The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (18 page)

With the 1960 arbitration award, the Port of New York was officially open to any ship line wishing to carry freight in containers. The reality was otherwise. The arbitrators had ordered that the container royalties be paid into a fund, but they had refused to say anything about how the fund should be spent. In addition, the arbitrators had neglected to define the term “container.” Gleason, the union’s representative on the arbitration panel, predicted that these omissions would cause further union-management conflict. He was right.

The ILA’s Pacific coast counterpart, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, took an entirely different tack in addressing waterfront automation.

The ILWU had a long history of difficult and at times violent relations with employers in the Pacific ports. The union, then the Pacific division of the ILA, gained recognition only after a bloody coastwide strike in 1934, and staged 1,399 legal and illegal stoppages over the next fourteen years in order to assert its rights. The net result of this constant conflict was a large body of rules, both written and unwritten, governing port operations in great detail. One formal rule provided that, once assigned to a job at a particular hatch of a particular ship, a worker would do only that specific job until the ship sailed; if loading was complete at one hatch but not at another, an idle worker from the first hatch could not be shifted to help out at the second. An important “hip pocket” rule, codified nowhere but enforced by the gang foreman as required, provided that a trucker delivering palletized cargo to a pier would have to remove each item from the pallet and place it on the dock. Longshoremen would then replace the items on the pallet for lowering into the hold, where other longshoremen would break down the pallet once more and stow each individual item—all at a cost so high that shippers knew not to send pallets to begin with.
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Developing such rules, a top ILWU official admitted later, “took no end of imagination and invention.” The union regarded them as indispensable to preserve jobs and maintain uniform costs among competitors. The stevedoring firms with which the ILWU negotiated were willing to accept the rules to avoid the alternative of endless wildcat strikes. Louis Goldblatt, the union’s longtime secretary-treasurer, claimed that the stevedores actually liked many of the rules, because the ship lines paid them a premium of 30 percent for each man-hour worked. Perversely, the more man-hours required to discharge and load a ship, the more profit the stevedore could make.
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The other reason strict work rules were accepted is that there was little choice. The stevedores’ association had attempted to loosen many of the rules in contract negotiations in 1948. Unwisely, it did so by mounting a personal attack on Harry Bridges. The union president, a political radical from his Australian youth, made no secret of his socialist sympathies, and the employers labeled him a Communist and declared that they would not deal with Communists. By so doing, they merely enhanced his reputation on the docks. The ILWU walked out when the contract expired, and the union’s leadership was so successful in promoting solidarity that members stayed out through a ninety-five-day strike. Finally, the major ship lines brought the conflict to an end by pushing aside the stevedores’ association and their own rabidly anti-Communist counsel and taking charge of negotiations. The union achieved its greatest desire: it was finally able to negotiate face-to-face with the ship operators that ultimately paid for its services, rather than with the financially tenuous middlemen at the stevedoring companies.
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The largest of the Pacific ship lines, Matson, was facing a financial squeeze, and it persuaded the others that it was time for “a new look” in labor-management relations. The companies agreed to leave the work rules alone, in return for a contract clause allowing stevedores to use new devices and methods so long as individual workers did not face speedups. Innovation would no longer automatically trigger a strike. If a gang thought it was being asked to perform dangerous or excessive tasks, a union representative and a supervisor would try to work things out while unloading or loading continued; if no settlement could be reached at the job site, the dispute would move quickly to higher levels and, if needed, to binding arbitration. These provisions created a new openness, with the union frequently bending the rules to permit new equipment and smaller gangs so long as workers received a portion of the savings. Faced with cargo volumes one-quarter smaller than before the war, the ILWU, in the words of two California labor experts, accepted that “[r]adical measures were necessary to halt the decline in maritime commerce.”
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The amount of cargo handled per man-hour through the early 1950s, however, remained dismally low. A congressional investigation of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in 1955 uncovered such informal practices as “four-on, four-off,” a custom that had begun as a brief rest break for half of the eight holdmen in each gang and had expanded to the extent that workers often worked for only half of their shifts. The investigation left the ILWU cornered and friendless. It had long been plagued by allegations that it was a Communist front, and the government had sought repeatedly to deport Bridges, notwithstanding his status as a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, the leftist side of the labor movement, had expelled it for alleged Communist ties in 1951, and after the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955, Bridges was fearful that the Teamsters and other AFL-CIO unions would seek to challenge its jurisdiction over the docks. Even its former parent union, the ILA, wanted nothing to do with the ILWU, despite its own isolation from the rest of the labor movement; when Bridges wrote ILA president William Bradley to offer support during the 1956 East Coast dock strike, Bradley fired back that Bridges’s support was undesired. Bridges, a sophisticated tactician, was painfully aware of his union’s vulnerability to government pressure, and he knew that ending contract abuses and improving productivity were essential to keep the government out of union affairs. “You have got our promise and the employers have got our promise that we will go down there [to the rank and file] and persuade and push and do our best,” Bridges told the congressional committee.
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The impending launch of Pan-Atlantic’s container service in the East, and the ongoing study of container usage by Matson, the largest West Coast ship line, made it clear that shipowners were intent on automating cargo handling. Although many members of his union opposed concessions of any sort, Bridges, protected by his credentials as a militant uncorrupted by his dealings with the bosses, began to argue publicly that the union needed to think ahead. “Those guys who think we can go on holding back mechanization are still back in the thirties, fighting the fight we won way back then,” he said.
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Its origins in the West’s turn-of-the-century labor radicalism, its remarkable victories in the strikes of 1934 and 1948, and the ideology of its leaders gave the rank and file unusual power within the ILWU. A change in the union’s position on work rules and automation could not be imposed from the top; it would have to be endorsed by the coastwide caucus of representatives elected by their local unions, and then approved by a vote of the entire longshore membership. The task of selling the need for a new approach fell to Bridges. He first presented the issue to the union’s negotiating committee, of which he was a member. In March 1956, as the ILWU caucus debated priorities for the upcoming contract negotiations, the negotiating committee urged that the union accept automation in return for higher wages and shorter working hours:

