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By Root 850 0

Manhattan, much less those in Houston and Savannah. In 1961, dissidents demanding strict contract enforcement and maintenance of twenty-one-man gangs won union posts at Anthony Anastasia’s Local 1814 in Brooklyn. In the midst of contract negotiations the following year, the choleric Anastasia tried to withdraw his local from the ILA and bargain on independently. Bradley relied on Teddy Gleason, officially the union’s chief organizer and executive vice president, to sort out such internal political complications as well as relations with employers. Gleason, who had once been a pier supervisor—a management job—had the waterfront in his blood; his father and grandfather had both been longshoremen, and he and his twelve siblings had been raised a few blocks from the docks in lower Manhattan. His longshore work, though, had been as a checker counting cargo, not as a holdman physically lifting coffee and cement. The Irishmen among his rank and file were not sure that he was tough enough, and the Italians and blacks, the other main ethnic groups working the docks, were not sure they wanted yet another Irish American leader. This was not an environment in which bargainers could make progress on a subject as emotional as automation.33

The union’s internal political problems were rooted in unpleasant economic realities. Although the port as a whole was prospering, Manhattan’s piers were not. The number of men hired at the five Manhattan hiring halls fell 20 percent from 1957–58 through 1961—62, while hiring in Brooklyn and New Jersey increased. Urban redevelopment projects, such as the proposed World Trade Center, threatened the removal of piers that would never be replaced, and the congestion along the entire Hudson River waterfront made it obviously unsuitable for new container operations. Brooklyn longshoremen, by contrast, saw no immediate threat to their jobs. Container operations had not even begun in many ports, including Philadelphia and Boston, and therefore were not a priority for local leaders. With these very different situations leading powerful local presidents to stake out differing views, the ILA had great difficulty coming up with a united approach to the container.34

The arbitrators’ temporary compromise of 1960, protecting jobs but allowing the employers unlimited use of containers and machinery in return for payments into a royalty fund, barely mattered. A royalty board was set up to manage the expected flood of money, but a drop in port traffic during the economic slowdown of 1960—61 meant that there was little by way of royalties. Gleason alleged that other ship lines were trying to evade royalty payments by encouraging shippers to pack their cargo on pallets rather than in containers. “This is a clear-cut threat to our existing collective bargaining agreement and to the royalty program,” he charged in late 1961. Longshore hours worked in December 1961 were down 4 percent from the previous year and down 20 percent from December 1956, but there was still no compensation being paid out to the men whose work had diminished.35

Job security in the face of automation thus became the overwhelming union concern as contract negotiations began in 1962. Job security, though, played differently in different places. New York leader Frank Field demanded that the ILA negotiate for a portwide seniority system: business at his own Local 858’s docks, in lower Manhattan, was drying up, but the customary pier-specific seniority meant that displaced Manhattan longshoremen could not easily find work on other piers. The leaders of other locals had no desire to reduce their own members’ job security by giving Field’s members priority in hiring.36

Those internal divisions were all too apparent as the ILA entered negotiations for the 1962 contract. The union opened with demands that all New York longshoremen involved in handling prepacked cargo of any sort receive an extra two dollars per hour, and that all containers be assessed a penalty of two dollars per ton payable to the royalty fund. Anastasia, whose Brooklyn local had seen