The Box - Marc Levinson [16]
These reforms led to a major change in the nature of waterfront employment. Although the longshore labor force was vast in the years after World War II—more than 51,000 men worked as dockers in New York in 1951, and there were 50,000 registered dockers in London—very few of these men had full-time jobs. With the end of the shape-up, governments and unions sought to raise longshoremen’s incomes by restricting the supply of labor, especially “casual labor,” the men who shaped only when their off-dock work fell through. New rules limited or blocked entry into the dockworker profession. Authorized longshoremen were required to obtain registration books, and ship lines and stevedore companies were barred from hiring anyone other than a registered longshoreman assigned by the hiring hall. The men who registered were assigned hiring categories based on their seniority. Hiring began with men in the highest category—the “A” men in New York, the professionnels in Marseilles—being selected in random order, and less senior workers could not get on until all higher-category men who wanted to work on a given day had been offered jobs. The expectation was that those who did not work frequently would find other careers, leaving a cadre of better-paid workers with fairly regular incomes.11
Thanks to the new hiring halls, longshoremen no longer needed to endure the daily humiliation of literally fighting for a job. But their incomes remained most uncertain, because the demand for their services varied hugely. In the most extreme case, Liverpool, stevedoring firms needed twice as many workers on busy days as on quiet ones. In London, where dockworkers did not win a pension scheme until 1960, men over the age of seventy commonly showed up in hopes of winning a light assignment. Even where government schemes provided payments to dockers who were unable to find work, the payments were far lower than regular wages, and many dockers were ineligible. Of the non-Communist world’s major ports, only in Rotterdam and in Hamburg, where semicasual workers were guaranteed income equal to five shifts per week in 1948, could most dockers look forward to earning steady incomes.12
The peculiarities of dockworker life had long since given rise to a distinct waterfront culture. Longshoremen rarely worked for a single employer for long; their loyalty was to their colleagues, not to “the company.” Many believed that no one knew or cared how well they did their work. Their labor was arduous and often dangerous in ways that outsiders could not appreciate, contributing to an unusual esprit de corps. Lack of control over their own time interfered with dockers’ involvement in off-the-job activities scheduled around workers with regular shifts. “A longshoreman’s wife seldom knows when her husband will be working, and owing to the uncertain length of the workshift, she is seldom certain when he will be home for supper,” wrote Oregon longshoreman William Pilcher. And, of course, income was highly irregular. Most dockers earned hourly wages above the local average for manual labor—when they worked. Frequent episodes of part-day work or unemployment could lead to days or weeks with little income. On the other hand, many dockers cherished the fact that their work was inherently casual. If a longshoreman chose not to work on any particular day, if he decided to go fishing rather than shaping, he was entirely within his rights.13
Thanks to these particularities, one sociologist observed, “More than in any other industry in a big city, it appears that waterfront jobs belong to particular working class communities.” Longshoremen often spent their entire lives