over the decades that efficiency ever rewards the workers. We're something like over twice as efficient as workers 50 years ago, but our buying power has gotten worse, and we work more hours. Companies has shown we can't trust them to achieve that Jetson Utopia of doing an hour of work a day at efficiencies of entire 20th century factories as an individual. Our reward is just to manage 100 factories instead.

Exactly how is the economy going to function if 20% of people can't afford anything if they have no way to trade for goods and services?

no, the workers will start to wonder why a small group of people who do barely any work are sucking up all the profit.

There's other options. For example, the automation could open up other job opportunities. And it could get rid of the job completely. This is a problem we've faced for hundreds of years (if not longer).

> What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs?

We wind up having other things for them to do, the exact same as we always have, when we've faced this exact problem in the past.

This is a really out of touch answer akin to how globalists and economists argued for off-shoring because “competitve advantage.” The reality is far more nuanced. For example, one could argue wage growth stagnated in the US and instead we had tremendous growth in developing countries. For many Americans, globalization was a tax that further exacerbated income inequality. Congratulations: this is Pareto optimal! Some company’s bottom line is improving, some shareholder is profiting, and wages stagnant—so society is “better off as a whole” definitionally… but is it really?

The same can be said about unions and market power. Sure deadweight loss exists. Someone will absorb the cost, but it’s not necessarily “the people”.

Companies cannot pass costs onto consumers as easily as economists claim, so often profits take the brunt of the deadweight loss. Think of it this way: if companies could just pass on the cost, why go through the expense of fighting the union when they could do just that?

Mind you, I’m talking about unions in general: it’s nuanced. I honestly don’t know enough about the specific demands here to have an opinion, but I encourage everyone to listen to an interview with the longshoremen.

> Unions by definition are exercising market power to withhold labor and force a higher than market price on said labor. Thus, they are causing dead weight loss to society and making everyone worse off in the base case.

Well, everyone except the people who work for money.

> Then one has to ask themselves in which situations could a union pushing up labor prices make things better?

In the situation where people get paid that higher labor price, those people are better off.

I'm not convinced the first principals are so clear. Economics research in the last 30 years has often examined market distortion due to incomplete information (especially information asymmetry) in the marketplace. Given the tendency to hide salary data, labour markets have very incomplete information. It's like having a stockmarket where the stock prices are secret.

In a consumer economy such as the US such inefficiencies are a economic benefit because gains of labor tend to increase the velocity of money in ways gains from capital do not.

Banning slavery caused dead-weight loss. Market clearing price for commodified labor is minimal sustinence.

>force a higher than market price on said labor. Thus, they are causing dead weight loss to society and making everyone worse off in the base case.

This seems to make an optimistic implication that "market price" is 1) reasonable and 2) realistic. Of course a business wants skilled labor to be paid peanuts to do 168 hours of highly profitable labor a week. But there's multiple layers of barriers here that stop that reality.

For the former, the rising cost of living everywhere is why strikes are starting to happen more frequently now. If you cannot pay your expenses while giving half your waking hours to a job, you either ask for more money or leave. that CoL may or may not be that Companie's fault, but what was reasonable in 2019 is not reasonable in 2024. Yet compensation has fallen far under inflation, let alone what is "reasonable" to survive now.

unions have flaws, but they are made to make sure workers are "reasonably" compensated and treated well. That's how they make things better.

>when one looks at the contracts being offered it's really hard to say labour prices are being pushed below market clearing rate

What are these contracts, and are they reasonable by 2024 standards?

Are high profits by corporations a dead weight loss for the rest of us?

> making everyone worse off in the base case.

Everyone else. That is the point. But only in a theoretical sense.

The corporations might benefit from stability in the workforce and the owners might benefit from the workers being able to have the faintest possibility to keep the manager class in check.

in the early 1900s this is exactly the argument used by wealthy business owners who didn't want to invest in safety equipment or take care of the workers who died or were crippled.

It's not wrong, it just assumes that business owners are behaving well.

We all know there's a massive accumulation of capital in the hand of a tiny few.

That indisputable, right? You don't disagree with that statement?

Unless you're one of those billionaires, attacking one of the few mechanisms for correcting that imbalance seems counter-productive to sanely discussing this.

A mechanism that programmes are bizarrely hostile to, even though their work is one of the nost exploited.

> Take a drive through Gary, Indiana or Flint, Michigan or a thousand other towns throughout the country that were supporting thriving, middle-class communities and are now burnt-out, depopulated husks.

It is Revisionism to blame the fall of Flint/Detroit on NAFTA.

{The South / union benefits, Saudi Arabia / the Oil Crisis, The Civil Rights Act / The Southern Strategy} destroyed Detroit, not NAFTA. Detroit’s population peaked in the late 1960s, but NAFTA/WTO didn’t start until late 1990s.

