[big-green-man]

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson is a book I cannot recommend enough. I never thought a book about shipping containers could be so engaging. It's one of those that will have your nose in it til you're done. It talks about the fight with unions in the face of container shipping among other things, and gives you a nice overview on the history of these port workers unions and the politics around them.

I'm personally in much agreement with you and am not sympathetic to unions generally speaking. It's one thing if a company needs you and you band together to get better pay, it's another to blackmail whole industries and even countries to keep paying you for something nobody needs you to do.