Just think of how many farm jobs today if only no one had invented the tractor!

That’s the same logic of the International Longshoremen’s Association, who, with White House help, won big in their three-day port strike. Its members got a 62% raise over six years.

But that’s not the end of the story and they may not be done with their threats to shut down the eastern seaboard.  Another crippling strike could begin after a cooling-off period ends on January 15.

What’s their next grievance: automation!  Harold Daggett, the 78-year-old ILA president, tells his members.  “Someone has to get into Congress and say, ‘Whoa, time out.’ This world is going too fast for us. Machines got to stop.”

He’s backed up by Senator Bernie Sanders who says: “Billionaires in the shipping industry must not be allowed to get even richer by replacing port workers with robots.”

Next thing you know kitchen help in restaurants will protest electric dishwashers and the typewriter operators’ unions will try to ban PCs.

The United States has prided itself on being the technology capital of the world.  But thanks to this kind of union resistance, we have some of the least modern and efficient ports in the industrialized world. The World Bank’s annual ranking of trade gateways rates the Charleston port 53rd most efficient in the world. And that’s the highest-ranked port in the country! Part of this is due to union work rules and part is due to substandard automation.

Ironically, while the union boasted that 50,000 of its members were on strike, only half of that number actually work in the ports. The other 25,000 collect royalties NOT to work, under an agreement struck when the union opposed a previous round of technological change: containerization.