The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

by Marc Levinson

The ILWU had a long history of difficult and at times violent relations with employers in the Pacific ports. The union, then the Pacific division of the ILA, gained recognition only after a bloody coastwide strike in 1934, and staged 1,399 legal and illegal stoppages over the next fourteen years in order to assert its rights. The net result of this constant conflict was a large body of rules, both written and unwritten, governing port operations in great detail. One formal rule provided that, once assigned to a job at a particular hatch of a particular ship, a worker would do only that specific job until the ship sailed; if loading was complete at one hatch but not at another, an idle worker from the first hatch could not be shifted to help out at the second. An important “hip pocket” rule, codified nowhere but enforced by the gang foreman as required, provided that a trucker delivering palletized cargo to a pier would have to remove each item from the pallet and place it on the dock. Longshoremen would then replace the items on the pallet for lowering into the hold, where other longshoremen would break down the pallet once more and stow each individual item—all at a cost so high that shippers knew not to send pallets to begin with.10