The Rackett-Ridden Longshoremen
Bell, Daniel
Rimmed off from the rest of the city by a steel-ribbed highway and a wall of bulkhead sheds is the New York waterfront, an atavistic world more redolent of the brawling money-grubbing of...
...The steamship companies accepted the "tough world," too...
...Ships still require a fast turn-around to equalize mounting dock costs...
...Job control means limiting the number of jobs, or the number of men seeking jobs, and a defined system of seniority, in order to assure equity and security in the title to the job...
...The New York waterfront remains, aging, chipping, cracking, and congested by traffic...
...Politics is primarily a matter of organization...
...The truckers...
...The political interventions of the State and Federal agencies and of the AFL in the New York waterfront situation were based on the belief that by changing the power relations in the longshore union, the conditions which gave rise to racketeering might be eliminated...
...ILA president, Joe Ryan, hastily called a conference between the public loaders and truckers...
...The longshoremen were suspicious of the AFL's intentions...
...For a cab driver, an idle teamster—and even a city fireman or policeman off duty!—the system was an easy way to pick up a few extra dollars, particularly on weekends or evenings, when overtime rates prevailed...
...In effect, the harbor was declared a quasi-utility and a set of controls, as stringent as any imposed on an industry, was established...
...The Italians in Brooklyn feared Anastasia, the boss of the Brooklyn piers, but they knew him as one of their own...
...Only a small percentage of New York's piers can accommodate the 40 foot mammoth trucks which carry cargo, so that for the most part freight must be handled in the choked marginal streets outside the piers...
...And it is significant that strikes erupted on the New York waterfront after the war—there were none in the twenties and thirties and during the war —only when some form of regularized employment had arisen...
...All they wanted was stability and order...
...It was inevitable, thus, that shipping would come to New York...
...Why...
...The key man on the dock was the hiring or "shaping" boss...
...In the early 1930s, legalized pricefixing by the New Deal undercut the role of the industrial racketeer...
...Thousands of such workers put in small and irregular amounts of time on the docks...
...Forced into the narrow, gridiron-patterned streets built to accommodate the horse and wagon, the trucks force all traffic to back up behind them...
...The most expensive cost item in trucking became waiting time...
...Although much of the general cargo tonnage is handled on narrow Manhattan, the island does not have a single steamship pier with direct track connection to a trunk line railroad...
...I make a distinction between corruption and industrial racketeering...
...Since all actions of any consequence had to be approved by the District Council, dissident locals were easily outvoted...
...Ex-convicts were barred from registration unless they obtained clearance from the Commission...
...Moreover, by the ability to create delay, by slowdown or strike, the pier cliques were able to exert crippling leverage upon the companies...
...That was all.* Yet, for the privilege of controlling the loading "concessions" on different piers, more than a score of men were murdered, prominent shipping executives cowed, entire union locals taken over by mobsters, and city officials persuaded to look the other way...
...When the votes were announced, the ILA had won by 11,827 to 7,428...
...Many of the men are illegal aliens, smuggled into the country like cattle...
...But the width of the slips between piers is insufficient both for the berthing of ocean-going freighters and the squat lighters which hover alongside the ships to unload or deliver the bulk cargo...
...The answer, briefly, involves an understanding of the economics of the industry, the peculiar political relationships between the union and the urban Democratic party machine in the port cities, the ethnic patterns within the longshoremen groups, the psychology of the longshoremen as an "isolated mass" suspicious of the urban community around them, and the "Chinese warlord" structure of the union itself...
...Many resented the close ties of the AFL with the Dewey waterfront commission, and the AFL's support of the licensing and registration provisions of the Act—which smacked to many unions of governmentcontrolled hiring halls...
...As Squint Sheridan, Dunn's partner, told the police: "To control a pier you've got to control the Ioading...
...Rail freight has to be delivered to or taken from the ships by lighters which float across the harbor or by truck...
...Reform Without Change In September 1953, the AFL expelled the ILA and chartered a new union in its stead...
...A trucker who arrived to pick up the consignment had to lift the shipment onto the truck himself or get some help...
