West-Coast Waterfront - The End Of An Era
Swados, Harvey
One of the first things to strike an outsider about San Francisco is the respect and esteem in which longshoremen are held by the rest of the community. They are good credit risks; they are...
...Neither do a number of younger men at the executive end...
...Some of our own members don't want it to get off the ground...
...I'm afraid so...
...nevertheless it remains true that in the course of obtaining this security he will be transformed...
...You know it and I know it...
...The mechanics of this were worked out by the men themselves and were democratically defined by union rules for both "gang" men and "plug" men...
...This is insufficiently known, and represents one of the most fascinating and illuminating—if depressing—aspects of the whole West Coast waterfront story...
...For another thing, the contract provides that "payments into the Fund shall be abated" up to the maximum Employer obligation of $13,650 per day, "in the event of a work stoppage in any port or ports in violation of the provisions of this document...
...He has already assured me that he is not going to stand for "phoney militants" upsetting the smooth functioning of the new agreement...
...Finally fed up with Stalinism in '52 or '56 or whenever, they turned to the ILWU because Harry Bridges seemed still to be leading a democratic working-class anti-capitalist force...
...In return he will yield up those conditions for which he fought not only in 1934, but for a decade and a half thereafter, in a series of over twenty major port strikes...
...An injury to one, they discover very very late, is no longer an injury to all...
...I have in mind those dissidents who, because they are Socialists or Trotskyists or exWobblies or ex-Stalinists, persist in operating as though the principles of solidarity and brotherhood were antecedent to self-aggrandizement, the accumulation of power, or the captivating glare of publicity...
...Not only will the radical dissidents of whom I have been speaking be harder to find...
...The contract is, as I have indicated, terribly complex, and is susceptible of a variety of interpretations as to the applicability of smaller gang sizes or larger sling load limits, on the part of both workers and employers...
...So I asked Harry Bridges, and he replied, "Although the 'B' men are not considered a part of the industry, they're better off working here two or three days a week than they would be now in industry at large...
...Here again, Bridges was quite frank with me in granting that this can be, and probably will be, used to whittle down local autonomy and concentrate more power in the hands of the International leadership...
...What is shocking, though, is the cold gray impersonality of the containerized shipping operation represented by the Hawaiian Citizen...
...I am more concerned, however, with the dedicated militants than with the anti-union...
...This fly is the group of dock workers known as `B" men, about 1500 workers up and down the Coast, who are specifically excluded from the benefits of the new agreement...
...In order to understand the terms of this deal, its relation to the real problem of mechanization/automation, and what effect it will have on the working lives of the thousands of members of the union, we are going to have to go back, and spell out some of the conditions that existed prior to the new contract—conditions that made West Coast long shoring the most attractive way of life for a casual laborer in the United States, if not in the entire world...
...And if it is true it will only be because the men themselves are vigilant and the union itself is militant in supporting their "beefs...
...The official replied that most of the American press had received the agreement favorably, that many editorials had hailed it as an epoch-making solution to some of the human problems posed by automation and mechanization for industry at large, but that the Wall Street Journal had condemned it as "Communistic" because it paid hard cash for buying back prerogatives that should always have been management's...
...This story may reveal more about the nature of the Soviet Union, or of its bureaucrats" conception of communism, than it does about this new contract...
...Now they find that they are expendable...
...WHAT ABOUT THE MEANTIME...
...This may turn out to be true...
...most, however, are increasingly bitter and vengeful...
...One of these work conditions which is not often talked or written about, but which strikes me as both civilized and unique, has been the longshoreman's relative freedom of choice as to which days in the week he would take off...
...in the Port of Los Angeles Area, mostly Latins from the Southwest and from Mexico...
...PMA was anxious for a more stable and reliable work force than that available from the pool of casuals...
...It has been described, I think, inaccurately, as an "automation" or a "mechanization" agreement...
...mechanization, total mechanization, of our shipping industry—like so many other problems that tax human ingenuity—is going to have to be globally resolved...
