The Box - Marc Levinson [57]
In 1962, the Brooklyn waterfront was still lined with piers crowded with ships, vast transit sheds, and large, multistory factory buildings literally a stone’s throw from the docks. The shift of shipping to New Jersey through the 1960s, combined with the closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966, helped destroy the industrial base of one of the largest manufacturing centers in the country. Long known for having a disproportionately large share of the New York region’s manufacturing, Brooklyn was remarkable for its disproportionately small share of manufacturing activity by 1980. Economic conditions were so bad that Booklynites abandoned the borough in droves. The population fell 14 percent between 1971 and 1980. Inflation-adjusted personal income fell for eight consecutive years. Not until 1986 did Brooklyn workers regain the income level they collectively enjoyed in 1972.43
The container was not the sole cause of the surprising and painful economic changes of the 1960s and 1970s, but it was an important cause. Container technology developed far more quickly and affected transportation industries far more significantly than even its most ardent proponents had imagined. New York was only the first established shipping center whose economy would be transformed in ways that were unimaginable before the container arrived on the scene.
Chapter 6
Union Disunion
The dislike between Teddy Gleason and Harry Bridges was almost visceral. Gleason, a voluble Irish-man born hard by the New York docks, held together the International Longshoremen’s Association, the union representing dockworkers from Maine to Texas, with a combination of personal charm, warm humor, endless patience, and more than occasional tolerance of corruption. Bridges was an Australian-born ascetic, a man whose role in the brutal battles that brought the International Longshoremen’s and Ware-housemen’s Union (ILWU) to power in Pacific ports made him a legend among his members. The two men disagreed about almost everything, including how their unions should respond to the threat that automation posed to longshoremen’s jobs. For a decade beginning in 1956, they struggled with very similar issues in very different ways. Both leaders understood from the outset that automation could put tens of thousands of jobs at risk and transform shoreside labor—their members’ labor—into almost an incidental expense. They ended up finding different ways to win extraordinary benefits for their members—in return for allowing the container to reshape the long-established pattern of life on and around the docks.
It was in New York, where Gleason had run a local ILA union and then become the chief deputy to “Captain” William Bradley, the international president, that automation first arose as a major labor-relations issue. The New York Shipping Association, the group of stevedoring companies and ship lines that negotiated the local contract with the ILA, offered an unusual proposal in 1954. Shippers were starting to send their export cargo to the dock already tied on wooden pallets, intending that the entire pallet be transported as a single unit. Since pallets were easy to move with forklifts on the pier and to stow with forklifts inside the ship, the Shipping Association asked the union to handle them with gangs of only 16 men at each hatch, rather than the normal complement of 21 or 22. The ILA quickly did the math: the companies’ proposal could mean the loss of up to 30 jobs on a vessel with five hatches. The union objected, and the Shipping Association retreated.1
Pan-Atlantic’s venture at Port Newark two years later initially attracted little attention from the union. Port Newark, like all parts of New York harbor, operated under ILA contracts. Gleason knew Malcom McLean—the ILA had organized some McLean Trucking warehouse workers in 1939—and the union agreed to handle Pan-Atlantic’s containers when the Ideal-X first set sail in 1956. Some union