I think that is one reason that unions in the USA have failed so badly. When I look at unions in Germany they understand they are part of a team, and while they have to work for their goals, they also have group goals as they are a team.
It is kinda like the mentality that is growing in the USA, individualism even when it cuts off your own nose.
Of course, in Germany the law dictates that the unions are included as part of the team making decisions - where in the US, businesses do Everything They Can to avoid engaging with the unions in making sane decisions (and the stock market encourages that behavior)
US law prohibits the German type of arrangements. The law is pro-union, in that it exempts unions from having any responsibility for the clear consequences of demands that their members find popular. Thus, many dock workers take home six-figure incomes for unskilled labor, and public school teachers enjoy near perfect autonomy in many districts, students be damned. Unions are a necessary counterbalance to arrogant administrations. In the public employee sphere, I believe that the current balance is skewed in the wrong direction.
Regardless of the union/business balance question - the very fact that US law doesn't allow what Germany does is my point. For unions to "understand they are part of a team" also requires a situation where they actually can be "part of a team" - catch-22 in the US mostly - so everything becomes adversarial zero sum
I agree Ben, and I wish union leaders were better leaders of the people and groups that they represent at times. This is where I get confused as well. Shouldn't union leaders want to accept some level of automation so they can handle more containers (i.e. volume) which should lead to growth, and also reduce the amount of wear and tear on their bodies?
There should be a way to increase automation, efficiency, etc without a reduction in pay and only a slight reduction in jobs if at all. Protecting jobs at or wages at all costs, usually can be self defeating long term, also just because people have always historically done a certain job shouldn't mean. Humans historically used to also wash all dishes and clothes by hand, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, especially if there is a more efficient and safer way to do something. I'm just shocked that Union Leaders and workers can look at how far behind the US is in certain areas compared to our peer groups in efficiency and think that this is sustainable and we shouldn't change anything.
Structurally, the problem is that unions must exist in an adversarial relationship with their counterparty. Also, there's the incumbency bias toward advancing the high-seniority members' interests. The U.S. doesn't afford the kind of arrangement like in Germany where a board seat is reserved for a labor representative, or even the union getting a clutch of equity (i.e., stocks) in proportion to labor's share of a firm's costs.
I've often said that worker representation on boards and getting equity would be a far better outcome than just protecting jobs imo. But you bring up great points. 100% agree with you.
The ILWU -- the West Coast dockworkers' union -- has generally been smart enough to accommodate automation and use it to build the power of their members and get a great deal on pay and benefits. Oh, and their members take pride in how skillfully they handle the high-tech cranes and other equipment.
A lot of the remaining human labor post-automation has to do with hard-to-automate tasks like traffic control and compliance -- going through paperwork, working with Coast Guard and authorities to check for illegal activities, assessing duties, and in Southern California in particular air and water quality monitoring.
I want to observe with detached amusement (and sadness) that we actually confronted and tried to address some major problems in our society over the past few years, including some instances of really hideous police brutality that have no place in a modern society. We also learned that Hollywood covered for Harvey Weinstein for years, and that our law enforcement system had chosen to give Jeffrey Epstein the lightest possible slap on the wrist while harassing his victims. (The guy responsible for the Epstein non-prosecution actually got rewarded with a cabinet position for his trouble.)
I won't say that we made *no* progress on these issues, but in the end our response was some pretty weak-tea bullshit. Yet to read this post, all that was just an annoying trend, like beanie babies or Chappell Roan, and we should all be glad it's over. Maybe in the moment this seems like a reasonable conclusion, but I'm not convinced that future generations will think very highly of us for it.
So, is NEPA really the problem or the way it is being interpreted by the regulators and courts. Exempting projects from NEPA seems like just going back to the way things were before - which was why NEPA came into existence in the first place. Seems like a much saner approach is to either change NEPA to make it harder to just randomly throw up roadblocks or change the way it is interpreted (if that is the actual problem).
Permitting reform is clearly needed, but just not sure that just doing exemptions is a very good solution. I am old enough to remember why NEPA was needed in the first place
I belive it (woke gone) when I dont see it. Do the indoctrinated actually belive things like girls have penises and math is White Supremacy? Or have they just been pretending to avoid getting canceled? And how many NPR ladies out there really prefer to grow old alone with their cats rather than with a man who may lean conservative?
"And how many NPR ladies out there really prefer to grow old alone with their cats rather than with a man who may lean conservative?"
