The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (6 page)

Even where race and ethnicity were not major issues, longshore unions openly discriminated against outsiders in order to be able to offer jobs to members’ kin. The work was strenuous and uncomfortable, but it paid better than anything else readily available to a blue-collar worker who had not finished high school. In dockworker families, taking a sixteen-year-old son to shape-up and calling in a favor to get him hired on was a rite of passage. Among Portland longshoremen, the most common paternal occupation was longshoreman. In Antwerp, 58 percent of dockworkers were the sons of dock-workers. The ratio in Manchester was three-quarters, and many of the rest had entered the docks with the help of their in-laws after marrying a dockworker’s daughter. In Edinburgh in the mid-1950s, recalled longshoreman Eddie Trotter, “There wis nobody at all, other than a son, grandson, or a nephew or a brother o’ a docker got a job as a docker.” British prime minister Harold Macmillan, confronted with yet another strike threat, opined in 1962, “[T]he dockers are such difficult people, just the fathers and the sons, the uncles and nephews. So like the House of Lords, hereditary and no intelligence required.”
¹⁶

Harsh working conditions, economic uncertainty, and the insularity of docker life gave rise to unique mores. Dockworkers saw themselves as tough, independent men doing a very tough job. William Pilcher, studying longshoremen while working as one, found that his colleagues cherished and cultivated reputations as drinkers and brawlers. “They like to see themselves as rough-and-ready individuals, and that is the image that they present to outsiders and to one another,” Pilcher observed. That self-image was also the public’s image. A British survey published in 1950 placed dockers twenty-ninth among thirty professions in status, above only road-sweepers, at a time when dockers earned more than the average national wage. That judgment was the same among both men and women and among people of all social classes. Being a longshoreman meant belonging to a global fraternity of men with a common outlook on life and a common sense of exclusion from the mainstream.
¹⁷

Labor militancy was a natural outgrowth of the dockworkers’ situation. Longshoremen around the world fully understood that their well-being depended on collective action, because otherwise the large supply of men desperate to do manual labor would force wages to near-starvation levels. Their employers, in most cases, were not ship lines and terminal operators with assets and reputations to protect, but contractors hired to service a particular dock or a particular ship. This system allowed shipowners to evade responsibility for working conditions by claiming that not they but their contractors were in charge of dock labor. The lack of central authority on the management side was frequently mirrored on the union side. With no routine methods of resolving employment disputes, and with competing unions trying to prove their aggressiveness but often unable to impose settlements on their own members, strikes were frequent. A single grievance could bring an entire port to a standstill. An eleven-nation study found that dockworkers, along with miners and seafarers, lost more workdays to labor disputes than any other professions. In Britain alone, dock strikes resulted in the loss of nearly 1 million man-days of labor from 1948 through 1951 and another 1.3 million in 1954. Dockworkers proudly represented the leading edge of labor radicalism.
¹⁸

Solidarity was strengthened by the lessons of history. Longshore unions’ power had waxed and waned in industrialized countries since the middle of the nineteenth century, and periods of union weakness inevitably brought heavier workloads and lower wages. After defeating a tumultuous strike in 1928, Australian dock operators slashed weekend pay and began hiring for half-day shifts, eliminating the single shift that had been a key union achievement. Across the United States, where the right to collective bargaining was not secured in law, shipping and stevedoring companies set out to break dock unions in the years after World War I and largely succeeded. Longshore wages in New Orleans fell from eighty cents an hour to forty cents after employers defeated the unions in 1923. West Coast employers rousted longshore unions in every port from Seattle to San Diego between 1919 and 1924 and then imposed lower wages and higher workloads. Demands for double shifts were common, and some ports tried to speed up loading by putting workers on piecework rather than hourly pay. After employers crushed the unions in Marseilles in 1950, “[i]t was a job with no rules,” remembered French docker Alfred Pacini. Nothing speaks more eloquently to the traditional status of longshoremen than Edinburgh dockers’ recollection of the greatest improvement after creation of the National Dock Labor Board in 1947: construction of an “amenity block” with individual lockers and showers, neither of which private employers had ever seen fit to provide.
¹⁹