...But a hardheaded economist like Max Kossoris, in an article in Monthly Labor Review for January 1961, speaks not of "whether" but of "after": "After most of the class B longshoremen and the casuals have been eliminated from the industry, how will the rest...
...That these practices have by and large been eliminated in recent years is symbolized by the enforcement of a "performance and conformance" clause in the 1959 agreement...
...As his social life becomes more and more middle class in all of its values, so will his union become more and more of a tightly enclosed job protective association, as Bridges himself conceded to me...
...IT IS RATHER UNLIKELY that Bridges will insist upon the union's grimly supporting "beefs" to the limit if these, no matter whether they should be justified, were to interfere with his generation's getting its due...
...Ironically the `B" men of San Pedro may be in better shape, even though more work will be lost there, because the Port of Los Angeles, unlike San Francisco's waterfront, is growing so rapidly that in a few years it will become one of the great ports of the world...
...It could—but there is a fly in the ointment...
...For every Matson Line auto ship, specially designed so that cars can be driven aboard at California (instead of pushed aboard by the traditional eightman gang), loaded like sardines, and driven off at Hawaii at such a saving that it pays to send the ship back empty from Hawaii, there are a hundred ships plying between here and the Orient that will be dependent for decades on the individual products of Asia and the individual toil of its thousands of straining dock workers...
...so will the other oddballs, the men with brains who liked to work with their hands, the occasional novelist, painter, or philosopher whom one encountered on the waterfront because it was—as loyal union member Eric Hoffer put it to me— "a good place to talk and a good place to think, a mixture of physical and intellectual stimulation...
...Two additional safeguards in the new contract will serve to reinforce worker compliance with PMA-union leadership interpretations...
...but one wonders...
...His fully-registered membership will have job security, an eventual guaranteed minimum work week, and a fairly comfortable and se cure old age, with $7,920 coming each man's way after 25 years of service, in addition to his pension and social security...
...Furthermore, Bridges is discharging an obligation to those who built the union and fought the good fight...
...the latter, because it was going to be able to replace the retiring and the dying with men who were by and large devoted to Harry Bridges and his kind of trade unionism...
...In our opinion, they'll be all right for the next two or three years...
...they are homeowners (yes, some have swimming pools...
...By 1966 Eric Hoffer will have retired with his pension, and both the union and the waterfront will be far less hospitable havens for whatever Hoffers this nation may be fortunate enough to produce in the future...
...The actual number of working longshoremen is therefore very small indeed...
...Not only do they have little, if any, contact, with the "B" men, the ones who will be frozen out of the industry by the contract...
...Sure, the most universally respected management negotiator on the Coast (and very possibly in the nation...
...When he got to work, the longshoreman who worked less difficult cargoes—light case goods, containers, unitized loads—could often look forward to rest periods equal to 25 to 40 per cent of his work day, depending on whether he was discharging or loading...
...He will become more like other American workers, whether manual or white-collar: he will go to work more regularly, more steadily, more habitually, he will do what he is told—and in consequence I suspect he will come to like it less...
...In addition to the traditional grounds of safety violation in what is still one of the most hazardous occupations in the United States today, the workers are entitled to object to changes on grounds of "onerousness...
...When you climb aboard the Hawaiian Citizen you are no longer entering the swaying world of the seafaring man...
...The tractors haul them to an enormous gantry crane which picks them up and deposits them in the hold where they fit, one atop the other, like the blocks of a Chinese puzzle...
...They will no longer be there, on the company payroll, under the terms of the new agreement—but this is hardly the most striking aspect of this mech anized vessel...
...With this ratification of the contract, excited newspaper reporters and publicity men have been telling us, February 1, 1961, marked a new day in the history of men and machines, a day which was "historic" and "epoch-making" in that by mutual agreement employers and workers were exchanging the introduction of labor-saving equipment for the establishment of a fund to provide for early retirement, no layoffs, and a guaranteed minimum work week...
