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 Transport and General Workers Union was powerful, but not omnipotent. It had never bothered to sign up members at the tiny Port of Felixstowe, located on a North Sea estuary ninety miles northeast of London. Felixstowe, one of the hundreds of towns on Britain’s coasts, had two docks owned by the Felixstowe Railway and Dock Company, a private company controlled by an importer of grain and palm oil. The docks had been destroyed in the storms of 1953, and by 1959 the only activity involved ninety permanent workers who unloaded tropical commodities into a few storage tanks and warehouses. Felixstowe had no general-cargo business to protect, no militant unions, and, because it had never employed casual dock labor, no requirement for ship lines to contribute to the national dockworker severance scheme.