The Box - Marc Levinson [110]
The Port of New York Authority docks in Newark and Elizabeth were expanding without cease as container shipping became an international business. By 1965, half a dozen ship lines announced plans to launch container services from New Jersey docks to Europe in 1966, and dozens of new ships were on order. The embrace of containerization was not repeated up and down the coast. The obstacles were the same almost everywhere: labor and money.
On the labor front, the New York Shipping Association and the ILA had negotiated smaller gang sizes and a guaranteed annual income for displaced longshoremen in 1964, but union locals at other ports, save Philadelphia, had not. Unlike New York, where the efforts of the Waterfront Commission had eliminated casual dock-workers in the 1950s, most other East and Gulf Coast ports had large numbers of part-time longshoremen well into the 1970s. Boston longshoremen worked an average of one and a half days per week, New Orleans longshoremen two days. If containers were allowed, these part-time jobs were likely to vanish as the industry shifted to a permanent, full-time workforce. The ILA had seen how container shipping had decimated its membership rolls in New York, and it was loath to tolerate it in other ports until income guarantees were in place.18
Interunion disputes were a problem as well. In Boston, the Massachusetts Port Authority spent $1.1 million to build a container crane in 1966 so that Sea-Land ships could call on their way between New York and Europe, but the terminal was kept closed first by a dispute between the ILA and port employers and then by a dispute between the ILA and the Teamsters union. Sea-Land and its competitors soon learned that they could operate more profitably by trucking Europe-bound containers to New York and having their ships bypass Boston, and port traffic never recovered. In New York and other ports, the Teamsters objected to contracts that guaranteed ILA members the right to consolidate partial loads into containers at inland warehouses. The ILA viewed these contracts as essential to preserving its members’ jobs as traditional maritime functions moved away from the waterfront, but the Teamsters viewed them as infringements on their own jurisdiction over the warehouse industry. Contests over which union’s members would do the work persisted until 1970.19
Aside from Baltimore, most ports found the cost of building dedicated container facilities so daunting that they postponed decisions. The city of Philadelphia, short of funds, did nothing toward containerization until worried business leaders pushed for the creation of a port corporation with authority to issue bonds, in 1965. Only after a study predicted that Philadelphia would soon be losing a million tons of freight per year did the new corporation reluctantly invest in a container terminal, which opened in 1970. Miami built ramps for roll on-roll off ships but no specialized wharves for containerships. Gulf Coast ports such as Mobile decided not to invest in containerization because many of the Caribbean islands to which they exported were too small to require large containers. New Orleans, long the largest Gulf port, handled containers over the same wharves used for other types of cargo; its first purpose-built container terminal, located on a canal that subsequently proved too shallow, did not open for business until 1971. Houston, Sea-Land’s original western terminus, invested sooner, and it firmly established itself as the premier containerport on the Gulf.20
The net result of these decisions was that a single port, the Port of New York Authority’s complex at Newark and Elizabeth, dominated container shipping in the East. In 1970, only one other harbor between Maine and Texas, the Hampton Roads of Virginia, could boast even one-ninth the container capacity of the wharves on New York harbor. The emerging economics of container shipping meant that the laggards faced potentially serious consequences. The newly built containerships coming on