Another Thought on Longshoremen

I was discussing my longshoremen's post with my business partner over lunch yesterday. Having just published it, I didn't want to go back and alter it.

However, this thought occurred to me as we chatted about my analysis of the situation involving US unionized ports, shipping lines, and the two large longshoremen's unions.

These unions, together, have about 100,000 members, according to the WSJ piece. I just checked the Yahoo profiles on Ford and GM. They have a combined total workforce of about 630,000. Figure roughly 600,000 are UAW members. Gross that up 50% for related workers at other auto producers, or parts manufacturers, like Delphi (184,000 employees). That's about 900,000 members, or between 9x the size of the longshoremen's unions.

My point is, the longshoremen are hardly the sort of "union" Samuel Gompers and Walter Reuther had in mind when they began organizing labor in the first half of the last century. The Teamsters and the UAW are still largely, legitimately, "blue" collar unions.

The longshoremen sound like they wear pastel polo shirts these days, with khakis, and maybe topsiders. Sort of like a private version of PATCO, the air traffic controller's union with which Ronald Reagen so effectively dealt in the 1980s.

As I reflect on yesterday's piece, and these numbers, I have to say, I don't really even consider the longshoremen a "union" in the classic sense. They just don't evoke hordes of minimum wage immigrants, clamoring to get "better conditions" or "more jobs." Heck, these guys don't care how many jobs get displaced, so long as they are paid for theirs. Talk about pulling up the ladder!

If anything, I'd consider the dockworkers of today a sort of min-professional association. More like an engineering, medical society or the attorney's bar than the classical union of old. Their intelligent outmaneuvering of the management of US ports and global shipping lines suggests that, though they may call themselves a union, they behave like one of the better-organized "businesses" I think I've observed.