The 1960s was an amazing time to be an auto worker in that area, but those companies became uncompetitive when oil got expensive and union labor became a liability in a time when the entire US auto industry needed to compete with tiny Japan and Europe exports moving up the value chain. Also, auto companies figured out it was far cheaper to move to the old slave states than to keep paying defined benefits plans to Rust Belt workers.

Self-inflicted wound by unions. They get too focused on self-interested negotiations and can’t see when innovation is ready to disrupt the current market leaders.

> Many would argue otherwise. In reality, the result ends up being a massive reduction in the number of longshoremen / dock workers as they are replaced with robots.

I’ll bite. How long does it take to automate all of the ports on the US East Coast? Most likely 10-30 years, in which time all of the current union members will be retired.

Unions care too much about the small possibility of losing some jobs quicker than expected and not enough about the entire country becoming uncompetitive because they are the only people who can unlock high productivity between countries.

>Except the longshoremen, the dock workers, their families, the businesses around the docks and the communities where the (now unemployed) dock workers and their families live.

Exactly. This is why container ships should be banned, as well as any containerized shipping. We need to go back to using stevedores to load and unload all cargo on ships by hand, even though this results in a large fraction of it getting broken or damaged and takes far, far longer to complete. This will employ far more people in shipping.

After that, we need to ban transportation of cargo by tractor-trailer, and require cargo to only be transported by horse and carriage, and also paddlewheel riverboat. This will revive the industries around these things that employed countless people.

I’m not sure how to interpret this:

> I tend to see it as ruling class propaganda in action, when a fellow poor or middle class person expresses their wish to improve their situation or else they won’t work, the shaming and blaming start immediately.

I’m fine with supporting unions and their collective bargaining to the extent it benefits groups larger than just the union. If the negotiations benefit the port, the country/economy, or improve the experience of many consumers downstream of the port, I’ll support their efforts.

However, I see the longshoremen claiming to want 0 automation. I see them trying to negotiate a contract now to get some profit sharing from a once-in-a-century event which led to some of the ports/shipping companies charging massive premiums (those premiums are gone now, BTW). I’m not inclined to support a union if the opening bids for negotiations do not appear to help anyone outside of the union. I look at the massive US spending bills which were designed to improve US infrastructure but we can’t get modern ports because one group of self-interested people figured out how to use massive leverage at a specific time.

And I do care who wins the next election. I don’t expect a union to ignore some of their best leverage just because there is a significant election a month away, but I just might hold it against those union members if I perceive it tilts the election away from my preferred candidate.

Longshoremen aren't little guys sticking it to the big man. They're goons keeping US logistics in the 1950s to protect their hereditary mafia like jobs. They're an archetypal example of unions gone wrong, and gangsters seizing control of unions.

They aren't repeating an axiom, they're literally talking about port automation. We already know port automation increases throughput and efficiency.

Automation increases throughput in the same way you no longer have to wait for the gas station attendant to pump your gas. Large stations with 16+ pumps don’t need to hire several attendants.

Automation can lower costs. No tall building needs to hire a dedicated elevator driver these days. If a job is make-work, then I’m fine with it being automated away.

No child wakes up and dreams of being a barcode scanning drone for a living. We need some people to work transactions at retail shops, but I’m completely capable of using self-checkout and just as fast as professional checkers.

Maybe apply your axion heterodox thinking to your own ideas before you ask others to undo it with theirs.

> Yep, it looks like it'll help Trump get elected, and he'll probably do exactly the same thing with these union workers that Reagan did when the air traffic controllers went on strike (he fired them all).

Reagan fired federal employees. Are the striking dockworkers employees of the US federal government?

Trump is notoriously transactional. If the unions continue to play ball, he might apply leverage in their favor.

I’m sorry - without looking at the Feds graphs, are you saying that most workers, he’ll most HNers have had a pay rise of over 30% in the past five years ?

If more than 1 in 10 of HNers on this thread have had annual pay rises of 5% each year every year since 2019 Inwill eat my hat

> For context, the USMX countered with 50% over 6 years which still sounds high to my ears, having only received 5, 5, and 3% in the years prior.

This is fully dependent on historical numbers. What I’ve learned about following the Boeing strike is that Boeing’s offers also looked very high. However, news came out that the workers had received almost no raises for far longer and that the offer doesn’t even bring the workers to match COL adjustments during those prior years. I would tread very carefully with reading the news around unions because media outlets will latch onto these big numbers because it catches audience’s eyes. Good reporting and adding context is work that modern media outlets will not do.

