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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It

This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....

There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?

We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?

As a guy who would prefer to live in a stable republic, it drives me up the wall that there's anyone with the power to try this kind of thing in an election season. That it happens to be my candidate benefitting doesn't make it drive up my blood pressure any less, not unlike all these people dying without water and power from the hurricane.

The operators caved.

A 62% raise over six years. That’s an 8.37% raise every year.

I can’t fucking believe it. How do the port operators just cave like that? It’s like we’re all sick of living in a wealthy country or something.

Honestly, the only thing I can come up with is that Mr. Daggett's extortionist rhetoric was real and valid. USMC must've concluded that even a brief strike would've been catastrophic.

But what about the 'no automation' thing? It would be cheaper to pay them all 620% more until the day they died than to agree not to automate

"Among key issues that remain unresolved is automation that workers say will lead to job losses." from [Reuters] (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ship-queue-grows-us-ports-dockworker-strike-enters-third-day-2024-10-03/). Which I suppose was predictable, no way operators were going to lock away that growth option, human perf can only scale so well by adding workers. It seems be only a candidate agreement, though?

Once the automation happens their bargaining power is gone. The now retiring boomer dock workers also want to pass on their jobs to their sons and nephews. Unions always oppose automation and labor saving technologies. It erodes their bargaining power in this one industry they control, even as it raises wages for workers more generally, but they only care about the rents they can extract from the docks, something automation kills.

Articles: Reuters, AP

The tentative agreement is for a wage hike of around 62% over six years, Reuters was told by two sources familiar with the matter, including a worker on the picket line who heard the announcement. That would raise average wages from $39 an hour to about $63 an hour over the life of the contract.

The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) workers union had been seeking a 77% raise while the employer group—United States Maritime Alliance (USMX)—had previously raised its offer to a nearly 50% hike.

The mob is the mob is the mob (etc). Breaking it takes genuine guts as a politician, either out of actual civic spirit or a ruthless desire for self promotion as a prosecutor, cop or politician (and of course the lines there are very much blurred). Otherwise nobody wants to live a life of fear (and, even if murder is nowadays pretty rare, endless harassment, property crime, low level threats and stress for yourself and your family is still common).

Really? No one's made the standard case against unions?

(I've been too lazy to actually make an account here for three years, though I participated occasionally in the old place. This, finally, has pushed me over the edge.)

Say you're an autoworker in a nation that doesn't participate in trade (or that the labor lobby has persuaded to engage in sufficient protectionism the rest of the world can't possibly compete). Would you rather the auto industry be unionized? In principle, yes. (In practice, unions are so dysfunctional the answer might well be no, but let's put that aside and assume for the moment the union will genuinely work towards your interests.)

It'll make the industry objectively less efficient:

  • The union will torpedo labor-saving innovations
  • Collective bargaining makes it much harder for employers to remove poor performers or reward high performers. At best they'll be permitted to act on irrelevant or gameable metrics, like seniority or overtime hours
    • As a result, there's very little incentive for any employee to do more than the minimum
  • Strikes obviously reduce productivity, and negotiations waste everyone's time and attention
  • Someone's gotta pay the union organizers their six or seven figure salaries. Stapling a whole second bureaucracy onto a company isn't exactly cheap

These factors aren't transfers from the greedy capitalists to the deserving workers, they're just lighting money on fire to bully the capitalists into making those transfers. But so what? It's not coming out of your pocket. You'll make higher wages with much better job security. You can just slack off and collect a better wage than when you were working your ass off! Sure, cars are a lot more expensive, but you're only going to spend a small portion of your salary on cars, so you still come out ahead.

So far so good, right? In fact, it's so good that the factory workers want in on the action, and they unionize. Then the farmhands, and the janitors, and the retail workers, and the accountants, and... Soon enough every industry in your nation has unionized. And the funny thing about workers and consumers is they're actually the same people, depending on the good or service in question. It's easy to see that you're in fact worse off now than you were when there were no unions: all that money you lit on fire has to come from somewhere, and the only people putting money into this whole arrangement are the customers.

But at least the capitalists are mad too?

Unions are government-backed cartels. That's not, like, an insult, it's just factually what they are. (It's also an insult.) I'm baffled how people who are eager to point out the problems corporate monopolies pose (most often with a very generous definition of monopoly) don't see that unions are bad in exactly the same ways and much worse in others. (Monopolies actually don't have to burn that much money to maximize their profits.)

Uncharitably, it's tempting to say they just care more about hurting the capitalists than helping the workers, or that they're happy to defect in full knowledge they're taking advantage of our insane laws on the subject to rent seek. Charitably... I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable explanation than ignorance, which isn't very charitable. I suppose Democrats cynically supporting them as a source of partisan advantage might be more charitable, provided you allow they think their partisan advantage will be good for the country?

(As far as 'fairness' is concerned: things are worth what you can sell them for. This isn't some special standard invented to screw over workers, it's how literally everything else is valued. And note: that's the marginal value, not the average value of the whole class of the product. You can see this easily by observing that food is pretty cheap despite the value of food as a class being effectively infinite for everyone. Collective bargaining is no more 'fair' than Nestle buying up all the water rights and charging you every cent you have for privilege of not dying of dehydration.)

