The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (44 page)

13.
Paul M. Romer, “Why, Indeed, in America? Theory, History, and the Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” Working Paper 5443, NBER, January 1996.

14.
David Ricardo,
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(London, 1821; reprint, New York, 1965), pp. 77–97. Richard E. Caves and Ronald W. Jones point out that the widely taught Heckscher-Ohlin model, which shows that a country has a comparative advantage in producing goods that make more intensive uses of its more abundant factor of production, assumes that transport costs will not affect trade; see their
World Trade and Payments: An Introduction
, 2nd ed. (New York, 1977). More typically, Miltiades Chacholiades,
Principles of International Economics
(New York, 1981), p. 333, describes international market equilibrium under the unstated assumption that trade is costless.

15.
The seminal article in this field was Paul Krugman, “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography,”
Journal of Political Economy
99, no. 3 (1991): 483–499. The impact of changing transportation costs is further developed in Krugman and Anthony J. Venables, “Globalization and the Inequality of Nations,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
110, no. 4 (1995): 857–880, and in Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables,
The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade
(Cambridge, MA, 1999).

16.
David Hummels, “Have International Transportation Costs Declined?” Working Paper, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, 1999, and the International Monetary Fund,
World Economic Outlook
, September 2002, p. 116, contend that the cost of sea freight has not fallen significantly in recent decades. James E. Anderson and Eric van Wincoop, “Trade Costs,”
Journal of Economic Literature
42 (September 2004): 691 751, and Céline Carrere and Maurice Schiff, “On the Geography of Trade: Distance Is Alive and Well,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3206, February 2004, are among those arguing the continued significance of transport costs in determining trade flows. David Coe and three coauthors offer a technical critique of those arguments and conclude that long-distance international trade has in fact increased, implying that lower transport costs may have encouraged globalization; see “The Missing Globalization Puzzle,” International Monetary Fund Working Paper WP/02/171, October 2002.

17.
The closest approximation to a general history of the container is Theodore O. Wallin, “The Development, Economics, and Impact of Technological Change in Transportation: The Case of Containerization” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1974).

1.
Dramatic photos of cargo-handling operations on the West Coast, which were similar to those on the New York docks, can be found in Otto Hagel and Louis Goldblatt,
Men and Machines: A Story about Longshoring on the West Coast Waterfront
(San Francisco, 1963). Description of coffee handling is from Debra Bernhardt interview with Brooklyn longshoreman Peter Bell, August 29, 1981, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Project, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University, Tape 10A. See also recollection of former longshoreman Jock McDougal in Ian McDougall,
Voices of Leith Dockers
(Edinburgh, 2001), p. 28; of former San Francisco longshoreman Bill Ward in the ILWU oral history collection, viewed July 5, 2004, at
http://www.ilwu.org/history/oral-histories/bill-ward.cfm?renderforprint=1
. Grace Line anecdote from interview with Andrew Gibson, Box AC NMAH 639, COHP.

2.
Alfred Pacini and Dominique Pons,
Docker à Marseille
(Paris, 1996), p. 174; T. S. Simey, ed.,
The Dock Worker: An Analysis of Conditions of Employment in the Port of Manchester
(Liverpool, 1956), p. 199; New York Shipping Association, “Annual Accident Report Port of Greater New York and Vicinity,” January 15, 1951, in Jensen Papers, Collection 4067, Box 13, Folder “Accidents-Longshore Ind.”

3.
Charles R. Cushing, “The Development of Cargo Ships in the United States and Canada in the Last Fifty Years” (manuscript, January 8, 1992); Peter Elphick,
Liberty: The Ships That Won the War
(London, 2001), p. 403.

4.
Ward interview, ILWU; interview with former longshoreman George Baxter in McDougall,
Voices of Leith Dockers
, p. 44.

5.
See the colorful descriptions of unloading in Pacini and Pons,
Docker à Marseille
, p. 137.

6.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Estimates of Non-Residential Fixed Assets, Detailed Industry by Detailed Cost,” available at
http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/faweb/Details/Index.html
; Andrew Gibson interview; Paul Richardson interview, July 1, 1997, COHP, Box ACNMAH 639. Cost estimate of merchant ships appears in testimony of Geoffrey V. Azoy, Chemical Bank, in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries,
Hearings on HR 8637, To Facilitate Private Financing of New Ship Construction
, April 27, 1954, p. 54. MacMillan and Westfall estimated that cargo handling and port expenses accounted for 51.8 percent of the total cost of a short voyage on a C2 freighter in 1958 and 35.9 percent of the total cost of a long voyage. “Competitive General Cargo Ships,” p. 837.

