This all comes back to the fact efficiency has gone up 170% in the last 50 years but wages are stagnant. People have been led to believe it's government inefficiencies that are the cause but federal government spending as a percentage of GDP is the same at ~22% since 1970. What has changed is corporate tax code. As efficiency has been gained the corporate tax rate and top marginal tax rate has plummeted from an effective 50% rate in 1960 to 13.3% in 2020. If we want to make progress, and not turn every american worker into a card carrying Luddite, that mix has to change. The longshoremen should be asking for 50% profit sharing, not a wage increase, that way they are incentivized to be more efficient and are on board. As well as a generational trust fund for workers who are displaced due to efficiency. (Shh don't tell them this is called UBI).
It's a torturous balance. It's crazy not to use technology/automate to a degree for cost and efficiency, but not all technology is good (whether it's just badly designed, not always safe etc.). And disruption by automation is painful, as it means the displaced workers will ultimately need to retrain for new jobs since their old ones don't exist anymore. The real problem is that these are all extremely subjective issues in terms of how much corporations AND governments owe the disrupted workers in terms of helping them retrain etc. Each political party will be on the side they are always on. I certainly wouldn't want to have to ordain where that balance is.
I sympathise with your boyfriend, though I'm not anti-tech per se, I'm just anti a lot of it that doesn't work well/bad UI/UX & stuff that is rather dehumanising. I also hate how it is hard to get through the day if I forget/don't charge my phone. But stuff like Lime bikes in a big city with gridlocked public transport (& where you get fed up with owning a bike due to wheels being nicked all the time) are amazing. And I still find it amazing that I can talk into my phone & it will transcribe it all on the fly - I used to dream of that.
I would point out that Bryan Merchant's book (which you referenced) specifically states that the Luddites were never opposed to *using* those new machines; they simply wanted to be compensated for using them, and receive their fair share of the profits from increased productivity (not my assertion -- it's literally stated in Merchant's book). If the monopoly the Longshoremen are railing against offered them a share of the profits made and money saved with these machines, they'd accept the contract. They're not opposed to increased productivity; they just want their fair share.
Or just take the country back from the corporatists. It's been decades of profits over people. Of course workers will fight automation. Their government has been sold out to the highest bidder and the safety nets are anemic/non-existent.
Spoken like someone who's never operated a heavy industry crane, nor knows anything about computers. I've done both computer programming and operated cranes that moved 50 ton objects. There's too much chaos in the system for a computer to manage everything.
That won't work under the present ILA (East/Gulf) and ILWU (West) agreements. Under the agreements, any port jobs at any new site would immediately and by agreement fall under the unions. So, open a new port.... the workers will be ILA or ILWU. Canada? They have the Canadian ILWU and ILA... same arrangement. Unload at Mexican ports and rail up into the USA - that's been an ongoing gradual process, has it's own issues. (Note, I started in Container Shipping in 1987 - been around a bit).
As though reams of undeveloped deep water harbors are just sitting around waiting to be developed? This reveals a profound ignorance of maritime, urban and industrial history. Any decent deep water port locations became coastal cities in the 1820s on the West Coast of the US, and far earlier than that on the Eastern seaboard.
I feel like your analysis skirts around the core issue: as long as workers are only worth their labor, automation is antithetical to the middle class. The ENTIRE goal of automation is to have to hire fewer people. People will lose their jobs not as a side effect but as a goal. I’m not saying this is a good thing, i’m saying that as long as progress is steered by the owning class, it’s Entirely unavoidable. Automation is only a societal good if the majority of society profits from it, and that’s not what it’s being developed for, It’s being developed to cut as many people out of the equation as possible. Software cut out manufacturing and sold a product that can be infinitely copied, but still requires a lot of software developers. The next step is selling a physical product that maximizes the capital-to-labor ratio, so 20 people can make a million laptops and receive the profits all to themselves.
I would sympathize more with this strike if it wasn't so transparently done so close to the election, and if the president of the union hadn't shown already huge support to Donald Trump. Biden should step in, sooner rather than later.
