The Box - Marc Levinson [69]
If Gleason’s ascent altered the bargaining environment, so did the continuing decline of New York City’s docks. With containers accounting in 1963 for more than 10 percent of the entire port’s general cargo for the first time, and with Robert Wagner, the mayor who had made the docks a priority, preparing to retire, resolving the container situation became urgent for the New York contingent within the ILA. Fear that automation would destroy the union was the major issue at a conference of the ILA’s southern locals in June 1964. When the Department of Labor released its study of the Port of New York at the start of July, Gleason offered an unexpected response: “The time may well be ripe to institute in this industry a guaranteed annual wage.”40
The 1964 contract negotiations took on an unusually conciliatory tone. The New York Shipping Association proposed smaller gangs and more flexibility in work assignments, as the Labor Department report urged. In return, it offered increased pensions and early retirement, a guarantee that each man hired would get eight hours’ work, severance pay for men permanently displaced, and an annual income guarantee for regular longshoremen. When the ILA rejected any concessions on gang sizes, federal mediators were requested once more. The mediators named by President Johnson in January 1964 urged that employers fund a guaranteed income for permanent longshoremen who showed their availability for work. In return, the mediators proposed that employers be permitted to transfer workers from hatch to hatch, and from one task to another, and that the size of general-cargo gangs be pared to seventeen men by 1967. Gleason was willing to concede smaller gangs, but the proposal to let workers do multiple jobs sparked outrage among the checkers, who feared that their less strenuous record-keeping jobs might vanish. Against his own desires, Gleason was forced to take the union out on strike again in September 1964.41
The Johnson administration, increasingly concerned about inflationary labor settlements, ordered the dockers back to work and imposed an eighty-day cooling-off period. This time, the ILA and the New York Shipping Association negotiated without the usual histrionics. In return for a massive wage and benefit increase all along the coast, including three additional paid holidays and a fourth week’s vacation, the union agreed to reduce the gang size for all general cargo, including containers, to seventeen men by 1967. Starting in 1966, employers in New York would pay a royalty on every container passing through the port, with the funds to be used to guarantee qualified longshoremen the equivalent of sixteen hundred hours of work each year so long as they checked in at the hiring hall, even if they rarely got hired. This Guaranteed Annual Income would be paid until retirement age, creating a permanent subsidy for displaced dockers. A union flyer summed up the huge changes that the new contract would bring: “This agreement takes the industry from a completely casual workforce to a stable, secure livelihood.”42
Where the ILA was concerned, though, nothing was ever simple. Just before Christmas, as the cooling-off period expired, wildcat strikes began in Baltimore, Galveston, and New York. Then, in a secret ballot on January 8, 1965, ILA members in New York shocked the union leadership by rejecting the new contract, income guarantees and all. Gleason scheduled a revote, but not before hiring a public relations firm and, in an extraordinary act for the head of a secretive union,