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by gsnedders 3066 days ago
> There is another side of this coin too. I just finished reading The Box, a book on the advent of containerization, and it's appalling how unions fiercely fought any sort of mechanization. A job that required only 1-2 longshoremen mandatorily needed many more because unions said so. Days, and sometimes weeks, were wasted on strikes when a consensus couldn't be reached. Jobs that weren't needed anymore were still forced to be kept because any labor-saving innovation was undesirable. In the end, it was more cost-effective to compulsorily retire the longshoremen with a guaranteed income than to fight them.

To be fair, that's a failing with those unions, and in a sense part of the systemic problems with US unions; plenty of unions elsewhere saw automation as inevitable and got training for their members to find jobs in other areas.
2 comments
pm90 3066 days ago
> To be fair, that's a failing with those unions, and in a sense part of the systemic problems with US unions; plenty of unions elsewhere saw automation as inevitable and got training for their members to find jobs in other areas.

Do you think this is because the Unions are different, or perhaps maybe the people/culture are different?

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gsnedders 3066 days ago
> Do you think this is because the Unions are different, or perhaps maybe the people/culture are different?

What is a union if not a collective of its members? i.e., is there a difference between unions being different and people/culture being different?

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peoplewindow 3066 days ago
Which unions? I grew up in the UK and unions there were antagonistic in the same way. French farming unions regularly pull stunts like dumping cow shit on the roads:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2822120/French-farme...

The only country I've ever seen held up as an example of productive unionisation is Germany, and unions there don't seem to bear much resemblence to unions anywhere else. Possibly because of its unique history with respect to socialism.

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gsnedders 3066 days ago
> The only country I've ever seen held up as an example of productive unionisation is Germany, and unions there don't seem to bear much resemblence to unions anywhere else. Possibly because of its unique history with respect to socialism.

There's several other Germanic examples, including Sweden/Norway (and I'd be surprised if Denmark wasn't the same here) and Austria, and I believe Switzerland.

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