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By Root 915 0

pallets often held stacks of loose cartons or bags. When the draft was ready, the longshoremen on the dock would slip cables beneath the sling board and tie the ends together. On the ship’s deck, the winch driver, or “deck man,” waited for his signal. When it came, he positioned the hook of the shipboard crane over the sling. The dockside men placed the cables on the hook, and the winch hoisted the draft from the dock, maneuvered it over an open hatch, and lowered it into the hold. The hook was released quickly and lifted out to grab another load, lest the foreman complain that “the hook is hanging.” Meanwhile, in the dimness of the ship’s interior, another gang of longshoremen removed each item from the sling board and found a secure place to stow it, maneuvering it into position with a four-wheeled cart, a forklift, or brute force. Every longshoreman carried a steel hook with a wooden handle, designed to grab a recalcitrant piece of cargo and jerk it into place under power of nothing but human muscle.

Unloading could be just as difficult. An arriving ship might be carrying 100-kilo bags of sugar or 20-pound cheeses nestled next to 2-ton steel coils. Simply moving one without damaging the other was hard enough. A winch could lift the coiled steel out of the hold, but the sugar and cheese needed men to lift them. Unloading bananas required the longshoremen to walk down a gangplank carrying 80-pound stems of hard fruit on their shoulders. Moving coffee meant carrying fifteen 60-kilo bags to a wooden pallet placed in the hold, letting a winch lift the pallet to the dock, and then removing each bag from the pallet and stacking it atop a massive pile. The work could be brutally physical. In Edinburgh, unloading a hold full of bagged cement meant digging through a thirty-foot-high pile of dusty bags, tightly packed together, and lifting them into a sling, one by one. Copper came from Peru to New York in the form of bars too big for a man to handle. Longshoremen had to move these enormous hunks of metal across the dock, from the incoming ship to a lighter, or barge, which would transport them to a plant in New Jersey. “Because they had to bend over to do that, you’d see these fellows going home at the end of the day kind of like orangutans,” a former pier superintendent remembered. “I mean, they were just kind of all bent, and they’d eventually straighten up for the next day.”1

Automation had arrived during World War II, but in a very limited way. Forklifts, used in industry since the 1920s, were widely used by the 1950s to move pallets from the warehouse to the side of the ship, and some ports installed conveyors to unload bags of coffee and potatoes. Even with machinery at hand, though, muscle was often the ultimate solution. Longshoremen had to be prepared to handle small cartons of delicate tropical fruits one day, tons of filthy carbon black the next. They labored sometimes in daylight, sometimes at night, in all weather conditions. Sweltering holds, icy docks, and rain-slicked gangways were part of the job. The risk of tripping over a load of pipe or being knocked down by a draft on the hook was ever present. In Marseilles, forty-seven dockworkers were killed on the job between 1947 and 1957, while in Manchester, where dockers serviced oceangoing vessels that ascended a canal from the Irish Sea, one out of two longshoremen suffered an injury in 1950, and one out of six landed in the hospital. New York, with a lesser injury rate, reported 2,208 serious accidents in 1950. Government safety rules and inspections were almost nonexistent. Outsiders may have found romance and working-class solidarity in dock labor, but for the men on the docks it was an unpleasant and often dangerous job, with an injury rate three times that of construction work and eight times that in manufacturing.2

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