Now, I'm not saying unions should be banned. There are... vaguely union-shaped things that actually work pretty well in some circumstances, like worker co-ops or law firm partnerships. (After all, these are examples of workers organizing and bargaining as a collective, right?) Trying to draw up definitions that capture the necessary subtleties wouldn't be easy, and I have no faith in the legislature's ability to do so. They're currently protecting them, so I think that's plenty fair.

Fortunately, I don't think that's necessary. Just strip their ridiculous legal protections and businesses will make their own judgments, hiring law firms that provide genuine value while firing rent seekers. In this particular case more work might be necessary, but organized crime is a solved problem.

Story of America etc.

Pretty sure this is being intentionally amplified as ammo by corporations to levy the body politic against unions. At the same time, as someone technically working in this field, Daggett and all his ilk are scum of the worst kind and have single-handedly set back American productivity for decades. The state of American ports are a joke, liners would rather offload in Canada and then have that stuff trucked through the border than wait in line at an American port.

In an ideal world there'd be a compromise between labor protection and wealth extraction, but that seems increasingly impossible. I have no doubt that the union will win their negotiation, because there's no alternative right now and upgrading American ports would be a multi-year project, maybe even multi-decade given the speed at which people like to litigate, protest and gum up the works. So everything gets worse for everybody.

At the same time, Daggett is not an idiot. He sees what's happening to ports globally and knows that his days are, although extended by the unwillingness of the port industry to embrace change in any form whatsoever, numbered. He is a rational actor who doesn't want his gravy train to stop.

US ports are actually some of the least efficient in the world because of this point-blank refusal to adopt automation, IIRC they were next to Tanzania on the leaderboard. China and Japan are far ahead.

However, we do need to consider a balance between automation and human labour renumeration and leverage. I doubt any of us have worked in a port. Few of us are professional artists or actors, I suspect. I imagine many here would be much more sympathetic to extremely highly-paid software engineering or finance jobs getting axed and replaced by AI.

It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation. But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society. Some level of working-class unity (interpreted broadly to mean all who derive most of their earning from their wage) may be appropriate here. What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?

There was a Liu Cixin short story about an Ancap civilization enforced by AI NAP killbots where one capitalist ended up owning all the parks, all the water and air after winning a completely fair free-market competition. Everyone else was confined to desolate hive cities, rasping away in filthy reprocessed air until their machines failed, unable to step a few metres away and enjoy the beautiful landscape. It is all private property. I am a NVIDIA shareholder and feel somewhat insulated by all of this... but many are not. Who is to say that someone or something won't decide 'oh these little people who bought shares pre-singularity didn't really contribute, off to penury with them! Print out another billion clones of us!'? We need leverage to negotiate and getting into a habit of discarding leverage may not be helpful, despite obvious good reasons to do so.

I imagine many here would be much more sympathetic to extremely highly-paid software engineering or finance jobs getting axed and replaced by AI.

Meanwhile I'm over here like "give me the nuclear codes"

At that point we might as well full moldbug and pay those workers as much to hand-carve stone into beautiful statues while AI runs the roboport by itself.

Who is to say that someone or something won't decide 'oh these little people who bought shares pre-singularity didn't really contribute'

I agree, but I think it's scarier than that. I don't think anyone will have to decide or coordinate to get rid of the non-contributors, they'll just be out-competed. It won't be one capitalist owning all the resources, it'll be the entirety of productive civilization, just like it is today.

It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation.

Good.

But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society.

Good.

Productivity is the source of wealth. Holding productivity back in pursuit of rents is how you get extended (ie. century long) periods of economic stagnation.

What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?

What does happen when they automate all the farm work? Where will we go?

-- Farm laborer, 1860, when 70% of the population worked in agriculture.

Productivity is the source of wealth. What happens when we, individual human beings without exceptional skills (and eventually them too), are no longer productive in any job? It's going to happen sooner or later, likely sooner.

When we are no longer productive, all we have are legal/moral claims to wealth that is fundamentally controlled by others. That's a precarious position to be in!

Competing states are absolutely advantaged by higher productivity but you and I aren't states or economies or large firms.

What happens when we, individual human beings without exceptional skills (and eventually them too), are no longer productive in any job?

I suggest you read about the microeconomic term "comparative advantage".

I suggest you read about the microeconomic term "comparative advantage".

Right back at you.

I hate it when people brandish "comparative advantage" as a talisman against the idea of technological unemployment, illustrating that they fail to understand it. Ricardo, the very economist who originally coined the term "comparative advantage" recognized that technological unemployment was still possible, even likely, despite it.

"Comparative advantage" says that the value of an individual's labor will never fall to zero, and that they will still be better off specializing in something, and trading the products of that specialty for the things they don't specialize in, than if they try to be fully self-sufficient. It does not at all guarantee that the maximum value of an individual's labor, when they specialize in their comparative advantage, cannot fall below their cost of living. Indeed, there are some people alive right now, among the most severely disabled, whose labor is worth less than what it costs to keep them alive. There's nothing in "comparative advantage" that prevents large portions of the population from joining them.

I'd point to this quote from economist Karl Smith back in 2012:

My longer thesis is that the rising return to unskilled labor is a function of industrialization and that industrialization is unique in this. The wage rate on unskilled labor never benefited before and its not immediately clear that it will ever benefit again.

This is because rents always accrue to the scarce factors of production. Industrialization meant that the only thing we were short on were “control systems” everything else in the production process was effectively cheap.

