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social changes stemming from the disappearance of the timeworn pattern of waterfront work. Traditional skills, such as knowing how to stow cargo aboard a breakbulk ship, lost value. Older men, whose seniority had enabled them to climb from the depths of the hold to less demanding work on the deck, found that smaller gang sizes made deckmen’s jobs too stressful. Fathers could no longer bring their sons into high-paying, albeit dangerous and demanding, waterfront jobs, because the jobs themselves were vanishing. Longshore families, now receiving stable incomes, were free to move from tough waterfront neighborhoods to comfortable suburbs, dealing a blow to the class solidarity that came from isolation. The days of long-established gangs working together, of casual conditions that let men work when they wanted to work and fish when they wanted to fish, would never be regained, as work once marked by independence and freedom from control became a high-paying but highly structured job. “They’re turning this job into a factory job,” complained New York longshoreman Peter Bell. Agreed Sidney Roger, editor of the ILWU newspaper in San Francisco, “I’ve heard so many men say, this is exactly what they said: ‘It’s no fun any longer working on the waterfront. The fun is gone.’ The fun has to do with the men working together, a sense of camaraderie.”48

Despite these discontents, the longshore unions’ tenacious resistance to automation appeared to establish the principle that long-term workers deserved to be treated humanely as businesses embraced innovations that would eliminate their jobs. That principle was ultimately accepted in very few parts of the American economy and was never codified in law. Years of bargaining by two very differ entunion leaders made the longshore industry a rare exception, in which employers that profited from automation were forced to share the benefits with the individuals whose work was automated away.

Chapter 7

Setting the Standard

Containers were the talk of the transportation world by the late 1950s. Truckers were hauling them, railroads were carrying them, Pan-Atlantic’s Sea-Land Service was putting them on ships, the U.S. Army was moving them to Europe. But “container” meant very different things to different people. In Europe, it was usually a wooden crate with steel reinforcements, 4 or 5 feet tall. For the army, it involved mainly “Conex boxes,” steel boxes 8½ feet deep and 6 feet 10½ inches high used for military families’ household goods. Some containers were designed to be shifted by cranes with hooks, and others had slots beneath the floor so they could be moved by forklifts. The Marine Steel Corporation, a New York manufacturer, advertised no fewer than 30 different models, from a 15-foot-long steel box with doors on the side to a steel-frame container with plywood sides, 4½ feet wide, made to ship “five-and-dime” merchandise to Central America. Of the 58,000 privately owned shipping containers in the United States, according to a 1959 survey, 43,000 were 8 feet square or less at the base, while a mere 15,000, mainly those owned by Sea-Land and Matson, were more than 8 feet long.1

This diversity threatened to nip containerization in the bud. If one transportation company’s containers would not fit on another’s ships or railcars, each company would need a vast fleet of containers exclusively for its own customers. An exporter would have to be cautious about putting its goods into a container, because the loaded box could go only on a single carrier’s vessel, even if another line’s ship was sailing sooner. A European railroad container could not cross the Atlantic, because U.S. trucks and railroads were not set up to handle European sizes, while the incompatible systems used by various American railroads meant that a container on the New York Central could not readily be transferred to the Missouri Pacific. As containers became more common, each ship line would need its own dock and cranes in every port, no matter how small its business or infrequent its ships’ visits, because other