The Box - Marc Levinson [6]
As wage earners, on the other hand, workers have every reason to be ambivalent. In the decades after World War II, wartime devastation created vast demand while low levels of international trade kept competitive forces under control. In this exceptional environment, workers and trade unions in North America, Western Europe, and Japan were able to negotiate nearly continuous improvements in wages and benefits, while government programs provided ever stronger safety nets. The workweek grew shorter, disability pay was made more generous, and retirement at sixty or sixty-two became the norm. The container helped bring an end to that unprecedented advance. Low shipping costs helped make capital even more mobile, increasing the bargaining power of employers against their far less mobile workers. In this highly integrated world economy, the pay of workers in Shenzhen sets limits on wages in South Carolina, and when the French government ordered a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, it discovered that nearly frictionless, nearly costless shipping made it easy for manufacturers to avoid the higher cost by moving abroad.3
A modern containerport is a factory whose scale strains the limits of imagination. At each berth—the world’s biggest ports have dozens—rides a mammoth oceangoing vessel, up to 1,100 feet long and 140 feet across, carrying nothing but metal containers. The deck is crowded with row after row of them, red and blue and green and silver, stacked 15 or 20 abreast and 6 or 7 high. Beneath the deck are yet more containers, stacked 6 or 8 deep in the holds. The structure that houses the crew quarters, topped by the navigation bridge, is toward the stern, barely visible above the stacks of boxes. The crew accommodations are small, but so is the crew. A ship carrying 3,000 40-foot containers, filled with 100,000 tons of shoes and clothes and electronics, may make the three-week transit from Hong Kong around the Cape of Good Hope to Germany with only twenty people on board.4
On the wharf, a row of enormous cranes goes into action almost as soon as the ship ties up. The cranes are huge steel structures, rising 200 feet into the air and weighing more than two million pounds. Their legs stretch 50 feet apart, easily wide enough for several truck lanes or even train tracks to pass beneath. The cranes rest on rails running parallel to the ship’s side, so that they can move forward or aft as required. Each crane extends a boom 115 feet above the dock and long enough to span the width of a ship broader than the Panama Canal.
High up in each crane, an operator controls a trolley able to travel the length of the boom, and from each trolley hangs a spreader, a steel frame designed to lock onto all four top corners of a 40-ton box. As unloading begins, each operator moves his trolley out the boom to a precise location above the ship, lowers the spreader to engage a container, raises the container up toward the trolley, and pulls trolley and container quickly toward the wharf. The trolley stops above a rubber-tired transporter waiting between the crane’s legs, the container is lowered onto the transporter, and the spreader releases its grip. The transporter then moves the container to the adjacent storage yard, while the trolley moves back out over the ship to pick up another box. The process is repeated every two minutes, or even every ninety seconds, each crane moving 30 or 40 boxes an hour from ship to dock. As parts of the ship are cleared of incoming containers, reloading begins, and dockside activity becomes even more frenzied. Each time the crane places an incoming container on one vehicle, it picks up an outbound container from another, simultaneously emptying and filling the ship.
In the yard,