The Box - Marc Levinson [65]
Two months later, when the draft Mechanization and Modernization Agreement was presented to the ILWU’s October caucus, delegates knew that it meant the end of an era. “It is the intent of this document that the contract, working and dispatching rules shall not be construed so as to require the hiring of unnecessary men,” read the key clause. The word “container” did not appear, but the language gave management the right to change working methods for all types of cargo so long as this did not result in unsafe conditions or “onerous” workloads; the union could file a grievance if it believed conditions were onerous. The ILWU retained control of cargo sorting on the dock, but containers and pallets arriving at the dock fully loaded would no longer be emptied and repacked by longshoremen.
In return for near-total flexibility, the employers agreed to pay $5 million per year. Part of the money would support retirement: longshoremen with 25 years of service would receive $7,920, or approximately 70 weeks’ base pay, upon retirement at age 65, plus the $100 monthly ILWU pension. Workers aged 62 to 65 would be paid $220 a month until age 65 if they would retire early. The rest of the money guaranteed all A-men average weekly earnings equivalent to 35 hours of work, whether or not their services were needed on the docks. Anyone hired as a longshoreman after the agreement was signed would never be eligible for the guarantee because, as a union spokesman explained, “they will not have given up anything.”25
The caucus demanded numerous changes before sending the draft for a membership vote. More than one-third of the ILWU’s members voted no. Some opponents, such as San Francisco’s famed longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, were outraged on ideological grounds. “This generation has no right to give away, or sell for money, conditions that were handed on to us by a previous generation,” Hoffer stormed. Dockers in Los Angeles, still angry that Bridges had interfered in their local labor dispute and upset about the loss of work unstuffing and restuffing containers, rejected it by nearly two to one. The local in Seattle backed Bridges; so did his home local in San Francisco, where the unusually old workforce—nearly two-thirds of San Francisco longshoremen were 45 or older—liked the retirement provisions. Members in those two cities provided most of the votes to approve the contract.26
The Mechanization and Modernization Agreement brought surprises all around. The initial result, predictably, was a wave of retirements. With incentives encouraging older longshoremen to leave the workforce, the number over age 65 fell from 831 in 1960 to 321 in 1964, and the number between 60 and 65 dropped by one-fifth. Contrary to expectations on both sides, though, income guarantees for active dockers proved unnecessary. Rather than a labor surplus, the docks experienced a labor shortage thanks to an increasing flow of cargo. Large numbers of B-men were admitted as A-men for the first time in years.27
The agreement delivered everything the ship lines had hoped for in terms of productivity. Labor productivity had been flat for nearly two decades prior to 1960. The employers’ new ability to change work methods for noncontainerized cargo drove up tonnage per man-hour 41 percent in five years, and overall productivity, adjusted for changes in the mix of cargo, doubled within eight years. Shippers could send their canned goods, bagged rice, flour, and similar products on pallets without having to pay longshoremen to unpack and repack the pallets. Iron and steel were handled by two men on the dock rather than four or six, and six cotton bales were now sent for export prepacked on a single pallet weighing 3,000 pounds—too heavy under the old rules, but permissible under the new. Tonnage per man-hour in sugar rose 74 percent between 1960 and 1963, in lumber 53 percent, in rice 130 percent. In the agreement’s third year, West Coast ports used 2.5 million fewer man-hours of labor than the previous