[toomuchtodo]

Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture (Marx). They strike because they can, and their labor has value. If it didn’t, the strike would not be feared.

Why should we care if the corporation profits more? I am not in the top 10% owning 93% of total US equities, so I do not care. Automation so the wealthy get wealthier doesn’t help anyone but the wealthy, and they need no help. Consumer excess can come from there as well, vs the pockets of people who do actual work.

[ahupp]

The cost of shipping contributes to the cost of every product we export and import. Treating this as a purely zero-sum transfer between longshoreman and shippers is ignoring all the reasons this is interesting & important.

As a hypothetical example, if there was some new method of transport that bypassed ports entirely at 1/10th the cost, would you support an effort to scuttle it to support longshoreman?

This same issue played out with the introduction of the shipping container; if history had played out differently and we were still manually packing ships I don't think you'd choose that world over what we have today.

[toomuchtodo]

Great comment, and I'm glad you brought this point up so we can deep dive. If you read the book "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson," (Chapter 6: Union Disunion) [1] it covers the historical negotiation and agreement between the longshoreman unions and shippers when the shipping container improved efficiencies; they split the gains from the efficiency improvements knowing it was going to reduce the need for labor into the future.

If that was on offer today, I would have a different opinion, for sure. I would strongly support Automating All The Things. I think the grand bargain that was previously made when the world standardized on shipping containers was reasonable and fair. But that is not what is on offer. What is on offer is the Robber Barron equivalent of folks attempting to automate as much as possible to the detriment of labor for shareholder and management returns, and because of that, I hold the opinion that I do. With the decline in labor unions and lack of labor regulation in the US for the last several decades (since the Ronald Reagan era, broadly speaking), Capital has ground down Labor, and Labor needs to grind back to make up for lost time and ground [2] [3].

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...

[2] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[3] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...

[seizethecheese]

Automation helps everyone via lower consumer prices. It’s really basic economic theory that capital would not capture all the gains here.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture

Of course it isn’t. To make this construct work in the modern world requires amortising past labour across future automation in a way that almost deifies the first work.

[piva00]

How is that "of course not"? All wealth comes from labour, somewhere, somehow. To build automation requires labour, to create the machines (or the machines that create the machines), operate them, etc.

[s1artibartfast]

Labor is a component. Often a required component. That does not mean it is the source and and value creation can be solely attributed to it.

Labor by itself produces no value. Roll a rock up and down a hill and no value is created.

The labor theory of value is Myopic in this respect.

[piva00]

> Labor by itself produces no value. Roll a rock up and down a hill and no value is created.

The statement isn't that all labour produces value but that labour is the source of all value. Without labour there's absolutely no way to provide value.

I'd like to know an example of something that produces value without labour, I really cannot come up with one.

[s1artibartfast]

Being a requirement is different than the source. It is a component and an input. You can have multiple inputs that each are necessary but not sufficient. The issue arises in describing something as the sole cause or source.

Humans need to Air to breath. Air is the source of all life. Humans need water to drink. Water is the source of all life. Humans need food to eat. Food is the source of all life.

The reality is that humans need all these things and more to live. None of them are sufficient for life by themselves.

The same is true of labor.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I'd like to know an example of something that produces value without labour

A painting by a long-dead artist. That’s what I meant by “amortising past labour across [the] future.” (I phrased it badly originally.)

Also, natural resources. The total value of a chopped-down tree is well in excess of the labour used to chop it down.

[piva00]

> A painting by a long-dead artist. That’s what I meant by “amortising past labour across [the] future.” (I phrased it badly originally.)

Thanks for elucidating it, I understand your point better.

Then again, the source of value came from labour. The long-dead artist had to put on labour not only for that single piece of painting but across a whole body of work for that painting to appraise in value over time, the scarcity drives its value further but it was from labour the value originated and grew from, both the actual work done for that painting as the whole life of the artist to become a valuable object.

> Also, natural resources. The total value of a chopped-down tree is well in excess of the labour used to chop it down.

Without the labour to chop the tree down it doesn't have inherent value, through labour it's transformed and more wealth is created since a natural resource after processing is more useful. It does not detract from my point that without labour there would be no exchangeable value/trade to extract surplus value since the material would not exist, the source of wealth creation is labour.

[s1artibartfast]

IMO, the whole concept of "value" is useless when unmoored from the appraiser. Value is subjective. Something can have different value to the buyer and seller, and in fact there must be a difference in value for transactions to occur.

Whose labor is responsible for the market value of the wood. Is it the planter, the cutter, or hauler, and in what proportions? All are necessary, none are sufficient. The only way to have a meaningful assessment of "labor value" is in the the prevailing price in a labor market.

[dudisubekti]

If you live in neoliberal capitalist country, your wellbeing is tied to the profit of the private company that runs the infrastructure…

If they don’t find things profitable, then they would just not run said infrastructure, disrupting the lives of many people.

This is why strikes make people nervous.