Port strike and automation

[bilby]

Artists don't take subsidies from the government and then complain about government

My observation is that some artists do nothing else.

 

[barbos]

The discussion went the usual way to blaming billionaires, completely ignoring the fact that these poor union "workers" are ridiculously overpaid.

So? Billionaires are ridiculously overpaid.

So? that's not the topic of discussion here.

Not your call to say what the topic of discussion is.

Not your either. It's topic starter's.

BTW How can you discuss someone's income without comparison to others? Otherwise you are just bitching.

Yes, and the first thing came to your mind (as usual) were billionaires.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The case I'm thinking of is commercial passenger airlines. The safety rules do not permit a complete turnover of cockpit crews--I wouldn't be shocked if this was deliberately put in there to have the very effect it does. So you have the current reality that the very senior pilots get very good pay while the junior pilots in many cases don't get enough to be safe. Union pay scales are engineered to trap workers with a single company to deprive them of their most powerful weapon: their feet.

Trap???

Hyperbole much?

I see nothing in that that rebuts what I'm saying.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As for your second--there's a huge flaw in that data. Once again, I point to Freakonomics. It is incredibly UNcommon for people to go from the bottom quintile (starting out in life) to the top quintile (at retirement.) They only addressed it by quintiles and your chart breaks at 90% rather than 80% so it is not directly comparable. However, note that 90th percentile is $1.6m which is a completely reasonable number for professionals at retirement.

FTFY.

Except you didn't. You didn't address the issue at all. Most people start their life in that lower 50%.

Thirty-two percent of persistently poor children spend half of early adult life in poverty, while only 1% of never-poor children do.36 In addition, only 16% of persistently poor children are able to escape poverty between the ages of 25 and 30.37 Due to one or a number of factors, these individuals are unable to climb above the poverty line and must subsequently raise their own children in poverty.

That doesn't even include becoming millionaires.

You seem to mention Freakonomics quite often. Perhaps you can cite what it says concerning this.

Oops, forgot the link.

Intergenerational Poverty in the United States - Ballard Brief

Every consequence of growing up in poverty acts as another barrier for someone to rise above the poverty line.

ballardbrief.byu.edu

Poverty. Not merely the lower 50%. Poverty is a major trap but it's an attitude that usually can't be solved by money.

And one of the biggest ways to trap yourself is to have children before you're in a position to afford them. You can easily screw your whole life that way.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It is simply not possible for that labor's share of GDP in the US since the 1980s because of people are being replaced by automation because THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE WORKING.

What you are missing is that more is being done.

Some numbers for illustration only: We had 100 workers and machines equivalent of another 100. Now we have 150 and machines that are equivalent to 300. More workers, lower percent of productivity due to the workers.

I pointed out a fact that contradicts barbos’s written claim. Labor’s share of GDP did not decline because fewer people are working because there are more people working. Productivity is irrelevant to that reality based observation.

Your claim is akin to saying 2 + 2 = blue….

I corrected a premise about fact: the number of people working since the 1980s has not decreased but increased. Hence the hypothesized causation by barbos is false because it is based on a false premise.

<Whack! With a clue-by-4.>

You conveniently snipped away the part of my response that explained your error. That doesn't fix it.

 

[laughing dog]

It is simply not possible for that labor's share of GDP in the US since the 1980s because of people are being replaced by automation because THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE WORKING.

What you are missing is that more is being done.

Some numbers for illustration only: We had 100 workers and machines equivalent of another 100. Now we have 150 and machines that are equivalent to 300. More workers, lower percent of productivity due to the workers.

I pointed out a fact that contradicts barbos’s written claim. Labor’s share of GDP did not decline because fewer people are working because there are more people working. Productivity is irrelevant to that reality based observation.

Your claim is akin to saying 2 + 2 = blue….

I corrected a premise about fact: the number of people working since the 1980s has not decreased but increased. Hence the hypothesized causation by barbos is false because it is based on a false premise.