However, any mentally healthy human being is a decent control system. So, this meant huge returns to being a human. It also meant collapsing returns to being a horse. Though, people think of this as a difference in kind, I urge you not to. Horses are not so different than you and I.

As it so happened the wage rate for horses fell below sustenance and they died off. There is simply no basic reason this cannot happen to humans, save for the fact that other humans will enact policies to stop it. The market itself will not differentiate.

See also Smith in Forbes here. I can't find the specific passage at the moment, but I remember Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms also making a similar comparison to what happened to horses as an example of what could await most of us.

While human wants may be infinite, jobs depend on humans being able to meaningfully contribute to the production of those wants. Humans are finite, and thus, I would argue that our capacities are finite, and thus, the number of ways we can meaningly contribute to the production of goods and services is ultimately also finite. I'll point to Kevin Kohler's Substack post here:

So, are we destined to eventually follow the path of the horse in the economy? Daron Acemoglu & Pascal Restrepo (2018) argue that “the difference between human labor and horses is that humans have a comparative advantage in new and more complex tasks. Horses did not. If this comparative advantage is significant and the creation of new tasks continues, employment and the labor share can remain stable in the long run even in the face of rapid automation.” In other words, the high human general intelligence allows us to be more adaptive and shift to new tasks as the automation of more established tasks rolls forward.

The economists Anton Korinek & Donghyun Suh (2024) have created a model specifically considering why humans might run out of new tasks in the face of AGI and what would happen to wages in such a scenario. Their basic approach is that all possible tasks that could be performed by humans are ordered in terms of computational complexity and as digital computation expands more and more tasks can be automated moving the automation frontier from left to right. This is essentially a restatement of Moravec’s metaphorical landscape of human competences and automation (see figure below). In this metaphor the peaks reflect the most complex human competences, whereas AI automation is represented as a rising tide that continuously moves the shore line up.

…

If the complexity of economic tasks performed by humans is bounded (in other words, if there is no infinitely high mountain in Moravec’s landscape of human competences), automation will eventually cover all tasks, leading to complete automation. In the short term, automation increases productivity and boosts wages for non-automated tasks. In the long term, humans run out of tasks at which they can outperform machines and the labor share of income collapses fairly steeply as we approach full automation.

…

My judgement is that it’s likely that AI will eventually be able to outperform humans even on tasks with unbounded complexity and irreducible uncertainty. First, in some domains the ability of AI to perform complex tasks can already not be matched by humans. No human can filter mails or social media posts based on 10’000-dimensional decision boundaries. Second, the exponential growth of parameters in artificial neural networks means that, given enough training data and compute, AI can represent an exponentially growing amount of complexity, whereas our biological neural networks have fairly fixed upper limits.

…

If, at some point in the future, AGI can work at or below the cost of human labor and masters the meta-ability to learn novel tasks at least as quick and as well as humans, we have permanently lost the reskilling race. Then, new tasks can be automated as quickly as they are created.

And what this leaves out, is that human capacities are not only finite, but unequal; some of us will "run out" of ways to meaningfully contribute — again, the value of contributing will never hit zero, but it can fall below subsistence — before others. (As a disabled individual surviving by parasitizing of hard-working taxpayers via the public dole, this is quite an acute point for me.)

Ok, let's work through this. Let's actually start here:

Indeed, there are some people alive right now, among the most severely disabled, whose labor is worth less than what it costs to keep them alive.

I agree that there are, and have always been, severely disabled people who are simply unable to support themselves.

"Comparative advantage" says that the value of an individual's labor will never fall to zero, and that they will still be better off specializing in something, and trading the products of that specialty for the things they don't specialize in, than if they try to be fully self-sufficient.

Here, you acknowledge, but skip right over something key. You acknowledge that being fully self-sufficient is a lower bound. That is, excepting the severely disabled, the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history. Comparative advantage means that you will be better off than being self-sufficient, by your own acknowledgement.

It does not at all guarantee that the maximum value of an individual's labor, when they specialize in their comparative advantage, cannot fall below their cost of living.

But here is where you contradict yourself. You just said that they will be better off than being self-sufficient. That is, better off than their cost of living.

humans are horses

Humans are not horses. They're still not horses. This is literally a meme on the badecon subreddit, for good reason. Humans have agency, can understand (or at least act as if they understand) opportunity cost and comparative advantage. Like, the primary things under discussion here are a major reason why humans are not horses. Horses are more like hammers than they are humans.

Humans are finite, and thus, I would argue that our capacities are finite, and thus, the number of ways we can meaningly contribute to the production of goods and services is ultimately also finite.

Sure. Irrelevant, but sure.

automation will eventually cover all tasks, leading to complete automation

You're telling me that delivering me an even better standard of living than I currently have is going to be fully automated? And the marginal cost of such automation is going to be basically zero? (At the very least, lower than the cost of convincing someone to switch from their life of abundance and leisure to helping out.) Huh. Sounds pretty nice.

Like, what is even your model here? A magic robot that can provide all your food, shelter, luxury desires, etc., it costs how much? Why does it cost that much? Who is being paid when one is purchased? It must be obscenely cheap to beat out how cheap those things would be otherwise. $10? $100?

some of us will "run out" of ways to meaningfully contribute — again, the value of contributing will never hit zero, but it can fall below subsistence

Nah, you already agreed that subsistence is a lower bound for anyone who is not severely disabled.