This implies that a very large number, perhaps a majority, of those cat ladies don't know what they really want. You could have expressed confidence that NPR Cat Ladies are quite capable of figuring out what they really prefer.
Then you excuse yourself by saying that your opinions will affect no one. We speak to interact with and affect our environment. If you are deeply convinced that your opinions will have no impact, please babble henceforth only to your dog or cat.
Frankly, as a non-cat owning and non-NPR Listening woman, I have a hard time telling when someone is attempting serious communication and when somebody is just throwing things out that he will later disavow.
Who is the "indoctrinated"? And who have you met in real life that really believes these things? Also way to be brusque dismissive of "NPR ladies" who would prefer to be alone with cats.
The majority of people who seem to be obsessed with "woke" seem to be conservative people who create strawman arguments and then get upset about their own made up scenarios.
Let me add another externality associated with the loss of manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing is a good fit for many neurodiverse people (ADHD and Autism). Factories are big and watching over then requires moving around, not just sitting in a cubicle. Machines don’t give off inscrutable social clues that neurodiverse people cannot accurately interpret. An economy based completely on service jobs, whether low-paying retail or high paying finance, is not going to be a good fit for a big fraction of the population. It’s better to have diversity in job types so people can find a place that fits their temperament.
The ILA’s demand to prohibit automation of the piers reminded me of 1950s Chicago where the Electrician’s Union prohibited the use of electric tools on construction sites. They claimed it was for safety.
Creating NEPA exemptions for favored projects while leaving NEPA intact for everything else is not actually progress. It just makes the regulatory environment less predictable and more subject to political whims. Those "major federal actions" should be subject to the same environmental reviews as other construction projects, but those reviews need to be sensible and practical.
Thanks for the Five Interesting Things this week Noah. Based takes and important context for topics that are top of mind as usual. Thank you, very informative, pragmatic and nuanced read!
A question on "wokeness" (whatever that really means). Is Noah asserting that the issues (sexism, racism, etc) are going away or that the concerns about them are going away or that just talking about them is going away? Or that people no longer want to admit to themselves that some of these issues are systemic? Or that we just don't seem to know how to solve systemic issues?
When we get from woke-thinking to woke-praxis, that's when things get ugly.
"What is to be done?" Lenin famously asked. The answer turned out to be the Soviet Union and its depredations. "Heighten the contradictions," asserted Mao. Under Mao's leadership, the Great Leap Forward killed from 15 million to 55 million people. The Cultural Revolution, where Mao let China's temporal equivalent of 4channers run wild, killed another 2 million or so people. And Mao believed GLF and CR should be durable, permanent conditions of humankind.
If you want to get even darker, you can read Frantz Fanon. In "The Wretched of the Earth," Fanon made a psychological argument for violent revolution as both necessary and essential. He noted that revolutions are crucibles for culture -- they beget heroes, myths, values and social arrangements to be created from a blank slate. This psychological state is a precondition for the Marxist material betterment of the underclass.
A somewhat extreme jump from my simple question. All of this started simply to address long term systemic issues. Plenty of debate about the best way to do that, but far from anything you are even talking about.... Sigh
Simple and systemic are two opposite things. You can't really do "Explain systemic racism to me in Twitter terms".
Intersectional identity politics (in Twitter terms, wokeness) is the most systemic treatment of racial, gender, sexual and class dynamics ever theorized. X-idpol also goes beyond the material analysis advocated by Marx and demands the psychological analysis of power dynamics as well, which is why so much value is placed on lived experiences in addition to material conditions.
Praxis is the point where some movement comes along and believes wokeness should be a guiding principle for organizing a society, like the most successful religions and governments and economies do. Marx and Engels would have been an academic obscurity until Lenin and Mao came along. Fanon serves as the intellectual wellspring for many postcolonial revolutionaries and warlords.
And wasn't Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" a big influence driving the rise of left-wing anti-Zionism, which sees the Israeli Jews much as Fanon would have seen the pied-noir settlers in Algeria?
I don't know about Fanon's influence, nor do I want to get close enough to the anti-Zionists to find out.
In Europe, antisemitism is casualized to where there are both leftwing and rightwing variants justifying the hatred of Jews as Jews. The rightwing variant is Jews as The Other, crystallized in the form of Nazi Germany. The leftwing variant is Jews as economic manipulators. Then of course there are syntheses that meld both racialist and economic ideologies.
The leftwing and synthetic antisemitisms migrated over to the U.S. and achieved contagion among college students and street protests, leading to ideas about the current I-P war that are charitably fractally wrong at best and poisonously antisemitic at worst.
