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As many Americans now know, our economic and material well-being is in the hands of a gaggle of racketeering union thugs who, at any given moment, could hold Americans hostage as they make their demands. 

This week, several thousand union dockworkers on the East and Gulf Coasts “began their first large-scale strike in nearly 50 years,” shutting down roughly half of American ports. 

Americans appear to have gotten a temporary reprieve in the form of a “tentative agreement” which increases dockworkers’ pay, while tabling “all other outstanding issues” until 2025, when we can expect these thugs to once again threaten strikes at all American ports if their demands aren’t met.

Rather than being relieved about that, we should probably take this moment to understand the danger in these union mobsters having so much leverage over the American people and the American economy. 

The threatened shutdown would have potentially cost the American economy nearly $5 billion a day, further strangling Americans who have been crippled by the punishing inflation visited upon them these past few years, and many of whom are in desperate need of supplies after Hurricane Helene ravaged the East Coast.  And if you think strangulation and crippling are excessive metaphors about what the American consumer will experience at the hands of these thugs, then perhaps you should meet 78-year-old union boss for the International Longshoremen’s Association, Harold Daggett.

“These people today don’t know what a strike is,” he said in a conversation on YouTube.  “When my men hit the street, every single port from Maine to Texas will lock down.”  After threatening that his strike will cause malls to shutter and car salesmen and construction workers to lose their jobs in the weeks following, everyone may then realize, he says, just how important their jobs are.  Then, he says that even if the president invoked Taft-Hartley (a tragically laughable prospect, knowing as we all do that the president is a vegetable), companies will be forced to pay workers’ salaries while moving only thirty-percent of the product they’re capable of moving.

“They’re gonna be like this,” Daggett said, putting his hands to his throat as if being strangled.  “You’re better off sittin’ down,” he warns, “and let’s get a contract, and let’s move on with this world.  Because in today’s world, I’ll cripple ya.”

Let’s set aside, for a moment, that union boss Harold Daggett has actually been accused of Mafia ties, and is threatening to personally orchestrate the unemployment of hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans who are struggling to feed their families and just trying to get by.  Let’s also disregard that he earns over $900,000 annually, lives on a sprawling multi-million-dollar estate, and has a yacht that prompted Elon Musk to point out that the “[d]ude has more yachts than me!” 

But let’s just take him at his word, and assume that he’s being honest in saying that all the pain and suffering that his union strike is meant to inflict upon Americans and dockworkers’ employers is going to make them all realize just how important longshoremen’s jobs are, as he says. 

Harry Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell (which is an academic discipline now, I guess), agrees, saying that “this group has a lot of bargaining power.  They’re essential workers that can’t be replaced, and also the ports are doing well.”

O.K.  But if that’s so, then why does part of the corrupt union’s “bargaining” with employers involve a demand that some longshoremen cannot be replaced by machines?  Among the picket lines, signs calling for “more money” for longshoremen are juxtaposed with signs calling for a “ban on automation,” says the New York Post.

Attacks against automation due to potential market disruption are nothing new, though the union representative threatening to inflict harm upon the American people in order to prevent automation happens to be cartoonishly evil in this instance. 

In the very different world of 1965, economist Tom Rose said that automation is “simply a new name for an old process: the transfer of work from people to machines in order to lighten man’s burden and increase his output.” 

Rose offers an “absurdly simple” formula to explain the relationship of technological change to human well-being, and why more automation invariably increases output.  “Man determines his material wealth (standard of living) by taking natural resources and applying his human effort to develop them with the aid of tools.” 

In the most basic sense, one could argue that the transfer of work from people to machinery birthed the Industrial Revolution.  And the Industrial Revolution was, beyond any legitimate dispute, the greatest advancement of material well-being for humankind in all its history.  As even Kelsey Piper over at Vox is forced to admit, “almost all the gains in human well-being in history happened since the Industrial Revolution.”

One ancillary by-product of all that improvement in human lives, however, is market disruption. 

Here’s a quick example.  In the late 1700s, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture.  Today, after two centuries of increased automation and technological advancements, roughly 10% of Americans work in agriculture, and food has never been more plentiful.  While the advantages of increased food production via automation should be apparent, it is wildly incorrect to suggest that automation made 80% of Americans unemployed.  They simply became employed in jobs and fields that were more valuable, and thus improved their own lives and the American economy in this ever-evolving, symbiotic relationship that Adam Smith describes as a “free market” of voluntary exchange — which is arguably the actual miracle that made the advancement of human well-being that is often attributed to the Industrial Revolution possible in the first place.

“Automation,” as Tom Rose argues, can’t truly be the cause of unemployment, because “automation (better tools) can only increase production.”  And any measure of increased productivity at American ports would certainly be welcome, given that top U.S. ports rank among the worst ports on Earth in terms of efficiency, according to a 2021 World Bank Group study.

Consider the Port of Oakland, for example, which is ranked 359 out of 370 in that study (370 being none other than the Port of Los Angeles).  Thanks to union protectionism against automation, it is, like “most American ports in general,” one of the “most technologically antiquated in the world,” according to business publication Savannah CEO. 

Their study compares the shipping ports of Oakland and Rotterdam, and discerns that “cranes in Rotterdam are almost 80% more productive than in Oakland.”

Why? Well, they’re automated, and therefore more efficient.  The software doesn’t get tired or distracted as humans do, and is typically operating at peak efficiency.  But another reason that the port is so much more productive is because it’s easier to “have multiple shifts per day and better utilize expensive capital assets (cranes, trucks, berths, etc.).”  In Oakland, they also run multiple shifts, but at much higher costs due to “negotiated” overtime pay for union workers.

And one can hardly blame those union workers for being protective of their lucrative gigs.  The average union member in Oakland earns roughly $230,000 annually in wages and benefits.  To put that in perspective for you, the average salary of an aerospace engineer is $134,000. 

These union dockworkers “earned” these negotiated wages thanks to previous union bosses extorting their employers when they resisted previous “technological advancements” in shipping — simple things, these days, like the use of “containers” in the 1960s, or later, computers to track cargo.

Of course, innovations like containers and computers tremendously increased shipping volume and productivity at American ports.  This translates to more products imported and exported, and benefits everyone, even if the heavy wages of American longshoremen remains a millstone around the American consumers’ necks, taking its toll in the form of higher prices due to unnecessarily high labor costs.  We have no reason to think that automated cranes wouldn’t also improve productivity and reduce costs for producers bringing their goods to and from the global market, which translates directly to lower costs for millions upon millions of Americans.

Unions standing athwart technological advancements that would benefit every single American to protect their own hefty salaries, negotiated benefits, and overtime pay is a pretty sweet deal for longshoremen, and a pretty terrible deal for everyone else.  With any luck, this will be Americans’ revelation at these union goons latest attempt to extort the American people while trying to line their own pockets, and efforts will be made to hasten automation and make America’s ports more efficient while, of course, ensuring a fair market price for dockworkers’ labor.

Image: RawPixel // CC0 1.0 Universal // public domain