...Everybody on the West Coast knows that these workers have had a pretty good life, and a pretty clean union (this is not the place to probe such minor sores as the alleged job-selling activities of certain union-elected dispatchers at the hiring hall...
...Bridges's home base, Local 10 San Francisco (which voted up the contract 5-1), has an average age of 56...
...This article, together with other DISSENT pieces (revised) by Harvey Swados, and a good many other pieces, will be published next spring by Atlantic-Little, Brown in a book to be called A Radical's America...
...Therefore men will be losing their jobs under this new agreement, and it seems to me a piece of semantic legerdemain on the part of union and management publicists to insist that this is not so simply because "B" men are not "fully-registered" union longshoremen...
...When I asked an executive of PMA whether it wasn't really true that most of these men wouldn't be losing their livelihoods as a result of a contract publicized as a job-saving agreement, he replied, "The 'B' men are a matter for Harry Bridges' conscience...
...The first area of freedom that I mentioned, that of deciding for yourself whether you wanted to work on any given day, will be one of the first to go...
...When the new contract expires in 1966 the men who have lived under it will be a lot less easily distinguishable from the rest of the American workers than they are today...
...Again I am not speaking primarily of the opposition on the right, which ranges from white-superiority workers frustrated by Bridges's automatic bloc vote from Negroes (some of whom have been getting theirs back by "Crow Jimming" the whites), to "professional Catholics" who wear the Cross but have been known to wheel and deal with the Communists...
...It was born out of the employers' defeat in the 1934 general strike, and exists now solely as a bargaining agent with the maritime unions...
...The CP is a foundering hulk on the waterfront, of no use to anyone as either vote bloc or whipping boy...
...WHERE DOES MECHANIZATION come into the picture...
...The immediate beneficiaries will be the old-timers with 25 years of seniority, who will be able to retire with up to $7,920 cash money...
...No doubt even the 10 to 20 per cent of the San Francisco longshoremen who are functionally illiterate will soon be arguing the nuances of that word with at least as much fervor as their children in high school and college...
...As A RESULT of the truly historic 1934 strike, the longshoremen won a jointly-operated hiring hall, which freed them from serf-like dependence on the caprice of individual employers or bosses...
...of the cut in man-hours be absorbed...
...The following spring some 570 of the applicants were accepted after interview, and shortly thereafter the figure rose to nearly 800...
...ful of his followers...
...Aside from this last practice, retained almost solely at San Pedro and almost universally conceded by the longshoremen themselves to be ultimately indefensible make-work, these have been generally the conditions of the working life of the West Coast longshoreman...
...These men are not a statistic...
...WHO ARE THEY...
...The younger men will be absolutely assured of a vested interest in their jobs and will be able to look forward to the same deal as the older men...
...On the day that I watched the loading of the Hawaiian Citizen, during the waning hours of the old contract, several of the "witnesses" were snoozing and chatting just aft of the number two hatch...
...I number these among the finest men I have ever had the privilege of getting to know, but I must in conscience report that their prospects in the ILWU are dim indeed...
...it is also ugly, with its omnipresent oil pump levers pecking away like monstrous insects, in precise inverse ratio to the beauty and charm of San Francisco...
...You can't even blow coffee into a hold the way you can sugar or oil: as of now there are too many grades of coffee, and too many orders for one bag of this and three bags of that...
...Many of them carried the ball for Bridges in other unions when he needed bail money, or legal aid in fighting jail and deportation...
...furthermore, in opening its books to members with union background or maritime experience, it welcomed a substantial number of DP's from other unions which had also been expelled from the CIO on charges of Communist domination, or from unions which had themselves ousted substantial numbers of alleged Communists...
...A LEADING PMA OFFICIAL, recently traveling in the Soviet Union, was closely questioned at the Ministry of Marine, where he paid a courtesy call, about capitalist reaction to the new "Mechanization and Modernization" Agreement...
...Harry Bridges is in the anomalous position of being an internationallyknown labor leader (notorious or distinguished, depending on the angle of vision), with an actual membership of only a few thousand, and shrinking at that...