Here, you acknowledge, but skip right over something key. You acknowledge that being fully self-sufficient is a lower bound. That is, excepting the severely disabled, the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history.

He said:

than if they try to be fully self-sufficient.

To try is not to be.

Right in that first block quote is:

That is, excepting the severely disabled, the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history.

More comments

I don't know if I'm missing something, but I occasionally harp about how even in an opyimistic scenario, comparative advantage is not looking like Rats expect it to pan out. It's not going to be automating away the drudgery so we can devote ourselves to artistic and intellectual pursuits, if anything it's shaping up to be automating away artistic and intellectual pursuits, so we can artisinally mine quartz for the Quartz God.

Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances that, quite frankly, simply do not exist in the real world; perfect interchangability of goods produced, infinitely elastic consumer demand for the goods in question, no risk in sudden changes in demand, and limited parties.

Hypothetically arguing that because America can produce wheat, and Japan can produce cars, so who cares if the Detroit auto industry collapses because "Comparative Advantage baby!" ignores that Detroit can't just immediately shift to production of wheat;even if they could, what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers; what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently (and these all just barely scratch the surface of the actual problems with Comparative Advantage)

Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances

Nah, there's plenty of work that extends the concept to much more robust circumstances. And most of the time, when they're talking about limitations, it's like, "Yeah, gains from trade are still obviously positive and a major factor, but it's a bit trickier to make mathematically-precise statements that also work perfectly for predicting observational data, since there are all sorts of things like trade barriers and other refinements." This is throwing out all intuition gained for some strained belief that some fourth-order term that is mathematically-difficult to solve in closed form is going to actually magically reverse the sign of the result.

immediately

A claim literally no one has ever made.

what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers

Good news! We went from a world where some 90+% of people were employed as farmers to a world where ChatGPT tells me that the global figure is about 28%, but regions that are hardest hit by comparative advantage are down to 1-2%. I'm sure I would hate to live in one of those areas where it's down that low; those places probably suck from all the unemployment, starvation, etc.

what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently

That's literally the question of comparative advantage. Are you just worried about going beyond the two-country model in Econ 101? I'm pretty sure that even in Econ 301, they do multi-country models.

It has yet to happen anywhere, any time. There's always something else for people to do.

Competing states are absolutely advantaged by higher productivity but you and I aren't states or economies or large firms.

No, but we are advantaged by higher productivity, too. The 'golden age' of the post-war boom was possible because of higher than usual productivity growth from the 1920s through the 1970s.

People benefit from being wealthier. Higher productivity makes us wealthier. It's pretty straightforward.

I agree that it is bad for ports to be grossly inefficient. These dock workers probably do need to lose their sinecures. But we need a more sophisticated position than 'put it off till tomorrow' or 'make them humiliate themselves providing pointless services (Ubereats and 20 different fast food outlets) to the shrinking middle-class' or 'have them fill out some paperwork and pretend to be disabled'.

Higher productivity doesn't make everyone wealthier automatically, it just produces wealth. That wealth need not be distributed, it might just get turned into another 24/hour automated port, a factory with a few engineers overseeing the machinery, dividends, raising house prices another 20%. No law says that wages must keep pace with productivity.

There absolutely is such a law. Even in high theory, the situations where wages != Marginal labor product are situations of monopoly/monopsony, which are fought by breaking up the monopoly/monopsony. What do you think the proper word for a union with a chokehold on a service with an inelastic supply is? If you guessed monopoly, you'd be correct.

And it's funny you would bring up housing costs, which is an industry where construction productivity has been stagnant for most of a century and where severe supply restrictions are the underlying cause of price increases. This is another situation where the entrenched, rent-seeking interests need to be broken and the market allowed to function again, just like with the ports.

Breaking this union would be an unmitigated good for the country.

I don't see a law saying that wages must keep pace with productivity:

"2. This means that highly productive workers are highly paid, and less productive workers are less highly paid."

There is a distinction between what I said (where productivity might have nothing to do with the workers personally) and what the statement in your link says. In a world of high automation, one could easily argue that all workers are less productive and deserve much lower wages. Or we could imagine two countries. One where workers get 50% higher wages from productivity rising 100% and one where 20%, that could fulfill what I said and what 2. says. We have observed a general trend in the last 50 years where productivity rises much faster than wages rise: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Housing is indeed restricted by vested interests but it's just one example of an asset that could be bid up by increasing wealth. They could do it to shares or land as well. Pure market competition is not desirable in a situation where power and production is wildly, massively unequal. I am not going to be able to compete with a 200 IQ robot working 24/7 at $0.10 per hour. We have a mixed market economy to balance these competing interests. Now I don't want some govt planning board controlling automation and getting snookered by vested interests but I do want some kind of power/capital redistribution that preserves incentives for innovation without immiserating 90%+ of the population.

And I think the best chance we have of that is by not totally and unflinchingly embracing automation (even when it makes a lot of sense). We should establish a precedent where the gains of capital and automation are distributed even to wildly unsympathetic people.

I don't see a law saying that wages must keep pace with productivity:

Right there:

  1. The wage equals the value of the marginal product of labor.

In a world of high automation, one could easily argue that all workers are less productive and deserve much lower wages.

