Container Woes in Dockland

More pay for little or no work?

When Marlon Brando starred in On the Waterfront (1954), the morning shape-ups of New York dock workers were pretty much as the movie portrayed them--noisy, brawling scenes of men fighting for the jobs available. No longer. Now longshoremen "badge in" at 7:30 a.m. at local hiring halls by inserting a plastic card into an IBM computer and lounge around for a while. By 9 a.m. the unlucky ones have gone to work; the others can go home to watch TV or moonlight on a second job--and still collect full base pay ($64 per day). That undemanding life is largely the result of a combination of two forces: the rise of container ships, which has greatly reduced the need for dock labor, and the success of the International Longshoremen's Association in negotiating supergenerous pay guarantees for dockers who no longer have much to do. The I.L.A., however, sees a threat to its members' easy life--and on Oct. 1 it called a strike that has halted the loading and unloading of container ships at 30 Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports from Portland, Me., to Corpus Christi, Texas.

Since 1957, when a North Carolina trucker, Malcom McLean, discovered that he could save time and cut down on theft and breakage by hoisting his goodsladen truck rigs directly aboard ship, containerization has completely transformed the shipping industry. As a result, if the I.L.A.'s strike continues much beyond next week, it will tie up the great bulk of general cargo that moves by sea.

Initially, container cargo was limited to such high-value goods as machine tools and consumer products. Now shippers have devised ways to move everything from coffee beans to bulk chemicals in the cavernous boxes. These days container cargoes often include frozen food, fruit, yachts, trucks and even copies of Playboy magazine, which are thereby protected from pilfering deckhands. The Port of New York, which has the most elaborate container ship facilities anywhere, is ringed by sprawling concrete flatlands spiked with 135-ft.-tall cranes that hoist the 20-to 40-ft.-long containers onto and off ships. As late as 1970, Boston had no facilities for handling container ships; today 90% of all cargo passing through the port moves in vans. Says Robert Calder, executive director of the Boston Shipping Association: "The shift from freighters to container ships is no less a revolution than the transition from the sailing ship to the steamship."

The trend threatens to make longshoremen as redundant as pick-and-shovel coal miners. It once took 100 longshoremen working around-the-clock for a week to load and unload cargoes on a conventional freighter; 40 to 50 men can do the same job on a container ship in less than a day. Although U.S. cargo traffic has soared by 276% since container ships first appeared, the number of longshoremen working the docks nationwide has declined from 150,000 to 90,000. In New York, I.L.A. membership has dropped from 31,629 to 12,264.

Last week's strike was the I.L.A.'s latest move in more than a decade and a half of struggling to stop the job losses and guarantee steady incomes to the surviving dockers. In 1968, after a 57-day strike, shipping and stevedoring companies gave I.L.A. members a monopoly on packing and unpacking containers within 50 miles of dockside. In 1974, however, a U.S. court of appeals ruled that the agreement violated federal labor law. The Supreme Court last January refused to review the decision, and the I.L.A.'s crusty president, Teddy Gleason, 76, began warning of a strike when the union's contract expired unless some new job-protection scheme could be worked out.

As an alternative, the union demanded that along with an improved wage and benefits package, the companies strengthen a guaranteed annual wage clause that has been part of I.L.A. contracts since 1964. The clause provides that union members receive a minimum yearly salary whether or not there is work for them, and the I.L.A. agreed in return to put a freeze on additions to its union rolls. Locals in each port negotiate the size of the guarantee. The money comes from a tonnage charge levied by port employer associations on all cargo that crosses the docks. In the Port of New York, through which about a third of all U.S. container traffic passes, longshoremen are guaranteed pay for 2,080 hours annually--40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. In ports with less container ship traffic, guarantees are smaller--1,500 hours a year in Boston, for example.

The I.L.A. is now demanding that all port guarantees be brought closer to the New York level. Though New York employers naturally do not object, those in the other ports do, and as a result, the industry has been unable to agree on a common response. In New York, the lowliest longshoreman "earns" a minimum of $16,640 a year yet can often wind up doing no work for weeks at a time, though when he does work the job is a grueling grind. At the top, 354 New York longshoremen make $40,000 to $56,000 a year. Because of upside-down seniority rules, some older longshoremen never have to work at all. The rules provide in some cases that when there is actual work to be done, it must be assigned first to the most junior longshoremen; only when there are not enough young men available do veteran union members have to work for their pay.

So far, the strike has had little effect on the nation's economy; expecting the inevitable, importers and exporters rushed container ship deliveries through the ports before the deadline. Although past dock strikes have frequently been ended by Taft-Hartley injunction, the Carter Administration has pledged to keep hands off for the moment to allow the free collective-bargaining process to work. If there is no quick settlement, the I.L.A. threatens to extend the strike to other types of vessels besides container ships. Oil tankers, which haul the nation's biggest import, would not be affected (no longshore labor is required to unload them), but the bulk carriers that haul grain, a huge export item, out of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast ports would be stopped. So the nation's already worrisome trade deficit would worsen. That would be a high price to pay for ensuring the incomes of a few thousand dock workers who fill a dwindling need anyway.

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