An interesting question is why the NYT poll and the YouGov poll show such radically different results.. What does that say about either polling source? Do we think we really have valid data at all IF the polls are that different? So, yes, assertions of gender gap may be wrong or they may be right or maybe our data on it is just crappy
Also interesting that the gap is as large as it is (across age ranges) - in both polls. I think that still says something meaningful - if I remember, this gap wasn't anywhere near this big 20 years ago.
"Everyone who leaped at the chance to declare the CHIPS Act a failure at the first report of delays now has egg on their face. "
yes, but you can bet that most of the media sources (and the pundits who made those assertions) are going to make sure that their viewers/readers never see the updated info....
It’s very rare that an entire job is automated. Usually automation affects some fraction of the tasks of a job, allowing one person to do the work that used to take several people, but not allowing zero people to do the job of one. If the amount of work done goes up proportionally to the productivity increase, then the number of workers remains constant. There are some cases where the amount of work done goes up less that proportionally so there are some job losses, and there are also cases where the amount of work done goes up more than proportionally so there are job gains.
But it’s ridiculous to think that automation sends employment to zero - it’s only competition that does that.
No, coding jobs are being automated away by AI copilots. They should study nursing, life-coaching, podcasting, political consulting or some other human focused careers and let the automated cranes unload containers.
Or actually, just let them keep their jobs and salaries, but reduce their tasks to polishing the automated cranes, since with increased freight volume they won’t continue to hinder productivity.
Interestingly, there is a booming job market all throughout the logistics sector. Dockworkers are a small part of it. Even today, it isn't like "On the Waterfront" and there aren't a lot of gorilla-strength men hurling around containers. A lot of the manual labor involves traffic control in ports as well as checking for documents like manifests, bills of lading, etc.
There's no need to claw back high wages of longshore workers and reduce them to being temp-hire Amazon fulfillment center labor. There are management and executive level equivalent jobs for impacted workers with minor retraining; the job experience of longshore work makes them well-qualified for these jobs.
Unions in Europe were able to thread this needle by offering very generous early-retirement incentives for older high-seniority workers; the most generous have been 5 years before pensioner age. Think about this: if your country's retirement age is 64 (in the U.S., it'll be earliest age to collect Social Security), your union has negotiated that if you are 59, you can agree to a buyout and start drawing down on a portion of your pension. You could get like two-thirds of your income for doing nothing if you wanted to and just travel. Most of those older middle age workers don't stay idle, though; they can start a small business, become artisans, work as waiters and baristas while having that steady pension stream to ensure a stable standard of living. A few will work for the union, which will hire them as staffers or trainers.
The jobs slated for phaseout are given to lower-seniority and lower-paid workers; the midcareer workers will go into training for remaining or new positions. When the jobs are phased out, the low-seniority workers will become midcareer workers and take on training for advanced work.
This is interesting because under a seniority system, traditionally it's last-hired, first-fired. Giving planned obsolete work to lower-wage workers allows the company to remain competitive in tradeable market sectors like manufacturing.
Now, shipping is not tradeable like manufacturing is. Yes, the U.S. is brimming with sea, river and lake ports, but shippers choose a destination port for site-specific network reasons so ports can't really engage in commodification.
This was the answer I was looking for. This would have been the answer in the pre-Reagan days when corporations and their leaders had some feeling for the country and its ability to flourish, but corporations have to be forced to do the right thing these days and, if not forced, they usually just walk away with the money and leave the pollution, ruined lives, etc.
That view is a mistaken "all or nothing'" view which is unrealistic, and actively nurtured for political support by all sides of the political universe.
I used to live in the "White Highlands" of the SF Bay Area. There is no way the highlands are going to allow more density. Palo Alto stopped high rise cold. Same with the other members of the class. That leaves increasing density to "Black Lowlands". Post war urban renewal is a prime example.
My mind is blown by unions demanding no automation, the USA ports are already a joke. As is our shipbuilding industry...
The job of unions is to protect jobs and wages. You may think that they should work for the good of society, but that’s really not their remit.
Exactly. See, eg, teachers unions
I think that is one reason that unions in the USA have failed so badly. When I look at unions in Germany they understand they are part of a team, and while they have to work for their goals, they also have group goals as they are a team.
It is kinda like the mentality that is growing in the USA, individualism even when it cuts off your own nose.
