The Box - Marc Levinson [17]
As often as not, dockworkers had fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins on the docks as well, and they frequently lived nearby. Strangers, including men of different ethnic groups, were unwelcome. In London and Liverpool, the Irish ruled the docks, and non-white immigrants from the West Indies or Africa had no chance of finding employment. In the American South, where about three-quarters of all longshoremen were black, white and black dockworkers belonged to separate union locals and often worked separate ships; the main exception, an unusual alliance in New Orleans that had an equal number of black and white longshoremen working every hatch of every ship, had collapsed under intense employer pressure in 1923. In Boston, the Irish-controlled Longshoremen’s Union made no effort to sign up blacks even after many were hired as strike breakers in 1929. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) in New York had locals that were identifiably Irish, Italian, and black in practice, if not by rule, and Baltimore had separate locals for black longshoremen and whites. Although the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) in the West barred discrimination on the basis of race, its locals in Portland and Los Angeles were almost lily-white into the early 1960s; the Portland local even called off its efforts to represent a group of grain handlers when it was discovered that some of them were black.15
Even where race and ethnicity were not major issues, longshore unions openly discriminated against outsiders in order to be able to offer jobs to members’ kin. The work was strenuous and uncomfortable, but it paid better than anything else readily available to a blue-collar worker who had not finished high school. In dockworker families, taking a sixteen-year-old son to shape-up and calling in a favor to get him hired on was a rite of passage. Among Portland longshoremen, the most common paternal occupation was longshoreman. In Antwerp, 58 percent of dockworkers were the sons of dock-workers. The ratio in Manchester was three-quarters, and many of the rest had entered the docks with the help of their in-laws after marrying a dockworker’s daughter. In Edinburgh in the mid-1950s, recalled longshoreman Eddie Trotter, “There wis nobody at all, other than a son, grandson, or a nephew or a brother o’ a docker got a job as a docker.” British prime minister Harold Macmillan, confronted with yet another strike threat, opined in 1962, “[T]he dockers are such difficult people, just the fathers and the sons, the uncles and nephews. So like the House of Lords, hereditary and no intelligence required.”16
Harsh working conditions, economic uncertainty, and the insularity of docker life gave rise to unique mores. Dockworkers saw themselves as tough, independent men doing a very tough job. William Pilcher, studying longshoremen while working as one, found that his colleagues cherished and cultivated reputations as drinkers and brawlers. “They like to see themselves as rough-and-ready individuals, and that is the image that they present to outsiders and to one another,” Pilcher observed. That self-image was also the public’s image. A British survey published in 1950 placed dockers twenty-ninth among thirty professions in status, above only road-sweepers, at a time when dockers earned more than the average national wage. That judgment was the same among both men and women and among people of all social classes. Being a longshoreman meant belonging to a global