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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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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).

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