> Unions not looking out for employees but instead to show off their influence/power. Resulting in lower performance
You might write off the above comment as the opinion of someone who does not like unions, but as someone who has worked for a shipping company, I assure you it is not. The myths surrounding them are not myths, they are a reality.
Dock unions are terrible. These unions (or at least many of them around the world) impose regimes of intimidation, violence, sexism, property damage and theft.
It is not possible to disrupt them. If you built a port and staffed it with high paid non union staff, I can assure you that dock workers around the world would (possibly illegally) refuse to unload the cargo of ships coming from this port or they would, more subtly, damage the goods unloaded (drop containers to hard onto the ground etc.) until then nobody wanted to use your port anymore because the cost was to high.
The international cooperation they have going is fascinating. It's a pity collectism like this (minus the violence and bullying) is not used for good instead if lining the pockets of a few.
I thought there was a previous discussion[1, found it] on HN where the port of Rotterdam was automating portions of its operations...
Perhaps to disrupt (improve) port operations you'd need to do it on both ends of a balanced high throughput lane [to avoid the international unions cooperating on sabotage]
You might write off the above comment as the opinion of someone who does not like unions, but as someone who has worked for a shipping company, I assure you it is not. The myths surrounding them are not myths, they are a reality.
Dock unions are terrible. These unions (or at least many of them around the world) impose regimes of intimidation, violence, sexism, property damage and theft.
It is not possible to disrupt them. If you built a port and staffed it with high paid non union staff, I can assure you that dock workers around the world would (possibly illegally) refuse to unload the cargo of ships coming from this port or they would, more subtly, damage the goods unloaded (drop containers to hard onto the ground etc.) until then nobody wanted to use your port anymore because the cost was to high.
The international cooperation they have going is fascinating. It's a pity collectism like this (minus the violence and bullying) is not used for good instead if lining the pockets of a few.