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little impact from containers, publicly criticized his own union’s proposals as ridiculous and again threatened to withdraw from the ILA. The Shipping Association simply ignored the union’s demands, instead proposing that ship lines be allowed to handle containers with eight-man gangs and other cargo with gangs of sixteen, and that crane operators be removed from the union’s jurisdiction. These changes, multiplied by the 560 gangs in the port, would have been cataclysmic for the ILA. Economic consultant Walter Eisenberg warned Gleason that the employers’ proposal would lead to a sharp increase in container traffic and would save employers between $108 million and $144 million over the life of a three-year contract. The union thought that this money rightfully belonged to its members, but the employers considered it the unearned fruits of featherbedding, to which workers had no claim. The talks stalled, even with federal mediation, because Gleason lacked the political strength to agree to any contract that would eliminate work. The union, he pledged to his angry members, would “not sell out jobs like Bridges did.”37

Neither side was prepared for anything like the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement on the West Coast. After high-level political soundings in Washington, the mediators proposed that the ILA and the New York Shipping Association sign a one-year contract while undertaking a joint study of automation and job security. The Shipping Association agreed reluctantly. The union refused, and a strike closed the entire port at the end of September 1962. President Kennedy ordered the union back to work for an eighty-day “cooling-off period” and named three professors to investigate the dispute. Like the federal mediators a month earlier, the professors suggested a joint labor-management study. The employers refused unless the union agreed not to strike during the year. The ILA wanted no study that might cost jobs in the long run. The mediators’ hint that the employers might eventually reduce the workforce by paying workers to retire made Gleason irate. “We don’t want to sell jobs,” he insisted in late October. “The West Coast sold their men out, but here on the East and Gulf Coast, we don’t do that.” The professors withdrew. Two days before Christmas 1962, the cooling-off period expired, and the union walked out once again.38

Kennedy named three men to try to mediate: Republican senator Wayne Morse, who had formerly worked as a labor mediator; Harvard Business School professor James Healy; and Theodore Kheel, a New York labor lawyer. On January 20, 1963, nearly a month into the strike, they announced a proposal: the union would get a one-year contract with large pay and benefit increases, and the secretary of labor would study the job security issues and make recommendations. The ILA and the Shipping Association would attempt to implement the recommendation, but if they failed, they would select a neutral board to do the job. Superficially, the plan seemed to favor the union; the employers faced a large increase in wage and benefit costs with no assurance of greater productivity. Gleason criticized the proposal, then accepted it, while the Shipping Association futilely objected. The union, seemingly victorious, returned to work.

The appearance of a union victory was misleading. A separate statement by the mediators could be read in no other way than as a warning to the ILA: “We wish … to emphasize our strong belief that the capacity of this industry to support wages and benefits to which the employees are entitled cannot continue without serious impairment in the absence of marked improvement in manpower utilization.” The implication was that if the union remained unwilling to make a deal on containers, the government stood ready to impose one.39

As the Labor Department studied port automation through the rest of 1963, the ILA endured yet another internecine feud. Gleason, officially the executive vice president but clearly the union’s most powerful figure, launched a campaign to replace Bradley as president. The