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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 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.
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?
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