<Whack! With a clue-by-4.>

You conveniently snipped away the part of my response that explained your error. That doesn't fix it.

There is nothing to fix - you appear unable to parse basic statetments. barbos's analysis is based on a false premise. I pointed out the false premise which makes his analysis false. Nowhere did I make any claim about causation. Unless you can show that I was in error when I said that more people are working now than in the 1980s, all you have done is waste our time in dealing with your misinterpretation and the time of anyone reading this.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It is simply not possible for that labor's share of GDP in the US since the 1980s because of people are being replaced by automation because THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE WORKING.

What you are missing is that more is being done.

Some numbers for illustration only: We had 100 workers and machines equivalent of another 100. Now we have 150 and machines that are equivalent to 300. More workers, lower percent of productivity due to the workers.

I pointed out a fact that contradicts barbos’s written claim. Labor’s share of GDP did not decline because fewer people are working because there are more people working. Productivity is irrelevant to that reality based observation.

Your claim is akin to saying 2 + 2 = blue….

I corrected a premise about fact: the number of people working since the 1980s has not decreased but increased. Hence the hypothesized causation by barbos is false because it is based on a false premise.

<Whack! With a clue-by-4.>

You conveniently snipped away the part of my response that explained your error. That doesn't fix it.

There is nothing to fix - you appear unable to parse basic statetments. barbos's analysis is based on a false premise. I pointed out the false premise which makes his analysis false. Nowhere did I make any claim about causation. Unless you can show that I was in error when I said that more people are working now than in the 1980s, all you have done is waste our time in dealing with your misinterpretation and the time of anyone reading this.

You committed a basic mistake: Comparing a percentage to an absolute value. I called you on it, you snipped my description of your error and you are now blaming me for your error. Are you a Republican?

 

[Bomb#20]

Nobody is saying they should not get paid. But they are already very well paid. They want ridiculous amount more (70% pay increase) and no automation in ports, and are using extortion, monopoly power of their union, and an unreasonably friendly White House to get their way.

First time I've heard collective bargaining referenced to as extortion.

That's bizarre -- that rhetoric is a fixture in debates about unions, and you've been in quite few of those. But hey, you've heard what you've heard. Have you ever heard employment for wages referred to as extortion? "Do what I say or else you're fired."? Calling that extortion is a fixture in debates about capitalism, and you've been in a few of those too.

The thinking behind this sort of rhetoric is identical. It's not reasoning-based; it's a pattern-matching thing. In some people, "If you don't do for me what I want, I won't do for you what you want." triggers the same neural network as "If you don't do for me what I want, I'll beat you up.".

I called it extortion because it is. Fundamentally, extortion is a threat to do harm if the target doesn't do the desired action. And that's what a strike is. It's about disrupting operation, not merely about not working.

By that standard, negotiating for anything counts as "extortion". People will call anything they don't like "harm", and the whole point of negotiating is to get a larger fraction of the producer+consumer surplus for yourself, which necessarily involves a threat to "harm" the other party by reducing the remainder of the producer+consumer surplus to zero.

A grad student I interviewed at one of my old jobs was so good he got an offer not just from my boss but also from another department of the company, in Oregon. He ended up going there. My department probably could have gotten him if we'd offered him more. But of course how much we offered him was up to HR, not to my boss. Likewise with Oregon -- when they offered him a position their offer was up to the exact same HR department, so of course both departments offered him the same pay and he chose the job he liked better rather than the pay he liked better. From our CEO's point of view it would have been ridiculous for us and Oregon to be competing with each other on price and bidding up his salary, since it was all coming from the same pile of money -- HR's job was to estimate how much they needed to pay him to get him not to take a job with some other company; it wasn't their job to let him play our departments off against each other and get more money from our shareholders than we needed to give him. But from his point of view it was collusion between two competing buyers to hold down the price of his labor. We in effect threatened to not hire him at all if he wouldn't go for our single take-it-or-leave-it offer; that evidently would have "harmed" him by disrupting his plan for how he was going to operate his career. So the question is, by choosing to put up a united front in our negotiation with him, instead of competing with each other, were our two departments "extorting" him?

