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I'm about as pro union as anyone I know. I'm not blind to the problems with unions but I do think that generally the benefits outweigh the costs. This situation

I'm about as pro union as anyone I know. I'm not blind to the problems with unions but I do think that generally the benefits outweigh the costs. This situation has me pretty torn however. I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation. This just seems unreasonable and anti progress. I understand that automation costs jobs and a union's primary responsibility is to protect the jobs of its members but what are we really supposed to do here? Continue with antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people? I get that that's unfortunate and perhaps a very serious problem for people working in that industry but what choice do we really have? I'm reminded of something a teacher said to me in high school about how one day many of my classmates and I would have jobs that didn't exist when he was a kid. Isn't that how this works? As time goes on some jobs go away and new jobs come about and there is some pain in the interim? I'm all for figuring out some way to ease that pain for the people in the transitional period but I don't know who's really responsible for that.

sanswork 2y ago
If you read the book the box they did the same when standard containers came in. The docks were forced to pay for like 5x the number of workers required because of Union agreements.
- dustincoates 2y ago
  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.)
dools 2y ago
Yeah recently Rail Workers in Sydney struck and one of the things they objected to was driverless trains. It just makes them look like fucking idiots.
- treyd 2y ago
  There's a ton of safety issues that can arise with driverless freight trains.
  - beau_g 2y ago
    If you think those issues are bad, just wait til you hear about the safety issues that have happened with non-driverless freight trains
    - Mountain_Skies 2y ago
      Can you quantify both sets for us so we can make an objective comparison?
    - user3939382 2y ago
      From what I’ve seen the danger comes primarily from the operating companies refusing to provide an adequate number of workers for the trains so the ones that are present are stretched too thin. So the issue isn’t driverless vs not, it’s adequate staffing.
  - dools 2y ago
    These are metropolitan trains.
- archagon 2y ago
  If they get to keep their jobs, then why would they give a shit whether they look like “fucking idiots” or not?
- consteval 2y ago
  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!
jmyeet 2y ago
> I'm not blind to the problems with unions What problems are you referring to, specifically? > I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation So there are two ways automation could affect a workplace. The first way is that it replaces and displaces workers. With layoffs comes downward pressure on the wages for existing workers who, for fear of losing their jobs, now do more labor for the same or less money. The second way is that automation makes your job easier, ideally so it's safer, less physically strenuous and you have to work fewer hours. In the coming decades, this is a problem we're going to increasingly face as the more menial jobs increasingly get automated. That automation is going to get more and more sophisticated. What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs? That could either be fantastic or dystopian.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  no, the workers will start to wonder why a small group of people who do barely any work are sucking up all the profit.
  - jmyeet 2y ago
    Currently we have 0.1% of people sucking the majority of the profit. 20% would be a vast improvement. But, to your point, the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are wars and revolution. What happened 200+ years ago in France can happen again. And it will if we don't start being just a little bit fairer in the distirbution of profits.
    - night862 2y ago
      It almost did, too. The New Deal answered the question of labor unions and every day folk. The alternative was not and would not be pretty.
      - Aerroon 2y ago
        The New Deal also set up time bombs in the economy. Government spending as a percentage of GDP is ever-increasing. Early 1900s this was at about 3-5%, nowadays it's 40-60%. On top of that it gave us the pension and healthcare time bombs due to birthrates decreases. Whether we like it or not, but eventually this spending is going to grow high enough that it can't grow anymore.
snapplebobapple 2y ago
