:rat-salute:
Crane operators [...] belong to a powerful union and earn up to $250,000
:gigachad: Why yes, I do understand the value of my labor and the power of collective bargaining. How could you tell?
Good. The truck drivers should also be getting paid that much. Don't tear them down, take goddamn notes.
Nah, nobody should be making a quarter of a million dollars a year. That wealth should be spread throughout the entire working class. We need one workers union, competing unions is not good.
You'd be surprised how much wealth is actually out there. We're being fed scraps, friend. I agree on the one big union.
All yeah. Dividing the working class because they delayed your treats. Amerikkka is back baby :libs-owned:
People will piss and moan about an undereducated person making a good salary for an extremely high skill job but be fine with a finance bro making five million by gambling with their retirement funds
they assume one of those is hard because they think the finance bros are A. doing math and B. actually determining the risk/reward ratio. Moving a box from a ship to a truck they can understand, so it sounds easier than how they think investing works, although the opposite is true.
Also, being a crane operator is a blue-collar job that doesn't have the same status as white collar jobs. The finance nonce wears a suit and tie do naturally he should be paid more.
Lmao sure staring at a computer screen and reading numbers can be hard, but its got nothing over having outstanding kinesthetic visualization of the movement of multi-ton machines that could easily kill people and cause massive disruptions to the supply chain, and have the fine motor control to make the movement happens.
That sounds like it could be really stressful, it's a lot of responsibility... In other words it sounds like they've earned the quarter million dollar salary
Good for the crane operators but the truckers are really getting screwed over.
This article reminds me of the toxic dynamic between Grubhub/Doordash drivers and cooks at my restaurant job. Grubhub has a tendency to send the drivers to pick up the orders too early, so their deliveries aren't done when they arrive. A lot of the time the drivers blame us even though it's not our fault, and they start to get pissy and rude towards us. This causes the restaurant staff to resent the drivers, not only because they're rude to us but also because we don't get any tips from Grubhub/Doordash so fulfilling those orders is just extra work and stress for no extra pay.
There seems to be an insidious dynamic within the gig economy that pits waged/salaried employees and "independent contractors" against each other, and it is making solidarity and class unity harder to achieve.
They’ve succeeded so well in atomizing and dividing us. It’s all just so fucked :(
Nothing lasts forever, not even the bad shit. We’ll end it ourselves if we have to.
Drivers in my area are grabbing food and canceling the orders.
The crane operators are part of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which also represents longshoremen. Veteran operators who have a set schedule make approximately $250,000 a year, while others who receive daily work assignments make $200,000, said labor consultant Jim Tessier, who represents longshoremen in disputes against the union.
“What you are talking about is perfectly described behavior,” Tessier said of the crane operators. “This is all a reflection of the management they have down there, the inmates run the asylum. The managers are all afraid to say anything because the operators are so powerful they get management fired if they don’t like them.”
:gigachad-hd:
IIRC the ILWU are the most radical big union in the country too
the operators are so powerful they get management fired if they don’t like them
Literally how places like the GDR and other Eastern Bloc nations operated. Everyone there loved it, even if they maybe took it for granted. Note that having actual workplace democracy didn't destroy output or productivity, as the gains that communist nations made in industrial & agriculture production outdid anything in the capitalist world.
Yeah, but they didn't have blue jeans and treats so it was literally :84:
"The inmates run the asylum" really just up and saying "no we're the ones meant to be tormenting you!"
There will be a shortage of sex arses for Christmas and it's because crane operators gets paid a fair salary, not because porky has stretched his supply chains recklessly thin in order to siphon off more money for himself.
I used to not understand the craze for just in time inventory. It seemed really fragile. Now I realize it was just trying to grab every penny, and was based on the assumption that workers absolutely could not throw a wrench in the system.
Capitalists love to put themselves at the total mercy of others in order to make a penny, whether that's the U.S. or Chinese governments, or their own workers (not that I have a problem with this exactly, but it's probably not exactly what I would do)
Management's job is not to make a profit. Management's job is to increase profits.
It's a never-ending cycle. They never get to a point where they say, "whew, done!" It's cut here, cut there, and sooner rather than later they cut too much and problems begin. They institutionally can't stop doing it, though. It's who they are.
So there never really is an end of history. They pretended the class struggle was over, or even acted like it never existed at all, and then they intensified it.
These people suck.
The End of History is not the end of change but the destruction of the historical record.
Capitalist Realism is about destroying the idea that there was ever a better way to live.
At my old job, we had a crane operator, and he had to work very closely with the guy in the tree (the crane was used in jobs with the biggest trees like 4+ feet diameter. and only removals, not regular pruning).
It was crazy watching them work together. Depending on the angles and lengths, the crane could only pick so much, like 3-5k lbs at a time. So the climber had to make good cuts, the crane operator had to be good at killing the motion of the dangling log (2 ton pendulum bad lol). Everyone just had to really know what they were doing or shit could go way sideways
It was all crazy skilled stuff that could turn dangerous any minute. Except I think this guy made like $23/hr tops, and he’d been at the company for at least 20 years.
He was funny, I learned he always bought his work boots at a rinky dink little independent shoe store that’s super close to where I live. It’s in a different city from where he lived, I have no idea why he chose it.
Obviously a different sort of crane than the kind to pick shipping containers. But craning, it ain’t easy
how much do you think the crane operators all living in the same area means they get to know each other and then unionize is an advantage over the truckers being from who knows where and not really meeting so they never think to unionize?
Anarchism and communism historically spread through the ports, which is why they were so syndicalist in the beginning. Also why port workers are so well organized today.
