The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

by Marc Levinson

  The ships of the era were breakbulk vessels, built with several levels of open space below deck to handle almost any kind of dry cargo.* Much of the world’s commercial fleet had been destroyed during the war, but nearly 3,000 U.S. merchant ships survived and were available for merchant service by 1946. Among them were more than 2,400 of the Liberty Ships that U.S. shipyards had turned out between 1941 and 1945. Designed as convoy vessels and built in fewer than 70 days from prefabricated parts, the Liberty Ships were very slow and cheap enough to be expendable. The vessels were deliberately built small so that little cargo would be lost if a ship were sunk by German submarines; Liberty Ships were just 441 feet long. In 1944, U.S. shipyards started to make Victory Ships, which were much faster than the 11-knot** Liberty Ships but only a few feet longer and wider. The U.S. Navy sold 450 Liberty Ships to U.S. merchant lines after the war, and sold another 450 or so for commercial use in Europe and China. More than 540 Victory Ships outlasted the war, and the navy began selling them off in late 1945 as well.3

  Neither type of vessel was designed for commercial efficiency. The interiors were cramped. The curvature of the ships’ sides meant that the five small holds on each vessel were wider near the top and narrower at the bottom, and more spacious toward the middle of the vessel than forward or aft. Longshoremen had to know how to fill these odd dimensions: for the shipowner, wasted space meant money lost. Each hold was covered by its own hatch, a watertight metal cover secured to the deck; cargo for the first port of call had to be loaded last so it would be near a hatch, available for easy unloading, while cargo for the final port on the ship’s itinerary was shoved to the distant corners of the hold. At the same time, every single piece of freight had to be stowed tightly so that it would not shift as the ship rolled at sea; a loose box or barrel could break, damaging the contents and other cargo as well. Experienced long-shoremen knew which items to push into the irregular spaces along the outside walls and which to weave into interior bulkheads, inter mingling cartons and sacks and lumber into temporary walls to keep the cargo wedged in place while still having it available for discharge when the ship reached port. Mistakes could be fatal. If a load shifted in an ocean swell, the ship could capsize.4

  At journey’s end, loading for the next voyage could not begin until every bit of incoming cargo had been removed. Cargo in the hold was too tightly packed to be sorted, so longshoremen often piled things on the dock and then picked through them, checking labels and tags to figure out what should be moved to the transit shed and what was being picked up on the spot. If the ship was arriving from abroad, customs inspectors walked the pier prying open crates to assess duties. Buyers’ representatives came onto the dock to make sure their orders had arrived in good shape, and meat and produce dealers sent agents around to sample the new merchandise. The longshore workforce included a small army of carpenters and coopers, whose job was to repair broken crates and barrels once these various inspectors were done. At that point, noisy diesel trucks might back onto the dock to pick up their loads, while forklifts would move other cargo off to the transit sheds. Moving an incoming shipload of mixed cargo from ship to transit shed and then taking on an outbound load could keep a vessel tied up at the dock for a week or more.5

  These waterfront realities meant that shipping was a highly labor intensive industry in the postwar era. Depression and war had sharply curtailed the construction of privately built merchant vessels since the 1920s, so ship operators had little capital invested in the business. In the United States, total private outlays for ships and barges from 1930 through 1951 amounted to only $2.5 billion, which was less than shipowners had invested during the decade of the 1920s. Ship lines could buy surplus Liberty Ships, Victory Ships, and tankers for as little as $300,000 apiece, so the carrying cost of ships that were sitting in port rather than earning revenue was not a major expense. Outlays for shoreside facilities were negligible. The big cost item was the wages of longshore gangs, which could eat up half the total expense of an ocean voyage. Add in the tonnage fees paid to pier owners and “60 to 75 percent of the cost of transporting cargo by sea is accounted for by what takes place while the ship is at the dock and not by steaming time,” two analysts concluded in 1959. There was little sense investing in fancier docks or bigger vessels when the need to handle cargo by hand made it hard to cut turnaround times and use docks and ships more efficiently.6