You really have to look at this stuff from first principles and first principles are pretty clear. 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. Then one has to ask themselves in which situations could a union pushing up labor prices make things better? There's basically only one situation and that is where there is a labor monopsony and the company holding the monopsony is pushing labor prices down below market clearing rates (because pushing prices higher gets us closer to the market clearing rate in theory, lowering dead weight loss from labor). Is this a monopsony? Yes, it kind of is, but when one looks at the contracts being offered it's really hard to say labour prices are being pushed below market clearing rates. If anything they have been and continue to pay a premium, so this is not a situation where a union is a good idea for society.
- roughly 2y ago
  > 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.
  - snapplebobapple 2y ago
    yes, but everyone else is worse off by a greater amount because that higher price causes other reactions and repricings in the supply chain. There are some really nice graphs in first year economics that explain this. That we are in a potential situation where there is market power being exercised by the employer is basically the only reason we have to even consider that a union could make things better off is because the person with the monopsony doesn't benefit from decreasing output as the union pushes wages higher if the end result is at or below the efficient price for labor.
bsder 2y ago
> I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation. This just seems unreasonable and anti progress. Maybe, but automation can also be used to run the remaining workers ragged. See the current issues with high frequency train scheduling and the attendant accidents due to fatigue.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Precision railroading exists because the government enforces a monpoloy on labor in the rail sector.
  - monocasa 2y ago
    Which monopoly on labor? Railroad workers aren't required to be union the United States.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      The rail labor act which forbids striking.
      - loudestdog 2y ago
        You make people work, they've already said they're going to slow down so you paying them for 25% of the work. And they still win in the end. The reason strike has happened because the dock companies themselves profit off of a strike. They charge extra fees money for storage etc.
  - bsder 2y ago
    We're talking about whether automation is worth striking over for safety reasons and you just pointed out that the railroad situation is because the workers can't strike. So ... sure? Apparently, we're in agreement.
throwaway48476 2y ago
I don't necessarily like unions but I struggle to come up with something better. Unions are the worst form of labor organizing except for all the others.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >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.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Most of the negotiated terms in union contracts aren't pay which makes me think mandating pay isn't a silver bullet.
  - morkalork 2y ago
    There's also the case of public sector where unions are needed because the government making the regulations is also the employer so there's a conflict of interest going on.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    > just capping executive pay based on the lowest wages of the labor they pay. I really don’t see a problem with this, executives are employees too. Make their incentives align
    - chgs 2y ago
      Lowest paid employees get outsourced. We already see it in most companies - they buy in cleaning services rather than employing the cleaners for example.
      - Aerroon 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
devjab 2y ago
We don’t have to automate things before the alternative systems are in place to suppprt the millions of people who will need re-schooling. Especially not while the benefits of the automation goes solely to investors and owners. There is also the part where some automation is vulnerable to infrastructure attacks. I don’t know if this apply to dockworkers in particular, but there are some areas we probably shouldn’t be automating. This is probably where I should point out that I’m Danish, and, left leaning. Which means I’m more “eat the rich” than what most of you will encounter. Somewhat ironically I also worked with digitalisation in the public sector for about a decade, but that’s another story. Anyway, an example of things I really don’t think we should automate is public pool control. We did PoC on that because some bean counter decided we could save something like 5 hours a month if we automated it rather than have one of the janitors (which isn’t the correct work for these people but I simply can’t find the right English word) wouldn’t have to check once a week. The disadvantage of this was that you could remotely alter the chemicals in the pools. These days I work in the green energy industry where you could seriously disrupt a lot of plants and storage by entering through weakly protected inverters by gaining accesses to wholly unnecessary automation. Unnecessary because you already have a lot of greenfield engineers on site or nearby. Now, I don’t know if dock work is vital infrastructure, but if it is, then automation might be an unnecessary risk.
