The Box - Marc Levinson [60]
The flood did not come, because nothing had been agreed but generalities. Three arbitrators, including Gleason, a management representative, and a neutral third member, spent months pondering the details, trying to navigate between the ship lines’ concern that a royalty on each container would “become another long-term mortgage on the industry” and the ILA’s worry that the carriers would find ways to avoid paying royalties. Finally, in the autumn of 1960, the arbitrators ruled by a two-to-one vote that employers in the Port of New York could use container-handling equipment without restriction—in return for paying $1.00 per ton for every container moving on a containership, $0.70 per ton for each container on ships designed both for containers and mixed freight, and $0.35 per ton for containers being carried on conventional breakbulk ships. As a sop to the union, the arbitrators dictated that when ship lines or stevedore companies stuffed or unstuffed containers at their own terminals, they would have to employ ILA labor.9
With the 1960 arbitration award, the Port of New York was officially open to any ship line wishing to carry freight in containers. The reality was otherwise. The arbitrators had ordered that the container royalties be paid into a fund, but they had refused to say anything about how the fund should be spent. In addition, the arbitrators had neglected to define the term “container.” Gleason, the union’s representative on the arbitration panel, predicted that these omissions would cause further union-management conflict. He was right.
The ILA’s Pacific coast counterpart, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, took an entirely different tack in addressing waterfront automation.
The ILWU had a long history of difficult and at times violent relations with employers in the Pacific ports. The union, then the Pacific division of the ILA, gained recognition only after a bloody coastwide strike in 1934, and staged 1,399 legal and illegal stoppages over the next fourteen years in order to assert its rights. The net result of this constant conflict was a large body of rules, both written and unwritten, governing port operations in great detail. One formal rule provided that, once assigned to a job at a particular hatch of a particular ship, a worker would do only that specific job until the ship sailed; if loading was complete at one hatch but not at another, an idle worker from the first hatch could not be shifted to help out at the second. An important “hip pocket” rule, codified nowhere but enforced by the gang foreman as required, provided that a trucker delivering palletized cargo to a pier would have to remove each item from the pallet and place it on the dock. Longshoremen would then replace the items on the pallet for lowering into the hold, where other longshoremen would break down the pallet once more and stow each individual item—all at a cost so high that shippers knew not to send pallets to begin with.10
Developing such rules, a top ILWU official admitted later, “took no end of imagination and invention.” The union regarded them as indispensable to preserve jobs and maintain uniform costs among competitors. The stevedoring firms with which the ILWU negotiated were willing to accept the rules to avoid the alternative of endless wildcat strikes. Louis Goldblatt, the union’s longtime secretary-treasurer,