My perspective as a Canadian is… good for Biden for not stepping in. Let the workers and the employers hash this out. Our prime minister just legislated striking rail workers back to work and I think that is dishonest and highly unfair. Maybe there would have eventually been a point to step in if there was an extreme extended period of impasse, but at least give them an honest chance to negotiate. But I like the idea of working very slowly as a workaround. Philosophical question time: how slowly can one work before it’s considered “not working?” Because you can arrest workers for refusing to work once they’ve been legislated back to work, but if you go back to work and just get basically nothing accomplished, you can have the same effect as being on strike within the letter of the law. Anyhow, great article, as always!
a great disaster that brings unions into disrepute and led to the sort of upheavals as 'the winter of discontent' 72\73 UK and Thatcher' s determination to break the coalminers strike in 79 re the equivalent to Dugatt? ie Arthur Scargill
Seeing "Industry 5.0" slapped on healthcare and bioprocessing news and imagining the term could be co-opted as a negotiation framework for broad "just transitions" if defined threshold of worker replacements, job/responsibility compression, and/or employee marginalization are achieved, especially since efficiency from automation (e.g., containerization) has improved dockworker's physical wellbeing and been accompanied by increased trading volumes and in many cases increases job sophistication (small example: introducing robotic arms in Dx/QC labs where highly trained people used to and still in many cases spend most of their days bent over a bench fussing over pipetting errors).
Wonder if we'll see a broad rekindling of UBI conversations as a result of this...
I expect this will not be fully sorted until labor has their own political party. This is the reason we do not have publicly funded Healthcare options, for instance. And everyone here is buying reams of the crap being imported. Vote with your wallet and stop buying that crap. Or buy more of it, if that's what you're into.
It's interesting to consider how much leverage workers in different occupations have to capture the gains from automation. In the case of the longshoremen, that's 50k workers that can impact a significant percent of GDP!
But the roughly 3 million customer service representatives across the US likely won't have anywhere close to the same leverage as their work is increasingly impacted by AI, even though there are more of them: https://www.2120insights.com/i/146378400/technology-driven-change
Elle Griffin wrote about Mondragon a few weeks ago which opened my mind to a new, more fair way to compete in a capitalist economy. They are a federated corporation of co-ops. I think this model could solve a lot of the issues workers face with automation.
Great piece, Kyla! I'm curious if you know of any cases where automation has occurred in a more "democratic" fashion than the one you've described here - do we have any positive examples to draw from?
This all comes back to the fact efficiency has gone up 170% in the last 50 years but wages are stagnant. People have been led to believe it's government inefficiencies that are the cause but federal government spending as a percentage of GDP is the same at ~22% since 1970. What has changed is corporate tax code. As efficiency has been gained the corporate tax rate and top marginal tax rate has plummeted from an effective 50% rate in 1960 to 13.3% in 2020. If we want to make progress, and not turn every american worker into a card carrying Luddite, that mix has to change. The longshoremen should be asking for 50% profit sharing, not a wage increase, that way they are incentivized to be more efficient and are on board. As well as a generational trust fund for workers who are displaced due to efficiency. (Shh don't tell them this is called UBI).
Wages are /not/ stagnant.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
It's a torturous balance. It's crazy not to use technology/automate to a degree for cost and efficiency, but not all technology is good (whether it's just badly designed, not always safe etc.). And disruption by automation is painful, as it means the displaced workers will ultimately need to retrain for new jobs since their old ones don't exist anymore. The real problem is that these are all extremely subjective issues in terms of how much corporations AND governments owe the disrupted workers in terms of helping them retrain etc. Each political party will be on the side they are always on. I certainly wouldn't want to have to ordain where that balance is.
I sympathise with your boyfriend, though I'm not anti-tech per se, I'm just anti a lot of it that doesn't work well/bad UI/UX & stuff that is rather dehumanising. I also hate how it is hard to get through the day if I forget/don't charge my phone. But stuff like Lime bikes in a big city with gridlocked public transport (& where you get fed up with owning a bike due to wheels being nicked all the time) are amazing. And I still find it amazing that I can talk into my phone & it will transcribe it all on the fly - I used to dream of that.
I would point out that Bryan Merchant's book (which you referenced) specifically states that the Luddites were never opposed to *using* those new machines; they simply wanted to be compensated for using them, and receive their fair share of the profits from increased productivity (not my assertion -- it's literally stated in Merchant's book). If the monopoly the Longshoremen are railing against offered them a share of the profits made and money saved with these machines, they'd accept the contract. They're not opposed to increased productivity; they just want their fair share.
This is an opportunity for somebody to build a new port that is fully automated.
Or just take the country back from the corporatists. It's been decades of profits over people. Of course workers will fight automation. Their government has been sold out to the highest bidder and the safety nets are anemic/non-existent.
Spoken like someone who's never operated a heavy industry crane, nor knows anything about computers. I've done both computer programming and operated cranes that moved 50 ton objects. There's too much chaos in the system for a computer to manage everything.
Somebody? Securing the land alone is beyond the reach of almost everybody. That somebody needs incredibly deep pockets.
That won't work under the present ILA (East/Gulf) and ILWU (West) agreements. Under the agreements, any port jobs at any new site would immediately and by agreement fall under the unions. So, open a new port.... the workers will be ILA or ILWU. Canada? They have the Canadian ILWU and ILA... same arrangement. Unload at Mexican ports and rail up into the USA - that's been an ongoing gradual process, has it's own issues. (Note, I started in Container Shipping in 1987 - been around a bit).