That's not the way productivity measurement works.

https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/how-is-productivity-measured/calculating-productivity.htm

Automation makes individual workers more productive.

A labor productivity index can be calculated by dividing an index of output by an index of hours worked

We have observed a general trend in the last 50 years where productivity rises much faster than wages rise: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

EPI is a bullshit factory think tank funded by labor unions to produce propaganda. Their """researchers""" are paid to sit around all to figure out how to twist economic statistics to push their ideological agenda.

If we're going to go for low quality sources, here's a reddit thread on that bullshit graph:

https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/productivity_pay_gap_in_epi_we_trust/

The EPI graph is an embarrassment designed to draw in ignorant young people on the internet to believing something that isn't true because it's not like they can check it. Pretty much everything you've absorbed about the economy from the internet is bullshit lefty propaganda.

And I think the best chance we have of that is by not totally and unflinchingly embracing automation (even when it makes a lot of sense). We should establish a precedent where the gains of capital and automation are distributed even to wildly unsympathetic people.

And I think we should let consumer preferences drive the evolution of the economy.

More comments

A true ragged-trousered philanthropist.

I was undecided on unions. This video black-pilled me.

The entire cabal of entitled brats must be abolished. It's a an alliance of anti-social elements on either side of the culture war. None of these jobs need to exist. In that sense, the US has a more social welfare than Europe. It's just that this welfare goes to a small group who exploit social dynamics to siphon money.

The majority of longshoremen seem to be based out of NJ and NY. Do their votes matter for the presidential election ?

Times like these make you miss leaders like Lee Kuan Yew. This speech would have won Kamala the election. Alas, leaders of this era have no spine.

The problem of longshormen is fairly specific. They are essentially holding monopoly power over a natural resource, which is the port. Most other "private" unions are far less horrible.

Also he's probably actually a mobster.

A key witness in his trial was murdered and he was acquitted.

Edit: Listening to the radio right now. The host says they found that guy's body in the trunk of a car in New Jersey outside of a diner. Starting to sound like Tony Soprano may be a fictionalized version of Harold Daggett.

I’d say they owe their continued existence to the fact that they are rationally, game-theoretically correct. Your employer does not need you. It needs people like you. Why shouldn’t you bargain as a group?

Yes, they levy a tax, and we could do things cheaper without them. “Cheapness” isn’t the only goal worth pursuing. Something resembling “fairness” has its own place in the American mythology, and unions were lionized because they flattered that goal. The further they get from that motte, the less support they’ll see from left and right.

Why shouldn’t you bargain as a group?

This is really only possible through federal legislation that enables it. That’s who they owe their existence to. Other countries don’t have this problem: why? Their governments don’t allow it

That…isn’t actually a reason.

That it’s illegal is a great reason not to do something!

I'm seeing a lot of kinda lukewarm pro-union takes here there don't really capture the current situation.

This isn't a normal union.

It's a mostly hereditary union that is segregated along racial lines. The members get paid gobs of money, with a median wage north of $150k per year. Foremen can pull down up to $500k a year. The union boss makes $1 million a year (plus whatever illegal takes he draws), drives a Bentley and recently sold his 77 foot yacht. He is closely connected to the Genovese mob family and a witness was killed to protect him from RICO charges in 2005.

This one really isn't big business vs. hardworking blue collar types. It's more like feudal lords vs. petty barons. The oppressed peasantry are not represented on either side of the table. There is no fairness here.

A hereditary union (not officially) segregated along racial lines. Sounds right up the alley of some of the folks here, interestingly.

In what ways could these unions be considered EHC? I mean they've clearly managed to get one over on all of us. That takes skill.

“Lukewarm” is about what I’d expect for principled defenses of uncomfortable optics.

I kind of waffled between my two paragraphs. I’m strongly in favor of collective bargaining as a concept, since firms are categorically different than individuals, so I objected to OP’s characterization. And I really do think the popularity of unions stems from a genuine desire for “fairness,” so cases like this will damage them. On the other hand, I’d be alright with more limitations; I just don’t have a good idea of what those look like.

(Also, I’ve been trying more aggressive editing for conciseness. It’s going okay.)

this union needs to go. Unions in general have their place, and a port is one of those places.

I'd have a lot more sympathy for unions if they just demanded higher wages/safer working conditions, even extreme increases, instead of fighting against automation and other measures that increase productivity.

I mean automation directly means less jobs and that people will be fired. Why wouldn't they fight against it?

The union's job isn't to increase productivity, it's to protect the workers.

I argue against a lot of things that are in the actor's best interests. Theft is the most obvious example: it gets you stuff, why wouldn't you do it?

Their fight against automation is anti-social, so opposing the unions is justified IMO.

Yeah, I'm on board with this. Someone saying, "I want more money for my job" is rational and often sympathetic. Someone saying, "I could be replaced by a robot, but I'll break your stupid fucking robot so you'd better just pay me" is a criminal and should be destroyed. The government explicitly favors the criminal thugs that would prevent businesses from improving efficiency, which makes the matter that much uglier.

What about "I could be replaced by an immigrant"?

More comments

That criminal thug you described is going to be all of us in about five years.

