The Box - Marc Levinson [70]
The Mechanization and Modernization Agreement on the Pacific coast and the Guaranteed Annual Income in the North Atlantic were among the most unusual, and most controversial, labor arrangements in the history of American business. They were products of a time in which the permanent disappearance of work owing to automation was a matter for thoughtful discussion. The United States government, particularly the Department of Labor, was undertaking serious studies of automation’s impact in hopes of better assisting affected workers, and organizations such as the American Foundation on Automation and Employment were holding much noticed conferences. President Kennedy addressed the issue himself in 1962: “I regard it as the major domestic challenge, really, of the 60s, to maintain full employment, at a time when automation, of course, is replacing men.”44
For organized labor, automation was a front-burner issue. Two-thirds of the labor leaders responding to a survey identified it as unions’ most serious concern. Automation is “rapidly becoming a curse to this society,” AFL-CIO president George Meany told the labor federation’s annual convention in 1963. The substitution of machinery for manpower was threatening to unions, blurring long-established jurisdictional lines and raising bargaining costs byreducing the number of workers in a plant, and displacement could be devastating to workers. Many workers in the 1960s lacked basic reading and mathematical skills, and education levels were low enough to make retraining problematic: half of U.S. factory production workers had no more than a tenth-grade education.45
Individual unions and employers tried to grapple with automation in their own ways. New York electricians bargained for a five-hour day in 1963 to spread the available work. The United Auto Workers proposed a flexible workweek, rising to forty-eight hours when the unemployment rate fell below a specified level and falling below forty hours, to save jobs, when unemployment was high; the automakers rejected that plan, but they eventually accepted the union’s proposal for a fund to continue workers’ incomes in the event of layoffs. The Airline Navigators’ Association agreed to surrender jobs at Trans World Airlines in return for up-front cash payments, plus three years of severance pay and health insurance. The United Mine Workers, the International Typographers Union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers, and the American Federation of Musicians all tried to bargain for contracts that protected their members as employers sought to automate.46
The longshore agreements were seen as models for addressing these concerns. They by no means resolved all problems. “The union gave up more than it should have,” former ILWU secretary-treasurer Louis Goldblatt insisted in 1978. “It did not get all it was fundamentally entitled to, such as recapturing all work on the water-front.” There were many struggles yet to come over union control as container terminals moved away from the docks. On both coasts, the Teamsters union challenged labor contracts that promised off-dock stuffing and unstuffing work to the longshore unions, disputes that the courts eventually settled in the Teamsters’ favor. The use of ships that carried entire barges loaded with containers posed a novel set of labor-relations challenges, and union representation of the office workers whose computers increasingly controlled container operations would be a source of dispute for decades.47
More problematic for many longshoremen were the