Nobody is Talking About THIS PART of The Longshoremen Strike
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I could have had class. could have been a contender. I could have been somebody on the waterfront. 2024, this is not. Anyway, anyway, we’re going to talk a little bit about this dock workers strike and what’s taking place right now. You’ve got various different counter offers that have been exchanged.
the longshoremen are actually asking for a significant pay increase in order to just sit down at the table. It’s up to 77 % over the next six years. As it stands right now, they are on strike. Many of the importers, they’ve kind of saw this coming and they learned a lot after what happened during COVID and they have rerouted a lot of their…
a lot of their shipments to California. California settled their union issue, I it was a couple of years ago now, and many also as well are flying product in. Some also brought a lot of stuff in early for Christmas, knowing that this was on the table. This labor union has 47,000 members up and down the East Coast. Joe Biden, not stepping in.
on this. The last time, I think it was in the California strikes when George W. Bush was president where he stepped in and forced them back to the table. You know, this kind of reminds me of, I know did the on the waterfront bit right there. Great television series, huge fan of. It’s actually one of those few series I’ve watched several times is The Wire. And the second season of The Wire has a lot to do with
longshoremen and corruption in the Baltimore waterfront. And the issues from the wire, some of the issues that are coming up in this strike today is automation, efficiency. And the wire episode, lot of the longshoremen, they went and they saw what was taking place at other ports around the globe. And they actually recognize that their time
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Time was coming and things were changing. Just to put this into perspective, to put this into perspective, ports in the United States are some of the least, with an L, least efficient in the entire world. The ports in Africa, Kenya, Tanzania are a hell of a lot more efficient than ours. Plus you want to compare it to the
in Japan, Rotterdam, China, blows ours away. Least efficient ports, some of the least efficient ports in the world. But you what about the workers? Some of the highest paid.
some of the highest paid workers running the least efficient ports. Does that sound at all like capitalism to you? Does it? I know there’s some people listening right now. Protect these jobs. Listen, technology changes things.
I again, I remember when when Barack Obama, one of his speeches was ridiculous, was talking about, know, the ATM replacing tellers out there. Yeah, it did. It did replace tellers. But also it increased the amount of employment at the banks because it freed up time and space to do other things. So the banks got involved with this is just a natural ebb and flow.
Put it into perspective, with overtime, these longshoremen making upwards of $200,000 a year, nothing wrong, I don’t have any problem with people making money. I do have a problem where you, in essence, are not allowing an industry to improve or evolve just for the sake of some labor contract. This is problematic. Again, you
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where Donald Trump weighs in on this, I don’t know. We’ll see. I haven’t really heard much of kind of talking on the edges. But in order to make America great again, like he says he wants to do, you need to make America competitive as well. And having the least efficient ports in the world with the highest paid workers, which again, makes no sense. Makes no sense is a bit of a problem. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
