I assume that Pat and other Trump supporters are cheering the dock strike and thanking the ILA for protecting us from cheap imports.
You can assume all you want but you are wrong. Just FYI, in general, people who lean Libertarian do not favor unions at all. Politicians curry union favor because a huge chunk of those dues paid by the rank and file go to political contributions. That in itself should be a trigger warning that the unions are not there to benefit the people who pay dues.
Having been forced to be a card-carrying member of the Teamsters Union at the age of 19, I am pretty anti-union. I was a clerk in the purchasing department of a woman's clothing manufacturer - it's a long and ugly story and I won't bore you with details. Over the course of my long career building multi-million dollar applications for large corporations, I also worked for many client companies who were unionized. I was doing desktop support in the early 80's in a plant that was 1/3 of a mile from one end to the other and they all needed support. Our base was not centrally located. It was at the far southern end of the plant. Back in those days we were wearing heels at work and I needed to have mine resoled every 3 months due to all the walking on concrete floors. I was doing installs of dBase - remember dBase? It came in a huge box that was pretty heavy. My arms weren't long enough to carry more than one at a time and still see where I was walking so I was running myself ragged. I had the brilliant idea to bring in my luggage carrier (what we used before all luggage had wheels). I could easily take 3 at a time. I got written up by the union. Only riggers could pull/push wheeled gear. So, I had to get a rigger - an expense which management would never authorize - or i had to carry them myself, one at a time. I also couldn't move a printer from one desk to another for a user. I needed to call a rigger. THAT is what unions do. They ensure that you cannot help yourself. You must always have extra people involved in performing tasks.
Unions had a place in history but they long ago outlived their usefulness AND they are partially responsible for the high cost of manufacturing in this country. Stupid regulations are the other big cost and Trump did a great job of getting rid of the make-work regulations. Why do you think new factories are built in right-to-work states rather than those controlled by labor unions? Let the Chinese make choochkies for pennies using slave labor. Who cares.
The union in this case is asking for a huge wage increase. Absolutely outrageous and probably the bargaining point. The real goal is to limit the automation of the cargo transfer process. We are seeing it all throughout the country, the higher the wages for people who have repetitive, manual, or entry level jobs, the more automation we see. Your favorite barista will soon be a robot who will probably remember you and greet you by name due to facial recognition software that is becoming part of everything. Wheeled luggage displaced most porters at airports, train stations, and hotels.
Ask yourself WHY when low skill jobs are being replaced by automation, are we importing unskilled labor who don't even speak the language and so could never find anything other than brute force labor type jobs?
The speed with which automation can displace workers is frightening at a societal level. Even WE are being displaced by AI. Uncle Gizmo and a few others are expanding their knowledge base by using AI. What does a society do with people who don't have the skills to survive in an information based world? Surely importing new non-workers by the million can't be a good idea.
Maybe we'll all have our own personal
slaves assistants. When we lived in Kuwait, at the entrance to the souk there were always a bunch of farashes with baskets they balanced using a head band on their backs (what they called go-fers. We had one at work that washed our car every day). We would hire one for 1 dinar (~ $2.50) and he would follow us around for a few hours and carry anything we bought.