  One fact above all had traditionally defined life along the waterfront: employment was highly irregular. One day, the urgent need to unload perishable cargo could create jobs for all comers. The next day, there might be no work at all. A port needed a big labor supply to handle the peaks, but on an average day the demand for workers was much smaller. Longshoremen, truckers, and warehouse workers were caught up in a world of contingent labor that shaped the communities built around the docks.7

  Almost everywhere, longshoremen had been forced to compete for work each morning in an age-old ritual. In America, it was known as shape-up. The Australians called it the pick-up. The British had a more descriptive name: the scramble. In most places, the process involved begging, flattery, and kickbacks to get a day’s work. In 1930s Edinburgh, “[t]he foremen got up on the platform about five tae eight in the mornin’ and it wis jus a mad scramble for a damned job,” remembered Scottish longshoreman George Baxter. The same had been true in Portland, Oregon: “They would hire their gangs and maybe you would be on that dock at seven o’clock Tuesday morning. And maybe that ship would get in at nine o’clock Tuesday night. But you didn’t dare leave. You were hired, but you weren’t getting paid.” In Marseilles, the workday in 1947 began at 6:30 in Place de la Juliette, where workers milled on the sidewalks in the winter darkness until a foreman made a sign to the workers he wanted; the chosen could proceed to a nearby cafe to await the start of work, while the others went looking for another foreman. In San Francisco, men shaped on the sidewalk near the Ferry Building. In Liverpool, they congregated beneath the concrete structure of the “dockers’ umbrella,” more formally known as the Liverpool Overhead Railway, and waited for a foreman to come and tap them on the shoulder.8

  The shape-up was more than just a ritual. It was an invitation to corruption. On the Waterfront was a dramatization, but payments to pier foremen were often the price of getting work. Newark long-shoreman Morris Mullman testified that he could no longer get hired after declining to contribute to a union official’s “vacation fund” in 1953. In New Orleans, a weekly payoff of two or three dollars was the norm to secure work the following week. Compulsory bets were another means of extracting money from the men; workers who failed to bet might find it difficult to get selected for work. In many ports, foremen commonly had a side business in moneylending. Liverpool dock foremen specializing in forced lending were called “gombeen men,” a term derived from “gaimbin,” an Irish word meaning usury. By taking a loan to be repaid with a threepenny premium on every shilling—25 percent interest for just a brief period of borrowing—a docker could be assured of being hired, because he knew that the gombeen man would take repayment from his wages.9

  Pressure from labor unions and governments gradually eliminated some of the worst excesses of the shape-up. On the U.S. Pacific coast, employers lost control of the hiring process after a bitter strike in 1934; thereafter, the order of hiring was determined by the public drawing of longshoremen’s badge numbers each morning in the shelter of a union-controlled hiring hall. The Australian Stevedoring Board took over longshore work assignments after World War II, and the creation of Britain’s National Dock Labour Board in 1947 did away with the scramble. In Rotterdam, violent strikes over working conditions in 1945 and 1946 persuaded employers that they were better off with full-time staff than with occasional labor; by 1952, more than half the port’s longshoremen worked regularly for a single company. New Zealand and France started government agencies to regulate longshore hiring. The Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, created by the states of New York and New Jersey to fight corrupti
on on the docks, took charge of hiring in the Port of New York in 1953.10

  These reforms led to a major change in the nature of waterfront employment. Although the longshore labor force was vast in the years after World War II—more than 51,000 men worked as dockers in New York in 1951, and there were 50,000 registered dockers in London—very few of these men had full-time jobs. With the end of the shape-up, governments and unions sought to raise longshoremen’s incomes by restricting the supply of labor, especially “casual labor,” the men who shaped only when their off-dock work fell through. New rules limited or blocked entry into the dockworker profession. Authorized longshoremen were required to obtain registration books, and ship lines and stevedore companies were barred from hiring anyone other than a registered longshoreman assigned by the hiring hall. The men who registered were assigned hiring categories based on their seniority. Hiring began with men in the highest category—the “A” men in New York, the professionnels in Marseilles—being selected in random order, and less senior workers could not get on until all higher-category men who wanted to work on a given day had been offered jobs. The expectation was that those who did not work frequently would find other careers, leaving a cadre of better-paid workers with fairly regular incomes.11