...Kossoris himself was engaged for a year by PMA, with the consent of the ILWU, to devise such a system of measurement...
...This despite the fact that Max D. Kossoris, director of the Western Regional Office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, argues that the shoe is on the other foot, since PMA will be pouring $5,000,000 a year into the union treasury regardless of how well the members cooperate in living up to the terms of the new agreement...
...Some are still inclined to trust Harry...
...Harry Bridges at sixty does not envisage anything approaching complete mechanization of the waterfront in his lifetime...
...It means quite simply that from here on out such devices will be manned by the minimum number of longshoremen needed to carry out the operation, rather than by contractually specified six or eight man gangs...
...I asked one of these disillusioned men, and he replied with a weary smile, "They're sitting home nights...
...What are all the old lefties doing...
...Whether they will be able to do anything about it is another matter...
...Nor is the ILWU, as many believe, a Communistdominated union...
...The waterfront is not a coalmine, where you can swiftly calculate whether it will pay to install automatic equipment: if it won't you shut down the uneconomic mine, if it will, you buy the equipment and throw out the men, and in a decade you have mechanization...
...When I asked him how he intended to educate his membership to the subtleties of the new agreement, and to the necessity for self-discipline if it is to work, he replied readily, "We'll give it to them Castro-style, at our meetings...
...It ran an ad in the local papers and received about fourteen thousand applications for membership—such was the attractive power of the union and of the longshore work in the Bay Area...
...Cargo is packed in huge twenty-four foot aluminum cubes which are picked up by a monstrous four-legged device known as Christine (because it looks bisexual, or asexual) and coupled to yard tractors driven by ILWU men who used to drive fork-lifts and jitneys...
...THE "B" MEN themselves just don't know...
...It is too early to say whether new challenges will develop which will make working on a fully containerized shipping operation as varied, or as much fun (I use the word advisedly) as more traditional waterfront work...
...No, the infinite variety of objects shipped from nails to locomotives, together with the conflicting aims of shippers and the infinite variety of conditions prevailing in various ports, is going to preclude rapid conversion of our merchant fleet to Hawaiian Citizens or of our docks to full-scale mechanization for many decades...
...One of the first things to strike an outsider about San Francisco is the respect and esteem in which longshoremen are held by the rest of the community...
...it confined its investigation of applicants pretty much to questions of their responsibility and possible existence of a criminal record...
...Then bring them in and give them equal working rights...
...There are an infinite number of gradations of mechanization taking place on the waterfront ("automation" as such is not really at issue, since what is being replaced is not brainpower but backpower), from the blowing or pumping of sugar, like oil, into ships' holds, to such seemingly petty (to the outsider...
...But this does not mean that hitherto no such devices had been introduced in the maritime transportation industry...
...since I do not have to meet a payroll, I am so far from feeling that there is anything shock ing about this that I incline to the belief that maybe we would all live longer if there were more of it...
...And of these a number are ships' clerks...
...It is also true that many men never abused these practices, but utilized them as part of a natural work rhythm in the course of which they spelled each other, equalized their burdens, and lightened the load for the older men in the gang...
...ALTHOUGH IT IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that he now has more in common, intellectually and temperamentally, with Paul St...
...they are pillars of society...
...But there are no guarantees of it embedded in the agreement...
...and the people with whom I spoke in San Pedro, from President George Kuvakas on down, are bitterly agreed with Bridges that the new contract will be a knife to gut their dissident local, to render it powerless to protest, should the new agreement not only knock oil an anticipated 80U jobs by eliminating multiple handling but also impose a harder working life on the membership...
...True, no one can defend the business of insisting that every single little piece of cargo be placed on the skin of the dock, and then picked up again, one at a time—that is, not unless he is arguing for the principle of make-work as an employer contribution to the struggle against rising mass unemployment (a defensible principle, by the way, for a radical union which sees it as a holding action...