Of course, in Germany the law dictates that the unions are included as part of the team making decisions - where in the US, businesses do Everything They Can to avoid engaging with the unions in making sane decisions (and the stock market encourages that behavior)
US law prohibits the German type of arrangements. The law is pro-union, in that it exempts unions from having any responsibility for the clear consequences of demands that their members find popular. Thus, many dock workers take home six-figure incomes for unskilled labor, and public school teachers enjoy near perfect autonomy in many districts, students be damned. Unions are a necessary counterbalance to arrogant administrations. In the public employee sphere, I believe that the current balance is skewed in the wrong direction.
Regardless of the union/business balance question - the very fact that US law doesn't allow what Germany does is my point. For unions to "understand they are part of a team" also requires a situation where they actually can be "part of a team" - catch-22 in the US mostly - so everything becomes adversarial zero sum
Correct, which is why we should crush them into the ground.
Society, for its own good, should ignore them.
I agree Ben, and I wish union leaders were better leaders of the people and groups that they represent at times. This is where I get confused as well. Shouldn't union leaders want to accept some level of automation so they can handle more containers (i.e. volume) which should lead to growth, and also reduce the amount of wear and tear on their bodies?
There should be a way to increase automation, efficiency, etc without a reduction in pay and only a slight reduction in jobs if at all. Protecting jobs at or wages at all costs, usually can be self defeating long term, also just because people have always historically done a certain job shouldn't mean. Humans historically used to also wash all dishes and clothes by hand, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, especially if there is a more efficient and safer way to do something. I'm just shocked that Union Leaders and workers can look at how far behind the US is in certain areas compared to our peer groups in efficiency and think that this is sustainable and we shouldn't change anything.
Structurally, the problem is that unions must exist in an adversarial relationship with their counterparty. Also, there's the incumbency bias toward advancing the high-seniority members' interests. The U.S. doesn't afford the kind of arrangement like in Germany where a board seat is reserved for a labor representative, or even the union getting a clutch of equity (i.e., stocks) in proportion to labor's share of a firm's costs.
I've often said that worker representation on boards and getting equity would be a far better outcome than just protecting jobs imo. But you bring up great points. 100% agree with you.
The ILWU -- the West Coast dockworkers' union -- has generally been smart enough to accommodate automation and use it to build the power of their members and get a great deal on pay and benefits. Oh, and their members take pride in how skillfully they handle the high-tech cranes and other equipment.
A lot of the remaining human labor post-automation has to do with hard-to-automate tasks like traffic control and compliance -- going through paperwork, working with Coast Guard and authorities to check for illegal activities, assessing duties, and in Southern California in particular air and water quality monitoring.
I want to observe with detached amusement (and sadness) that we actually confronted and tried to address some major problems in our society over the past few years, including some instances of really hideous police brutality that have no place in a modern society. We also learned that Hollywood covered for Harvey Weinstein for years, and that our law enforcement system had chosen to give Jeffrey Epstein the lightest possible slap on the wrist while harassing his victims. (The guy responsible for the Epstein non-prosecution actually got rewarded with a cabinet position for his trouble.)
I won't say that we made *no* progress on these issues, but in the end our response was some pretty weak-tea bullshit. Yet to read this post, all that was just an annoying trend, like beanie babies or Chappell Roan, and we should all be glad it's over. Maybe in the moment this seems like a reasonable conclusion, but I'm not convinced that future generations will think very highly of us for it.
Well said
So, is NEPA really the problem or the way it is being interpreted by the regulators and courts. Exempting projects from NEPA seems like just going back to the way things were before - which was why NEPA came into existence in the first place. Seems like a much saner approach is to either change NEPA to make it harder to just randomly throw up roadblocks or change the way it is interpreted (if that is the actual problem).
Permitting reform is clearly needed, but just not sure that just doing exemptions is a very good solution. I am old enough to remember why NEPA was needed in the first place
Great footnote.
I belive it (woke gone) when I dont see it. Do the indoctrinated actually belive things like girls have penises and math is White Supremacy? Or have they just been pretending to avoid getting canceled? And how many NPR ladies out there really prefer to grow old alone with their cats rather than with a man who may lean conservative?
Speakng as a woman, I suggest to you that when we run into a man who knows what we really prefer, we tend to really prefer to avoid that man.
Did I say or imply that I know what women prefer, as if all women have the same preferences? I was just responding to Noah's points.
Anyway, I'm an old married guy (40 year anniversary coming up) so my opinion is of no consequence at all
"And how many NPR ladies out there really prefer to grow old alone with their cats rather than with a man who may lean conservative?"
This implies that a very large number, perhaps a majority, of those cat ladies don't know what they really want. You could have expressed confidence that NPR Cat Ladies are quite capable of figuring out what they really prefer.