- wskinner 2y ago
  > 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.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Only if the automation is cheaper and more efficient and that improvement/saving gets passed on to the (un)loading fees and then to the companies doing the transport and then to the marketplace middlemen and then then to the buyers/sellers.
    - wskinner 2y ago
      It is, and it does. US ports are far less efficient than the more automated ports in Asia and Europe.
Uehreka 2y ago
> Isn't that how this works? As time goes on some jobs go away and new jobs come about and there is some pain in the interim? I don’t think this is quite as guaranteed as people think. When we mechanized farming the manufacturing sector had already existed for decades, it was clear what kinds of jobs the ex-farm-workers would move into. When we automated/offshored manufacturing, it seemed plausible that those ex-manufacturing-workers could move into service sector jobs (though that didn’t work out as well in practice, many people took a large cut to their household income). Nowadays we don’t have a sector hungry to absorb the laborers whose manufacturing and service jobs are being automated away. A lot of people act like the market will come up with jobs we can’t conceive of today, but that’s not how this has worked in the past. Even when there’s a sector with tons of existing job opportunities, the transition isn’t guaranteed to work. We don’t really have a precedent for what happens if we automate away a sector (or two) and don’t have an extra sectors-worth of job opportunities to replace it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- trhway 2y ago
  >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.
  - Uehreka 2y ago
    The people in these threads arguing that unions are a drain on society are not going to go for UBI-esque schemes, and currently UBI itself isn’t politically popular enough in general to happen. It’s not enough to have an idea of how things could work—you need something we can feasibly pull off in the current political landscape, otherwise it’s just wishful thinking.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>but what are we really supposed to do here? Continue with antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people? that's why context is important. For Generative AI I'm not against the technology. I'm against the outright theft of content and abuse of current and future contracts for talent. Generative AI as it is still relies on the human element to be useful at all, and companies steal instead of following the 3C's. Even though I bet they'd still be profitable with the latter way. It's just greed and utter disregard for labor. The story here wasn't clear on what was being automated here and how, though. It sounds like some sort of mechanical automation, so there's less ground to stand on. Especialyl since physical automata isn't exactly cheap to maintain to begin with (and of course, current iterations still require human assistance. If only for liability's sake). regardless I don't really pity big industries these days. If jobs are going to be automated then you may as well get a few licks in before the inevitable.
throwawaybbq1 2y ago
In the limit, this is like arguing against the use of wheels. Automation improves labor productivity. Economies that have not invested in capital, have seen labor productivity and incomes stagnant. This is a current debate going on in Canada (especially as compared to the productivity and income gains in the last decade). Canada does have strong Unions, so I wonder if this is related. Another thing that seems troubling is how a small group of people can hold a majority of the country by the bXlls. Given how this is an election year, I can see this turning into huge fiasco. The rest of the economy is collateral damage.
- youcanalwayszzz 2y ago
  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.
- navane 2y ago
  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.
  - throwawaybbq1 2y ago
    In the US? I don't think what you are saying is supported by real data. My understanding is that US works did see an improvement in incomes in the last decade but Canadian workers did not. What makes life better for everyone is competition. Canada's stagnation can be be summed up in a single phrase - lack of competition. Generally, the US has been a free-for-all when it comes to competition and hence its populace enjoys some of the best living standards. I'll also relate my experience traveling the subway in Asia vs. Manhattan. Asian transit seems like space-age compared to what we have in the West. I think UBI won't save us as the income must come from somewhere. Hiking taxes kills incentives. The better way is to have more freedom/efficiencies in my humble opinion.
