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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31398 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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“Lukewarm” is about what I’d expect for principled defenses of uncomfortable optics.

I kind of waffled between my two paragraphs. I’m strongly in favor of collective bargaining as a concept, since firms are categorically different than individuals, so I objected to OP’s characterization. And I really do think the popularity of unions stems from a genuine desire for “fairness,” so cases like this will damage them. On the other hand, I’d be alright with more limitations; I just don’t have a good idea of what those look like.

(Also, I’ve been trying more aggressive editing for conciseness. It’s going okay.)

this union needs to go. Unions in general have their place, and a port is one of those places.

I'd have a lot more sympathy for unions if they just demanded higher wages/safer working conditions, even extreme increases, instead of fighting against automation and other measures that increase productivity.

I mean automation directly means less jobs and that people will be fired. Why wouldn't they fight against it?

The union's job isn't to increase productivity, it's to protect the workers.

I argue against a lot of things that are in the actor's best interests. Theft is the most obvious example: it gets you stuff, why wouldn't you do it?

Their fight against automation is anti-social, so opposing the unions is justified IMO.

Yeah, I'm on board with this. Someone saying, "I want more money for my job" is rational and often sympathetic. Someone saying, "I could be replaced by a robot, but I'll break your stupid fucking robot so you'd better just pay me" is a criminal and should be destroyed. The government explicitly favors the criminal thugs that would prevent businesses from improving efficiency, which makes the matter that much uglier.

What about "I could be replaced by an immigrant"?

I am not broadly sympathetic to the "took errrr jerbs" line of anti-immigration arguments. Maybe there's something there, maybe there's not, but whether it's immigrants or just other domestic laborers, I'm not impressed with rent-seeking in the form of artificially limiting labor supplies.

Are they threatening to kill the immigrant, which is analogous to breaking the robot?

They want to ban immigration like how the union wants to ban automation. To reduce competition for jobs, at the expense of everyone else who could be benefiting from greater productivity.

The argument was that someone was saying "I could be replaced by a robot, but I'll break your stupid fucking robot so you'd better just pay me". This clearly refers to a threat to cause damage to the robot if the robot is used, not just to ban the robot, so the analogy is killing the immigrant, not just disallowing immigration.

Also, the concept of "everyone" becomes meaningless if you're allowed to change who "everyone" consists of. It's like using robots and claiming that automation is good for everyone because you think it's good for the robot and you're counting the robot as part of everyone.

That criminal thug you described is going to be all of us in about five years.

They dealt with the Luddites eventually. By having soldiers and mercenaries shoot them and then hanging the survivors.

"rent seeking bullshit jobs until the sun swallows the earth" is maybe not the worst fate for humanity but it's gotta be up there.

Wonder if there's a business opportunity in plausibly-deniably selling equipment for that purpose.

I don't think the typical inefficiencies introduced by unions are literal violence. The issue is more that, when negotiations happen, the union bureaucracy inserts things that are more aligned with its continued and expanded power, and employers accept those things because they're cheaper in the short term than simply paying workers more or sharing some of the gains of automation with them. If it causes issues for the company/government a decade or more down the line, what does it matter? The individuals involved in the negotiation will be comfortably retired anyways.

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