Then you excuse yourself by saying that your opinions will affect no one. We speak to interact with and affect our environment. If you are deeply convinced that your opinions will have no impact, please babble henceforth only to your dog or cat.
Frankly, as a non-cat owning and non-NPR Listening woman, I have a hard time telling when someone is attempting serious communication and when somebody is just throwing things out that he will later disavow.
If your opinion is of no consequence, you could consider keeping it to yourself.
Who is the "indoctrinated"? And who have you met in real life that really believes these things? Also way to be brusque dismissive of "NPR ladies" who would prefer to be alone with cats.
The majority of people who seem to be obsessed with "woke" seem to be conservative people who create strawman arguments and then get upset about their own made up scenarios.
Let me add another externality associated with the loss of manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing is a good fit for many neurodiverse people (ADHD and Autism). Factories are big and watching over then requires moving around, not just sitting in a cubicle. Machines don’t give off inscrutable social clues that neurodiverse people cannot accurately interpret. An economy based completely on service jobs, whether low-paying retail or high paying finance, is not going to be a good fit for a big fraction of the population. It’s better to have diversity in job types so people can find a place that fits their temperament.
The ILA’s demand to prohibit automation of the piers reminded me of 1950s Chicago where the Electrician’s Union prohibited the use of electric tools on construction sites. They claimed it was for safety.
Creating NEPA exemptions for favored projects while leaving NEPA intact for everything else is not actually progress. It just makes the regulatory environment less predictable and more subject to political whims. Those "major federal actions" should be subject to the same environmental reviews as other construction projects, but those reviews need to be sensible and practical.
100%
Thanks for the Five Interesting Things this week Noah. Based takes and important context for topics that are top of mind as usual. Thank you, very informative, pragmatic and nuanced read!
A question on "wokeness" (whatever that really means). Is Noah asserting that the issues (sexism, racism, etc) are going away or that the concerns about them are going away or that just talking about them is going away? Or that people no longer want to admit to themselves that some of these issues are systemic? Or that we just don't seem to know how to solve systemic issues?
When we get from woke-thinking to woke-praxis, that's when things get ugly.
"What is to be done?" Lenin famously asked. The answer turned out to be the Soviet Union and its depredations. "Heighten the contradictions," asserted Mao. Under Mao's leadership, the Great Leap Forward killed from 15 million to 55 million people. The Cultural Revolution, where Mao let China's temporal equivalent of 4channers run wild, killed another 2 million or so people. And Mao believed GLF and CR should be durable, permanent conditions of humankind.
If you want to get even darker, you can read Frantz Fanon. In "The Wretched of the Earth," Fanon made a psychological argument for violent revolution as both necessary and essential. He noted that revolutions are crucibles for culture -- they beget heroes, myths, values and social arrangements to be created from a blank slate. This psychological state is a precondition for the Marxist material betterment of the underclass.
A somewhat extreme jump from my simple question. All of this started simply to address long term systemic issues. Plenty of debate about the best way to do that, but far from anything you are even talking about.... Sigh
Simple and systemic are two opposite things. You can't really do "Explain systemic racism to me in Twitter terms".
Intersectional identity politics (in Twitter terms, wokeness) is the most systemic treatment of racial, gender, sexual and class dynamics ever theorized. X-idpol also goes beyond the material analysis advocated by Marx and demands the psychological analysis of power dynamics as well, which is why so much value is placed on lived experiences in addition to material conditions.
Praxis is the point where some movement comes along and believes wokeness should be a guiding principle for organizing a society, like the most successful religions and governments and economies do. Marx and Engels would have been an academic obscurity until Lenin and Mao came along. Fanon serves as the intellectual wellspring for many postcolonial revolutionaries and warlords.
And wasn't Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" a big influence driving the rise of left-wing anti-Zionism, which sees the Israeli Jews much as Fanon would have seen the pied-noir settlers in Algeria?
I don't know about Fanon's influence, nor do I want to get close enough to the anti-Zionists to find out.
In Europe, antisemitism is casualized to where there are both leftwing and rightwing variants justifying the hatred of Jews as Jews. The rightwing variant is Jews as The Other, crystallized in the form of Nazi Germany. The leftwing variant is Jews as economic manipulators. Then of course there are syntheses that meld both racialist and economic ideologies.
The leftwing and synthetic antisemitisms migrated over to the U.S. and achieved contagion among college students and street protests, leading to ideas about the current I-P war that are charitably fractally wrong at best and poisonously antisemitic at worst.