...To get his minimum wage guarantee (the new agreement calls for a floor under earnings, with the minimum tentatively established at 35 hours), he will have to accept any work offered—work like bananas or freezers that he would formerly have left to the casuals...
...The longshoreman knew finally —if he worked in the port of San Pedro—that his fairly continuous employment was assured by multiple handling, a jurisdictional form of featherbedding which delimited teamster from longshore work and specified that under certain circumstances a cargo load would have to be moved from pallet boards to the skin of the dock, put together and taken apart one or two extra times, between its removal from the ship and transport from the dock by truck...
...a third man, alone at the hatch, wiggles his fingers to indicate that it is being properly lowered into the rack that will hold it rigid until it is discharged in the same way some days later...
...a second man, alone at the controls 150 feet above the pier apron, picks up the 46,000 pound cube and guides it onto the trolley...
...they were willing to do just about anything for him, and in fact some of them did do just about anything for him...
...the leadership hoped that the great number of Negro applicants would behave like many of their relatives and friends, who always went down the line for Harry...
...The terrible disillusionment of these idealists finds its parallel among the scattered opposition to Bridges in the fully-registered union members, including some of the older men...
...Perhaps...
...For anyone who, like myself, has ever followed the sea, the Citizen is no longer a freighter...
...At work the sling load limit was set at 2100 pounds, which meant that large or unwieldy or dangerous loads would be broken—"skimmed" —into two or more manageable loads within the weight limit, thereby spreading the work equitably and making it possible for those laboring in the hold to work off a four-wheeler...
...But then negotiations got underway for what was eventually to emerge as the five-year mechanization and modernization agreement— and the "B" men, who had first been told frankly that they were being taken on to get extra work, and then promised at a series of special meetings that they would become full-fledged union members in six months to a year, found that by mutual agreement a freeze had been clamped on the industry...
...if any sharpy on either side tries to create dissension, there will be plenty of sincere people to do some yelling...
...Here is a liveyear built-in insurance that hotheads and militants, whether "phoney" or not, will think twice before depriving their older union brothers, the men who built the organization, of the negotiated rights of their declining years...
...In fact the Communist party in Harry Bridges's own Local 10 (San Francisco) now consists of one aging stalwart, who turns to with his little bundle of newspapers and leaflets, and a hand 448 © 1961 by Harvey Swados...
...they have given him substantial and unique control over what might be called the process of production on the docks (that is, the movement of cargo), and they have now been amended or altered for a quid pro quo of $29,000,000, by membership vote of PMA and by referendum among over 11,000 voting longshoremen and clerks...
...But supposing that everything works out beautifully, that the longshoremen go along with the agreement in good faith, and that their employers exercise self-restraint in utilizing their new-bought domination of the work situation...
...Such an interpretation has been fostered by both union officialdom and employers in their publicity handouts, with the result that newspapers have been running leads like that of the San Francisco Examiner of last October 25: "Harry Bridges' outcast longshore union showed the Nation's labor organizations yesterday how to live and prosper with automation...
...In such an atmosphere, it will be a hardy union member who will persist in pressing a grievance or in asserting that the new agreement works an "onerous" hardship...
...NOW A FIVE-YEAR CONTRACT, which has received international attention, has been signed between the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association...
...In fact both parties are quite frank, in private discussion, in referring to the contract as a $29,000,000 bribe to buy back certain working conditions that have been in force for a generation...
...Not only will nobody be sleeping—nobody will be daydreaming, or arguing politics, or even getting a personal kick out of the cargo that he pats after he stows it properly in the hold...
...I cannot think of another part of the country in which, thanks in large part to their union, laborers are so well regarded and are in turn so proud of their work and their affiliation...
...There is no question but that a substantial number of these men—no one now knows how many, and it will vary from port to port —will be squeezed out of the bottom end of the industry, so to speak, even while the older men are being squeezed out of the top end into retirement...
...Negro members are deacons and elders of their churches and are regarded in their neighborhoods as doctors used to be by the newlyfledged Jewish communities...
