Sweeping Back The Tide

I recently started rewatching The Wire, a five-season HBO series about crime and law enforcement in the city of Baltimore. It was groundbreaking television that humanized both sides of that divide and illustrated the deterioration of various "institutions." The second season centered on the Port of Baltimore and the decline of the blue-collar union jobs associated with cargo shipping.

That season first aired in 2003. Jump ahead two decades, and the conflict between the relentless march of human progress and the protectionist instincts of union leaders and union-favoring politicians persists. The pandemic exposed just how antiquated American ports are compared to the rest of the world, and how the bottlenecks created by persistent obstruction of progress and automation ripple through our economy.

This video shows an almost fully automated Chinese port, with shipping containers being moved around by remote operators and artificial intelligence.

Last October, America's ports were briefly crippled by a longshoreman's strike. Lasting only a couple days, the strike was at its core about slowing progress. A six-year master contract was finalized on January 15th, and included both a pay raise and job protection. While the notoriously pro-union Biden administration brokered the deal, Trump kicked in his two cents:

I've studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it. The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.

This is perfectly in line with Trump's superficial "America First" thinking, and it's an instance of Bad-Trump. Economic progress is at its heart about increasing productivity, about improving the amount of wealth created by each hour of human activity. A farmer driving a combine harvester can reap 3-4 acres of grain per hour, a hundred-fold improvement over manual labor. Likewise, containerized shipping, which began in 1956, was an immediate 36-fold improvement in the cost of loading cargo. The decimating of longshoreman and stevedore jobs was inevitable, no matter how hard the unions fought.

Yes, it sucks to lose your job. It sucks even more when that category of jobs disappears, and the skills you developed for that job become useless. But, it's going to keep happening, and doing things to preserve obsolete jobs benefits a few at a greater cost to many. In the case of the ports, I'd argue that the better approach would be to do as Trump is looking to do on the government side - buy out existing workers with a compensation package big enough to give them time to retrench. Yes, it still sucks to have to find a new career, especially later in life, but better that than having the rug pulled out a couple more years down the road. And, better for the country as a whole.

Nominally, this matter should be management-vs-union. But, the complex interweaving between government and that union-management relationship makes that expectation unrealistic. Liberty lovers must always remember that ours is not a truly free-market society, and that there are many structural obstacles standing in the way of free-market remedies emerging organically. Our leaders should try to unravel that interweaving, but that's a long-term project that I see neither major party having much interest in pursuing.

So, I sit on the sidelines, rooting for remedies that land on the side of progress - in this case, automation and reduction in productivity-killing union rules - but knowing that I won't get as much of either as I'd like to see. I also know that, the benefits of progress will be diminished, and the products I buy that flow through ports will be more expensive than they might otherwise be.

Unions serve a vital role in any free enterprise system. Collective bargaining is an effective counterweight to company-vs-employee power imbalances, and absent government coercion in either direction the dynamic will sort itself out as market conditions dictate. Unfortunately, unions have for decades been as or more rent-seeking in their behavior as corporatist companies that leverage political influence to their benefit and to others' detriment, and many politicians (cough, cough, Joe Biden) have made their bones on being "union guys." Presidents - all politicians, really - should not pick sides here, but they all do, Biden and Trump included. Money and votes are more important than tenets of liberty and limited government.

Today, unions appear more interested in protecting their worst than benefiting their best. A good union would provide value-added to both employee and company, but that's mostly a fantasy nowadays, and I won't mention public-sector unions other than noting they should not exist. Like anything else, unions need to adapt or perish, and anti-automation stances merely delay the inevitable should they choose to take them. I have plenty of sympathy for individuals on the wrong side of progress, but I know that propping them up via coercive limitation of that progress does harm to all of us. Accumulated over years and decades, that harm becomes real and substantial. Had our ports automated at the pace of the rest of the world's, the supply chain disruptions we witnessed during the pandemic may not have occurred at all.

The tide of human progress can (and often is) be slowed by government, but it cannot be stopped. It is the slowing that magnifies the shocks that progress inevitably brings, and we are better off with moderate but steady "pain" than with postponements that result in much greater hurt once they fail.