The Box - Marc Levinson [113]
Tilbury’s opening in 1967 was accompanied by a “voluntary” severance scheme for dockworkers, funded by charges on cargo at major ports. The union soon accused employers of abusing the rules to get rid of workers, and it objected to the new government policy encouraging permanent employment rather than daily hiring on the docks. Reaching back to a tactic tried by the International Longshoremen’s Association in New York a decade earlier, the union imposed a ban on containers at Tilbury from January 1968.29
The Transport and General Workers Union was powerful, but not omnipotent. It had never bothered to sign up members at the tiny port of Felixstowe, located on a North Sea estuary ninety miles northeast of London. Felixstowe, one of the hundreds of towns on Britain’s coasts, had two docks owned by the Felixstowe Railway and Dock Company, a private company controlled by an importer of grain and palm oil. The docks had been destroyed in the storms of 1953, and by 1959 the only activity involved ninety permanent workers who unloaded tropical commodities into a few storage tanks and warehouses. Felixstowe had no general-cargo business to protect, no militant unions, and, because it had never employed casual dock labor, no requirement for ship lines to contribute to the national dockworker severance scheme.
In 1966, while the British government was trying to convince container ship lines to call at Tilbury, Felixstowe’s owners had had the foresight to strike a private deal with Sea-Land Service. They spent £3.5 million pounds ($10 million), a fraction of the government’s outlay at Tilbury, to reinforce a wharf and install a container crane. Sea-Land opened service in July 1967 with a small ship shuttling containers back and forth to Rotterdam, and soon added ships directly from the United States. In 1968, with Tilbury closed by the strike, the hitherto obscure Port of Felixstowe became Britain’s largest container terminal. U.S. Lines finally was able to use Tilbury after reaching a union agreement, but the port remained closed to most other container carriers, including British lines. By 1969, Felixstowe, with two or three North Atlantic sailings each week and several feeder services running across the North Sea to Rotterdam, handled 1.9 million tons of general cargo, every bit of it in containers.30
Tilbury’s prolonged closure hit hard at the two consortia of British carriers that had planned to launch container services there, one across the North Atlantic and the other to Australia. They struck back in the traditional way: by trying to stifle their competitors. Sea-Land’s request to join the conferences that set rates between the United States and Britain was rejected until the company filed an antitrust suit in British courts. When a small U.S. company, Container Marine Lines, offered Scottish distillers a through rate covering shipments between their plants and U.S. ports, including land transportation from Scotland to Felixstowe, the conference objected that a through rate would lead to “regulatory disintegration.” Only the threat that the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission would curb the conference’s right to set rates forced it to accept more competition.31
Felixstowe’s fortune came directly at London’s expense. London’s port had been busy through the mid-1960s. The shift to container shipping boosted average tonnage per man-hour 66 percent in just four years. The abrupt fall in costs at other ports drove the London docks to collapse. As Tilbury opened, the famous East India Dock closed without warning in 1967. As Felixstowe burgeoned, the St. Katherine Docks, adjoining the Tower of London, were shut in 1968. The nearby London Docks followed immediately, and the Surrey Docks, across the river, closed in 1970. Of the 144 wharves that had operated in London at the start