>countered with 50% over 6 years which still sounds high to my ears, having only received 5, 5, and 3% in the years prior.

Sounds good to the ear, then you do the math and it turns into 2% raises every year. Probably not even keeping up with inflation for the 2020's. And Assuming they don't try to lay off a lot of that union somehow in those 6 years.

But I get what you're saying about crabs in a bucket. This would all be low balls for tech, but dreams for many other workers.

It's no wonder people fight the automation - there is no support to help them upskill or retrain. Although they are fighting a force that nobody has successfully stopped, it makes sense why they would do this when the response to "we don't want automation because it threatens our livelihoods" is "get that automation in place ASAP so we can get these people out of here".

Accordingly, it’s a great idea to strike before this becomes a viable option.

Yeah... it's a pretty strong signal to send to the company owners. It's a direct threat to the company's ability to compete and therefore survive in exchange for maximum personal benefits. I guess it's probably mutual and the company squeezed them for maximum profit too but man.. This is not a fight that can be won unless the entire world stagnates at the current technological level forever.

Why would this be a good idea? I don't mean in the narrow sense of our current society etc. etc. but in general should't people have to contribute to society to get resources from society? this seems so anti social

I don't mind. But that discussion doesn't even seem to really be fancied as of now.

Rather have more of that before talking about justifying the end of an entire labor sector.

> Instead of giving people makework

Who suggested that?

> we could move towards divorcing "livelihood" from "employment".

Why would we do that?

I think employment security is one such measure. If employers have to retrain rather than replace, that would help. Some of the value from effectivization is then turned into training. And striking for better job security would make a lot more sense than striking in protest of automation.

In this case, a lot of the value will be shared to society via lower prices of the products passing through the port. Another of course would be higher corporate taxes.

They're in for a rude awakening to how important the presidential election is when their actions get Trump elected and he just fires them all like Reagan did, or calls in the national guard.

The president isn't the boss of the ports. What "pressure" can he apply?

Really? Seems to me that economic disruption under Biden would hurt Harris. Obviously the union wants Harris over Trump. They could very well tip the election against themselves.

The only leverage the election gives them is against Biden, but they're not negotiating with Biden.

There have been a few dock strikes since his term started, and I don’t think he has ever used this power.

unions want to shut down automation because there's never been talks about how to make sure the replaced labor moves on properly after they are fired. I wouldn't vy for automation without some very specific stipulations on retraining at the minimum. Companies long since broke that social contract, so extremes need to be countered with extremes.

It should be ~40/hr for East Coast, but will easily hit six figures for senior positions or with plenty of OT. The numbers OP is citing are probably about right for West Coast dockworkers from the numbers I've seen. IIUC, part of the reason for the striking is due to that disparity between east and west.

You're both right. Base salary is around 20-40. Overtime work can put it well into the 6 figures, though.

So I wonder if the wages will also help relieve their hours. people making 200k must be doing 70 hours on average.

I’ve met a dozen or so longshoremen and I would not classify the majority as “skilled workers”. Maybe 2-3.

It's not a negotiation tactic. They really want the automation gone. It also came up in negotiations here in Seattle.

> You're next. Enjoy the breadline.

This isn’t any different than stable boys demanding auto sales be banned. Get a different job. Progress has replaced stupid and/or repetitive work forever.

No, but people here can and will be the next Steve Wozniak, and that's good for society. Folks with lots of constructive (i.e. the opposite of critical) thinking tend to be extremely economically productive, and tend to earn a lot.

Luddites will be left in the dustbin of history where they belong. We don't mourn after the dead horse-back carriage and telegraph unions, and we shouldn't mourn for a dead longshoreman union.

> This is a harbinger for a world where skilled workers can be replaced by amoral, skilled automatons.

And?

labor is being abused by the capitalists - isn't it perfect that labor can be replaced by robots instead of being abused by the capitalists?

> Tax the rich, redistribute the wealth.

Most lottery winners end up broke, and in a worse place than where they started. How would this be any different? Behaviors have to change. Throwing money at people won’t change their behaviors. They also won’t be very careful with how they spend/save free money.

Didn’t we see this play out during the pandemic stimulus? People got free money and spent it immediately, and then some. Stock prices went up for these companies with the healthy sales, making the rich richer, and the people went into more debt, because they spent more than they got. I’m sure there are exceptions, but that seemed to be the overall trend.

It seems the incentives need to change for companies, where the stock price or profit isn’t the only bottom line they need to care about. Where pulling the levers of increased wages or lower prices, at the expense of raw profits, help this new bottom line.

Leaving everyone without money is ultimately bad for business, because there is no one to sell to. The credit card industry is the only reason companies have gotten away with it so far, but I have to image that house will eventually collapse under its own weight.