The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

by Marc Levinson

Renting time on an IBM 704 computer at several hundred dollars a minute,

With tensions mounting, the ILA stopped work on November 18 and convened twenty-one thousand longshoremen at Madison Square Garden to hear about the threat of mechanization.

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.

Contrary to the union’s expectations, these massive productivity gains came from sweat, not automation. “The evidence suggests that the employers, for the most part, devoted their effort to trying to squeeze more physical labor from the workforce, rather than innovating or undertaking new investment,” wrote economist Paul Hartman after a careful analysis of the trends. Sacks grew larger, and sling loads, no longer bound by the former weight limit of 2,100 pounds, increased to as much as 4,000 pounds. The result was much harder physical work for the men in the hold, who had to shove these heavy loads into place. Extremely large sling loads, long prohibited by contract, were soon known on the docks as “Bridges loads.”29 Bizarrely, the parties now switched sides. The union demanded that the employers mechanize faster to eliminate these physical burdens. “We intend to push to make the addition of machines compulsory,” Harry Bridges told management negotiators in 1963. “The days of sweating on these jobs should be gone and that is our objective.” The ship lines were hesitant to spend the money. The ILWU responded by filing grievances against the lack of machinery on docks and in holds. After one of the strangest arbitration proceedings ever to occur in any industry, the employers were ordered in June 1965 to provide longshoremen with more forklifts and winches.30

Starting in 1966, employers in New York would pay a royalty on every container passing through the port, with the funds to be used to guarantee qualified longshoremen the equivalent of sixteen hundred hours of work each year so long as they checked in at the hiring hall, even if they rarely got hired. This Guaranteed Annual Income would be paid until retirement age, creating a permanent subsidy for displaced dockers.