This is the problem. Even if a company wants to do better, they risk being run out of business by those who don't care. Market failure at its purest.“I’m not going to say that there were no violations out there,” said Weston LaBar, executive director of the Harbor Trucking Association. But, he added, they were “unintentional,” the result of market pressures that threatened to bankrupt trucking companies.
The transport sector is so cutthroat, and so is the warehouse work. They force you to compete with your colleagues, and it's not in a "fun" way, it's a "whomever does the worst will get fired at the end of the week, or told by the employment agency that we don't need you." People end up sabotaging each other because they need the job. But it's because they're forcing humans to try to compete with automation, on a broad scale. All of the companies who have the money are moving in the direction of automation because it's cheaper and better than labour, and all the companies who don't are bleeding their workforce dry trying to keep up. And this isn't new either, it's just exacerbating an old problem. This started when all the big marts started artificially lowering prices to attract consumers. What started as loss-leading became "let's see how we can have this price all the time." To do that, they have to tie their manufacturers into contracts where they will pay less than what it costs to make the item, but promise to buy in bulk. Then they tie the shippers into contracts where they will pay them less than what the mileage will cost, but promise to be exclusive. Then, when those contracts come up, they refuse to pay more than their previous contract. Indeed, they usually offer less. If the shipper or manufacturer refuses, they just find somebody else who will take the old contract price and start again. They squeeze blood from the stone to get more people in their doors, and that blood comes from the people on the bottom end of the totem pole - drivers, loaders, order pickers. All in the name of getting cheap consumer goods. We're our own worst enemies.
Well, that's certainly the obvious slant of the article, but it's also not necessarily what the man said about market pressures. They quoted him on one word, 'unintentional,' and made up the rest. You can call this market failure but it's not. The article is extremely biased and it's very obvious from the start. It's not reporting, it's editorial. An example, "Many drivers thought they were paying into their truck like a mortgage. Instead, when they lost their job, they discovered they also lost their truck, along with everything they’d paid toward it." Why did they think this? They certainly talk to each other. They certainly signed the documentation that put them into the agreement. If I buy a car with a loan, or a lease, I should know the difference. But the article portrays this as if the companies stole money from them. If you have a lease, you don't get the equity. You're paying for the depreciation I did the math. If I made a 1600 payment on a 5 year loan, even with 3% financing for 60 months, I can afford a $83,000 truck. A new truck like California requires STARTS at $150,000. So these guys were paying depreciation, which is what a lease does. There are tons of examples in the article where these people are working for little to no money. Why? That's not a market failure, that's a failure on their part for their willingness to participate. You could work at McDonald's for fewer hours, come home every night, and still make more money. Another example: "In October 2008, that changed dramatically in southern California, home of the nation’s busiest ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. State officials, fed up with deadly diesel fumes from 16,000 outdated trucks, ordered the entire fleet replaced with new, cleaner rigs. Suddenly, this obscure but critical collection of trucking companies faced a $2.5 billion crossroads unlike anything experienced at other U.S. ports." So California introduced a huge and immediate new cost into the trucking industry during one of the worst economic downturns in American history which gravely affected retail and thereby the trucking industry. And the trucking companies had to get really creative about how they could even afford those trucks. Which is to say, they couldn't. So if they wanted trucking in any sort to continue to exist, they had to start leasing trucks. Or, of course, they could have stopped working for shady companies and become independent contractors. The article even mentioned that some of these guys owned their own truck and gave it up to the company as a down payment? On what fucking planet is that a good idea? Those trucks are extremely valauble. House valuable. As in, you could literally quit, sell it, and live off of the money for two years valuable. And they just gave them away as a down payment? Again, not a market failure, that's stupid to the point where I'm incredulous that it even happened like they're reporting. This article is garbage and is only getting shared because it agrees with Hubski's preconceived notions that capitalism is the bane of the working man. Critical thinking starts to expose this article as very biased.