I enjoyed this wonderfuly snarky econoblog, which doesn’t have a by-line, but appears to be written by someone in the UK. Update Victor at Fourstones IDs the writer as Daniel Davies, an economics PhD in the UK. Thanks!
On the West Coast Docks Lockout:
Consider for the moment, the dockworkers of the ILWU, who were on strike [ahem, it was a lockout] until recently, and who earn around $100,000 a year for doing a job that basically involves attaching a hook to a container and giving the thumbs-up to a bloke in a crane.
Now of course, when you read a sentence like the one above in a media account, how you react to it depends on who you are. If you’re Nathan Newman, you start immediately pointing out that it’s a lock-out, not a strike, and giving us lots of extremely useful chapter and verse on the Taft-Hartley Act. If you’re the ILWU, you start pointing out at length, what a skilled, complicated and dangerous job being a longshoreman is. And if you’re Max Sawicky, you start interrogating those numbers a bit, and finding out that the sum of $100K is an utterly misleading, high-balled estimate, completely unrepresentative of the average dockworker’s take-home pay and provided by management to an uncritical media.
But if you’re me, you just think:
“Fucking good on them! When one thinks of all the arseholes pulling down a hundred thousand for doing next to nothing, why shouldn’t someone get the same for hauling crates and occasionally half-inching the contents? They must have a bloody good union, good luck to them!”
He’s not familiar with Vernon Smith though… well, we’ve got Lynne to help with that.
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