This is a class question. The dividends resulting from greater efficiency on the waterfront are not used to create jobs or build hospitals and schools. They are appropriated by the stevedoring and shipping companies to accumulate profit and add to the wealth of a thin layer of multi-millionaires. The private profit system, which they represent, is creating unimaginable waste and inefficiency. In all the major capitalist countries, the talents, ingenuity and capacities of millions of workers have been laid to waste by unemployment.
Every worker is for the development of more productive methods.
But under the profit system, rising productivity means that more workers are consigned to the scrap heap, while youth face permanent joblessness. Genuine efficiency in production will only be achieved when the working class establishes a workers' government and takes the control of the productive forces out of the hands of the capitalist class, placing the banks, finance houses and other key sectors under social ownership. Only then will it be possible to use modern technology to eliminate backbreaking work, shorten working hours, and develop a more productive, democratically controlled, global economy to uplift the living standards of all. Not just Corrigan and Howard, but every company and government worldwide is driven by the escalating demands of global capital to relentlessly step up the exploitation of the working class. Decisive political issues therefore confront workers, issues that go far beyond replacing one capitalist government by another.