This history of antagonistic labor-management relations gave rise to two problems that plagued the shipping industry around the world. One was theft. Theft had always been a problem on the waterfront, and the growth of trade in higher-value products after World War II caused it to reach epidemic proportions. Some longshoremen justified thievery as a response to deteriorating economic conditions, but it remained a problem even where union contracts or government intervention had led to better wages: a British joke from the 1960s concerned a docker who was caught stealing a bar of gold and punished by having its value deducted from his next pay. “It wis the pilferin’ that upset me,” recalled a Scottish longshoreman of the 1950s. “It was terrible, terrible, terrible.” Longshoremen prided themselves on such arcane skills as the ability to tap whiskey from a sealed cask supposedly stowed safely in a ship’s hold. In Portland, small objects such as transistor radios and bottled liquor were usually stolen for personal use by family and friends, but not for sale. No such limits were observed in New York, where crime was rampant. Grace Line discovered that even sixty-kilo burlap bags of coffee beans were not immune from theft; the company purchased a sealed scale, protected against tampering by checkers who were aiding theft rings, to confirm the number of bags aboard trucks leaving the pier.
²⁰

The second problem arising from dockworkers’ intense suspicion of employers was resistance to anything that might eliminate jobs. Wherever they secured a foothold, dock unions insisted on contract language to protect against a long history of employer abuses. The number of men needed to work a hatch, the placement of those men in the hold or on the dock, the maximum weight of a sling, the equipment they would use, and countless other details related to manning filled page after page in collective bargaining agreements. Shipping interests in Liverpool tried repeatedly to eliminate a practice known as the welt, under which half of each longshore gang left the docks, often for a nearby pub, while the other half worked; after an hour or two, the absentees would return and those who had been working would take a prolonged break. Ports the world over had seen strikes over employer efforts to alter work practices. In Los Angeles, labor productivity dropped 75 percent between 1928 and 1954 as union and management struggled over mechanization; West Coast ports handled 9 percent less cargo per work-hour in 1954 than in 1952. The Port of New York needed 1.9 man-hours to handle a ton of cargo in 1950, but 2.5 by 1956. In Britain, tonnage per man-year was nearly flat from 1948 to 1952, leaped by one-third thanks to a surge of cargo in 1953, and then sank again under the weight of stringent work rules.
²¹

The solution to the high cost of freight handling was obvious: instead of loading, unloading, shifting, and reloading thousands of loose items, why not put the freight into big boxes and just move the boxes?

The concept of shipping freight in large boxes had been around for decades. The British and French railways tried wooden containers to move household furniture in the late nineteenth century, using cranes to transfer the boxes from rail flatcars to horse carts. At the end of World War I, almost as soon as motorized trucks came into wide civilian use, the Cincinnati Motor Terminals Company hit upon the idea of interchangeable truck bodies that were lifted onto and off of wheels with a crane. Farsighted thinkers were already proposing “a standardized unit container in the form of a demountable closed auto-truck body, which can be readily transferred by cranes between railroad flat cars, auto chassis, warehouse floors and vessels.” The first American railroad to adopt the idea was the New York Central, which around 1920 introduced steel containers that fit side by side, six abreast, on shallow-bottomed railcars with dropdown sides.
²²

The mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation’s largest transportation company, became a powerful proponent of this new idea. The Pennsylvania’s problem was that many of its customers did not generate a large amount of freight for a single destination. A small factory, for instance, might hold a boxcar on its siding for a week while filling it with goods for many different buyers. The railroad would have to attach this car to a freight train and haul it to its nearest interchange point, where the contents would be removed from the car, sorted into hand trucks, and reloaded into other boxcars headed toward different destinations. The Pennsy’s alternative was a steel container just over nine feet wide, perhaps one-sixth the size of the average boxcar. The shipper might fill one of these containers with freight for Detroit, another for Chicago, another for St. Louis. The containers could be placed on a railcar by forklift, and at the interchange point, a forklift would simply move the containers to the proper connecting trains. Sorting loose freight at the transfer station cost 85 cents per ton, by the railroad’s reckoning; transferring a five-ton container cost only 4 cents per ton, and also reduced damage claims and the need for boxcars.
²³