As you've worked in shipping for almost 40 years, you must aware of the enormous cost of opening a large maritime shipping port from scratch.
Suppose there is a strong desire to build a new maritime shipping port in Baltimore (for example).
The first thing that is needed is land adjacent to water deep enough for container ships to dock.
Acquiring the land alone seems daunting.
As though reams of undeveloped deep water harbors are just sitting around waiting to be developed? This reveals a profound ignorance of maritime, urban and industrial history. Any decent deep water port locations became coastal cities in the 1820s on the West Coast of the US, and far earlier than that on the Eastern seaboard.
This is on an Elon or large private equity consortium scale.
How can the unions have a preemptive right to organize any port in the US?
I feel like your analysis skirts around the core issue: as long as workers are only worth their labor, automation is antithetical to the middle class. The ENTIRE goal of automation is to have to hire fewer people. People will lose their jobs not as a side effect but as a goal. I’m not saying this is a good thing, i’m saying that as long as progress is steered by the owning class, it’s Entirely unavoidable. Automation is only a societal good if the majority of society profits from it, and that’s not what it’s being developed for, It’s being developed to cut as many people out of the equation as possible. Software cut out manufacturing and sold a product that can be infinitely copied, but still requires a lot of software developers. The next step is selling a physical product that maximizes the capital-to-labor ratio, so 20 people can make a million laptops and receive the profits all to themselves.
I would sympathize more with this strike if it wasn't so transparently done so close to the election, and if the president of the union hadn't shown already huge support to Donald Trump. Biden should step in, sooner rather than later.
My perspective as a Canadian is… good for Biden for not stepping in. Let the workers and the employers hash this out. Our prime minister just legislated striking rail workers back to work and I think that is dishonest and highly unfair. Maybe there would have eventually been a point to step in if there was an extreme extended period of impasse, but at least give them an honest chance to negotiate. But I like the idea of working very slowly as a workaround. Philosophical question time: how slowly can one work before it’s considered “not working?” Because you can arrest workers for refusing to work once they’ve been legislated back to work, but if you go back to work and just get basically nothing accomplished, you can have the same effect as being on strike within the letter of the law. Anyhow, great article, as always!
a great disaster that brings unions into disrepute and led to the sort of upheavals as 'the winter of discontent' 72\73 UK and Thatcher' s determination to break the coalminers strike in 79 re the equivalent to Dugatt? ie Arthur Scargill
it does leave a bitter taste
Seeing "Industry 5.0" slapped on healthcare and bioprocessing news and imagining the term could be co-opted as a negotiation framework for broad "just transitions" if defined threshold of worker replacements, job/responsibility compression, and/or employee marginalization are achieved, especially since efficiency from automation (e.g., containerization) has improved dockworker's physical wellbeing and been accompanied by increased trading volumes and in many cases increases job sophistication (small example: introducing robotic arms in Dx/QC labs where highly trained people used to and still in many cases spend most of their days bent over a bench fussing over pipetting errors).
Wonder if we'll see a broad rekindling of UBI conversations as a result of this...
I expect this will not be fully sorted until labor has their own political party. This is the reason we do not have publicly funded Healthcare options, for instance. And everyone here is buying reams of the crap being imported. Vote with your wallet and stop buying that crap. Or buy more of it, if that's what you're into.
It's interesting to consider how much leverage workers in different occupations have to capture the gains from automation. In the case of the longshoremen, that's 50k workers that can impact a significant percent of GDP!
But the roughly 3 million customer service representatives across the US likely won't have anywhere close to the same leverage as their work is increasingly impacted by AI, even though there are more of them: https://www.2120insights.com/i/146378400/technology-driven-change
https://open.substack.com/pub/ellegriffin/p/mondragon-as-the-new-city-state?r=1q0rqz&utm_medium=ios
Elle Griffin wrote about Mondragon a few weeks ago which opened my mind to a new, more fair way to compete in a capitalist economy. They are a federated corporation of co-ops. I think this model could solve a lot of the issues workers face with automation.
Highly recommend reading it, fascinating stuff.
Great piece, Kyla! I'm curious if you know of any cases where automation has occurred in a more "democratic" fashion than the one you've described here - do we have any positive examples to draw from?
Sweden has done a good job
Thanks I'll read into this more :)
Has anyone been able to estimate what inflation looks like if the strike goes on for, say, 3 months?
This is punted until January, and not resolved yet. I wonder if we will have to revisit it then…
check out Aimee Mann at the Boulder Theater on Nov 11, if possible. geeky healing energy.