The Box - Marc Levinson [66]
Contrary to the union’s expectations, these massive productivity gains came from sweat, not automation. “The evidence suggests that the employers, for the most part, devoted their effort to trying to squeeze more physical labor from the workforce, rather than innovating or undertaking new investment,” wrote economist Paul Hartman after a careful analysis of the trends. Sacks grew larger, and sling loads, no longer bound by the former weight limit of 2,100 pounds, increased to as much as 4,000 pounds. The result was much harder physical work for the men in the hold, who had to shove these heavy loads into place. Extremely large sling loads, long prohibited by contract, were soon known on the docks as “Bridges loads.”29
Bizarrely, the parties now switched sides. The union demanded that the employers mechanize faster to eliminate these physical burdens. “We intend to push to make the addition of machines compulsory,” Harry Bridges told management negotiators in 1963. “The days of sweating on these jobs should be gone and that is our objective.” The ship lines were hesitant to spend the money. The ILWU responded by filing grievances against the lack of machinery on docks and in holds. After one of the strangest arbitration proceedings ever to occur in any industry, the employers were ordered in June 1965 to provide longshoremen with more forklifts and winches.30
Through 1966, West Coast shipping interests paid $29 million into funds that provided early retirement, death, and disability benefits, along with wage supplements to displaced longshoremen. This proved to be a hugely profitable investment. In 1965 alone, by one estimate, the ship lines saved $59.4 million owing to the Mechanization and Modernization agreement, nearly twelve times their annual payment. The improved efficiency, which contributed to a surge in carriers’ profits, came at a time when the container had barely begun to make itself felt in the Pacific ports. Container shipments accounted for a scant 1.5 percent of all general cargo tonnage at Pacific coast ports in 1960 and less than 5 percent in 1963. When the container finally arrived in force, leading to unimagined productivity increases, it brought yet more surprises. The port of Los Angeles, where longshoremen had been so certain that automation would destroy jobs, was to flourish beyond all expectations, while the port of San Francisco, whose longshoremen had been the strongest proponents of the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement, would wither. As they negotiated over automation in 1960, though, neither management nor labor was able to foretell what the container would do. The law of unanticipated consequences prevailed. As Bridges confessed later, “Frankly speaking, the ILWU was caught off guard, as were many shipping companies.”31
The Mechanization and Modernization Agreement set the rules for the U.S. Pacific coast and was immediately extended to western Canada. In the East, the politics of the fractious International Long-shoremen’s Association would not allow such a sweeping settlement of automation issues. The ILA represented longshoremen from Maine to Texas, but it negotiated separately with different groups of employers up and down the coast. There was no coastwide contract such as there was in the West. Nor was there a Harry Bridges, a union leader trusted and respected enough to win member support for an otherwise suspect deal. The ILA’s headquarters had minimal power over local union leaders, who could do pretty much as they pleased. “It is the only anarchist union,” columnist Murray Kempton wrote aptly in the New York Post.32
William Bradley, the ILA’s president from 1953 through 1963, was a genial man who took the title “captain” from his days as a tugboat operator. He was named to head the union after longtime president Joseph Ryan was forced out on corruption charges in 1953. Having never worked the docks, Bradley won little respect among longshoremen in Brooklyn and