INSANITY ON THE WATERFORNT:

Cargo Kings: They've got money. They've got muscle. They've got power. Will Portland's longshoremen lose it all to a barcode scanner? (CHRIS LYDGATE, 10/9/2002, Willamette Week)

Full-time longshoremen earn an average of $107,000 a year, which ranks them among the best-paid union workers in the world. The PMA is offering a three-year contract with a 7 percent wage hike and a beefed-up pension plan. In return, the PMA wants to install new technology, such as barcode scanners and global positioning systems, to speed dockside operations.

While conceding that the new technology might eventually eliminate as many as 400 jobs on the West Coast (with about 20 of those in Portland), the PMA has promised to pay the displaced clerks for 40 hours a week until they retire--even if there's no work for them to do. "Not one longshoreman will lose his or her job as the result of technology," PMA chief Joseph Miniace vowed on Monday.

Your average worker would probably greet an offer like this by popping the champagne. But your average worker doesn't belong to the most powerful labor movement in America--the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

So America's economy should be slower and less efficient than it could be just so that these guys can make more than most of the doctors at the hospital across the street do? Posted by Orrin Judd at October 15, 2002 12:58 PM