More comments

I don't think the typical inefficiencies introduced by unions are literal violence. The issue is more that, when negotiations happen, the union bureaucracy inserts things that are more aligned with its continued and expanded power, and employers accept those things because they're cheaper in the short term than simply paying workers more or sharing some of the gains of automation with them. If it causes issues for the company/government a decade or more down the line, what does it matter? The individuals involved in the negotiation will be comfortably retired anyways.

This strike is comically atrocious PR for unions generally. Led by a fat entitled brat that looks like an IRL interpretation of Evrart Claire, with a millionaire salary who just so happened to start the strike one month before the election and having been photographed having a meeting with one of the candidates. He even has connections to the mafia and an unsolved murder (????) hanging over his head too.

Basic longshoremen themselves have had all sorts of suspicious stories come out, like how they get paid half a million per year to wash trucks, get fired for not showing up, and then rehired anyways due to their connections. Their salaries are also sky-high. They'll claim it's because they're working overtime since they're short-staffed, but it's an open secret that the union will only let you join if you have dynastic connections. They're also aggressively opposing automation in this strike as the cherry on top. Just a magnificent feast of hypocrisy, whiny entitlement, and rent-seeking.

Unions are good if they're counterbalancing employers' naturally higher market power, but unions that are too powerful are functionally just parasitic cartels that make society worse off for everyone.

What does the Overton window look like for dialing back Union power?

My first thought was capping each one to the size of the employer. It seems obvious that everyone in a particular factory ought to be free to associate, less certain that everyone in a corporation should, and by the time you get to an entire trade, it starts to look like monopoly. So perhaps that would be a viable limit. But I know the standard tactic against strikes is replacement, and if a union is unable to defend against that, does it have any effective power at all?

As far as I can tell, no one tried this even during the Red Scare. I’m not sure if it means it would be too strong, too weak, or have some horrible consequence.

Roll back the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley Act, including both the union protections and the union restrictions. They mostly served to consolidate union bureaucracies.

Particularly, allow minority and company unions. Still grant workers protections when it comes to organizing themselves, discussing wages, etc. Workers can strike when they want and do slowdowns when they want, employers can fire workers if they want, and unions and employers can voluntarily negotiate, but no one is compelled to come to the table (except insofar as being fired or production being disrupted makes them feel like they should come to the table).

Also, ban employer-associated defined benefit plans. They encourage negotiated terms that have costs far in the future, and individuals have shown themselves unable to be effective agents for organizations when that option presents itself.

employers can fire workers if they want

I wish. But this will have 100% opposition from union advocates.

What does the Overton window look like for dialing back Union power?

It's not just a binary of [less power<------------->more power]; it's also a question of scope and legal position in the economy. The U.S. under the Wagner Act has uncommonly-confrontational unions which are limited in scope and operating in a fairly inflexible legal framework. There are other models of unions - German unions are frequently mentioned here, but there are other examples as well - which don't work on this model at all, and have their own benefits and tradeoffs. I have no idea what the modal voter thinks about any of this (which I guess means this comment isn't all that responsive to the question you actually asked...oops :(...) but wanted to make the point that there's potentially room for policy entrepreneurship here.

Aside from the lame reference to covid, I didn't hear much in the clip that I was unsympathetic to.

It's ironic that I've been posting so much about the impossibility of changing one's mind the last couple of days, because I have noticed myself becoming substantially more sympathetic to unions in just the past couple of years. I'm tired of corporations using "profits" as an excuse for every shitty thing they do. Big tech platforms have to implement woke advertiser-friendly censorship because that's what's best for profits, and Boeing has to skimp out on safety because they need the profits, and we have to keep importing third world migrants and outsourcing manufacturing because well, that's simply what's best for profits! It seems to me that the much maligned "enshittification" of the 21st century is just a synonym for the race to squeeze every last drop of profit possible out of increasingly thin margins.

If profits incentivize so much bad behavior, then maybe we just need to chill on the profits for a while. Take a break. It won't be the end of the world. Share some of the excess cash with your employees, or invest it in a scientific or artistic endeavor of your choosing, or just burn it for all I care, it doesn't matter much.

I frankly don't know anything about the specific demands of the longshoreman's union in this case, or how proportionate they are to the actual work being done. But I'm sympathetic to the underlying impulse, and I'm definitely not feeling very sympathetic to corporate America right now.

The situation is symmetric though. The union's doing this exactly because it has the negotiating power to extract profits for its members! They already make double what the average menial laborer makes and want to double it again.

Also, the margins aren't increasingly thin. Stock prices (discounted future profits) keep going up, and stuff keeps getting cheaper. The things that aren't getting cheaper are often an illusion (healthcare is more expensive mostly because we're using more of it, education's getting more expensive because ... people want more of it, and price isn't tied to anything). Housing's bad, but you can't win everything.

healthcare is more expensive mostly because we're using more of it

The healthcare industry is so addicted to insane price opacity aided by gov't subsidy of demand (and restriction of supply) that people are using significantly more, at higher prices, than they would otherwise.

education's getting more expensive because ... people want more of it, and price isn't tied to anything

On top of subsidizing demand (causing the people wanting more of it) and restricting supply, the price actually is tied to something - the gov't swoops in and helps universities price discriminate and try to tie the price as close as they possibly can to your personal willingness to pay. It's the outliers like Harvard where they hardly even bother with prices for most customers. They can focus almost entirely on the few 'whales' who will 'donate' tens of millions of dollars with no explicit promise (only a wink) that their daughter or granddaughter will be admitted and then hold distributional power over the rest to give out as is politically useful or maximally self-serving.

