Getting Trimmed

In the years after the Great Potato Famine, a dozen tight-knit Irish families--the McDonoughs, the Sullivans, the Cosgroves, the Flahertys--emigrated to New York, where they did very well for themselves in a unique trade demanding great skill and courage. The menfolk became "grain trimmers," i.e., longshoremen who, using shovels and wooden scoops, level out grain after it is poured or blown into the holds of ships. It is a difficult trade because the grain raises huge clouds of choking dust, and dangerous because the dust has been known to explode. It is also well paid. On the docks of New York, where 105 workers, many of them descendants of the original dozen families, have inherited the trade and control it, a grain trimmer clears up to $200 a day.

Last week the trimmers figured that this was not quite enough. Demanding a raise, grain trimmers' Local 1268 of the rugged International Longshoremen's Association marched out on an angry strike that stopped all grain exports from the world's biggest port. The shippers answered with a counterdemand: that the trimmers abandon their 30-year-old system of piecework pay, instead accept regular longshoremen's wages of $3.12 an hour, as they do at all other U.S. ports. The New York trimmers now get $14 and up for every 1,000 bushels of grain that are loaded--trimmed or not.

Shippers estimate that the penalty of loading grain in New York amounts to about $2,500 per cargo. Naturally, they have turned to other ports. Because of the high handling charges and unfavorable rail-rate differentials, New York's annual grain shipments slid from some 20 million bushels 30 years ago to 5,000,000 bushels last year--almost all of it U.S. Government business. But even the Government is getting fed up, plans to ship no more grain from New York.

The grain trimmers show no signs of submitting. They argue that business has slumped so much that they can get only a few days' work a month, average less than $4,000 a year in wages, and that they are too old to learn another trade (many of them are already grandfathers). Local 1268 was a prime example of a tough union that had trimmed its employers so long and so hard that it was pricing itself right out of existence.

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