The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
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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.14
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.15
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:
[M]uch of our past effort has gone into a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to retard the wheels of industrial mechanization progress. In many cases, these efforts have only resulted in our eventual acceptance of the new device, accompanied by our loss of jurisdiction over the new work involved…. We believe that it is possible to encourage mechanization in the industry and at the same time establish and re affirm our work jurisdiction, along with practical minimal manning scales, so that the ILWU will have all of the work from the railroad tracks outside the piers into the holds of the ships.16
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.”17
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?”18
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.”19
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 loadin
g 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.20
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.21
Against that background, the employers made a concrete offer in 1959: in return for the elimination of work rules, they would guarantee that all A-men who had been on the roster in 1958 would at least equal their 1958 earnings in future years, and that employment would shrink only as longshoremen quit or retired. The union produced a counteroffer in November. In return for each man-hour saved by more efficient methods of cargo handling, it asked the employers to pay one hour’s average wage into a compensation fund. Trouble was, no one knew how much money might be involved. St. Sure finally grabbed a number out of thin air and offered the union $1 million in compensation for all work that might be lost owing to automation prior to June 1960. Bridges naturally asked for more, making a counteroffer of $1.5 million, and a temporary deal was struck. In return for $1.5 million and a guarantee that no A-men would be laid off, the union agreed that the employers had the right to change methods of work over the coming months. Negotiations on a permanent arrangement would continue.22
Months of serious study and dialogue ensued, involving the ILWU, the Pacific Maritime Association, and a variety of dissident factions within both groups. When formal negotiations reopened on May 17, 1960, St. Sure announced that the employers would not sign another interim agreement on automation; they wanted a complete contract. The union again proposed that employers contribute to a worker compensation fund based on man-hours saved. The ship lines had supported just such a concept in 1959. Now, however, they changed their tune, offering flat annual payments to buy out the old work rules for a fixed price, with no obligation to share future cost savings. Three days later, Bridges accepted the idea in principle. The union threw a figure on the table: $5 million per year over four years, an amount equivalent to about twenty cents each year for each man-hour worked in 1959.23
Dozens of bargaining sessions followed before the landmark Mechanization and Modernization Agreement was finally signed on October 18, 1960. On the management side, small coastal carriers, Japanese steamship lines, and stevedoring companies all demanded exemptions from contributing to the guarantee fund, and St. Sure had to threaten resignation to obtain unanimous support from the Pacific Maritime Association’s executive committee. The political problems on the union side were even worse. The ILWU local in San Francisco had agreed to terms for handling Matson’s new containership, Hawaiian Citizen, but when the vessel called at Los Angeles in August 1960, just as the mechanization talks were reaching a critical stage, ILWU Local 13 refused to work the ship. The Maritime Association promptly shut the entire port, and several ship lines threatened to move next door to Long Beach, where a different union local held sway. The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors responded with a proposed ordinance making port employees civil servants with no right to strike, an idea that was anathema to the ILWU. Bridges was forced to crack down hard on Local 13. Port, union, and Maritime Association officials signed an unusual agreement setting out penalties for men who refused to work as directed. St. Sure and Bridges made a joint appearance before the Board of Supervisors promising to install a full-time arbitrator to deal quickly with any labor disputes in the port. The Los Angeles docks reopened within a couple of weeks, but bad feelings lingered between the ILWU’s local officials and its international leaders.24
Two months later, when the draft Mechanization and Modernization Agreement was presented to the ILWU’s October caucus, delegates knew that it meant the end of an era. “It is the intent of this document that the contract, working and dispatching rules shall not be construed so as to require the hiring of unnecessary men,” read the key clause. The word “container” did not appear, but the language gave management the right to change working methods for all types of cargo so long as this did not result in unsafe conditions or “onerous” workloads; the union could file a grievance if it believed conditions were onerous. The ILWU retained control of cargo sorting on the dock, but containers and pallets arriving at the dock fully loaded would no longer be emptied and repacked by longshoremen.