This point of view was highly controversial within the union. The 1948 contract had left the ILWU firmly in control of the docks in almost every Pacific port. All longshoremen were either full ILWU “A-men” or else “B-men” who were hired as extras when all the A-men were employed, and hoped to get enough experience to be admitted to the union as A-men themselves. Most A-men belonged to regular gangs, with the same group dispatched together from the hiring hall under their elected gang boss, who was also a union member. The handling of each ship was supervised by a walking boss, an ILWU member as well. The stevedoring companies’ superintendents, nominally in charge, understood that it was usually wiser to get along with the union than to insist on strict enforcement of the contract. This cozy arrangement, which gave the longshoremen unusual control over their workplace, seemed to be threatened by the joint “Statement of Principles” put forth by the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association at the start of their 1956 negotiations. The key provision read simply: “There shall be no requirement for employment of unnecessary men.”
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Bridges put the Statement of Principles to a membership vote and received only a tepid endorsement, with 40 percent of ILWU members voting no. He clearly had no mandate to agree to changes in manning requirements. Instead, the union and the Maritime Association signed a contract dealing with normal economic matters, and arranged to address mechanization and work rules in separate talks.

Those talks began early in 1957 but quickly foundered on employers’ complaints that union members were ignoring the existing contract. J. Paul St. Sure, head of the Pacific Maritime Association, made clear that the shipowners were unwilling to trade money for elimination of work rules until they were certain that Bridges could make ILWU locals live up to whatever bargain he struck. That hard-nosed stance led to a year of intense debate among centralizers and decentralizes within the ILWU. In a surprising speech to the union’s caucus in April 1957, Bridges demanded that locals abide by contract language and improve productivity. Opposition, though, was still too strong to overcome; automation issues were referred to the Coast Labor Committee for further study. The committee, consisting of Bridges, one member from the Northwest, and one from California, reported to another union caucus in Portland in October that shippers were increasingly demanding to pack their own cargo into pallets, vans, or other loads that would be handled as single units on the docks. It estimated that up to 11 percent of longshore work hours could be lost as these practices spread. “There is nothing, except our willingness to handle them, that prevents a very considerable increase in unit loads, made up by the shipper,” the committee wrote. It painted a stark choice: “Do we want to stick with our present policy of guerilla resistance or do we want to adopt a more flexible policy in order to buy more specific benefits in return?”
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The report opened the way to a remarkable debate among rank-and-file members at the caucus. For the first time, men from up and down the coast had a chance to learn in detail about the changes under way in the shipping industry. “Every longshoreman started talking about what can be done under mechanization and still maintain jobs and income, benefits, pensions, and so forth,” recalled a labor journalist who was on the scene. Delegates from Los Angeles and Long Beach, where practices such as needlessly unloading and reloading pallets were most entrenched, opposed any compromise. “Perhaps we have the most to lose of any local on the coast,” one Los Angeles delegate complained. Delegates from Bridges’s home local in San Francisco led the support for negotiations over automation, arguing that the union should make sure that members shared the benefits of new methods of work rather than trying to stop them. After two days of debate, a voice vote backed Bridges’s proposal to begin informal negotiations about automation. On November 19, the union wrote the Pacific Maritime Association offering to discuss new methods and elimination of work rules, with the desire “to preserve the present registered force of longshoremen as the basic work force in the industry, and to share with that force a portion of the net labor cost saving to be effected.”
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Again, the employers were less than enthusiastic. “Many of them felt that this was a form of bribing the men on the job to do the job they were hired to do in the first place,” St. Sure explained. Bridges and St. Sure, who had developed a close working relationship, decided that the automation issues were too complex to resolve before the contract expired in June 1958, so they put their immediate focus on one very fundamental change in the contract. The union had won a six-hour workday in 1934, but an unwritten rule prohibited an employer from calling a halt after six hours if loading or unloading was not finished; although the contract guaranteed a minimum of only four hours’ pay when a longshoreman was hired, a “normal” shift was nine hours—six at straight time and three at time-and-a-half. The contract Bridges and St. Sure negotiated in 1958 turned longshoring into regular, full-time work. Longshoremen were guaranteed a full eight hours’ pay each day—at straight time. This benefited some men but hurt others, because the loss of overtime hours paid at 150 percent of base wage meant less income for many workers. Only 56 percent of ILA members voted to ratify the contract.
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The start of Matson Navigation’s West Coast-Hawaii service in 1959 made negotiations about automation urgent. “There were specialized cranes that were built specifically for Matson’s operation,” a former Los Angeles longshoreman recalled. “Well, after the worker saw that, or read about it in the
Dispatcher
[the ILWU newspaper], it didn’t take long to sink in that this was the coming way the cargo was going to be moved.” The leadership warned the union caucus in April of “such rapid changes in shipping that within even a few years the industry might take on a completely new appearance.” The Pacific Maritime Association, though, downplayed the risk of job loss. “We feel it will be years before the present work force will be affected at all by automation,” St. Sure told ILWU negotiators in May 1959. Bridges apparently shared that view. “Harry didn’t seem to believe that containerization was going to be that important,” said the
Dispatcher’s
former editor.
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