...In the meantime Harry Bridges will spend his declining years as leader of a steadily declining work force...
...This arrangement was made possible first by the fact that the industry works around the clock and through the week, depending on the number of ships in port, and second by the existence of a pool of casuals always available for work...
...The Minister ruminated for a moment, and then murmured to his translator, "Tell the gentleman that I agree with the Wall Street Journal...
...There are optimists who believe that economies resulting from the new agreement may revive coastwise shipping, now virtually moribund because of highway trucking...
...In fact its entire longshore membership (exclusive of Hawaii) is little more than 15,000...
...being reasonable men, they are not always certain that Bridges is automatically wrong on every issue...
...and his working life will become less and less spontaneously rhythmic, and more and more rigidly routinized as mechanization creeps in and productivity studies are utilized to standardize output and to housebreak the longshoreman...
...However, contrary to popular opinion, the ILWU is not a massmembership industrial union...
...It is true that the agreement as originally contemplated called for the adoption of a system whereby, instead of the work rules being bought out, employers' gains would be measured and the employees would be paid only for the actual man-hours saved (Mr...
...Contractual negotiations have been carried on not merely in public, but in a "goldfish bowl," with workers free to observe while union president Harry Bridges, surely one of the most adroit, sharp-tongued, and agile-witted maneuverers in the entire labor movement, sparred with the Pacific Maritime Association's J. Paul St...
...and so, as each operates with his small band of followers, they gradually lose heart and turn their intelligence to the resolution of other problems, whether personal or social...
...In short, while it has already been profitable for certain of the larger shipping companies to mechanize their ships and their port facilities even while they had to pay men to serve as "witnesses" (the term is Harry Bridges's), it will now be much more profitable under the new contract for those companies that can afford the capital investment to proceed with mechanization and thus compete more advantageously with foreign operators...
...his own explanation, that he was anticipating further restrictive legislation by the new administration, has its own flaw: while it is true that John F. Kennedy asserted last September in Salt Lake City that "An effective attorney general under present federal law could .. . depose Harry Bridges as head of the Longshoremen," and that this is one campaign pledge that the Kennedy brothers may earnestly attempt to fulfill, it also seems apparent that PMA would hardly have been willing and in fact eager to part with $29,000,000 to junk restrictive work rules if it were certain that Congress would go ahead and do the job for free...
...It is doubtful too whether he has guessed wrong about the temper of his people during the 1960s that they (including the leaderless and aimless young redhots of San Pedro) will settle for what he has won for them in the new contract and will not yearn—or struggle—for that which he has yielded up in return...
...Already men are working harder on the waterfront and are grumbling, but impotently, as they come to realize once again the meaning of the practices they voted out of existence...
...One reason why these workers—and the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, it must be added—are so well regarded and themselves have so much self-respect is that the union has substantially complete control over the labor force (so that worker loyalty is always to the union rather than to any employer who buys his services through the hiring hall), and control too over the way in which the work is done...
...And they didn't...
...Still meaningful, however, are the existence of a substantial number of sophisticated workingmen in the union, most of whom received their political education in or around the CP, and also the undimmed passion of Harry Bridges for the Soviet Union and Communist China, though he no longer needs the Communist party...
...and his vice president, Bob Robertson, struck an ominous note in The Dispatcher of January 13: "No fast operator, on either side, should start thinking of cutting a fat hog for himself, or making a name for himself, by disrupting the orderly process of change that will be necessary...
...Take the case of Bridges's Local 10, which for some years filled out the labor needs of management by supplying "permit" or "work card" men, in effect apprentices or postulant members, in addition to the "casuals" or "Social Security" men, like policemen or firemen or the unemployed, who came down to the waterfront to earn a day's pay...
...In an aging union, I think it can be fairly said that the proposed immediate beneficiaries were all but unanimous in their decision to "go along with Harry," while the younger men were split in their reactions...
...Several things can be said at the outset, however...
...Another said it was "cold and inhuman...
