The Box - Marc Levinson [15]
One fact above all had traditionally defined life along the waterfront: employment was highly irregular. One day, the urgent need to unload perishable cargo could create jobs for all comers. The next day, there might be no work at all. A port needed a big labor supply to handle the peaks, but on an average day the demand for workers was much smaller. Longshoremen, truckers, and warehouse workers were caught up in a world of contingent labor that shaped the communities built around the docks.7
Almost everywhere, longshoremen had been forced to compete for work each morning in an age-old ritual. In America, it was known as shape-up. The Australians called it the pick-up. The British had a more descriptive name: the scramble. In most places, the process involved begging, flattery, and kickbacks to get a day’s work. In 1930s Edinburgh, “[t]he foremen got up on the platform about five tae eight in the mornin’ and it wis jus a mad scramble for a damned job,” remembered Scottish longshoreman George Baxter. The same had been true in Portland, Oregon: “They would hire their gangs and maybe you would be on that dock at seven o’clock Tuesday morning. And maybe that ship would get in at nine o’clock Tuesday night. But you didn’t dare leave. You were hired, but you weren’t getting paid.” In Marseilles, the workday in 1947 began at 6:30 in Place de la Juliette, where workers milled on the sidewalks in the winter darkness until a foreman made a sign to the workers he wanted; the chosen could proceed to a nearby cafe to await the start of work, while the others went looking for another foreman. In San Francisco, men shaped on the sidewalk near the Ferry Building. In Liverpool, they congregated beneath the concrete structure of the “dockers’ umbrella,” more formally known as the Liverpool Overhead Railway, and waited for a foreman to come and tap them on the shoulder.8
The shape-up was more than just a ritual. It was an invitation to corruption. On the Waterfront was a dramatization, but payments to pier foremen were often the price of getting work. Newark long-shoreman Morris Mullman testified that he could no longer get hired after declining to contribute to a union official’s “vacation fund” in 1953. In New Orleans, a weekly payoff of two or three dollars was the norm to secure work the following week. Compulsory bets were another means of extracting money from the men; workers who failed to bet might find it difficult to get selected for work. In many ports, foremen commonly had a side business in moneylending. Liverpool dock foremen specializing in forced lending were called “gombeen men,” a term derived from “gaimbin,” an Irish word meaning usury. By taking a loan to be repaid with a threepenny premium on every shilling—25 percent interest for just a brief period of borrowing—a docker could be assured of being hired, because he knew that the gombeen man would take repayment from his wages.9
Pressure from labor unions and governments gradually eliminated some of the worst excesses of the shape-up. On the U.S. Pacific coast, employers lost control of the hiring process after a bitter strike in 1934; thereafter, the order of hiring was determined by the public drawing of longshoremen’s badge numbers each morning in the shelter of a union-controlled hiring hall. The Australian Stevedoring Board took over longshore work assignments after World War II, and the creation of Britain’s National Dock Labour Board in 1947 did away with the scramble. In Rotterdam, violent strikes over working conditions in 1945 and 1946 persuaded employers that