> Workers have a right to oppose automation and strike over it if they so choose
Workers have a right to strike. But there should be room, at the same port, for trying a more-efficient approach.
The management of this unionised workforce shouldn’t have a choice. But this union’s members shouldn’t have dictatorial power over our Eastern seaboard’s port infrastructure.
(Also, I have the right to demand a personal battleship. Not everything one has the right to do is reasonable.)
> But there should be room, at the same port, for trying a more-efficient approach.
I'll gladly steelman the opposite idea. If you're running a McDonalds and you fire half your employees to replace them with burger-flipping robots, you damn well better expect the cashier to quit or go on strike. People aren't that stupid - they can see the Looney-Tunes ACME anvil suspended over their heads, they know when they have to negotiate themselves off the red painted 'X'.
Similarly, I think introducing automation to a historically-human career like longshoring is absolutely an all-or-nothing shtick. You're either displacing your human workers entirely with unpaid alternatives, or you're dealing with the consequences of a partially human workforce. There is no magic compromise, despite what management wants. You either acquiesce or replace them with robo-scabs.
We shouldn't right wrongs by deliberately capping economic efficiency, especially in sectors that are foundational to the rest of the economy (e.g. maritime trade and energy).
We shouldn't. Dockworkers should allow automation, and those jobs that remain should capture a fair share of the increased productivity in increased wages.
The difficulty is that owners don't just voluntarily hand out "fair shares" to workers who agree to play nice. The only reason workers get paid at all is because if they stopped getting paid, they would stop working.
Once enough automation is introduced, the owners really have no incentive to pay a fair share to anybody whose labor they no longer need. So any promises to "share the wealth" that comes from automation ring hollow.
Workers have a right to strike. But there should be room, at the same port, for trying a more-efficient approach.
The management of this unionised workforce shouldn’t have a choice. But this union’s members shouldn’t have dictatorial power over our Eastern seaboard’s port infrastructure.
(Also, I have the right to demand a personal battleship. Not everything one has the right to do is reasonable.)