...Yet if it had succeeded, it is doubtful if the pattern of racketeering would have been upset, for without the reshaping and rationalization of the "technological" environment (using the word in its broadest sense to cover ecological, technological and economic aspects of operations), the conditions which gave rise to racketeering would persist...
...The AFL was never able to obtain a foothold in the closely-knit Italian community...
...Everybody is out to make a buck...
...As the Irish have moved out, the Italians have moved in, and the old patterns of exploitation in its many vicious forms appear once more...
...But it was obvious that its chances were slim...
...The profits of loading from one pier alone, said Sheridan, were about $900 a week...
...In the summer, the street is the living room...
...But for thousands of workers who sought regular livelihood the conditions of an open shape, and the favoritism it encouraged, were intolerable...
...A morose and sentimental individual, he came to success through the "freight entrance" and knew the seamy side of life the way a well-worn douanier knows the little vices and hypocrisies of the great travelers...
...Most of the aliens came from the hometowns of the ILA organizers...
...If payment was refused, Varick, through its union contacts, could provoke a slowdown or threaten a reluctant shipper with a strike...
...The Economic Fulcrum It is a schoolboy's maxim that New York owes its commanding position as the largest city in the United States to its magnificent port...
...How explain the hold of the old union in an obviously rotten and exploitative situation...
...The various loading bosses in the west side piers pooled their efforts and formed an organization known as Varick Enterprises, Inc...
...To get a quick "turn-around" the steamship company wants an over-supply of labor which can be readily available, will work long and continuous hours a few feverish days in the week, and will wait patiently over the idle stretches until the next ship comes...
...Gradually, through a process of squatters' rights, various individuals began to assert a monopoly on loading at each pier...
...There seems to have been private negotiations, too, with Harry Bridges' west coast longshoremen, a move privately favored by Hoffa, which would have set up a bi-coast teamster-longshore combination...
...If a shipping company was to have a profitable run, it needed a quick "turn...
...Hence, the often bitter struggles for control, and the iron suppression of opposition once in power...
...In November 1936, he and his lieutenants formed a "workers committee" and obtained from the ILA a charter for a union local known as the Terminal Checkers and Platform Men, Local 1346-2...
...When the leadership was vacant in 1928 the pier leaders met on the Colombian pier and shook dice for the leadership...
...For a while it seemed as if Dunn would talk and name others con nected with the loading racket...
...The reason was simple...
...It has existed in small-unit size, highly competitive, local product markets, such as trucking, garment, baking, cleaning, and dyeing, where no single force other than the industrial racketeer was strong enough to stabilize the industry...
...Approximately sixty such stevedoring concerns hire all dock labor, and they, together with the shipping lines, constitute the New York Shipping Association which negotiates with the union on wages and working conditions...
...and, in classic monopoly fashion, they began to charge, literally, all that the traffic would bear...
...All longshoremen had to register...
...Corruption involves spoliation of union funds, pay-offs, bribes, shakedowns, etc...
...The difference is split between the hiring boss and the stevedore...
...In the twenties a dozen members of the waterfront dynasty succeeded one another in rapid fashion.f In the mid-thirties, however, peace was established...
...which served as a central collection agency and strong-arm operation for the mobsters...
...A worker was given a brass check foreach day worked, and these checks were turned in at the end of the week for cash...
...In the "public morality" of American society, corruption can be tolerated, if clothed, but naked corruption is unsettling...
...Whether you needed a loader or not, you had to pay for the service, and on each ton of goods an extra tax was levied...
...Various loaders, operating through the agency, would go to the terminals, check on weights and names of truckers and consignees, • The public loader, therefore, differed from the longshoremen who were hired by the stevedoring companies to load and unload ships...
...The public...
...There was never a loading racket in San Francisco, in New Orleans, in Baltimore or Philadelphia—the other major maritime ports in the U.S...
...Eddie won...
...the larger society, the complexities of the skyscraper world over the "shadow line" were beyond his ken...
...Certainly this was the justification for the extraordinary intervention by the Eisenhower and Dewey administrations in the waterfront strikes in 1955 and 1956 although the Republicans had previously proclaimed that government should keep its hands off any labor dispute...
...So the industrial racketeer becomes established...
