Longshoremen Union Port Strike 2024 - NOOOOOO NOT MY HECKING BANANAS

[Fatsuit Shinji]

There's not many laws regulating anti-competitive behavior done by unions employees. Cause the unions and useful idiot bleedingheart normies contribute heavily to the democrats to ensure those laws don't get passed.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

Is it really bargaining power when most of their "power" comes from the fact their employers can't legally fire them for striking? Remove those protections and a lot of that bargaining power goes away as longshoreman are pretty easy to replace skillwise and even at their current salary there would be a long list of new applicants eager to take the gig. By the end of the week they would have a whole roster of new employees trained and working.

In non-clown world there would be no ready supply of scabs, and no strikes because the labor market would be so tight that companies would have to raise wages and benefits just to retain employees. Except this is clown world, so all your replacement dockworkers will be foreign nationals who don't speak a lick of English, and who will flat refuse to do so unless forced. Although, I bet having our national ports stocked with incompetent, lazy and uncaring scabs; and "losing" more containers in the stacks is a small price to pay so some megacorporation can fuck over multi-generation white Americans. Cause you still believe this is the 19 whenever and not 2024.

But like, why are there laws regulating anti-competitive behavior for the employers and not for the employees?

What would anti-competitive laws against employees look like? Non-compete agreements? Is that what you want? Baring people from using a skill or training they have because it might cost some corpo a few zeros?

Here's a video about the behind the scenes of the negotiations

 

[Mukhrani]

There's not many laws regulating anti-competitive behavior done by unions employees. Cause the unions and useful idiot bleedingheart normies contribute heavily to the democrats to ensure those laws don't get passed.

Typical beautiful loser mentality from the right wing. 'Unions support Democrats, so we should just spit on working people and gratuitously lick the assholes of megacorporations that want to ship in infinityniggers for scab labor.' And this during an election year when, for the first time ever, some unions are failing to endorse Dem candidates and are instead taking a step back politically while weighing their options. The union members are already voting increasingly right wing. But instead of doing what the Dems did to get power, and turning popular institutions to your side, you want to have a 'tism fit and scream about how unions are bad cause daddy (or e-daddy) said they were all commies.

Most people in this country are working class. Most want to make more money and have more labor protections. The base of the Republican party is increasingly working class, and a fair chunk of them are union members. Their interests align with the increasingly protectionist tack of the Republican economic platform, and the Rust Belt is now integral to any Republican path to electoral victory. Anyone who thinks that the way to win is to keep frantically quoting Milton Friedman and Bircher screeds while we stim with our fidget spinners is an idiot.

In non-clown world there would be no ready supply of scabs, and no strikes because the labor market would be so tight that companies would have to raise wages and benefits just to retain employees. Except this is clown world, so all your replacement dockworkers will be foreign nationals who don't speak a lick of English, and who will flat refuse to do so unless forced. Although, I bet having our national ports stocked with incompetent, lazy and uncaring scabs; and "losing" more containers in the stacks is a small price to pay so some megacorporation can fuck over multi-generation white Americans. Cause you still believe this is the 19 whenever and not 2024.

Also, any self-respecting white man expects to be paid a living wage that he can support a family on. The foreign scabs have zero issue abusing every entitlement under the sun, and the companies know that. Essentially, they want to replace you with the subliterate dregs of the third world, pay them a pittance, then have their newly imported serfs subsidize their poverty wages with programs paid for by your taxpayer dollars. The corporation will, of course, pocket the difference. Then your replacement, whom you're already subsidizing, can chain migrate over their whole smelly, retarded family, who will all get social security without paying a penny into it.

 

[Nonga Tork]

If anything, this strike proves that fascism with strong state planning is the way to go.

These guys make well over 150.000$ a year, and STILL want a massive pay rise just because they’re a cartel?

How is it any different from a corporation trying to increase its profits no matter how profitable they already are? It's the basic logic behind capitalism, always maximize how much money you make for anything you do.

 

[Fapcop]

How is it any different from a corporation trying to increase its profits no matter how profitable they already are? It's the basic logic behind capitalism, always maximize how much money you make for anything you do.

That’s why we need a strong government, who together with businesses and workers can set a cap on reasonable profits/wages.

Making more than a doctor for moving some boxes around is not a reasonable wage.

 

[Fatsuit Shinji]

How is it any different from a corporation trying to increase its profits no matter how profitable they already are? It's the basic logic behind capitalism, always maximize how much money you make for anything you do.

Thank the dodge v ford 1919 verdict which functionally made it illegal not to maximize income for the businesses.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

Thank the dodge v ford 1919 verdict which functionally made it illegal not to maximize income for the businesses.

