The Box - Marc Levinson [19]
The second problem arising from dockworkers’ intense suspicion of employers was resistance to anything that might eliminate jobs. Wherever they secured a foothold, dock unions insisted on contract language to protect against a long history of employer abuses. The number of men needed to work a hatch, the placement of those men in the hold or on the dock, the maximum weight of a sling, the equipment they would use, and countless other details related to manning filled page after page in collective bargaining agreements. Shipping interests in Liverpool tried repeatedly to eliminate a practice known as the welt, under which half of each longshore gang left the docks, often for a nearby pub, while the other half worked; after an hour or two, the absentees would return and those who had been working would take a prolonged break. Ports the world over had seen strikes over employer efforts to alter work practices. In Los Angeles, labor productivity dropped 75 percent between 1928 and 1954 as union and management struggled over mechanization; West Coast ports handled 9 percent less cargo per work-hour in 1954 than in 1952. The Port of New York needed 1.9 man-hours to handle a ton of cargo in 1950, but 2.5 by 1956. In Britain, tonnage per man-year was nearly flat from 1948 to 1952, leaped by one-third thanks to a surge of cargo in 1953, and then sank again under the weight of stringent work rules.21
The solution to the high cost of freight handling was obvious: instead of loading, unloading, shifting, and reloading thousands of loose items, why not put the freight into big boxes and just move the boxes?
The concept of shipping freight in large boxes had been around for decades. The British and French railways tried wooden containers to move household furniture in the late nineteenth century, using cranes to transfer the boxes from rail flatcars to horse carts. At the end of World War I, almost as soon as motorized trucks came into wide civilian use, the Cincinnati Motor Terminals Company hit upon the idea of interchangeable truck bodies that were lifted onto and off of wheels with a crane. Farsighted thinkers were already proposing “a standardized unit container in the form of a demountable closed auto-truck body, which can be readily transferred by cranes between railroad flat cars, auto chassis, warehouse floors and vessels.” The first American railroad to adopt the idea was the New York Central, which around 1920 introduced steel containers that fit side by side, six abreast, on shallow-bottomed railcars with dropdown sides.22
The mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation’s largest transportation company, became a powerful proponent of this new idea. The Pennsylvania’s problem was that many of its customers did not generate a large amount of freight for a single destination. A small factory, for instance, might hold a boxcar on its siding for a week while filling it with goods for many different buyers. The railroad would have to attach this car to a freight train and haul it to its nearest interchange point, where the contents would be removed from the car, sorted into hand trucks, and reloaded into other boxcars headed toward different destinations. The Pennsy’s alternative was a steel container just over nine feet wide, perhaps one-sixth the size of the average boxcar. The shipper might fill one of these containers with freight for Detroit, another for Chicago, another for St. Louis. The containers could be placed on a railcar by forklift, and at the interchange point, a forklift would simply move the containers to the proper connecting trains. Sorting loose freight at the transfer station cost 85 cents per ton, by the railroad’s reckoning; transferring a five-ton container cost only 4 cents per ton, and also