...The career of John "Cockeye" Dunn illustrates the ripe rewards and the casual murders that attended the growth of the loading rackets...
...A watchman found him dead with five bullets in his body...
...The beauty of "loading" was that it provided a bland legal mask for extraordinary gain on almost no investment, other than muscle men for intimidation, and that it provided a lucrative income, as regular as death and taxes, and subject only to the normal vagaries of the business cycle...
...Under a brawny leader, pier cliques grew up to assure the pick of the jobs for themselves...
...During World War I the number of vehicles trucking freight to and from the docks increased enormously...
...Five minutes later everybody left the pier but Eddie...
...Years of racket control, however, had eliminated the independent leadership among the men...
...In the end, however, he remained silent, and Dunn and Sheridan went to the chair in July 1949...
...Dunn did not organize workers...
...They would be afraid of him...
...A lift of about * The others are craft locals of carpenters, clerks, and checkers, and a large, miscelIaneous collection of locals of lumberyard workers, warehousemen, oil handlers, tugboat operators, grain elevator workers, ship caulkers, captains of deck scows, and others with such fancy titles as "Steamship Horse and Cattle Fitters, Grain Ceilersand Marine Carpenters," "Sugar Samplers," "Grain Trimmers," "Boom Testing andRigging Testing" workers, etc...
...And the states of New York and New Jersey set up a bi-state waterfront commission with broad regulatory powers over the longshoremen, the loaders, and the stevedoring concerns...
...In all these ports, other than New York, there are direct railroad connections to the piers, so transfer of cargoes is easily and quickly accomplished...
...But only a minority of piers maintained regular gangs...
...This was especially true in the 1920s when industrial racketeering flourished...
...Control of a union local meant control of a pier, and control of a pier meant control of the host of rackets that are spawned on the docks...
...Most of the people live in the houses where they were born, and die there...
...The costs could easily be passed along to the public...
...As a result of these antiquated facilities, shore handling costs, which once were a minor factor in the operation of a boat, in most instances began to exceed the combined costs of vessel depreciation, crew's wages, insurance, supplies, overhead, maintenance, and fuel oil...
...He was the "waxer" who, despite the rough manner, could talk and hold his own...
...In the New York region there were about 70-odd locals, some craft and others geographically based, whose mem • An old system of paying unskilled labor...
...Fifteen men do the work of the regular twenty-two whose "names" are entered on the books...
...The steamship companies couldn't complain...
...It dissolved in the mid-forties when the District Attorney's office began to investigate its operations...
...In short order, by murdering two men and wounding another, Dunn blasted his way into control of loading on Pier 59...
...What's that...
...Because their needs are irregular, most of the shipping companies do not hire longshoremen directly, but contract with stevedoring concerns on a tonnage basis for the loading and unloading of their ships...
...John L. Lewis, for reasons of power, or for pique at the AFL, thereupon announced his backing of the "new" ILA and pledged a loan of $200,000 to aid the union in its fight against the AFL...
...The steamship companies don't mind...
...The consignee...
...Moreover, the longshoremen feared that Paul Hall's seafarers would take their jobs...
...So, on loading and other lucrative concessions, the companies looked the other way—in exchange for the promise of the hiring boss that he would keep the men in line and get the ships in and out fast...
...The Cycle Resumes Looking back at the four decades, how could such a corrupt and fetid state of affairs have continued for so long...
...Msgr...
...So the tollgate was established...
...Either the steamship companies could provide loaders, or the teamsters could employ their own men...
...The rest of the membership was cowed by the discriminatory threats of loss of job...
...The stevedoring concerns still maintained control over hiring, however, but they could only employ registered longshoremen...
...That is why he reigned, but did not rule...
...But the biggest prize of all was the "loading racket...
...The truckers did not want to handle loading either...
...But this is not enough...
...The waterfront is tough, and he accepted life that way...
...What hitherto had been a quasi-economic but necessary function now became outright and unnecessary extortion...
...The NLRB, fearful that the expiration of the Taft-Hartley injunction would mean a ruinous waterfront war, ordered an election...
...With everyone crowded by space, they became crowded too by "time" and sought to cut corners...