  Thanks to the new hiring halls, longshoremen no longer needed to endure the daily humiliation of literally fighting for a job. But their incomes remained most uncertain, because the demand for their services varied hugely. In the most extreme case, Liverpool, stevedoring firms needed twice as many workers on busy days as on quiet ones. In London, where dockworkers did not win a pension scheme until 1960, men over the age of seventy commonly showed up in hopes of winning a light assignment. Even where government schemes provided payments to dockers who were unable to find work, the payments were far lower than regular wages, and many dockers were ineligible. Of the non-Communist world’s major ports, only in Rotterdam and in Hamburg, where semicasual workers were guaranteed income equal to five shifts per week in 1948, could most dockers look forward to earning steady incomes.12

  The peculiarities of dockworker life had long since given rise to a distinct waterfront culture. Longshoremen rarely worked for a single employer for long; their loyalty was to their colleagues, not to “the company.” Many believed that no one knew or cared how well they did their work. Their labor was arduous and often dangerous in ways that outsiders could not appreciate, contributing to an unusual esprit de corps. Lack of control over their own time interfered with dockers’ involvement in off-the-job activities scheduled around workers with regular shifts. “A longshoreman’s wife seldom knows when her husband will be working, and owing to the uncertain length of the workshift, she is seldom certain when he will be home for supper,” wrote Oregon longshoreman William Pilcher. And, of course, income was highly irregular. Most dockers earned hourly wages above the local average for manual labor—when they worked. Frequent episodes of part-day work or unemployment could lead to days or weeks with little income. On the other hand, many dockers cherished the fact that their work was inherently casual. If a longshoreman chose not to work on any particular day, if he decided to go fishing rather than shaping, he was entirely within his rights.13

  Thanks to these particularities, one sociologist observed, “More than in any other industry in a big city, it appears that waterfront jobs belong to particular working class communities.” Longshoremen often spent their entire lives near the waterfront. In Manchester, England, 54 percent of the dockworkers hired on in the years after World War II lived within one mile of the docks; although the houses were small and dilapidated and neighborhood amenities were few, sociologists found that “few of the dock workers living there want to move away.” In Fremantle, Western Australia, half the dockworkers in the 1950s lived within two miles of the docks. In South Brooklyn, a heavily Italian neighborhood adjoining the Brooklyn docks, one in five workers in 1960 was either a trucker or a longshoreman.14

  As often as not, dockworkers had fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins on the docks as well, and they frequently lived nearby. Strangers, including men of different ethnic groups, were unwelcome. In London and Liverpool, the Irish ruled the docks, and non-white immigrants from the West Indies or Africa had no chance of finding employment. In the American South, where about three-quarters of all longshoremen were black, white and black dockworkers belonged to separate union locals and often worked separate ships; the main exception, an unusual alliance in New Orleans that had an equal number of black and white longshoremen working every hatch of every ship, had collapsed under intense employer pressure in 1923. In Boston, the Irish-controlled Longshoremen’s Union made no effort to sign up blacks even after many were hired as strike breakers in 1929. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) in New York had locals that were identifiably Irish, Italian, and black in practice, if not by rule, and Baltimore had separate locals for black longshoremen and whites. Although the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) in the West barred discrimination on the basis of race, its locals in Portland and Los Angeles were almost lily-white into the early 1960s; the Portland local even called off its efforts to represent a group of grain handlers when it was discovered that some of them were black.15

