In Praise of the Dockworkers Shutting Down Our Ports | The Free Press

The International Longshoremen s Association, whose strike is crippling U.S. ports from the Gulf Coast to New England, may not seem like the wretched of the Earth. They re asking for a 77 percent pay increase on top of the $39 per hour those on the top tiers already make. The union s president, Harold Daggett, earns $728,000 a year and once owned a 76-foot boat. With major disruptions looming, no wonder even some of those Americans ordinarily sympathetic to organized labor might be thinking, Okay, this is going too far. The less sympathetic are already calling for the Marines to suppress the strike.

But here s the hard truth: The militancy showcased by the ILA is exactly what is needed to restore a fairer, more balanced economy the kind that created the middle class in the postwar decades and allowed your grandparents to access reliable healthcare, take vacations, and enjoy disposable incomes. Those who complain that today s left has come to privilege boutique identity politics over bread-and-butter concerns should cheer the longshoremen. There is nothing woke about their exercise of economic power to win material gains for themselves and their industrial brethren. 

via www.thefp.com

Well, this is a lot of old rubbish. The longshoreman are just the working class equivalent (if you discount the big salaries) of the grift that plagues the rest of our economy. A small group of legacy players has a strangle hold on a crucial link in the economy and they’re planning to exploit it for all it’s worth. It’s a question both of right and wrong and of efficiency. As to the right and wrong — this is a case of few thousand guys, occasionally hard working, holding up the rest of us to extract rents. I’ve heard estimates of $5 billion per day. In terms of efficiency, it’s utterly ridiculous. It’s like some old, decrepit family that controls the one bridge across the river demanding huge sums to carry anyone across while using a maze of laws to prevent the use of any alternative. If you count all the costs, it must be a lot more than $5 billion per day. Then there’s the opportunity cost of preventing automation, which is (of course) another demand the longshoremen are making. Bluntly, America cannot afford to have Tony Soprano running its docks, especially not now. Reagan knew how to handle this sort of strike.