Dockworkers -- Six Figure Strikers Creating Supply Risk
If we did not already have enough to worry about when it comes to global sourcing supply risk, we can now add a new -- well, old, but that's another story -- category into the mix: six figure strikers. That's right -- the California dockworkers are once again flexing their six-figure muscle. According to a recent story in The Trucker (hat-tip World Trade), "West Coast shippers said … that dockworkers at three California ports are intentionally slowing cargo movement and causing shipping delays as the two sides continue to negotiate a new contract. For nearly two weeks, workers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have been taking coordinated breaks and working slower." For those who are not familiar with the dockworkers this article, now six years old, has got some great facts and figures lest you begin to sympathize with these slowdown actions.
Just to name a few: Last time there was a strike, the dockworkers refused average salary increases to $114,500 and $137,500 depending on role. And in 2002, the cost of benefits was in excess of $40,000 per dockworker per year. Today, I'm estimating that the total compensation and benefits package for a dockworker is close to $200,000 per year -- maybe more. Of course there’s a great irony in this. And that’s that the workers across the Pacific in China are making 1/20th of this amount to do the same job. A metaphor for how union muscle has made the US uncompetitive in the world market for all but the highest value-added goods? I think so.
- Jason Busch
Just to name a few: Last time there was a strike, the dockworkers refused average salary increases to $114,500 and $137,500 depending on role. And in 2002, the cost of benefits was in excess of $40,000 per dockworker per year. Today, I'm estimating that the total compensation and benefits package for a dockworker is close to $200,000 per year -- maybe more. Of course there’s a great irony in this. And that’s that the workers across the Pacific in China are making 1/20th of this amount to do the same job. A metaphor for how union muscle has made the US uncompetitive in the world market for all but the highest value-added goods? I think so.
- Jason Busch
We are already headed in that direction in some industries. Consider the video-game company (I will not name them) that insists that programmers work every waking hour without overtime compensation, burns them out, and then replaces them with fresh meat when they can no longer sustain the pace.
Inevitably, jobs that can be performed more cheaply elsewhere will move elsewhere. Equally inevitably, workers "elsewhere" will eventually come to the same realization as workers in the first world -- namely, that capital will always suppress and exploit labor whenever it can. It is the inexorable law of the market. Unfortunately, the only defense that has worked is collective bargaining.
No, I don't begrudge these guys getting whatever they can when I see the millions being paid to CEOs who run their companies into the ground and collect bonuses for laying people off. Just wish I could get out of the revolving door of layoffs, working as a contractor somewhere, getting a "permanent job," and more layoffs. White collare jobs in middle management aren't what they're cracked up to be - and we don't have the unions.