7.
For examinations of dockworkers’ conditions in many countries, see Sam Davies et al., eds.,
Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History
, 1790–1970 (Aldershot, UK, 2000).

8.
U.S. Bureau of the Census and Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance,
County Business Patterns
, First Quarter, 1951 (Washington, DC, 1953), p. 56; George Baxter interview in McDougall,
Voices of Leith Dockers
, p. 44; unnamed longshoreman quoted in William W. Pilcher,
The Portland Longshoremen: A Dispersed Urban Community
(New York, 1972), p. 41); Pacini and Pons,
Docker à Marseille
, p. 46; Paul T. Hartman,
Collective Bargaining and Productivity
(Berkeley, 1969), p. 26; David F. Wilson,
Dockers: The Impact of Industrial Change
(London, 1972), p. 23.

9.
Many of the problems on the docks were eloquently discussed in the 1951 report of a New York State Board of Inquiry into waterfront conditions; for a summary, see “Employment Conditions in the Longshore Industry,” New York State Department of Labor
Industrial Bulletin
31, no. 2 (1952): 7. ILA president Joseph P. Ryan, who eventually lost his post owing to charges of corruption, proposed in 1951 that employers should offer loans to his men to give them an alternative to loan sharks; see “Ryan Message to Members 1951” in Jensen Papers, Collection 4067, Box 13, Folder “Bibliography—Longshoremen Study Outlines,” and Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor,
Annual Report
, various years. Mullman’s testimony is reported in “Newark Kickback Inquiry,”
NYT
, December 16, 1954. On mandatory betting, see Paul Trilling, “Memorandum and Recommendations on the New York Waterfront,” December 14, 1951, in Jensen Papers, Collection 4067, Box 12, Folder “Appendix Materials.” Information on New Orleans taken from Eric Arnesen,
Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics 1863–1923
(New York, 1991), p. 254.

10.
Some of these schemes are reviewed in Peter Turnbull, “Contesting Globalization on the Waterfront,”
Politics and Society
28, no. 3 (2000): 367–391, and in Vernon H. Jensen,
Hiring of Dock Workers and Employment Practices in the Ports of New York, Liverpool, London, Rotterdam, and Marseilles
(Cambridge, MA, 1964), pp. 153, 200, and 227. On Rotterdam, see also Erik Nijhof, “Des journaliers respectables: les dockers de Rotterdam et leurs syndicates 1880–1965,” in
Dockers de la Méditerranée à la Mer du Nord
(Avignon, 1999), p. 121.

11.
Wilson,
Dockers
, p. 34.

12.
In Amsterdam and Rotterdam, most dockworkers were in the direct employ of stevedoring firms, and most dockers who were not in full-time employment received guarantees of 80 percent of regular pay if they reported to the hiring center twice daily; on average, they received 39 hours’ wages and 9 hours of guarantee per 48-hour workweek. See untitled typescript from Scheefvaart Vereeniging Noord dated May 1, 1953, in Jensen Papers, Collection 4067, Box 13, Folder “Reports on Foreign Dock Workers.” On the UK pension scheme, see Wilson,
Dockers
, p. 118. On Hamburg, see Klaus Weinhauer, “Dock Labour in Hamburg: The Labour Movement and Industrial Relations, 1880s-1960s,” in Davies et al.,
Dock Workers
, 2:501.

13.
Raymond Charles Miller, “The Dockworker Subculture and Some Problems in Cross-Cultural and Cross-Time Generalizations,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
11, no. 3 (1969): 302–314. For belief that it did not pay to work well and quickly, see Horst Jürgen Helle, “Der Hafenarbeiter zwischen Segelschiff und Vollbeschäftigung,”
Economisch en Sociaal Tijdschrift
19, no. 4 (1965): 270. Oregon comments in Pilcher,
The Portland Longshoremen
, p. 22. Marseilles dockers went on strike in 1955 to demand regular shifts. See Pacini and Pons,
Docker à Marseille
, p. 118. According to data from the British Ministry of Labour, the base weekly pay of a full-time docker before World War II was 30–40 percent above the corresponding pay in construction and heavy manufacturing; dockers’ average weekly earnings, however, were only 10 percent higher than in those other sectors, because dockers’ work was more sporadic. See Wilson,
Dockers
, p. 19.

