[e63f67dd-065b]

The original impetus was more about banning robotaxis in Boston/MA than it is about the actual bargaining, from what I've heard. Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers (that's what teamsters were, that's why they're called teamsters), they're back to ban the next mode of transportation.

If you were at any of the city council meetings where this topic was brought up it was a circus show with people repeating 'boston is a union town' and grilling waymo execs.

[bwestergard]

Do you have a citation for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (today's "Teamsters") ever trying to ban automobiles? That doesn't really make sense to me chronologically.

It is not mentioned in "Fighting Traffic", which would be quite an oversight!

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/

[achatham]

No idea about them trying to ban automobiles, but oil pipelines were invented to get around their friction. From _The Prize_, referencing the mid-1800s:

"From the first discoveries, teamsters, lashing their horses, had clogged the roads of the Oil Regions with their loads of barrels. They were more than just a physical bottleneck. Holding a monopoly position, they charged exorbitant rates; it cost more to move a barrel over a few miles of muddy road to a railway stop than to transport it by rail from western Pennsylvania all the way to New York. The teamsters’ stranglehold on transportation led to an ingenious effort to develop an alternative—transportation by pipeline."

[VanTheBrand]

But based on pure physics alone it seems obvious that moving single truckloads of cargo over several miles of muddy road would be more difficult (and expensive) than moving dozens of loads simultaneously by rail over a significantly longer distance? That’s like the point of trains. How is this an indictment of teamsters?

[bwestergard]

Yeah, the post you're responding to quotes "The Prize" (an excellent book), but draws a conclusion that the quote doesn't support.

Interestingly, the Teamsters (IBT) represents a lot of oil pipeline workers today.

https://teamster.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/6617pipeline...

[achatham]

What conclusion do you think I was drawing? I was just sharing an interesting quote relevant to the thread.

Oil was solely a lighting product at this point. The Teamsters were clearly not thinking 70 years into the future to stop automobiles. But I think the "monopoly" part of the quote is somewhat germain, even if it's just opinion of the author.

[BoggleOhYeah]

They don’t have a citation because they made it up.

[satvikpendem]

Same for the longshoremen union, much is still done by hand whereas in other countries the shipping infrastructure is largely automated and much more efficient.

[themanmaran]

Just dropping here because it's an excellent read on US port automation

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...

[Animats]

No, US longshoremen lost that jobs battle decades ago, Some got settlements that lasted for life, but there were no more new longshoremen. There's a good writeup of this in "The Box", a history of the shipping container by Marc Levinson.

The Port of San Francisco stopped being a freight port because of containerization. A new container port was built in Oakland, using dirt and rock excavated for BART construction. San Francisco lost its freight rail service, and the railroad yard became the Mission Bay development. The San Francisco Belt Railroad closed in 1992. There used to be freight trains on the Embarcadero.

Something similar happened in London. A small non-union port on the east cost of Britain became the main container port, and container ships never made it to London. Not that they'd fit in the Thames River anyway. No more London dock workers.

In container ports, "by hand" means cranes and big forklifts. "Automated" means very few people in the container areas at all.

Port of Antwerp, 2015.[1] That's real, but sped up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo

[VanTheBrand]

The problem with US ports being slow isn’t the longshoremen or the lack of automation, it’s the ports themselves.

This has been studied and the main takeaway is that automated terminals are generally not more productive than conventional ones *once you control for things like terminal layout, cargo patterns, rail/truck integration, and geography.*

A lot of the “look at Rotterdam/Singapore/Shanghai” comparisons are misleading because those are purpose-built megaterminals with entirely different infrastructure and logistics networks.

US ports have different constraints (that have nothing to do with longshoremen) that make the specific automations more common in foreign ports less effective and sometimes counter effective here.

That’s not to say there aren’t automation improvements that could be made or Longshoremen labor is currently at some perfect optimal productivity equilibrium with automation, but it’s not a simple we need automation and they are in the way stopping it scenario.

Automation can certainly reduce some labor costs and improve yard density, but the idea that US ports are uniquely inefficient because dockworkers are manually moving containers around is mostly political rhetoric, not what the actual studies by people designing and running ports say.

Some reading: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...

https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24106498.pdf

https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/container-...

[Animats]

> The problem with US ports being slow isn’t the longshoremen or the lack of automation, it’s the ports themselves.

The Port of Oakland is a purpose-built container port. The Port of San Francisco is dead as a cargo port.

