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

When the container finally arrived in force, leading to unimagined productivity increases, it brought yet more surprises. The Port of Los Angeles, where longshoremen had been so certain that automation would destroy jobs, was to flourish beyond all expectations, while the Port of San Francisco, whose longshoremen had been the strongest proponents of the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement, would wither. As they negotiated over automation in 1960, though, neither management nor labor was able to foretell what the container would do. The law of unanticipated consequences prevailed. As Bridges confessed later, “Frankly speaking, the ILWU was caught off guard, as were many shipping companies.”31