...But these elements only provide the setting...
...By encouraging a surplus of labor, the union accommodated the companies...
...The dock is an anonymous place to work...
...To maintain registration, a longshoreman had to work steadily, or, failing to work nine months, lose his registration...
...Time is the answer...
...One could succeed to the title of king only by slaying his predecessor...
...Shortly after the war, in May 1946, a man named Anthony Hintz was designated as hiring boss on Pier 51...
...of "voting with its feet," a wildcat strike...
...There are the usual feuds and fights...
...And the narrowness of the piers themselves works havoc on the dock for the trucks...
...This would have meant the establishment of regular charges by the shipping companies, and the end of the racket...
...But the area itself was politically gerrymandered...
...The long lines piled up...
...And astride the ports stand the mobs...
...The truckers agreed, in return for a contract setting uniform loading rates, that they would surrender the right to do the loading themselves...
...The barriers may have been torn down...
...In October 1956, the AFL made its last challenge to the ILA...
...How come...
...Here the tremendous amount of cargo and produce which is consumed in the city, or shipped inland, and the cargo sent from the industrial east for export abroad are loaded and unloaded...
...The demand for labor fluctuates widely, depending upon the number of ships in port...
...The men live in a narrow band of tenements between Houston and the Federal Home of Detention...
...And for this, it needed a ready and compliant labor force...
...Compulsory public loading was outlawed...
...During World War II, because of the manpower shortage, and for reasons of security, the open shape, i.e., picking a group at random, was modified by the creation of steady or regular gangs who remained intact and had first crack at jobs on the gang's regular pier...
...On the docks, only the mobsters are successful, and they are a poor model for the devout...
...A cynical reason was supplied by an official of a large stevedoring concern who stated: ...If I have a choice of hiring a tough ex-convict or a man without a criminal record I am more inclined to take the ex-con...
...Roughly thirty of these were longshore locals which normally had geographical jurisdiction over one or a small group of adjacent piers.* Within a local, the small membership and the "face-to-face" contact made it possible for small cliques to gain and "enforce" control...
...Control of "loading" and its lucrative revenues was the major prize over which the bloody pier wars were fought on the New York docks for thirty years...
...Industrial racketeering can exist only in a specific type of economic market...
...Why should they object...
...Besides, "the men are undisciplined, and need a strong hand...
...Then the collectors made their rounds...
...Historically, the way of maintaining the necessary over-supply was an "open shape," i.e., encouraging all kinds of transients to congregate at the dock and picking the men on a gypsy basis...
...These included bookmaking, loansharking, kickbacks for jobs, etc...
...Rackets multiplied: by possessing two social security cards a man could work a minimum number of hours on one card and then collect insurance while working regularly on the other...
...The process started in congruously when loading shakedowns began to reach outrageous heights...
...A number of the wildcat walkouts over the collective bargaining agreements were not as "spontaneous" as they seemed but were inspired by dissident racketeer elements who sought to use these walkouts either for shakedowns of shipping concerns or to pry control of some piers from entrenched groups...
...Their interest was in a quick turn-around of their ships, and for this they needed a larger labor supply and a tractable labor force...
...They moved to Queens, the Bronx, and Washington Heights...
...The ILA itself put on a "reform" face...
...The pier facilities are still inadequate to speed the flow of cargo...
...If the number of longshoremen were limited, and steady gangs regularly employed, one source of the exploitation would be removed...
...by controlling the shape-up, the union leadership had an effective club over the men...
...The matrix of the problem is the dilapidated physical condition of the port...
...Many of the westside Hudson piers are still manned by the Irish, but the majority of longshoremen today are Italians, and "Austrians"— a vague waterfront term that covers all Slays and East Europeans...
...Because if he is in a boss job he'll keep the men in line and get the maximum work out of them...
...They hold their piers through a process of conquest and military occupation," wrote Alva Johnston in a New York Tribune series on loading in 1931...
...The biggest single shore expense became longshoring, which accounted for 50 per cent of the ship's total expense in moving cargo...
...he finds a strategic juncture and proceeds to occupy this point of vantage to his own profit...