Some railroads sought to take advantage of the container not simply by lowering rates, but by changing the way they charged shippers. Since the onset of federal regulation in the 1880s, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had held firm to the principle that each commodity required its own rate, which of course was subject to ICC approval. With containers, though, the railroads were not handling commodities; the size and loaded weight of the container mattered far more than the contents. For the first time, they offered purely weight-based rates: the North Shore Line, running between Chicago and Milwaukee, charged 40 cents per 100 pounds to carry a 3-ton container, but only 20 cents per 100 pounds to carry a 10-ton container, with no adjustment at all for what might be inside. After four months of hearings in 1931, the commission ruled weight-based rates illegal. Although it found the container to be “a commendable piece of equipment,” the commission said that the railroads could not charge less to carry a container than to carry the equivalent weight of the most expensive commodity inside the container. With that ruling, containers no longer made economic sense on the rails.
²⁴

Different container systems came into use on railways in other countries during the 1920s in response to a new competitive threat—the truck. Although long-distance truck transportation over primitive and often unpaved roads was impractical, trucks had obvious advantages for shorter hauls, and the railroads sought ways to reduce the truckers’ cost advantage. In Australia, the Sunshine Biscuit Company used containers plastered with its advertising to ship its treats on open railcars with sides of wooden slats. The London, Midland, and Scottish Railway carried three thousand containers in 1927, and the French national railway promoted them as an efficient way for farmers to ship meat and cheese to the city. In 1933, it joined other railroads to form the International Container Bureau, an organization dedicated to making international container freight practical in Europe. Several U.S. and Canadian coastal ship lines tried carrying containers and truck trailers in the early 1930s, and Grace Line built wooden vans with metal reinforcing to cut pilferage of shipments between New York and Venezuela. The Central of Georgia Railroad formed Ocean Shipping Company to move loaded railroad cars between Savannah and New York—an idea that allowed the Central of Georgia to keep control of its freight, rather than handing it off to another railroad.
²⁵

Experimentation began anew after the war. Amphibious landing ships were recycled as “roll on-roll off” vessels to transport trucks along the coast, improving upon techniques originally developed to land troops and tanks in over-the-beach invasions. The International Container Bureau was reestablished in 1948, and the U.S. military began using small steel containers, called Conex boxes, for soldiers’ personal belongings. The first ships designed for containers arrived in 1951 when Denmark’s United Shipping Company opened a container service to move beer and foodstuffs among Danish ports. Dravo Corporation of Pittsburgh created the Transportainer, a steel box seven feet nine inches long, and more than three thousand were in use around the world by 1954. The Missouri Pacific Railway promoted its “speedboxes,” aluminum containers on wheels, in 1951, and the Alaska Steamship Company began carrying both wood and steel containers from Seattle to Alaskan ports in 1953. Seatrain Lines, a ship line, approached containerization a different way, hoisting entire railcars on board ships and sailing them from U.S. ports to Cuba. All of these undertakings were modest in scope, but all had the same aim: to cut the cost of moving cargo through slow and inefficient ports.
²⁶

Yet these efforts were far from successful. “Contrary to what had been thought at first, the handling of containers led to hardly any cost savings,” an influential European maritime expert admitted. A 1955 census found 154,907 shipping containers in use in non-Communist Europe. The number is large, but the containers were not: fully 52 percent of them were smaller than 106 cubic feet, less than the volume of a box 5 feet on a side. Almost all European containers were made of wood, and many had no tops; the user piled the goods inside and covered the load with canvas—hardly an efficient system for moving freight. The containers promoted by the Belgian national railway were meant to be slid up a ramp to fit
inside
truck bodies, requiring an extra stage of handling. American containers were typically made of steel, providing better protection but at enormous cost; one-quarter or more of the weight of a loaded container was the container itself.
²⁷