Deadlock on the Docks

From Searsport, Me. to Corpus Christi, Texas, the great ports of the eastern and southern U.S. were as idle as millponds last week, immobilized by a sudden wildcat strike by the crime-ridden International Longshoremen's Association. Pickets in New York took a "coffee break" to let Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, Vatican diplomat, make a hasty departure from the Vulcania without suffering the embarrassment of crossing their line. A troupe of Yemenite dancers walked ashore with their luggage on their heads, and pursers and stewards from the U.S.S. Constitution helped 983 home-coming travelers tote their baggage ashore. Perishable goods were in danger of rotting on the piers and in ships' holds, and U.S. grain exports for the Far East, South America and Europe piled up at dockside at the rate of 11 million bushels weekly.

The strike began after I.L.A. officials in New York and other Northeastern ports had signed a truce agreement with the New York Shipping Association to extend the current labor contract until Oct. 15, while negotiations for a new contract continued. Longshoremen, with a base pay of $2.80 an hour, were demanding 50-c- more. Management was offering them 30-c-, but the real issue was not wages. It was what the I.L.A. uses as a cussword: "automation." The shippers wanted to replace antiquated loading and unloading equipment with new devices--belt conveyors for the obsolescent cargo slings of clipper-ship days; electronic gantry cranes, and huge container vans with detachable wheels and chassis. Union men feared that the new equipment would also replace longshoremen, demanded a contract clause which would give the I.L.A. the right of approval on all new equipment.

After the extension agreement had been signed in New York, Southern dock hands refused to go along because, they said, employers in South Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports had refused to make any future pay increases retroactive, as the Yankee shippers had agreed to do. From the Gulf, the strike spread swiftly north, and from the way the opposing sides talked, there seemed slight chance of quick settlement.

The whole thing, said LL.A. President William V. Bradley, was nothing less than "a dirty trick." The shippers, he cried, "knew our men in the South would not work without retroactivity. They figured that with the extension in the North

Atlantic District we would have to work ships diverted from the South. But we won't do it." Alexander P. Chopin, chairman of the New York Shipping Association, answered Bradley: "The public, which relied on the news of the extension to get thousands of tons of cargo moving toward the piers, have also been victimized by this flagrant violation of agreements. This may very well lead to one of the largest and costliest damage suits ever filed against a union."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.