...For the loaders, tough punks from the tough west-side world, the waterfront was a place where everybody was out to make a buck, so why not they...
...It had received 9,060 votes to 7,568 for the AFL, while 4,399 votes were challenged, principally by the AFL...
...A victorious clique had a number of concessions it could parcel out...
...The boss loaders then reverted to the previous policy of controlling territories on an independent basis...
...Industrial racke Leering, however, performs the function—at a high price—which other agencies cannot do, of stabilizing a chaotic market and establishing an order and structure in the industry...
...Through these locals, Dunn became a power in the trucking industry, at the same time maintaining control over a number of piers...
...The others voted openly or not at all...
...In the growing commerce of the country, no other city could match its assets: wide and deep channels and ice-free and rarely foggy waters which allowed great freighters to sail a few miles inland into a set of vast natural harbors, into protected estuaries curving into the bays and into long, navigable rivers, which offered numerous and accessible wharfs...
...Know why...
...Following the demise of the N.R.A., the trade unions in most of these fields were strong enough to take over the role of stabilizing and policing the industry for legitimate ends...
...By design there were far too many longshore locals with a paper membership...
...Ethnic considerations were important...
...The political effort failed...
...Loading in New York had become "legitimatized...
...this is still in the works...
...then, while his life was ebbing away, he told police, "Dunn shot me...
...While these moves were taking place, the collective bargaining contract between the shippers and the old ILA had expired...
...The stevedoring companies blinked at the padding because the sums were petty beside the vaster benefits obtained by a pliant hiring boss who would drive the men for greater productivity...
...On the New York waterfront, the racket pattern continued...
...Although the hiring boss was, in fact, a foreman, and thus a management representative, all the hiring bosses were members of the International Longshoremen's Association, and their choice was dictated by the local union...
...As a key patronage job, the choice fell to the union officer who traded it to a friend...
...Although the New York harbor curves in a sinuous perimeter of 700 miles, the hub of the port is the four to five miles of piers and landings along the west side of Manhattan...
...later they began to enforce compulsory service...
...In recent years some longshoremen have sought to break away from the docks...
...The shape-up obviously gave the shipping companies the floating labor force they needed...
...Without those economic requirements, the system would go under...
...Rimmed off from the rest of the city by a steel-ribbed highway and a wall of bulkhead sheds is the New York waterfront, an atavistic world more redolent of the brawling money-grubbing of the nineteenth century than the smooth-mannered business transactions of the twentieth...
...The classic pattern of American unionism, its raison d'etre, is job control...
...Varick Enterprises was so strong that at one time it helped elect Michael J. Kennedy a leader of Tammany Hall...
...How can one break this vicious cycle...
...This confirmed a latent cynicism of many longshoremen that both sides were no good...
...For three days Hintz wavered on the edge of death...
...at this vantage point between trucker and steamship company, like medieval robber barons, they erected their sluice gates and exacted their tolls...
...The Shape of the Labor Supply Shipping, by custom, is a "casual" operation...
...In effect, the question of the injunction was left squarely up to the Administration...
...Actually, the International Longshoremen's Association has been less a trade union than a collection of Chinese warlords, each ruling a great or small province...
...On January 8, 1947, as Hintz started down the stairway of his house to go to the dock, three men came up, and one pumped six bullets into him...
...The action of the Waterfront Commission is a step in that direction...
...But Manhattan is an island, and its handicaps are unique...
...In the postwar years when for the first time some records were kept, only seven locals, it was shown, held regular elections by secret ballot...
...Joe Ryan, the long-time head of the union, was not a vicious man...
...If the cost is not too high, or can be passed along easily to others as in the building trades, it becomes an accepted part of the way of doing business...
...He dropped his ILA charter and obtained from the national AFL three federal charters under the name of Motor and Bus Terminal Checkers, Platform and Office Workers...
...The spatial counterpoint of downtown financial skyscraper and squat west side bulkhead became the topographical symbol of this reciprocal genuflection of finance and commerce...
...Maritime union leader Joe Curran, mindful of the need for longshoremen cooperation on the docks, came out publicly in support of the ILA...
...The shipping companies refused to handle the loading...