[FireBeyond]

With apologies to The Wire, automation makes it much harder to "lose a can in the stack" so it can be stolen, either by the union or with the assistance of a payoff to the union.

[pibaker]

I think it is fascinating that HN thinks it is bad for workers in other professions to protest against things that take away their earning abilities, and then proceed to protest against things that take away the earning abilities of tech workers — AI, immigration, outsourcing, non necessary layoffs, you name it.

[dantillberg]

There are multiple different people that post comments here, each with their own divergent opinions.

[xg15]

You do see some obviously popular opinions on many threads though.

[gchamonlive]

You'd be surprised how much of a bubble HN actually is compared to the general public.

[cbdevidal]

Doesn’t appear they were successful, seems self driving taxis are still allowed. From my understanding, they have better bargaining rights for companies intending to switch to automation, but nothing preventing a scrappy upstart with only driverless taxis from coming in and eating their lunch.

[eamag]

Exactly, there's an episode covering it on Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-a-driverless-world-who-l...

[bcraven]

Search Engine covered it too: https://www.searchengine.show/the-trial-of-the-driverless-ca...

[criddell]

> Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers

Is that true?

[asdfasvea]

So a random poster makes an assertion and rather than Google it and verify it yourself you throw out a request for another random poster to concur? And that concurrence you will take at face value and then believe the original assertion?

[criddell]

I did google it and couldn’t find anything backing up the claim.

[wmeredith]

I think it's reasonable to request the person making the assertion to back it up. It's not on the audience to either only debunk or accept the assertion. It can just be rejected.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[DoneWithAllThat]

Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary? They didn’t claim to have discovered perpetual motion or something you can’t prove or disprove yourself, just shared a historical fact you can easily just check up on if you choose not to believe them.

[gruez]

>Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary?

FWIW I tried to get AI to substantiate it and came up empty. Maybe it's not as "extraordinary" as "Obama was a reptilian alien" or whatever, but for everything else what counts as "extraordinary" depends on your prejudices, I suppose. Regardless of whether it's "extraordinary" or not, it's definitely not common knowledge and needs to be substantiated rather than asserted without evidence.

[Forgeties79]

No. Quite the opposite if these first search results I'm reading are any indicator.

[Forgeties79]

You need to check your facts on that one just fyi. A cursory google search proves this is definitely not true.

[beastman82]

Well yeah they're presenting an irrational argument to benefit the few.

[palmotea]

> Well yeah they're presenting an irrational argument to benefit the few.

The only few that should benefit are the owners. If a few workers try to benefit, they're greedy bastards who would be pounded down.

[ETH_start]

When owners try to lock down industries with government restrictions, we also oppose that. In this case, society as a whole is harmed by what the unions are demanding. It means everybody, including other workers, get less affordable goods and services. Greater affordability through automation is the sole means by which wages and purchasing power increase over time.

[whimsicalism]

I would also be opposed to laws making it illegal for anyone to compete with the owners.

[xp84]

Unions are great and all, but they cannot solve all problems purely by maximizing their demands. If the resulting business (with the unions and the costs of satisfying them) is no longer able to offer a compelling marketplace offering then all the unions accomplish is destroy their own jobs. This is actually nuanced (meaning there is probably an ideal balance where both parties can enjoy benefits, but too far in either direction is either toxic to the workers or kills the business) but unfortunately the discussion is generally conducted with this kind of flippant emotional appeal. I think that’s why unions are in massive decline. A ton of unionized jobs died because the businesses couldn’t compete, and businesses work to avoid unions at all costs because of that reputation. A lose-lose for workers.

[gopher_space]

A key thing to understand about unions is that they're a lot of effort to set up and manage, and the time spent on it is in addition to your normal work hours. They don't just spring up out of nowhere.

If you're looking at a union there's a specific reason it formed, and probably a specific person in management behind that reason.

> A lose-lose for workers.

There's an ancient saying in labor: "the only thing worse than a union is no union."

[GolfPopper]

>A ton of unionized jobs died because the businesses couldn’t compete, and businesses work to avoid unions at all costs because of that reputation.

Do you have a source for any of this beyond "a corporate spokesmouth said so"?

[dominotw]

ok hope you stick to this stance when ai comes for your job

[bigfishrunning]

i think your sarcasm detector might be faulty

[dominotw]

yea have to send it to the shop to get it checked out