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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?
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.
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.
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).
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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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