 

[barbos]

By that standard, negotiating for anything counts as "extortion"

And by your standards anything can be called negotiation.
A guy with a gun comes to a bank and starts negotiations about how much money he should get in exchange for not shooting people.

 

[Bomb#20]

By that standard, negotiating for anything counts as "extortion"

And by yoursome newly made up standards anything can be called negotiation.
A guy with a gun comes to a bank and starts negotiations about how much money he should get in exchange for not shooting people.

FIFY.

What is it about those imbecilic standards you just made up that you think makes them mine?

The issue here is simple: if the multiple owners and managers doing employing within a company cooperating instead of competing with one another doesn't qualify as "extortion" or "price-fixing" or whatever, why on earth would the multiple workers getting employed within a union cooperating instead of competing with one another qualify as "extortion" or "price-fixing" or whatever? There's a core-level asymmetry in the inference rules and rhetoric used by anti-union arguers that looks an awful lot like all the core-level asymmetries in the inference rules and rhetoric used by anti-capitalism arguers, so I'm asking what grounds there are for that asymmetrical reasoning.

 

[Swammerdami]

GDP doesn't fully measure wealth. My concern is not productivity, it's wealth distribution. Productivity has risen greatly yet wages have stagnated for the lower and middle classes.

Lower class certainly has. That always happens as societies develop--the market values skills over warm bodies. The spread between high skill and low skill is much wider than it was in the past and thus low skill is farther from the average. And the answer is not to simply pay them more--the result of that approach is more unemployment.

Q: What IS the answer then? The spread between high and low skill is likely to continue increasing.
A: Taxpayer funding of necessities. Begin with medical care and child care.

Payroll taxes and other employer mandates serve as disincentives for hiring. Eliminate them, replacing revenue shortfall via carbon tax.

Hope this helps.

 

[robnisch]

GDP doesn't fully measure wealth. My concern is not productivity, it's wealth distribution. Productivity has risen greatly yet wages have stagnated for the lower and middle classes.

Lower class certainly has. That always happens as societies develop--the market values skills over warm bodies. The spread between high skill and low skill is much wider than it was in the past and thus low skill is farther from the average. And the answer is not to simply pay them more--the result of that approach is more unemployment.

Q: What IS the answer then? The spread between high and low skill is likely to continue increasing.
A: Taxpayer funding of necessities. Begin with medical care and child care.

Payroll taxes and other employer mandates serve as disincentives for hiring. Eliminate them, replacing revenue shortfall via carbon tax.

Hope this helps.

Over the many years that I have, mostly lurked here, seen a bit of elitism from some members when it comes to workers. I have worked what can be called low skill jobs.
But, I can assure you most of the people that look down on those you do these jobs would not last one day in one.
One skill that is needed is putting up with arrogant ass holes.

 

[Swammerdami]

GDP doesn't fully measure wealth. My concern is not productivity, it's wealth distribution. Productivity has risen greatly yet wages have stagnated for the lower and middle classes.

Lower class certainly has. That always happens as societies develop--the market values skills over warm bodies. The spread between high skill and low skill is much wider than it was in the past and thus low skill is farther from the average. And the answer is not to simply pay them more--the result of that approach is more unemployment.

Q: What IS the answer then? The spread between high and low skill is likely to continue increasing.
A: Taxpayer funding of necessities. Begin with medical care and child care.

Payroll taxes and other employer mandates serve as disincentives for hiring. Eliminate them, replacing revenue shortfall via carbon tax.

Hope this helps.

Over the many years that I have, mostly lurked here, seen a bit of elitism from some members when it comes to workers. I have worked what can be called low skill jobs.
But, I can assure you most of the people that look down on those you do these jobs would not last one day in one.
One skill that is needed is putting up with arrogant ass holes.

