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The Tip of the Spear: How Longshore Workers in the San Francisco Bay Area Survived the Containerization Revolution
Abstract
Introducing new technologies often crush unions; indeed, sometimes that is the purpose. However, the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), on the US Pacific Coast, demonstrates that need not occur. In 1960, the ILWU and Pacific Maritime Association signed the Mechanization & Modernization agreement (M&M). M&M represented among the first efforts by a union to shape this process—to “get a share of the machine.” Although workers understood that new technologies cannot simply be resisted, tremendous controversy still existed, culminating in the US shipping industry’s longest strike ever. In 1971, members of the San Francisco Bay area’s Local 10 led this strike, having experienced containerization most extensively. Although their numbers plummeted, those remaining maintained power at a strategic point of the global economy. Looking at how these workers managed to survive and partially shape the introduction of a valuable new technology suggests that it, and globalization, need not always destroy unions.
Repression of the North American trade union movement dates to the late nineteenth century. Much of this repression has occurred in response to union militancy during strikes, some of which were directed against political radicals of various orientations. Peaks of repression against radical trade unionism occurred during World War I and in the immediate postwar years as well as in the early Cold War period, after World War II’s conclusion into the early 1950s. Through the analysis of three recently published volumes, I argue that the repression of North American left-wing unions was intentionally severe because of the strength of these labor organizations and the threat they were perceived to pose to employers and the government. Given that these left-wing unions were much more militant than the American Federation of Labor unions, this governmental repression (as well as that of other forces) can be viewed as a conscious set of tactics invoked that were meant to break, or at a minimum tame, these radical unions in the service of capital. Such behavior also acted as a warning to nonradical unions that repression could be directed against them as well.
Our research compares and contrasts the transnational activism of maritime unions in Australia and the United States in what became the first and longest example of global solidarity in the post-World War II era – the anti-apartheid movement. Dockworkers, with a deep history of solidarity, occupied a strategic position to exert real influence on the South African state by refusing to unload South African cargo. We analyze the actions of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) in Australia and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the US, namely by exploring notions of solidarity and political unionism among marine transport workers, ideological motivations for solidarity activism, ethnic and race relations among workers, and labor connections these maritime unions made beyond the waterfront. We find and account for similarities and differences in Australian and US labor activism that often is underrepresented and incompletely explained in the literature.
Using a comparative methodology, this essay examines how and why longshore workers in both the San Francisco Bay area and Durban demonstrate a robust sense of working-class internationalism and solidarity. Longshore workers are more inclined than most to see their immediate, local struggles in larger, even global, contexts. Literally for decades, workers in both ports used their power to advocate for racial justice at home and in solidarity with social movements globally. While such notions might seem outdated in the twenty-first century, as unions have been on the decline for some decades, longshore workers grounded their ideals in the reality that they still occupied a central position in global trade. Hence, they combined their leftist and anti-racist ideological beliefs with a pragmatic understanding of their central role in the global economy. While not the norm, these longshore workers’ attitudes and actions demand attention, as they challenge the notion that workers in recent decades are powerless to shape their world.
For almost a decade during the 1910s and 1920s, the Philadelphia waterfront was home to the most durable interracial, multiethnic union seen in the United States prior to the CIO era. For much of its time, Local 8 was majority black, always with a cadre of black leaders. The union also claimed immigrants from Eastern Europe, as well as many Irish Americans, who had a notorious reputation for racism. This important study is the first book-length examination of how Local 8, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, accomplished what no other did at the time. Peter Cole outlines the factors that were instrumental in Local 8s success, both ideological (the IWWs commitment to working-class solidarity) and pragmatic (racial divisions helped solidify employer dominance). He also shows how race was central not only to the rise but also to the decline of Local 8, as increasing racial tensions were manipulated by employers and federal agents bent on the unions destruction. © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
In Durban, South Africa, stevedoring workers were the most physically powerful workers of all, and were known as onyathi in Zulu, or buffalo, which aptly described the physical and collective nature of their work. Throughout the century, the stevedoring industry was especially labour-intensive, necessitating teams of workers. As in most industries in South Africa, African workers built and maintained the docks. These buffalo developed the linkage that made Durban a thriving city and sustained the apartheid economy. Yet today the buffalo are all but gone, replaced by onboard warehouses known as containers. Machines have replaced the men once so integral to the survival of the city.
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible. But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential. Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.
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