Commentary on California
Commentary on CaliforniaHere in California, GWB did it to himself again. Last month GWB came out to support the Republican candidate for Governor, Bill Simon. First California is primarily Democratic. Second, Bill SImon has a less-than credible background, and he is not doing well in the polls even after the GWB visit. So Mr. Simon took it upon himself to publish pictures of the Democratic Governor/Candidate accepting political money in the wrong place: a government office. Now this was a stupid thing for Mr. Simon to do. He could have let the pictures be submitted by other persons with nothing visible to gain. This would have increased the power of the pictures. THe problem was that the pictures were fakes and now had his named permanently attached to them. It makes all of the scum things of which he is being accused sound complimentary.
Since my work at Chrysler in 1967 where the UAW assembly-line worker attaching side view mirrors earned twice what the college-educated design engineer earned, I have had a bad taste for unions and the manner in which they escalate prices to the level of football tickets. The average dock worker in Oakland earns as mush or more than the average software designer in Silicon Valley. That tidbit is just to set the scale. The one thing that GWB has started doing correctly is that he invoked the Taft-Hartley on the work stoppage. The public information on this is as skewed and as partial as the coverage of the 60's riots.
Here is the deal. The giant tankers hold container trucks. Each truck has a bas code on its side indiacting its destination. All it takes is unloading the container onto a trailer-frame and reading the bar code to determine which trucker and which destination. Nota problem. The reason for this is efficiency. The dock workers refuse to do this. Instead they go to the old paper documents and organize the containers to their own satisfaction. The automation would reduce the process by at least one person and the remainng person would have to know how to use the computer to understand the bar coding. One down, one to educate. Too hard for the union worker so we go back to paper documents and live with the extra workers and the overhead of re-sorting what was sorted when it went on the ship.
The dock workers want job guarantees for unloading and dispatching -- work that is redundant with the current technology already in place and being used -- except by the dock-workers who ignore the computerization and still do it manually. Now they are doing this manually very slowly to push their point without actually striking. They were so slow, and drawing full pay, that the company could not afford to pay them. The docks shut down, the union claimed lockout where they really had an on-the-job strike.
So now GWB invokes Taft-Hartley. The workers go back to work. Only now they have slowed down worse and do not even keep the hours they scheduled. Showing up hours late, working sporadically, parking at stop signs, etc. They want more workers. They want lower-skilled people to earn more. There is serious greed here folks. They are protesting to GWB for the wrong reasons. They are afraid Taft-Hartley will ruin the grinch dock-worker strategy: unload nothing that is intended as a Christmas present. I guess it is OK to tell your children that you refused to get the Christmas presents unloaded because you were too lazy to upgrade your job skills on your own and need someone else to pay you for not working instead.
In any case, invoking Taft-Hartley will not resolve the issues. Sort of like the hands-off policy in Israel: there needs to be some level of follow-up. Forcing the adversaries to be in the same place does not get the work done, it just ups the ante.