The Box - Marc Levinson [59]
It was not. Negotiations over container use resumed in January 1959 but got nowhere. The issue festered until August, the start of bargaining on new contracts for all East Coast and Gulf Coast ports. At the most important talks, covering New York Harbor, the ILA demanded that ship lines “spread the fruits of automation.” It offered to eliminate one or two longshoremen from each gang. In return, it sought a six-hour workday and a requirement that every container, whatever its origin, be “stripped and stuffed”—that is, emptied and then reloaded—by ILA members on the pier. Stripping and stuffing, of course, were entirely make-work, and would have eliminated any cost savings from containerization. A few days later, the New York Shipping Association countered with a general concept: employers would protect the jobs of regular longshoremen in return for unlimited freedom to automate.6
In a conventional labor-management relationship, a management proposal to guarantee jobs in return for the right to automate would have led to intense negotiations. Negotiating with the ILA, however, meant an endless series of distractions. With almost no warning, the union scheduled a membership vote for September 14—two weeks ahead of contract expiration—on whether the ILA should affiliate with the national AFL-CIO labor federation, six years after the old American Federation of Labor had expelled it for corruption. All other business was suspended while union leaders tried to convince members to vote yes. Only after the referendum’s narrow passage did contract negotiations resume, just a few days before the September 30, 1959, expiration date. The talks had a positive tone, and, with details unsettled a few hours before the contract expired, Gleason and New York Shipping Association president Alexander Chopin agreed on a fifteen-day extension. Field protested that the extension violated the ILA’s long-standing credo, “no contract, no work,” and his Manhattan local promptly went on strike. A few hours later, after separate negotiations covering southern ports failed, longshoremen from North Carolina to Texas walked out. Faced with two uprisings, Gleason canceled the contract extension and endorsed a strike—only to run afoul of powerful Brooklyn ILA boss Anthony Anastasia. Anastasia, a volatile Italian immigrant with no love for Gleason and the other Irishmen who dominated the ILA’s leadership, directed his own members to work and accused Gleason of backing the strike only to benefit Field. A court temporarily ended the chaos on October 6 by ordering the ports reopened for at least eighty days.7
The employer side was no more united than the union. Every ship line had its own plans for automation, and the only company that truly understood the container business, Pan-Atlantic, was not at the bargaining table. When serious negotiations resumed at the start of November, the Shipping Association rejected the union’s proposal to strip and stuff all containers at the pier, but agreed to a container tax to compensate longshoremen hurt by containerization. The details proved sticky. The employers offered severance pay for displaced dockers. The union wanted a guarantee of dock-workers’ incomes instead; it dismissed severance pay as impractical because, in an industry where workers were hired by the day, automation was likely to mean less work for everyone rather than total unemployment for some.
The outcome, in December 1959, was a three-year contract stating that New York employers would have the right to automate in return for protecting longshoremen’s incomes. Beyond that broad principle, all details were left to arbitration. “What the shippers did was give us a piece of the pie,” one ILA leader crowed. “Their savings with containers will be tremendous and