navane 2y ago
This is also the market at work. Just as the automaters want to make money by eliminating jobs, the unions want to make money by having jobs. Big capital creates leverage through monopoly, unions create leverage the same way; a union is a labor monopoly.
ambientenv 2y ago
The word, "progress" carries a lot of weight here. How do you define it? I have been working my way through this paper, [1], and it has plenty of good food for thought around this. [1] - https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/ https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/
MrMan 2y ago
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2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
I take issue with the timing. 34 days until the election? Feels designed to help a certain candidate rather than themselves.
ElevenLathe 2y ago
The demand for no automation at all is clearly an initial bargaining position. What the union (hopefully) really wants is some kind of phase-in of most of this tech that allows current members to keep their jobs and retire with dignity before they are replaced by robots. IMO dignity like this is the absolute minimum we owe to ourselves as workers and citizens. If the port operators were smart, they would have done this already and avoided the massive strike that will cost them billions of dollars, by using a small portion of that savings to keep their workers happy and on the job.
- CleaveIt2Beaver 2y ago
  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.
- hyperG 2y ago
  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!"
nataliste 2y ago
This is just "I'm not racist, but..." applied to labor.[1] You're not pro-union. You're anti-union plus rhetoric. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist%2C_but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist%2C_but...
- EasyMark 2y ago
  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.
  - consteval 2y ago
    This can be easily avoided by meeting the Union's demands. A free labor market means laborers are free to go. If this means you have no ports, then you are not competitive on the labor market. Corporations have gotten extremely comfortable with existing in an extremely skewed labor market. One where they do not have to pay because they don't have to be competitive - workers have zero mobility, zero visibility, and need to eat. If the corporations cannot meet the Unions demands and that results in failure to buy or sell, that is the free market at play. They can simply pay more. Clearly, the demand for this labor is extremely high and the supply is what it is. That means pay up.
    - sickofparadox 2y ago
      The unions demands may have been met if they didn't ask for ridiculous things like a complete ban on automation.
      - consteval 2y ago
        It's not ridiculous, it's a market force. Again, if the demand for such laborers is high enough then they will do it.
      - 2y ago
BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
> what are we really supposed to do here? The obvious, simple, everyone-wins solution is for the ports to offer to continue to pay every worker who gets replaced by automation for some negotiated period of time where they don't have to show up to work and can instead focus entirely on re-skilling or starting their own business or whatever else they want without needing to worry about winding up on the street or going hungry or losing healthcare. The initial double cost for the business is an investment in long term savings. Literally everyone wins in this scenario. Anyone who can't stomach the idea of paying someone to stay home despite the fact that literally everyone would win can enjoy the strike, I guess. > a union's primary responsibility is to protect the jobs of its members This is a common but wrong misunderstanding. The union exists to protect the members, not the jobs. It so happens that losing your job in this country generally means you also lose food, shelter, and medicine. Negotiate to protect the members in good faith and they'll have no need to fight automation. > I'm all for figuring out some way to ease that pain for the people in the transitional period but I don't know who's really responsible for that. If I had my way, the federal government would mandate my policy as a legal requirement when automating away domestic jobs. In the absence of that, if an employer wants to avoid a strike, it's in everyone's best interest to do it my way anyway. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, my way literally everyone wins.