In return for near-total flexibility, the employers agreed to pay $5 million per year. Part of the money would support retirement: longshoremen with 25 years of service would receive $7,920, or approximately 70 weeks’ base pay, upon retirement at age 65, plus the $100 monthly ILWU pension. Workers aged 62 to 65 would be paid $220 a month until age 65 if they would retire early. The rest of the money guaranteed all A-men average weekly earnings equivalent to 35 hours of work, whether or not their services were needed on the docks. Anyone hired as a longshoreman after the agreement was signed would never be eligible for the guarantee because, as a union spokesman explained, “they will not have given up anything.”25
The caucus demanded numerous changes before sending the draft for a membership vote. More than one-third of the ILWU’s members voted no. Some opponents, such as San Francisco’s famed longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, were outraged on ideological grounds. “This generation has no right to give away, or sell for money, conditions that were handed on to us by a previous generation,” Hoffer stormed. Dockers in Los Angeles, still angry that Bridges had interfered in their local labor dispute and upset about the loss of work unstuffing and restuffing containers, rejected it by nearly two to one. The local in Seattle backed Bridges; so did his home local in San Francisco, where the unusually old workforce—nearly two-thirds of San Francisco longshoremen were 45 or older—liked the retirement provisions. Members in those two cities provided most of the votes to approve the contract.26
The Mechanization and Modernization Agreement brought surprises all around. The initial result, predictably, was a wave of retirements. With incentives encouraging older longshoremen to leave the workforce, the number over age 65 fell from 831 in 1960 to 321 in 1964, and the number between 60 and 65 dropped by one-fifth. Contrary to expectations on both sides, though, income guarantees for active dockers proved unnecessary. Rather than a labor surplus, the docks experienced a labor shortage thanks to an increasing flow of cargo. Large numbers of B-men were admitted as A-men for the first time in years.27
The agreement delivered everything the ship lines had hoped for in terms of productivity. Labor productivity had been flat for nearly two decades prior to 1960. The employers’ new ability to change work methods for noncontainerized cargo drove up tonnage per man-hour 41 percent in five years, and overall productivity, adjusted for changes in the mix of cargo, doubled within eight years. Shippers could send their canned goods, bagged rice, flour, and similar products on pallets without having to pay longshoremen to unpack and repack the pallets.
Iron and steel were handled by two men on the dock rather than four or six, and six cotton bales were now sent for export prepacked on a single pallet weighing 3,000 pounds—too heavy under the old rules, but permissible under the new. Tonnage per man-hour in sugar rose 74 percent between 1960 and 1963, in lumber 53 percent, in rice 130 percent. In the agreement’s third year, West Coast ports used 2.5 million fewer man-hours of labor than the previous contract would have required, a figure equal to 8 percent of all the labor those ports had employed in 1960.28
Contrary to the union’s expectations, these massive productivity gains came from sweat, not automation. “The evidence suggests that the employers, for the most part, devoted their effort to trying to squeeze more physical labor from the workforce, rather than innovating or undertaking new investment,” wrote economist Paul Hartman after a careful analysis of the trends. Sacks grew larger, and sling loads, no longer bound by the former weight limit of 2,100 pounds, increased to as much as 4,000 pounds. The result was much harder physical work for the men in the hold, who had to shove these heavy loads into place. Extremely large sling loads, long prohibited by contract, were soon known on the docks as “Bridges loads.”29
Bizarrely, the parties now switched sides. The union demanded that the employers mechanize faster to eliminate these physical burdens. “We intend to push to make the addition of machines compulsory,” Harry Bridges told management negotiators in 1963. “The days of sweating on these jobs should be gone and that is our objective.” The ship lines were hesitant to spend the money. The ILWU responded by filing grievances against the lack of machinery on docks and in holds. After one of the strangest arbitration proceedings ever to occur in any industry, the employers were ordered in June 1965 to provide longshoremen with more forklifts and winches.30