...But it may serve to remind us too that a way of life is passing from the scene...
...This latter is no monolithic organization of ruthless waterfront employers...
...What is more, a two-way cycle is constantly in operation: as a load is placed in the ship another load is removed from it...
...IN ANY CASE, we must be quite clear that this wave of the future is not battering at the docks...
...Man-hour requirements are going to be substantially reduced, perhaps as much as 35 per cent (they will have to be, if the employers are going to make back that $29,000,000...
...Sure than he does with his own rank and file, Harry Bridges has in the past given great leadership to the workers of the West Coast...
...Of course it can be argued that what he is getting in exchange is a much more complete security than he ever had before (although most observers are skeptical that the minimum wage guarantee will ever go into effect, since it will probably be computed annually...
...there are even those who expect an impending revival of the China trade, once the mainstay of West Coast shipping...
...As I indicated at the beginning of this article, it is the fact that they exist that should matter—not how many of them there are...
...And although he has also done them some very questionable services indeed, it is a brave man who will rise to oppose him, knowing that he is opposing not only the leader's record, not only his practically unanimous support in the Negro ranks—which have always been accorded scrupulous equality and now form a majority of the membership of the San Francisco Local— but also his caustic tongue and his skill at both oratory and demagogy...
...Either could absorb the cut in man-hours and even make necessary the permanent employment of the "B" men as members of an augmented labor force...
...In these circumstances it does seem somewhat unusual that it should be the union officialdom which is giving the loudest assurances that, to quote The Dispatcher, "Actually, the only situations where men will work harder is where they haven't been working at all...
...The men viewed this as justifiable, because they were never compensated in wages for the unpaid hours necessarily spent at the hiring hall every day, or in time off for the necessarily continuous work on more difficult cargoes...
...One man described it to me as "ulcerating" work...
...This is an old man's contract...
...In four words: the employers shall be allowed to "Utilize labor-saving devices...
...After all, at workplaces with cost-plus contracts all over the country, from Anchorage to Miami, a small percentage of men are sleeping on the job, whether they are workers curled up in a dark corner or executives with their feet up on the desk...
...This seems the most satisfactory explanation of why Bridges pressed for the new agreement in 1960 rather than waiting until the expiration of the old contract in 1962 to bargain off the work rules...
...Save for a handful who had squeezed into full membership, some 615 "B" men in the Bay Area now await the end of the freeze and, what seems most likely, their gradually being starved out of the waterfront...
...The contract is officially titled an "Agreement on Mechanization and Modernization...
...Are there people who don't want to see this plan succeed...
...Nor can anyone defend some of the other practices, such as four hours on and four hours off, when they were abused as a means of goofing off by irresponsibles who had no trade union background and were not indoctrinated by the ILWU in the honorable traditions of trade unionism—in the most notorious instance a dead man was carried on a San Pedro walking boss's time sheet for two days before it was discovered that he had died in a brawl in Tia Juana...
...The union was anxious for new members who would be loyal and union-conscious...
...For one thing, in clause after clause it is specified that changes will be agreed on, not at the Local level, but at the Coastwise level...
...It has become an ingeniouslydesigned mobile warehouse floating between the states of Hawaii and California and rapidly filled and emptied at either end...
...With this new agreement he has re-entered the agreeable limelight, and what is more he has thrown down a challenge to those who threw him out of the official labor movement, the Meanys and the Reuthers, whom he continually excoriates for being more concerned with "respectability" than with "militancy," to come up with new agreements which will be as far-reaching and as "respectably" received as has been this agreement which he has maneuvered so shrewdly into existence...
...One way of looking at it is to say that in order for the longshoreman to maintain his privileged place in the general community he is going to have to yield up his privileged place on the waterfront...
...These are men, many of them, who entered the working class voluntarily and who, after rough years in the NMU or the MCS or the UAW fighting for the Communist party line because that line happened to coincide with their own idealism and socialist principles, are now at the end of their rope, at the end of the line...
