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leaders made clear their distaste for the container, but the ILA had a host of more pressing concerns: it was in internal turmoil; it faced yet another attempt to oust it as the sole union on New York’s docks; its portwide contract was set to expire on September 30, 1956; and its top bargaining demand, a single contract covering the entire Atlantic and Gulf coasts, was meeting strong management resistance. Members at Port Newark were worried about preserving their system for assigning work, which sought to equalize their earnings. In the grand scheme of things, two small ships carrying a few containers were not a priority at union headquarters on West Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Besides, as an ILA official later told Congress, Pan-Atlantic’s was a new operation that added longshore jobs rather than removing existing jobs. The servicing of Pan-Atlantic’s containerships, along with the work of consolidating small shipments into full containers at Pan-Atlantic’s terminal, was divided between two ILA locals, one black and one white, on the understanding that most of the twenty-one men in each gang were not needed for loading and unloading and would stay out of the way.2

Automation became a serious issue when the ILA negotiated new contracts in the fall of 1956. After observing McLean’s container operation, the New York Shipping Association sought freedom for employers to hire only as many longshoremen as they wanted “for any type of operation not practiced at this time.” An even more ominous issue arose in New Orleans, where the employers wanted to define longshore work as moving cargo from a point of rest on the wharf to the ship—language that would have shut the ILA out of work loading or emptying containers or moving them within the terminal area. Both proposals were eventually dropped, and after a ten-day strike the union achieved much of its main goal, winning a single contract covering wages and pensions from Maine to Virginia. Gleason, the union’s chief negotiator in New York, gave absolutely no ground on the automation-related demands, but the battle lines had been drawn. As a presidential board of inquiry noted dryly after the strike, proposals for smaller gang sizes “were a bone of contention with the union.”3

By 1958, the ILA had seen off competing unions in New York and was free to turn its full attention to automation. The first returns on container shipping were in, and they were alarming. “A containership can be loaded and unloaded in almost one-sixth of the time required for a conventional cargo ship and with about one-third of the labor,” McLean Industries told shareholders after two years of operation. Other ship lines were examining containers, and, unlike Pan-Atlantic, they wanted to move consolidation of small shipments away from the docks to inland sites, where it would be out of the ILA’s jurisdiction. The match was lit by Grace Line, a company specializing in the South America trade. In November 1958, Grace docked its new Santa Rosa on the Hudson. The vessel was designed such that workers could load containers and mixed cargo by rolling them through doors in the side rather than hoisting them through hatches in the deck. Citing the ease of loading, Grace asked to hire only five or six men for each hatch. ILA Local 791 promptly refused to work the ship. When the company held firm, the ILA announced a boycott of all containers, except Pan-Atlantic’s, unless they had been filled by ILA members. Fred Field, head of the council of New York ILA locals, angrily accused the ship lines of “soliciting freight in prepackaged containers.”4

With tensions mounting, the ILA stopped work on November 18 and convened twenty-one thousand longshoremen at Madison Square Garden to hear about the threat of mechanization. Union leaders demanded that employers “share the benefits” and insisted that they would not accept smaller gang sizes. The issue was critical to the union: if Grace Line had its way, far fewer men would be needed on the docks. Intense negotiations led to a temporary compromise in December: the ILA agreed