This has been discussed, and addressed by the ILA President. Sending them back to work doesn’t mean they’ll work. They’ll slow it down to a crawl. Nothing will change other than the workers will be paid. You think these people are going to work like they did before the strike, and putting in all that OT? Maybe in a computer sim, but not in real life.
Harold Dagget is a friend of Trumps. This is designed to help him.
If you know what the dock workers are asking for, and what was offered, you should see that they are not that far apart. This strike ends in 2-4 weeks max. Or just before the election.
They were offered a 50% raise over 6 years, and no change to automation over that time. And 3X retirement benefits.
They’re asking for a 77% raise and some tweaks to automation. The 77% figure is not an arbitrary number. It puts their pay even with west coast dock workers over 6 years.
Shame too. Not sure about the rest of the country but here in S Florida you can get a bunch of bananas for under $2.00 at the grocery store.
I like bananas and try to eat one sometimes two a day. Add some crunchy peanut butter, honey and yoghurt? Mmm
Hope I can get me some bananas next week! 
My understanding:
They (the men) want zero or almost zero automation
A LOT of the work of long shoremen do can be automated.
- Crane loads container onto truck
- truck drives a short distance in the yard,
- crane unloads container,
- truck returns shipside to crane #1
The process has been automated inside warehouses for almost a decade.
Now, with self-driving trucks, it can easily be automated inside in a closed shipyard. (No public roads, no public traffic involved.)
They want little/none of the automation
I think the best solution would be for the men to accept a buyout.
Admit that they are the last generation, take a big fat severance/retirement check, retire very young, pursue a second career or sit on the beach, either way cahs a check and let automation take over.
As far as I know, no such “buyout offer” has been made or requested.
Let the port go out of business. Buy the land and retool for automation under new ownership. Offer port services to the shipping public. Life goes on.
2 Likes
Coffee?
Coffee keeps well, so unlike bananas, there is probably a good strong inventory of coffee. Still, if we stop importing coffee from Brazil and Colombia a bidding war might start.
Is a buyout on the table?
I dn;t thnk ayone is talking about it.
I’m just spitballing ideas. abuyout makes sense.
Unionized longshoremen make good money.
$81,000 is kind of average, over $200,000 in some areas.
“That top-tier hourly wage of $39 amounts to just over $81,000 annually, but dockworkers can make significantly more by taking on extra shifts. For example, according to a 2019-20 annual report from the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, about one-third of local longshoremen made $200,000 or more a year.”
LINK
How much do dockworkers make? Here are the striking workers' salaries. - CBS News
Test
If I have done this correctly,
the video starts at 33 seconds
we see a mannequin-driven forklift find a pallet and successfully load it into a truck,
which is driven by another mannequin in a closed warehouse parking lot
Below is another video (warehouse unknown) of a driverless dolly towing five pallets. In an enclosed shipyard, the concept is the same and human drivers are not needed.
That’s overtime. Sometimes these figures include benefits. I don’t work overtime. I never have, never will. It has to be mandated. Their compensation does not justify me giving up my free time. I don’t ever voluntarily work OT.
I think your idea of automating exports is the best way to go. That could buy them several decades, as each contract is 6 years.
No one wants to pay employees, but they want people to pay for their service and buy their products. You can’t have both.
According to MS CoPilot 26.8% of US sugar is imported.
Here is a one-year chart.
Up 22% in one month
All of our coffee is imported.
A drought in Vietnam caused a substantial rise in Rustica coffee prices
(Used in instants and cans of iced coffee)
Arabica bean coffee is what you probably drink, but it is a subsitute product so it moves in loose tandemwith Rustica coffee.
Here is a one-year chart for Arabica beans.
Up 66% in a year.
Like coffee, 100% of US cocoa is imported.
Cocoa prices have also been rising sharply.
The actual shortage (~11% of supply) would be pretty subtantial on its own,
but, the market is not always rational in the short term and, this time, a specualtion frenzy ensued so . . . prices up 104% in a year and several candy makers began offering “new products” with less and less chocolate.
Cocoa up 104% in one year
So what does that mean for Dunkin’ Donuts and the small coffee I get every day after work for $2.55? Will it at some point spike to $12.55? Or will they just not have any at all? I guess this all depends on how long this drags out.
If there was no sugar in my house, I wouldn’t even notice. But I suspect the prices on these items to go up, or be scarce as people will buy them up now.
The strike might mean nothing for the price of coffee.
More likely as it drags on, a coffee shortage will occur,
at least some panic buying (hoarding) will result,
the price of coffee in supermarkets might rise a little, but most retailers are hestitant to do that even when they are not to blame.
I would be surprised if restaurants raise their coffee prices.
It costs Dunkin about the same to give you a cup of tap water as it does for them to provide you a cup of coffee. (Weird how that works, but it’s true.)
Isn’t paying dock workers more a way for middle class americans to gain from the offshoring of production?
Maybe I’m a bit dim, but I don’t understand your question.
There has been much misinformation about this strike in the media. At the current time, any perishables currently at the ports are still being offloaded. They are not rotting at the port. The longshoremen are not letting that stuff go to waste.
Another aspect of the misinformation has to do with the Taft-Hartley act. So many people in the media, or those that never worked a blue collar job think this is some magic wand solution. Why aren’t they doing it? Because it’s not going to work in this case. Just listen to the union president, and what he has to say about it. But they can’t be bothered to do the research.