You'll never guess who had a hand in that one. Hint: Dodge's early logo

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

That’s why we need a strong government, who together with businesses and workers can set a cap on reasonable profits/wages.

Making more than a doctor for moving some boxes around is not a reasonable wage.

Except it's a entirely reasonable one. It's the doctors and most everyone else in the US who needs a massive raise. Que the infamous productivity-wages chart.
More shekels than ever are being amassed, 'cept the worker isn't getting it. With the exception of these dock workers, who unionized and forced themselves into a equal negotiating position with their employers. And I guarantee you, their wages could go up, way fucking up and the business would still be far away from going bankrupt due to the workers wages.

 

[Marvin]

What would anti-competitive laws against employees look like? Non-compete agreements? Is that what you want? Baring people from using a skill or training they have because it might cost some corpo a few zeros?

I wasn't asking for anything. I'm just genuinely curious what the arguments usually are.

I don't see how a non-compete argument would disrupt collective bargaining or union action.

Laws regulating anti-competitive practices target things like monopolies and cartels. They're situations where a single entity holds some rare resource and (ab)uses their control over it to extract unusually high profits. Normally in the free market, an entity is generally allowed to charge whatever they want for their product/service, because if there's enough competition, they simply won't make any sales if they get too greedy. But monopolies/cartels disrupt that.

Most economists would consider a monopoly a failure case of the free market where the normal expectations are subverted, so we regulate things like that.

How do we distinguish normal pricing changes from an anti-competitive practice?

Well, if prices for a commodity rise over time, it might just be from the market conditions changing. But if it turns out that all the producers of the commodity got together and decided to collude to crank up their prices together, that would be price fixing and an illegal cartel.

The collusion there would be the crime.

A labor version of this would be, if you're trying to hire Mexicans at Home Depot to install your new deck, and you keep trying to charge them $3/hour, none of them would come to install your deck. They aren't colluding to hold out for a better price. No one can work for that cheap.

But if they all got together and decided they wouldn't work for less than $70/hour, that might be collusion.

(Though obviously day labor is extremely fungible and liquid, so while even if it's technically an attempt at collusion, it's destined to fail because scabs will always come along in that case.)

Normally I'm pretty free market myself, and yeah, usually labor is pretty fungible, so the workers don't often have enough leverage to be a big threat. It's fair for a regulator to take that into consideration. How much leverage do the parties actually have and are they abusing it?

But still, sometimes the workers do have massive leverage. Ok, sure, my example of day laborers is bad because they're all super replaceable, but not all jobs are like that. Plenty of jobs have elaborate certifications and credentialing requirements that unions exploit the shit out of.

Why can a union openly declare their intent to form what is functionally an illegal price cartel?

 

[Fapcop]

Except it's an entirely reasonable one.

HOW IN THE FUCK IS $150.000 to $200.000 for moving some boxes around “entirely reasonable” nigga?

It's the doctors and most everyone else in the US who needs a massive raise.

Doctors doesn’t need a raise. Just legislate a limit to malpractice lawsuits, so they don’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in insurance. There’s your pay raise right there.

Lots of people need a pay raise in the US, and an easy way to get there, would be to deport all the illegals that are driving down wages.

Que the infamous productivity-wages chart.
More shekels than ever are being amassed, 'cept the worker isn't getting it. With the exception of these dock workers, who unionized and forced themselves into a equal negotiating position with their employers.

They’re an absolute exception. First of all because communist cronies in Congress made laws that virtually make it impossible to avoid dealing with the union cartel.

Secondly they’re sitting on a vital bottleneck and are basically taking the entire economy hostage. Fuck em.

And I guarantee you, their wages could go up, way fucking up and the business would still be far away from going bankrupt due to the workers wages.

Unions are absolutely capable of killing both businesses and the economy. Just look to the UK or US in the 70ies before they broke their back.

Expecting unreasonable pay raises isn’t sustainable.

Just look at the idiots who demanded 20$ an hour wages for fast food workers in California, and as a result got businesses closed and workers replaced with robots.

FASCISM IS THE FUTURE!

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

Also, any self-respecting white man expects to be paid a living wage that he can support a family on. The foreign scabs have zero issue abusing every entitlement under the sun, and the companies know that. Essentially, they want to replace you with the subliterate dregs of the third world, pay them a pittance, then have their newly imported serfs subsidize their poverty wages with programs paid for by your taxpayer dollars

This is the only reason. To debase wages and make working people poorer and weaker against their efforts to enact control. The Roman elites did the same thing in the late empire with the taxes and tenant farmer systems.

As others and myself have noted, look at the chart of wages vs. productivity since 1947. It diverged in 1970 and ever since then more and more wealth has been stolen from workers by these elites.