sanswork 2y ago

If you read the book the box they did the same when standard containers came in. The docks were forced to pay for like 5x the number of workers required because of Union agreements.

dustincoates 2y ago
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.)

dools 2y ago

Yeah recently Rail Workers in Sydney struck and one of the things they objected to was driverless trains. It just makes them look like fucking idiots.

treyd 2y ago
There's a ton of safety issues that can arise with driverless freight trains.
- beau_g 2y ago
  If you think those issues are bad, just wait til you hear about the safety issues that have happened with non-driverless freight trains
  - Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    Can you quantify both sets for us so we can make an objective comparison?
  - user3939382 2y ago
    From what I’ve seen the danger comes primarily from the operating companies refusing to provide an adequate number of workers for the trains so the ones that are present are stretched too thin. So the issue isn’t driverless vs not, it’s adequate staffing.
- dools 2y ago
  These are metropolitan trains.
archagon 2y ago
If they get to keep their jobs, then why would they give a shit whether they look like “fucking idiots” or not?
consteval 2y ago
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!

jmyeet 2y ago

> I'm not blind to the problems with unions What problems are you referring to, specifically? > I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation So there are two ways automation could affect a workplace. The first way is that it replaces and displaces workers. With layoffs comes downward pressure on the wages for existing workers who, for fear of losing their jobs, now do more labor for the same or less money. The second way is that automation makes your job easier, ideally so it's safer, less physically strenuous and you have to work fewer hours. In the coming decades, this is a problem we're going to increasingly face as the more menial jobs increasingly get automated. That automation is going to get more and more sophisticated. What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs? That could either be fantastic or dystopian.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
no, the workers will start to wonder why a small group of people who do barely any work are sucking up all the profit.
- jmyeet 2y ago
  Currently we have 0.1% of people sucking the majority of the profit. 20% would be a vast improvement. But, to your point, the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are wars and revolution. What happened 200+ years ago in France can happen again. And it will if we don't start being just a little bit fairer in the distirbution of profits.
  - night862 2y ago
    It almost did, too. The New Deal answered the question of labor unions and every day folk. The alternative was not and would not be pretty.
    - Aerroon 2y ago
      The New Deal also set up time bombs in the economy. Government spending as a percentage of GDP is ever-increasing. Early 1900s this was at about 3-5%, nowadays it's 40-60%. On top of that it gave us the pension and healthcare time bombs due to birthrates decreases. Whether we like it or not, but eventually this spending is going to grow high enough that it can't grow anymore.

snapplebobapple 2y ago

You really have to look at this stuff from first principles and first principles are pretty clear. 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. Then one has to ask themselves in which situations could a union pushing up labor prices make things better? There's basically only one situation and that is where there is a labor monopsony and the company holding the monopsony is pushing labor prices down below market clearing rates (because pushing prices higher gets us closer to the market clearing rate in theory, lowering dead weight loss from labor). Is this a monopsony? Yes, it kind of is, but when one looks at the contracts being offered it's really hard to say labour prices are being pushed below market clearing rates. If anything they have been and continue to pay a premium, so this is not a situation where a union is a good idea for society.

roughly 2y ago
> 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.
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  yes, but everyone else is worse off by a greater amount because that higher price causes other reactions and repricings in the supply chain. There are some really nice graphs in first year economics that explain this. That we are in a potential situation where there is market power being exercised by the employer is basically the only reason we have to even consider that a union could make things better off is because the person with the monopsony doesn't benefit from decreasing output as the union pushes wages higher if the end result is at or below the efficient price for labor.

bsder 2y ago

> I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation. This just seems unreasonable and anti progress. Maybe, but automation can also be used to run the remaining workers ragged. See the current issues with high frequency train scheduling and the attendant accidents due to fatigue.

throwaway48476 2y ago
Precision railroading exists because the government enforces a monpoloy on labor in the rail sector.
- monocasa 2y ago
  Which monopoly on labor? Railroad workers aren't required to be union the United States.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    The rail labor act which forbids striking.
    - loudestdog 2y ago
      You make people work, they've already said they're going to slow down so you paying them for 25% of the work. And they still win in the end. The reason strike has happened because the dock companies themselves profit off of a strike. They charge extra fees money for storage etc.
- bsder 2y ago
  We're talking about whether automation is worth striking over for safety reasons and you just pointed out that the railroad situation is because the workers can't strike. So ... sure? Apparently, we're in agreement.

throwaway48476 2y ago

I don't necessarily like unions but I struggle to come up with something better. Unions are the worst form of labor organizing except for all the others.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
>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.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Most of the negotiated terms in union contracts aren't pay which makes me think mandating pay isn't a silver bullet.
- morkalork 2y ago
  There's also the case of public sector where unions are needed because the government making the regulations is also the employer so there's a conflict of interest going on.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > just capping executive pay based on the lowest wages of the labor they pay. I really don’t see a problem with this, executives are employees too. Make their incentives align
  - chgs 2y ago
    Lowest paid employees get outsourced. We already see it in most companies - they buy in cleaning services rather than employing the cleaners for example.
    - Aerroon 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