...Underneath all three, bearing the load, were the longshoremen...
...The "loading racket" was the key to criminal infiltration and baronial domination of sections of the ILA, and its intricate political and economic accommodations between the power elements in the New York waterfront history reveals all the facets...
...Rather than pay a driver's helper for snoozing on the truck the practice arose of sending a driver alone to the pier and having him hire a loader as he needed one from among the "shenangos" or barflies at the nearby saloon...
...The world is a jungle, and they want to give their children a better start...
...Here is where a difference in the "economic matrix" helps in part to explain the presence or absence of racketeering...
...Joe Ryan was the emissary to this world...
...Bradley then worked out a "mutual-aid pact" with Jimmy Hoffa, the fast-moving boss of the midwest Teamsters, who was then seeking to extend his power in the union...
...So close was the cooperation between the AFL and the state officials that if the AFL had opposed a Taft-Hartley injunction, none would have been issued...
...some pay, some don't...
...After all the stren uous efforts at clean-up, the old crowd was still in control...
...and issue a loading ticket—whether any services were performed or not—setting forth the amount of the charge...
...nor is there in these ports the congested and choking narrow street patterns which in New York forced the trucks to wait, piled up "time charges," or made for off-pier loading...
...Thus bookkeeping was minimized and few records had to be kept...
...Hence, the depth of the "spontaneous" support the AFL would get was exaggerated...
...Individual schedules are subject to the vagaries of weather, port delays, the kind of bulk consignments, etc...
...Truckers in a special hurry could pay a "hurry-up" fee and go to the head of the line...
...But withal, it is a community, and no one is a "cop-hollerer...
...When the results were in, the ILA had won...
...industry...
...it cost them nothing to have loaders on the pier...
...The organization had so efficient an intelligence service that it kept accurate tabs on every shipment, whether by rail or water, arriving in the city...
...The reason usually is "the kids...
...The simplest evidence, however, of the meaning of the low and unstable income status of a New York longshoreman is that banks and finance companies do not make personal loans to dock workers nor are they accepted, usually, as regular low-income tenants in public or private housing projects...
...The worker collected his pay by turning in the brass check, but so could anyone else who had the check...
...But the dilapidation remains...
...The following year, Dunn extended his activities...
...Longshoremen who went broke before pay day, or needed money in a hurry to pay bills, sold their checks for a percentage of their value...
...For this, they needed a "cooperative" union local...
...The ILA did...
...The rank-and-file, cynical about any settlement by the leadership of the union, sometimes took the only course it knew, i.e...
...As a union, the loaders negotiated loading rates with the truckmen's association...
...The industry itself is seasonal and cyclical, the volume of business subject to wars, political blackouts of trade routes, etc...
...berships ranged from ten to fifteen hundred members each...
...It is the thesis of this paper that the distinctive economic matrix of the port shaped a pattern of accommodation between the shippers and the racketeers and led to the continuation of the system...
...in few cases could a steamship or stevedore company name a hiring boss...
...This type of payroll padding, as well as loansharking and any number of other parasitic practices, was possible because of the "brass check,"* a system which had died out almost everywhere else at that time in U.S...
...There are the usual number of brawls, and on Sunday the little girls walk self-consciously in their white organdies to communion...
...The shortest waterfront reign was that of Eddie McGuire who ruled for five minutes...
...Each little local around a pier or neighborhood was a molecular world of its own with its own traditions, prerogatives, cliques, and jealousies...
...the men work fast and efficiently...
...Hence, serious congestion and delay create costly shifting expenses...
...A list of factors indicate the complexity of the problem: • While many of the longshoremen were cowed and exploited, a sizable core, roughly one-third of the work force, did have considerable privileges because of the system of favoritism...
...Slashed across the center is Pig Alley, a block-long cobblestoned, junk-strewn thoroughfare where in the daytime the boys play stickball, and at night the souses lurch along until they slide down into the street to sleep off their drunk...
...At first the ILA under the new "reform" leadership of William Bradley, a former tugboat Captain, sought to affiliate with the Miners...
...And the Administration, guided by Governor Dewey's office, in turn left the issue up to the AFL...
...It was easier to make a "deal...