  Even where race and ethnicity were not major issues, longshore unions openly discriminated against outsiders in order to be able to offer jobs to members’ kin. The work was strenuous and uncomfortable, but it paid better than anything else readily available to a blue-collar worker who had not finished high school. In dockworker families, taking a sixteen-year-old son to shape-up and calling in a favor to get him hired on was a rite of passage. Among Portland longshoremen, the most common paternal occupation was longshoreman. In Antwerp, 58 percent of dockworkers were the sons of dock-workers. The ratio in Manchester was three-quarters, and many of the rest had entered the docks with the help of their in-laws after marrying a dockworker’s daughter. In Edinburgh in the mid-1950s, recalled longshoreman Eddie Trotter, “There wis nobody at all, other than a son, grandson, or a nephew or a brother o’ a docker got a job as a docker.” British prime minister Harold Macmillan, confronted with yet another strike threat, opined in 1962, “[T]he dockers are such difficult people, just the fathers and the sons, the uncles and nephews. So like the House of Lords, hereditary and no intelligence required.”16

  Harsh working conditions, economic uncertainty, and the insularity of docker life gave rise to unique mores. Dockworkers saw themselves as tough, independent men doing a very tough job. William Pilcher, studying longshoremen while working as one, found that his colleagues cherished and cultivated reputations as drinkers and brawlers. “They like to see themselves as rough-and-ready individuals, and that is the image that they present to outsiders and to one another,” Pilcher observed. That self-image was also the public’s image. A British survey published in 1950 placed dockers twenty-ninth among thirty professions in status, above only road-sweepers, at a time when dockers earned more than the average national wage. That judgment was the same among both men and women and among people of all social classes. Being a longshoreman meant belonging to a global fraternity of men with a common outlook on life and a common sense of exclusion from the mainstream.17

  Labor militancy was a natural outgrowth of the dockworkers’ situation. Longshoremen around the world fully understood that their well-being depended on collective action, because otherwise the large supply of men desperate to do manual labor would force wages to near-starvation levels. Their employers, in most cases, were not ship lines and terminal operators with assets and reputations to protect, but contractors hired to service a particular dock or a particular ship. This system allowed shipowners to evade responsibility for working conditions by claiming that not they but their contractors were in charge of dock labor. The lack of central authority on the management side was frequently mirrored on the union side. With no routine methods of resolving employment disputes, and with competing unions trying to prove their
aggressiveness but often unable to impose settlements on their own members, strikes were frequent. A single grievance could bring an entire port to a standstill. An eleven-nation study found that dockworkers, along with miners and seafarers, lost more workdays to labor disputes than any other professions. In Britain alone, dock strikes resulted in the loss of nearly 1 million man-days of labor from 1948 through 1951 and another 1.3 million in 1954. Dockworkers proudly represented the leading edge of labor radicalism.18

  Solidarity was strengthened by the lessons of history. Longshore unions’ power had waxed and waned in industrialized countries since the middle of the nineteenth century, and periods of union weakness inevitably brought heavier workloads and lower wages. After defeating a tumultuous strike in 1928, Australian dock operators slashed weekend pay and began hiring for half-day shifts, eliminating the single shift that had been a key union achievement. Across the United States, where the right to collective bargaining was not secured in law, shipping and stevedoring companies set out to break dock unions in the years after World War I and largely succeeded. Longshore wages in New Orleans fell from eighty cents an hour to forty cents after employers defeated the unions in 1923. West Coast employers rousted longshore unions in every port from Seattle to San Diego between 1919 and 1924 and then imposed lower wages and higher workloads. Demands for double shifts were common, and some ports tried to speed up loading by putting workers on piecework rather than hourly pay. After employers crushed the unions in Marseilles in 1950, “[i]t was a job with no rules,” remembered French docker Alfred Pacini. Nothing speaks more eloquently to the traditional status of longshoremen than Edinburgh dockers’ recollection of the greatest improvement after creation of the National Dock Labor Board in 1947: construction of an “amenity block” with individual lockers and showers, neither of which private employers had ever seen fit to provide.19