The Box - Marc Levinson [173]
47. Goldblatt, “Working Class Leader,” p. 860. Herod, Labor Geographies, offers a sophisticated discussion of these disputes revolving around the nature and location of longshore work. Concern about jobs lost to barge carriers, known as LASH (lighter aboard ship) vessels, appears in Longshore News, December 1969, p. 3. Critics of the ILWU and ILA agreements have made much of the routinization and “de-skilling” of longshore work due to containerization. See, for example, Herb Mills, “The Men along the Shore,” California Living, September 1980. Containerization undoubtedly eliminated the need for some skills but greatly increased the need for others. Sea-Land, as one example, employed almost twice as many mechanics at Port Elizabeth in 1980 as were employed in the entire Port of New York two decades earlier. David J. Tolan, interview by Debra Bernhardt, August 1, 1980, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, Tape 123. See also Finlay, Work on the Waterfront, pp. 20, 121.
48. Bell interview; Finlay, Work on the Waterfront, pp. 174–176; Roger, “A Liberal Journalist,” p. 569. Stanley Aronowitz, From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America’s Future (Boston, 1998), p. 31, blames the ILWU and the ILA for creating a situation in which longshoremen’s sons “are obliged to seek work in low-wage, nonunion retail and service jobs which typically pay half of what factory and transportation jobs pay,” under the rather romantic assumption that greater union resistance would have kept the docks as they were.
Chapter 7
Setting the Standard
Many of the source materials for chapter 7 were obtained from private sources and may not be available in public archives.
1. European container census of 1955 reported in Containers 7, no. 13 (1955): 9; “Grace Initiates Seatainer Service,” Marine Engineering/Log (February 1960), p. 56. Marine Steel advertisement is in International Cargo Handling Coordination Association, “Containerization Symposium Proceedings, New York City June 15, 1955,” p. 3. Figures on the U.S. container fleet are from a Reynolds Metals Co. study cited in John G. Shott, Progress in Piggyback and Containerization (Washington, DC, 1961), p. 11.
2. Douglas J. Puffert, “The Standardization of Track Gauge on North American Railways, 1830–1890,” Journal of Economic History 60, no. 4 (2000): 933–960, and “Path Dependence in Spatial Networks: The Standardization of Railway Track Gauge,” Explorations in Economic History 39 (2002): 282–314.
3. Puffert, “Path Dependence,” p. 286; A. T. Kearney & Co., “An Evaluation of the 35’ Container Size as a Major Factor in Sea-Land’s Growth,” typescript, 1967; Weldon, “Cargo Containerization”; “Grace Initiates Seatainer Service,” Marine Engineering/Log (February 1960), p. 56.
4. On “lock-in,” see W. Brian Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor, 1994), chap. 2. There is an extensive literature exploring the economic costs of technological incompatibilities; see especially Joseph Farrell and Garth Saloner, “Installed Base and Compatibility: Innovation, Product Preannouncements, and Predation,” American Economic Review 76, no. 5 (1986): 940–955; Michael L. Katz and Carl Shapiro, “Systems Competition and Network Effects,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 2 (1994): 93–115; and S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, “Network Externality: An Uncommon Tragedy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 2 (1994): 133–150.
5. Minutes of November 18, 1958, meeting of Committee on Standardization of Van Container Dimensions (hereafter Marad Dimensions Committee).
6. Minutes of November 19, 1958, meeting of Committee on Construction and Fittings (hereafter Marad Construction Committee); author’s telephone interview with Vincent Grey, May 1, 2005.
7. Minutes of MH-5 Van Container Subcommittee, February 25, 1959.
8. Marad Dimensions Committee, December 9, 1958; Minutes of MH-5 Van Container Subcommittee,