OK. But I do wonder why you replied to ME. Did I write something arrogant or assholish?

 

[Gospel]

The case I'm thinking of is commercial passenger airlines. The safety rules do not permit a complete turnover of cockpit crews--I wouldn't be shocked if this was deliberately put in there to have the very effect it does. So you have the current reality that the very senior pilots get very good pay while the junior pilots in many cases don't get enough to be safe. Union pay scales are engineered to trap workers with a single company to deprive them of their most powerful weapon: their feet.

Trap???

Hyperbole much?

I see nothing in that that rebuts what I'm saying.

To be fair, it's pretty common around here for some folks to miss rebuttals. That said, unions aren't intentionally trying to limit workers' power; the intention is to reward experience and loyalty. However, I do agree that seniority-based pay scales can have unintended consequences—what I consider side effects, and what you call an engineered trap.

 

[robnisch]

GDP doesn't fully measure wealth. My concern is not productivity, it's wealth distribution. Productivity has risen greatly yet wages have stagnated for the lower and middle classes.

Lower class certainly has. That always happens as societies develop--the market values skills over warm bodies. The spread between high skill and low skill is much wider than it was in the past and thus low skill is farther from the average. And the answer is not to simply pay them more--the result of that approach is more unemployment.

Q: What IS the answer then? The spread between high and low skill is likely to continue increasing.
A: Taxpayer funding of necessities. Begin with medical care and child care.

Payroll taxes and other employer mandates serve as disincentives for hiring. Eliminate them, replacing revenue shortfall via carbon tax.

Hope this helps.

Over the many years that I have, mostly lurked here, seen a bit of elitism from some members when it comes to workers. I have worked what can be called low skill jobs.
But, I can assure you most of the people that look down on those you do these jobs would not last one day in one.
One skill that is needed is putting up with arrogant ass holes.

OK. But I do wonder why you replied to ME. Did I write something arrogant or assholish?

Sorry, not you. I should not have replied to your post. I should have just posted separately. It was meant for Loren.

 

[barbos]

By that standard, negotiating for anything counts as "extortion"

And by yoursome newly made up standards anything can be called negotiation.
A guy with a gun comes to a bank and starts negotiations about how much money he should get in exchange for not shooting people.

FIFY.

What is it about those imbecilic standards you just made up that you think makes them mine?

The issue here is simple: if the multiple owners and managers doing employing within a company cooperating instead of competing with one another doesn't qualify as "extortion" or "price-fixing" or whatever, why on earth would the multiple workers getting employed within a union cooperating instead of competing with one another qualify as "extortion" or "price-fixing" or whatever? There's a core-level asymmetry in the inference rules and rhetoric used by anti-union arguers that looks an awful lot like all the core-level asymmetries in the inference rules and rhetoric used by anti-capitalism arguers, so I'm asking what grounds there are for that asymmetrical reasoning.

You can call extortion negotiation, I don't care, it does not make any difference, it's still bad.

 

[laughing dog]

It is simply not possible for that labor's share of GDP in the US since the 1980s because of people are being replaced by automation because THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE WORKING.

What you are missing is that more is being done.

Some numbers for illustration only: We had 100 workers and machines equivalent of another 100. Now we have 150 and machines that are equivalent to 300. More workers, lower percent of productivity due to the workers.

I pointed out a fact that contradicts barbos’s written claim. Labor’s share of GDP did not decline because fewer people are working because there are more people working. Productivity is irrelevant to that reality based observation.

Your claim is akin to saying 2 + 2 = blue….

I corrected a premise about fact: the number of people working since the 1980s has not decreased but increased. Hence the hypothesized causation by barbos is false because it is based on a false premise.

<Whack! With a clue-by-4.>

You conveniently snipped away the part of my response that explained your error. That doesn't fix it.

There is nothing to fix - you appear unable to parse basic statetments. barbos's analysis is based
You committed a basic mistake: Comparing a percentage to an absolute value. I called you on it, you snipped my description of your error and you are now blaming me for your error. Are you a Republican?

