[munificent]

> Unions are already pushing back on AI (truckers, federal employees in Canada, writers in Hollywood) and maybe rightly so.

Interesting bit of historical trivia: In the US, the main truck driver's union is the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. What is a teamster? Historically, it was a person who wrangled a team of horses or oxen to pull a wagon. That profession was effectively eliminated by the creation of the internal combustion engine.

Two of the other main trades that were involved in the rise of unions are longshoremen and stevedores. The former pull cargo off ships and get it onto land. The latter organize cargo on the ships.

The creation of shipping containers dramatically reduced the need for those jobs, leading to some of the longest strikes in the US. While the unions technically "won", the strikes mostly incentivizing shipping companies to push even farther into mechanization so that they were less reliant on labor. There are far fewer dockworkers and longshoremen today than there were before containerization.

Change is hard.

[mediaman]

More on the port workers: today you'll find that skilled union port workers are extremely well-paid. Workers in the cranes that pull containers off the ship, for example, are paid >$300k.

They are quite skilled, but so are many other skilled tradespeople. Electricians and machinists for example do not make that kind of money despite their skill. So why do crane operators make so much?

When containerization, and subsequently other types of automation, hit ports, the union resisted fiercely but ultimately had to work out a deal with the port operators.

That deal was to reward the most tenured union tradespeople with much larger pay packages, at the cost of the less experienced tradespeople, who would have to find different work.

This agreement became agreeable to both sides, since the operators could still massively reduce the workforce, and the only price they'd have to pay would be high salaries for the union workers who remained. And the union was able to reward their longest tenured members.

It's hard to fault the union for this: the alternative was likely both huge reduction in workforce and less attractive pay, so they at least got good pay out of it for the remaining workers. But it made a lot of the less tenured union workers resentful because they felt the union sacrificed them in favor of the union 'insiders'.

The book 'The Box' by Marc Levinson is a great coverage of this topic, if steel shipping containers are the sort of thing that get you going.