I see some conversation in the inflation thread and in the October Surprise thread, but surely this issue is going to demand a thread of its own, right? I guess I'll kick off with an article: East Coast ports strike: Longshoremen's demand for pay rise (thehill.com)
in view of the current admin/Fed's fight against inflation, caused by Trump's ill-conceived trade war, which created many global supply chain bottlenecks, the Fed's apparent soft landing, Harris is leading on a close election, ---going on a limp---Biden will invoke the Taft Hartley Act to effect a 90-days cooling off period
I suspect he will. But how will this be looked upon by other unions? Does the invocation of the act sour other national unions? I do not profess to know much on this subject and the intermingling's of unions to other unions. So, what is more important at election time? Pissing off the union folk and keeping prices low, or collectively bargain and pray the strike gets over in a few weeks?
I'm with the longshoremen on this. I want them to get more pay. But, I doubt they get any concessions on roboticization. I get the concern, but the march of technology is never denied, so it seems hopeless. And, I don't think for-profit companies are the ones to address it -- it should be government that addresses it, and that redress probably involves Socialism. As robots and AI continue to raise the bar on how educated and trained you have to be in order to be better than a computer in creating value, the greater the percentage of the population will fall below that bar. At some point, you need to give up on telling the unwashed masses to just try harder. No amount of personal effort is going to beat the potential of automation. Embrace the fact that we've gotten so good at automation that we can sustain a large nonworking population on the ingenuity of a minority of our people -- and decouple income from work. He probably should. The carriers negotiating this might feel some economic pain from the strike, but it won't be as much pain as the consumer feels from the inflation that will likely result. Then everyone is going to start to have very strong political opinions about whether capital or labor are in the wrong here and who should concede because we're effectively hostages in this negotiation. We can avoid a lot of political tumult if the government would step in to protect the consumer. It does, however, strengthen the hand of capital at labor's expense and I don't think we have a well-developed toolset to dampen the bargaining power of the companies in labor negotiation.
I think we've seen that technology advancements usually have a foil in the cost center; there's the inevitable prediction of 'cost cutting' after cost of implantation, then it's revealed that the reality of the advancements have their own, unanticipated costs. Cutting out labor may not always be the best move. People can still intuit and respond abstractly where tech cannot. Being first to innovate can backfire. Learning from mistakes of other companies combined with a good sound business mission and culture run by experienced leadership usually wins. I've learned that reinventing the wheel (or trying to implement the new wheel first) is really a home run swing. It can work out amazingly, but it's a huge risk. I'd rather win the game with base hits because at the end, you still have won the game.
Just my opinion, but I think the longshoremen have all the leverage at this point. But in a few years your son or daughter might be loading the tankers from the warmth of their home office. My wife was a M-F worker before covid. Now when I come home i get excited if she has changed out of her pajamas. How we work is changing by the day.
I had to do some digging to see what the longshoreman wanted, and the 2 big things seem to be automation and pay. Just googling what the pay range is looks like its $65-$86k per year per salary.com and they want a 77% increase and part of their reasoning is that the Alliance made Billions during Covid for their increases in prices. Automation can be good and bad, years ago they had to unload things by hand and now they have machines that will do it, easier and more efficient but takes less "people" to do it. From a management perspective, 77% is steep BUT if they could do something like 50% over X amount of years, it "could be" palatable for all sides. At the end of the day, we the consumers will bear the brunt of any increase as the cost of doing business will go up. We will also bear the brunt of the estimated $5 billion per day that they are shut down, the shipping companies have diverted containers to the West Coast and rail and trucking companies will then send the goods across country. At my company we get containers in from China via Long Beach so not a direct impact on us, but the ports will begin to back up with the additional workload. I hope they both come away unhappy as that's the way negotiations should be........compromise
They are begging for the speed up of port automations. Either way automation will come, does not matter if they fight against it. I am just glad I probably won't have deal with it too much at my age.
??? He ordered the National Guard to be scabs? Also, weight restrictions are a safety issue. Seems unwise.
ha I know my response is an over reaction. We can't go full on automation across the board, naturally. However, over time it will be necessary to start replacing manual jobs with automation. We can't and shouldn't implement indefinite protection, else we would still be picking cotton seeds manually or hand scribing every book.
That was my first thought. Waiving weight restrictions on trucks, and most are likely to be the big rigs, appears to be a reckless act by Florida's governor. I'm not sure what DeSantis thinks the Florida national and state guard are going to do. Count the boxes as they go into likely to be overloaded trucks? That's not exactly their job, although I'm pretty sure they can count. Not sure if governor DeSantis can.
The irony is rich! both Commodore and Diet Trump were silent when Trump's ill-conceived trade war led to the closure / disruption of the global supply chain
