The Box - Marc Levinson [157]
16. On Portland, see Pilcher, The Portland Longshoremen, p. 17; on Antwerp, Helle, “Der Hafenarbeiter,” p. 273; for Edinburgh, see interviews with dockers Eddie Trotter and Tom Ferguson in McDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers, pp. 132 and 177; for Manchester, see Simey, The Dock Worker, p. 48. Macmillan quotation appears in Wilson, Dockers, p. 160.
17. On the docker culture, see Pilcher, The Portland Longshoremen, pp. 12 and 25–26; Wilson, Dockers, p. 53; and Miller, “The Dockworker Subculture,” passim. Rankings are reported in John Hall and D. Caradog Jones, “Social Grading of Occupations,” British Journal of Sociology 1 (1950): 31–55.
18. Wilson, Dockers, pp. 101–102; Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel, “The Interindustry Propensity to Strike—an International Comparison,” in Industrial Conflict, ed. Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dublin, and Arthur M. Ross (New York, 1954), p. 191; Miller, “The Dockworker Subculture,” p. 310. The most notable exception to labor militancy was in New York, where, as Nelson shows, a combination of corrupt union leadership and appeals to Irish Catholic solidarity against other ethnic groups undermined labor radicalism and allowed the port to operate without a strike between 1916 and 1945; see Nelson, Divided We Stand, pp. 64–71.
19. Rupert Lockwood, Ship to Shore: A History of Melbourne’s Waterfront and Its Union Struggles (Sydney, 1990), pp. 223–225; Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans, p. 254; David F. Selvin, A Terrible Anger (Detroit, 1996), pp. 41 and 48–52; Pacini and Pons, Docker à Marseille, pp. 46 and 174; interview with former longshoreman Tommy Morton in McDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers, p. 112.
20. Thievery as a response to reductions in pay is discussed in Selvin, A Terrible Anger, p. 54. The docker joke is one of several in Wilson, Dockers, p. 53. Theft is discussed, among many other places, in the interview with longshoreman Tommy Morton in McDougall, Voices of Leith Dockers, p. 115; in Pilcher, The Portland Longshoremen, p. 100; and in Andrew Gibson interview in COHP.
21. The Welt had originated as a way to give longshoremen a break when they were working in refrigerated holds, but it spread to general cargo in Liverpool and in Glasgow, where it was known as “spelling.” See Wilson, Dockers, pp. 215 and 221. For productivity, see Miller, “The Dock-worker Subculture,” p. 311; MacMillan and Westfall, “Competitive General Cargo Ships,” p. 842; Wilson, Dockers, p. 308; and William Finlay, Work on the Waterfront: Worker Power and Technological Change in a West Coast Port (Philadelphia, 1988), p. 53.
22. See the two interesting excerpts of articles on containers from 1920 and 1921 in “Uniform Containerization of Freight: Early Steps in the Evolution of an Idea,” Business History Review 43, no. 1 (1969): 84.
23. For early efforts to promote containers in America, see G. C. Woodruff, “The Container Car as the Solution of the Less Than Carload Lot Problem,” speech to Associated Industries of Massachusetts, October 23, 1929, and “Freight Container Service,” speech to Traffic Club of New York, March 25, 1930. A prescient summary of the possibilities of containerization, including the potential economic benefits to the public, is in Robert C. King, George M. Adams, and G. LLoyd Wilson, “The