...In the union Ryan was a captive...
...Here brawn and muscle, sustained where necessary by baling hook and knife, enforce discipline among a motley group of Italian immigrants, Slavic and Negro workers, and a restless and grumbling group of Irish...
...if too exorbitant it may lead to a demand for government intervention...
...they could pass the costs along to the customers easily...
...The answer was obvious long ago...
...With this local, Dunn planned to control loading not only at the piers, but in the inland freight terminals as well...
...that's life...
...a foot and a half...
...In the New York area, the longshore locals were grouped into a District Council which dealt with the problems of the longshoremen, checkers, cargo repairmen, maintenance men, etc...
...Andy [Hintz] was a boss loader"—and he stood in the way...
...Between twenty and twenty-five per cent worked more than thirty weeks...
...Nor were the city's narrow piers...
...Swanstrom, a Catholic priest who in 1939 published a detailed study entitled "The Water front Labor Problem," wrote: "Merely as a statement of fact, [the union's] officers and delegates have a vested interest in keeping the membership at a high level...
...Besides, too, many of the costs of doing business were met by government maritime subsidies—so what is the point of getting excited...
...It is a form of abuse of office or extortion from others, for the personal gain of the malefactor...
...and by this time, the locals were controlled by the racketeers...
...It does not exist in steel, auto, chemical, rubber, etc., where a few giant firms, acting in oligopolistic fashion, establish an ordered price structure in the industry...
...The one answer is the "regularization" of work...
...Subject to arrest and deportation, the men are unusually docile...
...They objected to loading only because they wanted to do the job themselves so they could make the buck out of the customer rather than us...
...Of the regular group, only between five to eight per cent obtained fifty weeks of work a year...
...In the postwar years, public loading was grudgingly given a garb of legality and became institutionalized...
...A gangster's crown, however, is like the Golden Bough of the priests of Nemi...
...When the steam ship companies deposited a consignment from the ship onto the pier shed floor they took no further responsibility for it...
...The AFL union imprudently accepted into its ranks several old ILA officials who had mob connections, principally Tony (Cheese) Marchitto of Jersey City...
...All pier superintendents and hiring bosses had to obtain licenses, and no exconvict could be employed in these jobs unless he could prove good conduct over the previous five years...
...There are many indigenous or historical factors to account for this lack, but the key fact is that the spatial arrangements of these othcr ports is such that loading never had a "functional" significance...
...And many men tried...
...The board skirted the issue which it had been called upon to judge...
...Why did the union tolerate these conditions...
...They were, in effect, independent, enterprising "middlemen" between the stevedoring operation and the trucker...
...Public loaders were in origin roughly akin to those public porters at rail stations who are not allowed through the train gate...
...Or the surplus work cards were used to pad the payroll by adding a fictitious work gang to the roster, and the extra money was divided by the hiring boss, the payroll clerk, and the clique...
...This group worked hard for the ILA...
...In response to various pressures, President Eisenhower set up a Board of Inquiry preliminary to obtaining a Taft-Hartley injunction...
...In 1950, about 40,000 men, regular workers and transients, worked on the piers...
...It was quite common for the hiring bosses on many of the piers to possess criminal records...
...Along with the house, there is the bar, and the social club, and occasionally the parish house as the center of community life...
...The truckers demanded that the shipping lines, who were the pier lessees, or their stevedoring agents, take over the loading...
...And the fulcrum is still time...
...Cross the shadow line and you are in a rough, racketridden frontier domain, ruled by the bull-like figure of the "shaping boss...
...From 1953 to 1956, the ILA sought some cover of respectability in the labor movement...
...but then, ironically, only with the backing of dissident racket leaders who used the occasion to challenge the entrenched mobs...
...The shape-up, as such, was abolished, and replaced by employment centers...
...The Rackef Fulcrum On the waterfront, control of a union local means much more than the ordinary prizes of political victory...
...the rest were floaters...
...and organization, particularly in such a rough and ready place as the waterfront, is built on the informal and "natural" leaders of the group...
...In 1936, Dunn, a man who had served time in two reformatories and a stretch in Sing Sing, turned to the waterfront...