...But you're not going to do that...
...And at least a half-dozen longshoremen have reported to me, with shame or fury, the meeting at which Bridges rose with his cold grin to taunt the fully-registered men for their qualms about dump ing the "B" men: "You want to play politics with the 'B' men...
...A few, with no trade-union background, may become so vengeful that they will attempt to sue the union: this may be why the union is once again holding special meetings for them, meetings which had not been called since the beginning of the freeze...
...internally its members are apparently as torn with dissension and wholehearted mutual contempt as any labor union, and member employers have been known to make backdoor arrangements with particular unions in order to beat out competitor companies...
...Besides, shipping is a two-way business...
...The explanation of his opponents, that he sold out, is unsupported by evidence...
...In order to make a week's pay, the longshoreman will really have to scuffle...
...First: it should not be taken for granted that all of the work practices which the union has bartered away were simply boondoggling...
...the entire ship can be emptied and reloaded in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods...
...If it works out this way couldn't it be described as a millennial labor-management accord, one which frees management for the job of modernization and mechanization while it protects the old worker who has given his life to the industry and the young worker who is committing his life to the industry...
...The cargo is not visible: it is simply a ranked series of metallic cubes locked into place...
...The most impressive of these conversions to date has no doubt been Matson's transformation of the S/S Hawaiian Citizen into a fully containerized vessel, together with a parallel transformation of the yards and cranes in the ports of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu...
...Thus both management and labor stood to gain by this influx of new blood: the former, because it was obtaining the services of men eager to enter the industry, ready to turn to every day, and more than willing to work all the dirty cargoes that the fully-registered men handled only reluctantly...
...it has to be remembered that, unlike the forest ranger or the lighthouse keeper, the longshoreman is engaged in a highly cooperative enterprise, one in which the goof-off artist as much as the eager beaver can not only disrupt the work rhythm but jeopardize the lives of the other members of his working gang...
...Whether they would have if Bridges had appealed to their best instincts that afternoon instead of their worst, is doubtful...
...His political heresies aside, Bridges has been incorruptible and has spoken always for the ranks, acutely sensitive to their voice...
...One man, alone on his tractor, drives the cube to the gantry...
...In the midst of negotiations, the measurement of gains concept—to which the union had agreed—was dropped, because, the employers claim, it was too cumbersome and technical, and the idea of an annual lump-sum payment was substituted...
...In the spring of 1958 the Local decided, in conjunction with PMA, to replace the members it was losing by attrition...
...The center of his opposition, Local 13 San Pedro (which voted down the contract 2-1), has an average age of 36...
...Now WHETHER OR NOT this free hand in management that employers now have, for the first time in a generation, is going to result in severe exploitation of the longshoremen is a question that can only be resolved on the docks in the months ahead (and by PMA, to whom individual employers wishing to introduce changes will have to make application...
...FOR THE UNION has a psychological and a financial stake in the success of this agreement...
...from fear or distrust they have almost nothing to do with each other...
...refinements in unitizing cargoes as mounting fuel drums, strapped in units of three on a board at their place of manufacture rather than having them handled and stowed singly on the waterfront...
...Nevertheless I think that this interpretation underestimates those pressures on the union leadership which I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph...
...The elderly men will retire, either voluntarily at 65, or mandatorily at an earlier age, with a cash payment to speed them on their way, if lessening man-hour requirements should require a shrinking of the labor force beyond the normal four per cent annual attrition...
...The fact is that these are nien who are committed to the shipping industry and are presently essential to it (they now do most of the hold work in San Francisco, Stockton, and other ports...
...To this extent, and to this extent only, is the new contract a "mechanization" agreement...
...They also won a set of conditions relating to the job itself which were easily enforceable by a militant democratic union, particularly one strongly influenced by professional revolutionists—conditions which came to be accepted as a way of life by the flood of new recruits to the waterfront during the boom days of World War II (in the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly Negroes from the Deep South...
Vol. 8 • September 1961 • No. 4
