The Box - Marc Levinson [61]
The other reason strict work rules were accepted is that there was little choice. The stevedores’ association had attempted to loosen many of the rules in contract negotiations in 1948. Unwisely, it did so by mounting a personal attack on Harry Bridges. The union president, a political radical from his Australian youth, made no secret of his socialist sympathies, and the employers labeled him a Communist and declared that they would not deal with Communists. By so doing, they merely enhanced his reputation on the docks. The ILWU walked out when the contract expired, and the union’s leadership was so successful in promoting solidarity that members stayed out through a ninety-five-day strike. Finally, the major ship lines brought the conflict to an end by pushing aside the stevedores’ association and their own rabidly anti-Communist counsel and taking charge of negotiations. The union achieved its greatest desire: it was finally able to negotiate face-to-face with the ship operators that ultimately paid for its services, rather than with the financially tenuous middlemen at the stevedoring companies.12
The largest of the Pacific ship lines, Matson, was facing a financial squeeze, and it persuaded the others that it was time for “a new look” in labor-management relations. The companies agreed to leave the work rules alone, in return for a contract clause allowing stevedores to use new devices and methods so long as individual workers did not face speedups. Innovation would no longer automatically trigger a strike. If a gang thought it was being asked to perform dangerous or excessive tasks, a union representative and a supervisor would try to work things out while unloading or loading continued; if no settlement could be reached at the job site, the dispute would move quickly to higher levels and, if needed, to binding arbitration. These provisions created a new openness, with the union frequently bending the rules to permit new equipment and smaller gangs so long as workers received a portion of the savings. Faced with cargo volumes one-quarter smaller than before the war, the ILWU, in the words of two California labor experts, accepted that “[r]adical measures were necessary to halt the decline in maritime commerce.”13
The amount of cargo handled per man-hour through the early 1950s, however, remained dismally low. A congressional investigation of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in 1955 uncovered such informal practices as “four-on, four-off,” a custom that had begun as a brief rest break for half of the eight holdmen in each gang and had expanded to the extent that workers often worked for only half of their shifts. The investigation left the ILWU cornered and friendless. It had long been plagued by allegations that it was a Communist front, and the government had sought repeatedly to deport Bridges, notwithstanding his status as a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, the leftist side of the labor movement, had expelled it for alleged Communist ties in 1951, and after the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955, Bridges was fearful that the Teamsters and other AFL-CIO unions would seek to challenge its jurisdiction over the docks. Even its former parent union, the ILA, wanted nothing to do with the ILWU, despite its own isolation from the rest of the labor movement; when Bridges wrote ILA president William Bradley to offer support during the 1956 East Coast dock strike, Bradley fired back that Bridges’s support was undesired. Bridges, a sophisticated tactician, was painfully aware of his union’s vulnerability to government pressure, and he knew that ending contract abuses and improving productivity were essential to keep the government out of union affairs. “You have got our promise and the employers have got our promise that we will