If profits incentivize so much bad behavior, then maybe we just need to chill on the profits for a while. Take a break. It won't be the end of the world. Share some of the excess cash with your employees, or invest it in a scientific or artistic endeavor of your choosing, or just burn it for all I care, it doesn't matter much.

I agree. I put forth the following modest proposal: require by law that every American send me (personally) a dollar. It's hardly any money at all, it can't matter to just about anyone. I'm even more generous than the longshoremen - I don't demand it in perpetuity, just a single lump sum.

The unions don't have the right to impose tariffs, that belongs to the federal government.

They're essentially requiring tariffs on these ports in order to line their own pockets.

I frankly don't know anything about the specific demands of the longshoreman's union in this case, or how proportionate they are to the actual work being done. But I'm sympathetic to the underlying impulse, and I'm definitely not feeling very sympathetic to corporate America right now.

This paragraph literally reads as "I don't know anything about the issue, but here's my feelings." I just want to verify this is your intent.

I'm tired of corporations using "profits" as an excuse for every shitty thing they do.

Perhaps it's a red herring? An excuse for behavior that's actually motivated not by profits, but by greed. "But but but greed == profits!" No, not really. You can run a profitable or non-profitable company and still be greedy and pay yourself or your executives far too much. Hell, you can run a freaking nonprofit and still pay yourself an insane amount of money. Several publicly listed tech companies don't actually turn net profits (which is different from operating profits which is different from free cash flow) - But pay their executives sky high salaries and award generous options packages that have been better than cash for 20 years.

"enshittification" of the 21st century is just a synonym for the race to squeeze every last drop of profit possible out of increasingly thin margins.

It's far worse than that. If "they" were squeezing profit out, it would be OK. They're squeezing cash out through all sorts of fun financial gimmicks and tricks. Or a very simply game of musical chairs. In fact, right now, the big vibe shift in Silicon Valley is that investors are being way more critical of a company's path to profitability.

"Profits" aren't the problem, it's the rent-seeking behavior on the way to profits. And this is what unions do; they seek rent through "collective bargaining" which is functionally synonymous with extortion and racketeering. If you have grown more sympathetic to them, you are growing more sympathetic to money being siphoned off for no other reason that those who are already there have their hand closest to the trough.

This paragraph literally reads as "I don't know anything about the issue, but here's my feelings." I just want to verify this is your intent.

I don't know anything about the longshoreman's union, but I am here to share my feelings anyway. Yes that is my intent.

This isn't a particularly unusual state of affairs, nor would I necessarily classify it as an epistemic vice. People form opinions based on incomplete information all the time. Nothing wrong with starting with an intuition and refining as you go. It's not too unlike certain Mottizens who have very strong opinions on the Frankfurt School, despite never having read a word of the Frankfurt School's work.

you are growing more sympathetic to money being siphoned off for no other reason that those who are already there have their hand closest to the trough.

I just can't bring myself to be very upset over money siphoning right now. So many awful decisions (I mentioned corporate wokeness and mass immigration) have been justified by recourse to "shareholders' bottom line". Very well then. If that's the case, then I don't care about their bottom line anymore. Siphon away.

This paragraph literally reads as "I don't know anything about the issue, but here's my feelings." I just want to verify this is your intent.

There has been an increasing number of posts like this here and I do not understand it.

“I don’t pay any attention to politics and don’t know anything about the candidates, anyway here are 14 paragraphs about my thoughts on the election”

Has it always been like this? I don’t remember it ever being so blatant.

Democrats are big on being anti "monopolies", why is it OK for one union to be able to shut down every port on the eastern seaboard?

Deep in my ancap heart I've got a little statist I let out during the Olympics and during flyovers and that little statist want's Biden to call up Dagget and explain to him "You do not break us, we break you." Then have every bureaucratic agency go though Daggett and every union hire ups life with a microscope. Maybe have 10 FBI guys befriend a couple union guys and have them take part in a plot to kidnap a governor. Or just Taft-Hartley and fire all of them.

Harold Daggett is, quite literally, a mobster.

In 2005, he was brought up on RICO charges, but the case fell through after the main witness was found decomposing in the trunk of a car. So apparently the docks haven't changed much from the time of On the Waterfront.

So how do we rid ourselves of these parasites?

Some have proposed that we pay them to go away. In practice, I don't know how this would work.

In an ideal world, a strong President would use Taft-Hartley and break the union much like Reagan broke the aircraft traffic controllers. Byrne Hobart had a fun take on Twitter, suggesting that maybe the union is striking to help Trump, who has promised to help them. Then, when Trump is elected, he's crush them. That's the bull case, I guess.

As for the current President, he's an empty suit. Add this to the long list of things that Biden has bungled, including Afghanistan, Iran, inflation, hurricane Helene, rural broadband, electric charging stations, etc.. The guy really does fuck up everything he touches, just like Obama said.

In an ideal world, a strong President would use Taft-Hartley and break the union much like Reagan broke the aircraft traffic controllers.

Or the existing exemption of unions from antitrust laws (1 2) could be eliminated. (Or, if we're talking pie-in-the-sky, the antitrust laws could be eliminated entirely. But "your rules enforced fairly" would be quicker than "my rules".)

Reminds me of Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad.