I made no such comparison. Pointing out a premise is about a cause is false is not making a comparison. Please show my exact words in the sequence they appeared that makes you feel I compared anything, let alone a percentage to an absolute value so we can get to the bottom of your JD Vance imitation.

 

[barbos]

The case I'm thinking of is commercial passenger airlines. The safety rules do not permit a complete turnover of cockpit crews--I wouldn't be shocked if this was deliberately put in there to have the very effect it does. So you have the current reality that the very senior pilots get very good pay while the junior pilots in many cases don't get enough to be safe. Union pay scales are engineered to trap workers with a single company to deprive them of their most powerful weapon: their feet.

Trap???

Hyperbole much?

I see nothing in that that rebuts what I'm saying.

To be fair, it's pretty common around here for some folks to miss rebuttals. That said, unions aren't intentionally trying to limit workers' power; the intention is to reward experience and loyalty. However, I do agree that seniority-based pay scales can have unintended consequences—what I consider side effects, and what you call an engineered trap.

For fuck's sake, what kind of experience deserves $200k salary here?
They are not flying passengers planes here to be paid more than US median salary.

 

[Gospel]

The discussion went the usual way to blaming billionaires, completely ignoring the fact that these poor union "workers" are ridiculously overpaid.

So? Billionaires are ridiculously overpaid.

So? that's not the topic of discussion here.

Bruh, Billionaires and top executives are often paid astronomically more than their employees, even though workers are the ones driving the production and value creation. These companies can absolutely afford to pay their workers more—it's just that the money is being funneled upwards to shareholders and CEOs.

When CEO's & Shareholders are earning thousands of times more than the average worker, it’s not the workers who are overpaid, it's the system that's skewed. Workers asking for increased wages is a response to the growing wealth gap. So yes, the fact that billionaires are ridiculously overpaid is absolutely relevant when discussing whether these workers are overpaid.

What also makes it relevant is that these companies, in particular, are owned by or accountable to much larger corporations, where shareholders and major investors—including potential billionaires—reap the benefits of profit growth.

Maersk - Despite fluctuating profits, still generated substantial revenue and has the financial capability to meet workers' demands for higher wages. They reported a profit before financial items (EBIT) of $470 million.

Hapag-Lloyd - Despite the decline in profits in Q1 2024, they still reported a significant profit of EUR 299 million. While there is a drop from the previous year's record profits, the company can still meet workers' demands for higher wages.

CMA CGM - In the second quarter of 2024, CMA CGM reported a net income of USD 661 million, with total revenue for the quarter standing at USD 13.1 billion.

Bruh...


I don’t see how these shipping companies wouldn’t remain profitable even after raising workers' pay. Do you? If so, I'd love to hear how.

 

[Gospel]

The case I'm thinking of is commercial passenger airlines. The safety rules do not permit a complete turnover of cockpit crews--I wouldn't be shocked if this was deliberately put in there to have the very effect it does. So you have the current reality that the very senior pilots get very good pay while the junior pilots in many cases don't get enough to be safe. Union pay scales are engineered to trap workers with a single company to deprive them of their most powerful weapon: their feet.

Trap???

Hyperbole much?

I see nothing in that that rebuts what I'm saying.

To be fair, it's pretty common around here for some folks to miss rebuttals. That said, unions aren't intentionally trying to limit workers' power; the intention is to reward experience and loyalty. However, I do agree that seniority-based pay scales can have unintended consequences—what I consider side effects, and what you call an engineered trap.

For fuck's sake, what kind of experience deserves $200k salary here?
They are not flying passengers planes here to be paid more than US median salary.

Bruh, it’s all absurd. How does LeBron James make $48.73 million just to play with a ball, while someone in law enforcement, risking their life every day, barely makes $50k in the same time frame? Why are you so caught up with these workers when everyone—shareholders, CEOs, and billionaires—are being just as if not substantially more ridiculous?