The Box - Marc Levinson [155]
17. The closest approximation to a general history of the container is Theodore O. Wallin, “The Development, Economics, and Impact of Technological Change in Transportation: The Case of Containerization” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1974).
Chapter 2
Gridlock on the Docks
1. Dramatic photos of cargo-handling operations on the West Coast, which were similar to those on the New York docks, can be found in Otto Hagel and Louis Goldblatt, Men and Machines: A Story about Longshoring on the West Coast Waterfront (San Francisco, 1963). Description of coffee handling is from Debra Bernhardt interview with Brooklyn longshoreman Peter Bell, August 29, 1981, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Project, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University, Tape 10A. See also recollection of former longshoreman Jock McDougal in Ian McDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 28; of former San Francisco longshoreman Bill Ward in the ILWU oral history collection, viewed July 5, 2004, at http://www.ilwu.org/history/oral-histories/bill-ward.cfm?renderforprint=1. Grace Line anecdote from interview with Andrew Gibson, Box AC NMAH 639, COHP.
2. Alfred Pacini and Dominique Pons, Docker à Marseille (Paris, 1996), p. 174; T. S. Simey, ed., The Dock Worker: An Analysis of Conditions of Employment in the Port of Manchester (Liverpool, 1956), p. 199; New York Shipping Association, “Annual Accident Report Port of Greater New York and Vicinity,” January 15, 1951, in Jensen Papers, Collection 4067, Box 13, Folder “Accidents-Longshore Ind.”
3. Charles R. Cushing, “The Development of Cargo Ships in the United States and Canada in the Last Fifty Years” (manuscript, January 8, 1992); Peter Elphick, Liberty: The Ships That Won the War (London, 2001), p. 403.
4. Ward interview, ILWU; interview with former longshoreman George Baxter in McDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers, p. 44.
5. See the colorful descriptions of unloading in Pacini and Pons, Docker à Marseille, p. 137.
6. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Estimates of Non-Residential Fixed Assets, Detailed Industry by Detailed Cost,” available at http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/faweb/Details/Index.html; Andrew Gibson interview; Paul Richardson interview, July 1, 1997, COHP, Box ACNMAH 639. Cost estimate of merchant ships appears in testimony of Geoffrey V. Azoy, Chemical Bank, in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Hearings on HR 8637, To Facilitate Private Financing of New Ship Construction, April 27, 1954, p. 54. MacMillan and Westfall estimated that cargo handling and port expenses accounted for 51.8 percent of the total cost of a short voyage on a C2 freighter in 1958 and 35.9 percent of the total cost of a long voyage. “Competitive General Cargo Ships,” p. 837.
7. For examinations of dockworkers’ conditions in many countries, see Sam Davies et al., eds., Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790–1970 (Aldershot, UK, 2000).
8. U.S. Bureau of the Census and Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, County Business Patterns, First Quarter, 1951 (Washington, DC, 1953), p. 56; George Baxter interview in McDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers, p. 44; unnamed longshoreman quoted in William W. Pilcher, The Portland Longshoremen: A Dispersed Urban Community (New York, 1972), p. 41); Pacini and Pons, Docker à Marseille, p. 46; Paul T. Hartman, Collective Bargaining and Productivity (Berkeley, 1969), p. 26; David F. Wilson, Dockers: The Impact of Industrial Change (London, 1972), p. 23.
9. Many of the problems on the docks were eloquently discussed in the 1951 report of a New York State Board of Inquiry into waterfront conditions; for a summary, see “Employment Conditions in the Longshore Industry,” New York State Department of Labor