Talking about how they had to work outside during COVID and how this was a threat is hilarious. They were certainly a lot safer from the virus than, say, grocery store workers.

I kind of doubt they are packed like sardines on those piers either.

The longshoremen’s union is uniquely bad, but unions themselves aren’t necessarily terrible. They do advocate for workers interests- workers have interests and rights too.

I believe they're largely prohibited in the US, but the European (?) model of non-adversarial, or at least less-adversarial, unions is something I think we should give more consideration. IIRC it involves things like board representation for labor.

You know, I was raised in a union family and firmly believe that unions were necessary and enormously beneficial back in the day. Sometimes, I assume, they still can be and are.

But I had a union job at one point. As an entry-level guy, they wanted some absurd amount of my paycheck. I'd have been working a couple months out of the year for them. Ended up leaving the job and the union.

Soon thereafter this union put its workers on strike for, IIRC, over a year. The demand was higher wages and a few other things. I saw people striking out in front of that place for a long, long time. Replacement labor was hired. At the end of it all, the union caved entirely, across the board, except for a couple of provisions which did nothing for the workers but benefited the union itself.

I think the reality is that unions are functionally obsolete. We didn't use to have strong protections for labor in terms of workplace safety, social welfare, healthcare accessible to the poor, reasonable human needs like lunches, breaks, and so on -- but now we do. If workers aren't making as much as they want, that's generally a market problem, not a regulation/union problem. And unions only have leverage inasmuch as labor is unwilling to agree to the baseline compensation (in whatever form) that employers are offering. The union I was in was toothless because, actually, a whole lot of people were willing to do those jobs at that pay and under those conditions. And that was completely reasonable.

So, my personal experience is that unions make things much more expensive and don't actually provide much value except in special cases of skilled labor which for some bizarre market failure reason (probably also related to overregulation) isn't making as much as it should. And that's before we get into the costs of protecting people who really deserve to be terminated, or the ties to organized crime.

In general, I don't see how unions aren't just making everything worse for everyone.

Union still have a positive role, it's just a union by union basis. For instance Resident Physicians are starting to unionize at various places, they do this because health systems will blatantly violate legal requirements and their contracts with the residents, because the residents can't leave.

If given the ability to do so most employers will misbehave ASAP. Beware of that possibility, even with shitty unions like this one.

The other thing is, I'd rather have these social problems solved by unions than the state, so my position is kind of all over the place.

They can also function as useful negotiating partners and as a way to limit wildcat strikes/unofficial industrial action and keep business running. Which ironically is very important in key sectors and bottlenecks in the economy, such as docks.

An example of this working is Sweden which despite it's very large number of unionised workers has among the lowest amount of strikes in the west.

The railroads in the USA are also 100% union. Sometimes paying an efficiency cost for keeping things running is worth it.

Why can't the workers advocate for themselves? Isn't this the case with thousands of other career fields?

They do- by having a union.

AFAICT you can train a longshoreman or railroad worker, outside perhaps of some very specialized subsets, in a matter of a few months, most of them on the job. Engineers cannot be, and therefore longshoremen and railroad workers are much more disposable giving them less bargaining power which means they need to coordinate better together to stand up for themselves. This is what they have unions for. There might be other factors involved sometimes as well- safety hazards, the need to distribute undesirable shifts and advancement opportunities where it really doesn’t matter who gets it as long as it gets done, etc.

Coordination problems are hard and unions solve them. This specific union is an Uber-corrupt mob run bunch of luddites, but they’re not all like that.

therefore longshoremen and railroad workers are much more disposable giving them less bargaining power

And so they shouldn't be allowed to form a labor cartel gifting themselves multi-hundred-thousand dollar incomes if they are actually low skilled replaceable labor. That's just them screwing all of society for their enormous benefit.

The US regulatory economy produces vast numbers of six figure jobs for people who don’t produce anywhere near that amount of value. It going to blue collar men is no more offensive than to girl bosses with their e-mail jobs.

As far as I'm aware, there's no union for fake email job havers extracting six figure salaries for them. They could be fired all tomorrow if they are truly useless and automatable. It would seem that the same does not go for the longshoremen.

I'd also support some manner in which HR drones and other fake email job types got replaced with LLMs or something.

Automate the ports and fire most school administrators. If I could somehow vote for that I would.

Let's pretend they weren't mobsters. Should a union get to dictate that 60% of the nation's ports can never modernize, and in fact, roll back existing automation. Because that's what they are asking for.

This union has too much power to hold back progress. It would be one thing if the union represented a single port. Then when the union choked it to death, other ports could take its place. But when the union controls 60% of the ports its too much.

These blackmailers will do $1000 in damage to the economy for every $1 in additional wages they get. What a waste.

This union would be uniquely bad even if it weren’t for the mob ties. I have no qualms with banning it and replacing them with someone more reasonable, like the teamsters(or better yet, multiple competing unions).

Clarification for lurkers: A single union is allowed to control workers at "60 percent of the nation's ports" because unions are specifically exempted from the antitrust laws (1 2).

They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc

Well...that and mob ties (allegedly). Daggett got out from under prosecution for that when his co-defendant who was testifying against him turned up dead in the trunk of a car in New Jersey, a murder which has mysteriously never been solved! He has even pulled out the old "anti-mafia measures are anti-Italian bigotry!" card

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