And they didn't do it through fair competition or whatever, it's because the federal government repeatedly intervened on their behalf, bailed them out for their mistakes, passed laws to protect them from even domestic competition, and so on. Every single act of malfeasance committed by corporations was paid for by workers, with the sole exception of the amounts the government can claw back for Superfund sites.

That's what caused the auto industry to go to shit in the 1970s too.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

I wasn't asking for anything. I'm just genuinely curious what the arguments usually are.

Ok. That's why I brough up non-compete agreements because that's the only think I could think of that would met what you are talking about to my mind.

Why can a union openly declare their intent to form what is functionally an illegal price cartel?

Are they? As far as I know no law says a company must hire or must come to terms with a union. The ports could hire scabs if they wanted to, as far as I know.

 

[Jump]

Making more than a doctor for moving some boxes around is not a reasonable wage.

But they DON'T make more then doctors in these regions.

I swear to fucking god there are people ITT stuck in a time warp where they still think 100k a year is a lot of money. i don't know if people are complete cope mode about the value of the USD or its just strait up crab bucket thinking. If you haven't been getting a 5-10% yearly increase in pay since 2016 then your real income has actually been dropping.




Shit's fucked. I don't blame the longshoremen for pulling what ever lever they need to be able hold on the vanishing "American Dream".

 

[Marvin]

Are they? As far as I know no law says a company must hire or must come to terms with a union. The ports could hire scabs if they wanted to, as far as I know.

It's not by force of law but that's similar for other situations where the federal government intervenes regarding anti-competitive behavior.

Like with mobile app stores. They intervene when Google gets up to fuckery like banning apps that compete with their own services or whatever. There's no law forcing you to use the Google app store but it's still a massively powerful control over the market that the government intervenes anyway.

I'm OK with the government doing that (somewhat) because it's satisfying watching Google getting kicked in the dick.

I'm just wondering about the discrepancy.

And I guess the realistic answer to my question is just a combination of history and realpolitik. Capitalism was a lot nastier in the past; robber barons and company towns and the Pinkertons and all that, and our current regulatory practices are the legacy of that.

 

[TJT]

Dude, most people in the USA don't make anywhere near $200k a year. You only get $200k a year as a forklift driver if you are a Longshoreman. That is cold hard reality. $100k - $200k is a damn good earnings for the overwhelming majority of Americans. If you make so much that $200k is lol money then more power to ya.

ITT you complete idiots conflate a company union striking against the company to this. This is completely false equivalence. If I have a Lumber Mill and my workers unionize and decide to go on strike. If I am the owner I have to deal with it and the union has to take the risk that I can outlast them. This can sometimes fail and the business closes down, throwing all of the union workers out on their ass but creating a market void for [some other business] to fill. This is a fine and tolerable situation.

When the gay ass longshoremen do this they are extorting everyone because its not a "either we win or you lose" situation because they are strongarming every company that relies on the flow of goods through ports. Its "if we don't win everyone loses." Comparing it to a company union a crock of shit.

 

[The best and greatest]

HOW IN THE FUCK IS $150.000 to $200.000 for moving some boxes around “entirely reasonable” nigga?

Same way making millions of dollars yearly for tossing a ball around is 'entirely reasonable'
Since when did free market capitalists give a shit about such things anyway? Who dictates what is reasonable pay? Is it you?

 

[DJ McHamfist]

I swear to fucking god there are people ITT stuck in a time warp where they still think 100k a year is a lot of money. i don't know if people are complete cope mode about the value of the USD or its just strait up crab bucket thinking. If you haven't been getting a 5-10% yearly increase in pay since 2016 then your real income has actually been dropping.

There is indeed a shitload of uninformed jealousy in this thread.

Unions are absolutely capable of killing both businesses and the economy. Just look to the UK or US in the 70ies before they broke their back.

Like check out this dumb motherfucker right here with this stupid illiterate take

 

[LaxerBRO]

HOW IN THE FUCK IS $150.000 to $200.000 for moving some boxes around “entirely reasonable” nigga?

The most they make is $39/hour is for employees that have been there for six or more years.



So is making $39/hour after six years of driving a forklift an unreasonable amount of money?

I don't care about how much money people make with overtime.

Why should we be angry at someone for working hard and not taking time off?

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

And I guess the realistic answer to my question is just a combination of history and realpolitik. Capitalism was a lot nastier in the past; robber barons and company towns and the Pinkertons and all that, and our current regulatory practices are the legacy of that.

I think the nation has always favored capital over labor, and our current laws reflect the only time the opposite was true.

 

[Quijibo69]

The strange thing about this is the hurricane Miltion started after the strike was on hold.