The Box - Marc Levinson [114]
The Transport and General Workers Union finally lifted its ban on handling containers at Tilbury after twenty-seven months, in April 1970. No sooner did the port reopen than it shut again, as the union waged a three-week nationwide dock strike to protest the stevedores’ preference for employing permanent, skilled workers to run their expensive equipment rather than hiring day labor. Nationally, dockers won a 7 percent pay raise, but a special agreement in London allowed containerization in return for double pay. Tilbury was able to open for container shipping at long last. But the delay took a toll. By the time it reopened, greater London had lost its place as the maritime center of Europe.33
The new center was Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. A port since the 1400s, Rotterdam had been demolished by German bombing in 1940. The old port had been modest, with two-thirds of the cargo being off-loaded into barges because deepwater ships could not reach the docks. The ruins provided Dutch planners a clean canvas on which to build a modern port starting in the 1950s along the river Maas. Road, rail, and barge connections to Germany helped Rotterdam prosper as the two countries joined in the European Common Market. By 1962, its vast imports pushed Rotterdam ahead of New York as the world’s largest port by tonnage. Rotterdam set aside land for containers early on, and Dutch longshoremen, unlike their British counterparts, posed no objections when containerships began calling in 1966. During two and a half years of union-induced delay in Britain, Rotterdam spent $60 million to build the European Container Terminus, with ten berths and room for more. Traffic that had once fed through London to other British ports was now transshipped at Rotterdam, which was on its way to becoming the largest container center in the world.34
In Liverpool, meanwhile, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board had become a financial disaster, its condition worsened by the diversion of cargo to the containerports. Parliament was forced to approve an emergency bailout in 1971. With Felixstowe now seen as a model, the national government took over the city’s docks. An infusion of government loans and grants paid off redundant dockers and financed completion of the new pier complex at Seaforth, including three terminals for containers. As the Royal Seaforth Docks opened in 1972, ten of Liverpool’s historic piers, some of them two centuries old, were abandoned for good. The great maritime center of the British Empire, the cosmopolitan city whose cotton trade fueled the Industrial Revolution and whose Cunard and White Star steamers dominated the North Atlantic, fell into an economic stupor that would last for three decades.
The container contributed to a fundamental shift in the geography of British ports. In the precontainer era, London and Liverpool had dominated Britain’s international trade, their docks and warehouses filled with goods headed to or from factories located nearby. The two ports each loaded one-quarter of Britain’s exports, with no other port handling more than 5 percent. The container stripped Liverpool of its competitive advantages. Its costs per ton of cargo were too high, and it was on the wrong side of an island that was reorienting its trade toward continental Europe. In 1970, only 8 percent of Britain’s rapidly growing container traffic moved through Liverpool, and the port’s share of all British maritime trade in manufactured goods was falling toward 10 percent. Within five years, the exodus of port-related manufacturing would leave the city’s economy devastated.35
Britain’s accession to the European Economic Community in 1973 reoriented its trade to Europe, favoring London