...Time," said Benjamin Franklin, "is money...
...Actually, the "full-time" longshore force was between 16,000 to 20,000 men...
...Congestion is so fierce and waiting time so high that the large motor carriers publish penalty rates for deliveries to steamship piers within the metropolitan area...
...The charters were for New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and Dunn made himself business agent and vice president of the New York local while his hired slugger, Andrew "Squint" Sheridan, became organizer for the Jersey local...
...Trucks still wait long hours to load or discharge consignments...
...When you have a good thing, said the devil, you organize it...
...the narrow, fringe-like piers still have little radial space to permit trucks to maneuver and unload...
...For this reason, it paid the companies to play ball and buy off the mobsters...
...By the turn of the century, New York had become the greatest concentration point of economic and social power in the U.S...
...Many of the docks are controlled directly or indirectly by mobsters who dominate the pier union local, parcel out the jobs and run the rackets...
...Since prostitutes were once also paid in this manner, the term, particularly among the Wobblies, became one of contempt and was used so by Upton Sinclair as the title of a book on the "kept" press...
...The real significance of the racket, for sociological investigation, is that "loading" is to be found only on the New York waterfront...
...What is distinctive, and has to be understood, is the role of the industrial racketeer...
...What they objected to was the arbitrary and erratic setting of rates which made it difficult to rationalize the extra charges to their customers...
...The public loaders, though in effect independent contractors, became officially members of the longshore union, in the Port Loaders Council of the ILA...
...But the shipping companies refused...
...Hintz refused to play ball with Dunn and held out for months despite efforts at intimidation...
...The cobbled streets along the waterfront right-of-way had not been built for such traffic...
...In our fascination these days with power and manipulation, we often ignore the economic fulcrum underneath...
...Each warlord knew his particular work and felt at home there...
...Fifty years ago, the Irish were the dominant group...
...Here one finds kickbacks, loansharking, petty extortion, theft and pilferage—and murder—a commonplace of longshore life...
...Stated more simply, why didn't the International Longshoremen's Association act like a union...
...A tight machine of loyal followers was built up through the handing out of regular jobs to a favored few...
...The system of regular gangs did allow new solidarities to form...
...In this fashion, the Commission sought to cut the supply of casual or "week-end" laborers, who by bribing hiring bosses for the lucrative evening and week-end premium pay hours had contributed to waterfront disorganization...
...Few unions in the United States encourage cutthroat competition among men for jobs, or tolerate a condition of job insecurity...
...But this was not feasible since the Miners, because Lewis had refused to sign the non-Communist affadavit of the Taft-Hartley Act, could not participate in the NLRB elections...
...One simple answer is that most of the individuals concerned found it difficult to recognize the face of evil...
...At a special convention in Philadelphia, in mid-November, Joe Ryan, who had been acclaimed president "for life," stepped down with a pension "for life," and Captain William J. Bradley, head of a small tugboat local, was named president...
...Veronica's Parish on the west side is a typical longshore slum...
...he simply went to the employers, "negotiated" a contract, and then told the freight handlers they belonged to his union...
...Hence, it is easy to arrange "short gangs...
...Here the ocean-going vessels dock...
...around," i.e., speedy unloading and loading, and a quick get-away...
...Public loading arose out of a peculiar situation...
...Like many self-made men he had the scorn —and fear—of "do-gooders" and reformers who have never known hard knocks...
...Why this racket domination has persisted is the subject of a broader paper...
...Public loading was simply the act of employing a helper to take the stack of goods stored in the pier shed, and lift it manually or mechanically with a forktruck from the floor of the dock to the tailgate of the waiting truck...
...The Padrone and the Peons The system of the shape tended to emphasize the uncertainties and insecurities of the job...
...In the decade after the war—in part because of this "factionalism," in part because of ethnic antagonisms— every major collective bargaining agreement between the shipping companies and the longshore union was repudiated by the men...
...Desperately striving to win a new contract, the old ILA called a strike which effectively shut down the east coast ports...
...At first they offered a service...
...Traditionally, most of the longshoremen have lived close to the docks, forming a homogeneous, self-contained community...
Vol. 6 • September 1959 • No. 4