devjab 2y ago

We don’t have to automate things before the alternative systems are in place to suppprt the millions of people who will need re-schooling. Especially not while the benefits of the automation goes solely to investors and owners. There is also the part where some automation is vulnerable to infrastructure attacks. I don’t know if this apply to dockworkers in particular, but there are some areas we probably shouldn’t be automating. This is probably where I should point out that I’m Danish, and, left leaning. Which means I’m more “eat the rich” than what most of you will encounter. Somewhat ironically I also worked with digitalisation in the public sector for about a decade, but that’s another story. Anyway, an example of things I really don’t think we should automate is public pool control. We did PoC on that because some bean counter decided we could save something like 5 hours a month if we automated it rather than have one of the janitors (which isn’t the correct work for these people but I simply can’t find the right English word) wouldn’t have to check once a week. The disadvantage of this was that you could remotely alter the chemicals in the pools. These days I work in the green energy industry where you could seriously disrupt a lot of plants and storage by entering through weakly protected inverters by gaining accesses to wholly unnecessary automation. Unnecessary because you already have a lot of greenfield engineers on site or nearby. Now, I don’t know if dock work is vital infrastructure, but if it is, then automation might be an unnecessary risk.

wskinner 2y ago
> 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.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Only if the automation is cheaper and more efficient and that improvement/saving gets passed on to the (un)loading fees and then to the companies doing the transport and then to the marketplace middlemen and then then to the buyers/sellers.
  - wskinner 2y ago
    It is, and it does. US ports are far less efficient than the more automated ports in Asia and Europe.

Uehreka 2y ago

> Isn't that how this works? As time goes on some jobs go away and new jobs come about and there is some pain in the interim? I don’t think this is quite as guaranteed as people think. When we mechanized farming the manufacturing sector had already existed for decades, it was clear what kinds of jobs the ex-farm-workers would move into. When we automated/offshored manufacturing, it seemed plausible that those ex-manufacturing-workers could move into service sector jobs (though that didn’t work out as well in practice, many people took a large cut to their household income). Nowadays we don’t have a sector hungry to absorb the laborers whose manufacturing and service jobs are being automated away. A lot of people act like the market will come up with jobs we can’t conceive of today, but that’s not how this has worked in the past. Even when there’s a sector with tons of existing job opportunities, the transition isn’t guaranteed to work. We don’t really have a precedent for what happens if we automate away a sector (or two) and don’t have an extra sectors-worth of job opportunities to replace it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
trhway 2y ago
>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.
- Uehreka 2y ago
  The people in these threads arguing that unions are a drain on society are not going to go for UBI-esque schemes, and currently UBI itself isn’t politically popular enough in general to happen. It’s not enough to have an idea of how things could work—you need something we can feasibly pull off in the current political landscape, otherwise it’s just wishful thinking.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>but what are we really supposed to do here? Continue with antiquated processes that affect an entire economy just to protect the jobs of a relatively small number of people? that's why context is important. For Generative AI I'm not against the technology. I'm against the outright theft of content and abuse of current and future contracts for talent. Generative AI as it is still relies on the human element to be useful at all, and companies steal instead of following the 3C's. Even though I bet they'd still be profitable with the latter way. It's just greed and utter disregard for labor. The story here wasn't clear on what was being automated here and how, though. It sounds like some sort of mechanical automation, so there's less ground to stand on. Especialyl since physical automata isn't exactly cheap to maintain to begin with (and of course, current iterations still require human assistance. If only for liability's sake). regardless I don't really pity big industries these days. If jobs are going to be automated then you may as well get a few licks in before the inevitable.

throwawaybbq1 2y ago

In the limit, this is like arguing against the use of wheels. Automation improves labor productivity. Economies that have not invested in capital, have seen labor productivity and incomes stagnant. This is a current debate going on in Canada (especially as compared to the productivity and income gains in the last decade). Canada does have strong Unions, so I wonder if this is related. Another thing that seems troubling is how a small group of people can hold a majority of the country by the bXlls. Given how this is an election year, I can see this turning into huge fiasco. The rest of the economy is collateral damage.