14.
Richard Sasuly, “Why They Stick to the ILA,”
Monthly Review
, January 1956, 370; Simey,
The Dock Worker
, pp. 44–45; Malcolm Tull, “Waterfront Labour at Fremantle, 1890–1990,” in Davies et al.,
Dock Workers
, 2:482; U.S. Bureau of the Census,
U.S. Census of Population and Housing 1960
(Washington, DC, 1962), Report 104, Part I.

15.
The proportion of African American dockworkers is from census data reported in Lester Rubin,
The Negro in the Longshore Industry
(Philadelphia, 1974), pp. 34–44. For a detailed analysis of racial preferences and discrimination among dockworkers in New York, New Orleans, and California, see Bruce Nelson,
Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality
(Princeton, 2001),
chaps. 1
-
3
. On the New Orleans dockers, see Daniel Rosenberg,
New Orleans Dockworkers: Race, Labor, and Unionism, 1892–1923
(Albany, 1988), and Arnesen,
Waterfront Workers of New Orleans;
odd details, carefully omitting any mention of race, are in William Z. Ripley, “A Peculiar Eight Hour Problem,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
33, no. 3 (1919): 555–559. On racial discrimination, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,”
Journal of American History
80, no. 1 (1993): 96; Seaton Wesley Manning, “Negro Trade Unionists in Boston,”
Social Forces
17, no. 2 (1938): 259; Roderick N. Ryon, “An Ambiguous Legacy: Baltimore Blacks and the CIO, 1936–1941,
” Journal of Negro History
65, no. 1 (1980): 27; Clyde W. Summers, “Admission Policies of Labor Unions,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
61, no. 1 (1946): 98; Wilson,
Dockers
, p. 29. The Portland grain workers’ case is mentioned in Charles P. Larrowe,
Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States
(New York, 1972), p. 368.

16.
On Portland, see Pilcher,
The Portland Longshoremen
, p. 17; on Antwerp, Helle, “Der Hafenarbeiter,” p. 273; for Edinburgh, see interviews with dockers Eddie Trotter and Tom Ferguson in McDougall,
Voices of Leith Dockers
, pp. 132 and 177; for Manchester, see Simey,
The Dock Worker
, p. 48. Macmillan quotation appears in Wilson,
Dockers
, p. 160.

17.
On the docker culture, see Pilcher,
The Portland Longshoremen
, pp. 12 and 25–26; Wilson,
Dockers
, p. 53; and Miller, “The Dockworker Subculture,” passim. Rankings are reported in John Hall and D. Caradog Jones, “Social Grading of Occupations,”
British Journal of Sociology
1 (1950): 31–55.

18.
Wilson, Dockers, pp. 101–102; Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel, “The Interindustry Propensity to Strike—an International Comparison,” in
Industrial Conflict
, ed. Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dublin, and Arthur M. Ross (New York, 1954), p. 191; Miller, “The Dockworker Subculture,” p. 310. The most notable exception to labor militancy was in New York, where, as Nelson shows, a combination of corrupt union leadership and appeals to Irish Catholic solidarity against other ethnic groups undermined labor radicalism and allowed the port to operate without a strike between 1916 and 1945; see Nelson,
Divided We Stand
, pp. 64–71.

19.
Rupert Lockwood,
Ship to Shore: A History of Melbourne’s Waterfront and Its Union Struggles
(Sydney, 1990), pp. 223–225; Arnesen,
Waterfront Workers of New Orleans
, p. 254; David F. Selvin,
A Terrible Anger
(Detroit, 1996), pp. 41 and 48–52; Pacini and Pons,
Docker à Marseille
, pp. 46 and 174; interview with former longshoreman Tommy Morton in McDougall,
Voices of Leith Dockers
, p. 112.

20.
Thievery as a response to reductions in pay is discussed in Selvin,
A Terrible Anger
, p. 54. The docker joke is one of several in Wilson,
Dockers
, p. 53. Theft is discussed, among many other places, in the interview with longshoreman Tommy Morton in McDougall,
Voices of Leith Dockers
, p. 115; in Pilcher,
The Portland Longshoremen
, p. 100; and in Andrew Gibson interview in COHP.