I can appreciate the dock workers wanting higher wages - who doesn't want more money? But halting automation? Yeesh!
Make a deal to not replace retirees and let's move on.
I do wonder whether the recent teamsters kerfuffle was also---in part---about automation, and self driving freight in particular.
An interesting question is why the NYT poll and the YouGov poll show such radically different results.. What does that say about either polling source? Do we think we really have valid data at all IF the polls are that different? So, yes, assertions of gender gap may be wrong or they may be right or maybe our data on it is just crappy
Also interesting that the gap is as large as it is (across age ranges) - in both polls. I think that still says something meaningful - if I remember, this gap wasn't anywhere near this big 20 years ago.
Yes, this is something I was wondering - who, if anyone, is right about this? Do we have enough information to confidently say?
"Everyone who leaped at the chance to declare the CHIPS Act a failure at the first report of delays now has egg on their face. "
yes, but you can bet that most of the media sources (and the pundits who made those assertions) are going to make sure that their viewers/readers never see the updated info....
When you automate the dockworkers jobs, how will they earn a living? Should they learn to code?
It’s very rare that an entire job is automated. Usually automation affects some fraction of the tasks of a job, allowing one person to do the work that used to take several people, but not allowing zero people to do the job of one. If the amount of work done goes up proportionally to the productivity increase, then the number of workers remains constant. There are some cases where the amount of work done goes up less that proportionally so there are some job losses, and there are also cases where the amount of work done goes up more than proportionally so there are job gains.
But it’s ridiculous to think that automation sends employment to zero - it’s only competition that does that.
No, coding jobs are being automated away by AI copilots. They should study nursing, life-coaching, podcasting, political consulting or some other human focused careers and let the automated cranes unload containers.
Or actually, just let them keep their jobs and salaries, but reduce their tasks to polishing the automated cranes, since with increased freight volume they won’t continue to hinder productivity.
Interestingly, there is a booming job market all throughout the logistics sector. Dockworkers are a small part of it. Even today, it isn't like "On the Waterfront" and there aren't a lot of gorilla-strength men hurling around containers. A lot of the manual labor involves traffic control in ports as well as checking for documents like manifests, bills of lading, etc.
There's no need to claw back high wages of longshore workers and reduce them to being temp-hire Amazon fulfillment center labor. There are management and executive level equivalent jobs for impacted workers with minor retraining; the job experience of longshore work makes them well-qualified for these jobs.
Why are they so opposed to automation which would let them do their jobs better?
Incumbency and the seniority culture of unions.
Unions in Europe were able to thread this needle by offering very generous early-retirement incentives for older high-seniority workers; the most generous have been 5 years before pensioner age. Think about this: if your country's retirement age is 64 (in the U.S., it'll be earliest age to collect Social Security), your union has negotiated that if you are 59, you can agree to a buyout and start drawing down on a portion of your pension. You could get like two-thirds of your income for doing nothing if you wanted to and just travel. Most of those older middle age workers don't stay idle, though; they can start a small business, become artisans, work as waiters and baristas while having that steady pension stream to ensure a stable standard of living. A few will work for the union, which will hire them as staffers or trainers.
The jobs slated for phaseout are given to lower-seniority and lower-paid workers; the midcareer workers will go into training for remaining or new positions. When the jobs are phased out, the low-seniority workers will become midcareer workers and take on training for advanced work.
This is interesting because under a seniority system, traditionally it's last-hired, first-fired. Giving planned obsolete work to lower-wage workers allows the company to remain competitive in tradeable market sectors like manufacturing.
Now, shipping is not tradeable like manufacturing is. Yes, the U.S. is brimming with sea, river and lake ports, but shippers choose a destination port for site-specific network reasons so ports can't really engage in commodification.
This was the answer I was looking for. This would have been the answer in the pre-Reagan days when corporations and their leaders had some feeling for the country and its ability to flourish, but corporations have to be forced to do the right thing these days and, if not forced, they usually just walk away with the money and leave the pollution, ruined lives, etc.
That view is a mistaken "all or nothing'" view which is unrealistic, and actively nurtured for political support by all sides of the political universe.
Maybe the US is not at the technological frontier of manufacturing and doing things more generally.
I used to live in the "White Highlands" of the SF Bay Area. There is no way the highlands are going to allow more density. Palo Alto stopped high rise cold. Same with the other members of the class. That leaves increasing density to "Black Lowlands". Post war urban renewal is a prime example.