That’s Just How We Do Things Here

The dockworkers’ strike should make it clear that allowing unions to stonewall technological advances has massive costs.

I magine you’re on a trip in a foreign country. You get off the plane and need to go down to the ground level of the airport to catch a taxi. You follow the signs to an elevator to take you there, and you discover the elevator still has a human operator. How charming, you think, and you smile as you tell the operator to take you down to the ground floor.

Then, you arrive at your hotel. You check in, and the receptionist directs you to the elevator — which also has a human operator. What lovely customer service, you think, as you wish him a good night while exiting to your room on the 19th floor.

You have a packed day ahead of you, so you get up early to get breakfast. Around 6:15 a.m., you head to the elevator, which has a sign on it informing you that the elevator does not open until 7:00 a.m.

What you found charming yesterday, today leaves you a little perturbed. “I’m fully capable of pushing the buttons without an operator,” you say to yourself. You don’t really want to go down and then back up 19 flights of stairs first thing in the morning, so you decide to just burn time until 7:00.

At 7:00, on your way down in the elevator, you ask the operator, “I’m not from here, can you explain why the elevator wasn’t opened this morning? Where I’m from, you can use them basically whenever.”

The operator replies, “Those are the rules. I don’t want to have to be awake in the middle of the night to run a few trips up and down.”

You politely nod and thank him for the answer, and you don’t want him to be inconvenienced. But at the same time, you think, this problem has been solved everywhere else you’ve ever been because the elevators don’t require operators.

You meet a friend of yours, who lives here year-round, for lunch. The restaurant is in the city center and has two floors, and an elevator operator shuttling customers between them. You ask your friend, “Does that guy really just bounce back and forth between the two floors here all day?”

She replies, “You know, I’ve never really thought about it, but I guess he does.”

You say, “I noticed there were elevator operators at the airport and in the hotel, too. What’s up with that? Back home, we just push the buttons ourselves.”

“It’s just how we do things here,” she replies. “We’ve always had them, and I think it’s kind of nice that they have jobs to support themselves.”

“Forgive me for sounding rude,” you say, “but how much do they make a year for pushing buttons?”

“It’s a pretty well-paid job, from what I understand,” she replies. “They do make it possible to move between floors in buildings, which is pretty important. I guess it would be nice to have elevators we could operate ourselves, but then they’d be out of work, and really, it’s not that big a deal.”

You don’t want to get bogged down in this conversation with your friend, whom you haven’t seen in a few years, but after you’re done eating, you’re sort of amazed that she couldn’t see how strange her country’s elevator situation is.

The restaurant is connected to a larger shopping center, and you walk to an atrium with an escalator. You realize that’s the first escalator you’ve seen in the country, and that it was sort of weird there wasn’t one at the airport. You see that there’s a line forming at the escalator because someone is standing in the way.

As you get closer, you realize that the person standing in the way has the same uniform on as the elevator operators. And he’s standing there, with his arm out, letting people go down the escalator only with huge gaps in between.

“Now that’s ridiculous,” you say to yourself. But nobody waiting in line to use the escalator seems particularly bothered by it. They probably think, like your friend, that’s just how things are.

You decide to do some digging online. You learn that during the 1960s and 1970s, when automated elevators became the norm everywhere else, the national union of elevator operators in this country successfully used its political power to keep elevator operators employed. And the dearth of escalators is due to their national labor contract, which allows them to be installed only if a union member can stand at the entrance to make sure there are spaces between people getting on it. This provision was justified in the name of safety.

The union didn’t just use political power and contract negotiations to get its way. It was also intertwined with organized crime and used violence and the threat of violence to force building owners to hire their operators, or pay kickbacks to hire other operators.

Politicians got upset at the organized crime part and appointed a commission to try to clean it up and prosecute wrongdoing. But even though the commission was abolished last year, the crime never fully stopped, and some of the union’s current officers have sketchy pasts with mobsters.

Looking closer into the union’s current leadership, you notice a bunch of them have the same last name. It turns out the president has made two of his sons vice presidents. And the nepotism doesn’t end there. Each union member can pass on his job to his son, and it’s actually difficult to get a job as an elevator operator if you’re not related to someone who already is one.

At this moment you realize that every elevator operator you’ve seen, which is over a dozen now, has been a man. You’re sure there probably are some women operators out there somewhere, but it seems as though this otherwise modern country has a patrilineal system of elevator operators who get paid to do things technology can easily do on its own, backed by government policy and maybe sometimes organized crime, and most everyone who lives here hardly thinks about it at all.

Your trip is done and it’s time to go back to the airport. You check out of your hotel, and you see on the receipt an “elevator service charge.” It takes you a second to mentally convert the charge to dollars, but when you do, you realize that the hotel was charging you about $15 each time you used the elevator.

Now you’re upset, and, perhaps unwisely, you take it out on the hotel receptionist. “You never said you were charging me each time I used the elevator! I have never, in all my years of traveling, been charged like that! What is going on?”

The receptionist answers, “I know it’s unusual in other places, and I’m sorry it wasn’t clear to you beforehand, but it’s how we do things here. The elevator operator has to eat, too, you know.”

“I know he has to eat, but couldn’t he eat by doing something useful instead of getting paid a bunch of money to do stuff technology does everywhere else on the planet? I can’t believe this country has such a backward system in place to do something so basic.”

That’s roughly how people from foreign countries should think about the stranglehold that dockworkers’ unions have on U.S. ports, which are some of the least efficient in the world and can be shut down for a strike during a hurricane recovery by union bosses who turned down a 50 percent wage increase and promise to “cripple you.” But that’s just how we do things here.