youcanalwayszzz 2y ago
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.
navane 2y ago
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.
- throwawaybbq1 2y ago
  In the US? I don't think what you are saying is supported by real data. My understanding is that US works did see an improvement in incomes in the last decade but Canadian workers did not. What makes life better for everyone is competition. Canada's stagnation can be be summed up in a single phrase - lack of competition. Generally, the US has been a free-for-all when it comes to competition and hence its populace enjoys some of the best living standards. I'll also relate my experience traveling the subway in Asia vs. Manhattan. Asian transit seems like space-age compared to what we have in the West. I think UBI won't save us as the income must come from somewhere. Hiking taxes kills incentives. The better way is to have more freedom/efficiencies in my humble opinion.

navane 2y ago

This is also the market at work. Just as the automaters want to make money by eliminating jobs, the unions want to make money by having jobs. Big capital creates leverage through monopoly, unions create leverage the same way; a union is a labor monopoly.

ambientenv 2y ago

The word, "progress" carries a lot of weight here. How do you define it? I have been working my way through this paper, [1], and it has plenty of good food for thought around this. [1] - https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/ https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/

MrMan 2y ago

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2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

I take issue with the timing. 34 days until the election? Feels designed to help a certain candidate rather than themselves.

ElevenLathe 2y ago

The demand for no automation at all is clearly an initial bargaining position. What the union (hopefully) really wants is some kind of phase-in of most of this tech that allows current members to keep their jobs and retire with dignity before they are replaced by robots. IMO dignity like this is the absolute minimum we owe to ourselves as workers and citizens. If the port operators were smart, they would have done this already and avoided the massive strike that will cost them billions of dollars, by using a small portion of that savings to keep their workers happy and on the job.

CleaveIt2Beaver 2y ago
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.
hyperG 2y ago
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!"

nataliste 2y ago

This is just "I'm not racist, but..." applied to labor.[1] You're not pro-union. You're anti-union plus rhetoric. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist%2C_but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist%2C_but...

EasyMark 2y ago
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.
- consteval 2y ago
  This can be easily avoided by meeting the Union's demands. A free labor market means laborers are free to go. If this means you have no ports, then you are not competitive on the labor market. Corporations have gotten extremely comfortable with existing in an extremely skewed labor market. One where they do not have to pay because they don't have to be competitive - workers have zero mobility, zero visibility, and need to eat. If the corporations cannot meet the Unions demands and that results in failure to buy or sell, that is the free market at play. They can simply pay more. Clearly, the demand for this labor is extremely high and the supply is what it is. That means pay up.
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    The unions demands may have been met if they didn't ask for ridiculous things like a complete ban on automation.
    - consteval 2y ago
      It's not ridiculous, it's a market force. Again, if the demand for such laborers is high enough then they will do it.
    - 2y ago

BugsJustFindMe 2y ago

> what are we really supposed to do here? The obvious, simple, everyone-wins solution is for the ports to offer to continue to pay every worker who gets replaced by automation for some negotiated period of time where they don't have to show up to work and can instead focus entirely on re-skilling or starting their own business or whatever else they want without needing to worry about winding up on the street or going hungry or losing healthcare. The initial double cost for the business is an investment in long term savings. Literally everyone wins in this scenario. Anyone who can't stomach the idea of paying someone to stay home despite the fact that literally everyone would win can enjoy the strike, I guess. > a union's primary responsibility is to protect the jobs of its members This is a common but wrong misunderstanding. The union exists to protect the members, not the jobs. It so happens that losing your job in this country generally means you also lose food, shelter, and medicine. Negotiate to protect the members in good faith and they'll have no need to fight automation. > I'm all for figuring out some way to ease that pain for the people in the transitional period but I don't know who's really responsible for that. If I had my way, the federal government would mandate my policy as a legal requirement when automating away domestic jobs. In the absence of that, if an employer wants to avoid a strike, it's in everyone's best interest to do it my way anyway. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, my way literally everyone wins.