I'm definitely in favor of breaking up the dockworkers/longshormans unions. I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.
So if you want to transport something from Northern California to Southern, you MUST truck it, even if you could afford to wait a few weeks. It's incredibly bad for the environment, and much less efficient.
The Jones act was passed in 1920 because the merchant marine had been withering away in the decades leading up to WWI. WWI was an "oh shit" moment for the US when it realized that if it had been more directly involved in the shooting war it wouldn't have any ships to fight in it.
Arguably it worked as intended because the American flag fleet was large and modern by 1942 when the US found itself in a shooting war across two oceans.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-ports-key-us-sup...
Union Pacific has decided that they will only run unit trains out of the inland empire to a few destinations north and east.
In order to get cargo from LA and Longbeach to those inland terminals thousands of truck movements have to occur across LA's congested freeway network every day. And if the container's not going to one of the preselected locations (Chicago, St Louis, DFW, a few others) it has to go the whole way by truck.
Recall the "solution" to the blockage during the pandemic was to stack containers even higher. This is because the problem wasn't with offloading the containers, it was the trucking (drayage) getting them out of the port and to either the railheads ("intermodal ports") in the inland empire, or to their destination.
"Temporarily embarrassed millionaire" refers to working-class people who oppose progressive liberal policies because they think they might have some future windfall that puts them in the capitalist class.
I have personally experienced multiple negative experiences in my personal and professional lives directly related to labor unions, but Jeff Bezos has had nearly zero identifiable impact on my life. Possible exception: a Jeff Bezos donation is paying for a nearby shelter for homeless families.
I'm not necessarily opposed to collective bargaining, but I can give you a litany of crap I've had to deal with over the years because of unions, itemized with i's dotted and t's crossed, and I simply cannot do the same for the supposedly awful wealth inequality I live with every day.
See what I did there?
The hostility to unions on this forum comes near exclusively from American posters, who coincidentally, have very poor workers rights compared to anywhere in the UK/EU/EEA.
Unions provide a balance of power to employers. The made our work places safer, gave us holidays and fair pay.
Perhaps we should realize how relevant that fact is to what we read here.
So you're against capitalism