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by ahupp
630 days ago
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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. |
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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...