What’s at Stake in the Longshore Negotiations
The International Longshoremen’s Association, whose members operate the container terminals along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, threatens to strike on January 15 unless employers back away from introducing more automation on the docks. The union can’t simply hold back the tide: it needs to ensure that the cost of using ports that have ILA contracts doesn’t divert cargo to Pacific ports, where the International Longshore and Warehouse Union — a union perpetually at odds with the ILA — holds sway. But whatever concessions ILA president Harold Daggett wins, he may have already accomplished something more important in the long run, turning his notoriously fractious union into a more unified one.
So far as I’m aware, no thorough history of the ILA has ever been written. Here’s a capsule version. The union originated in the Great Lakes in the late 1800s, but it has been centered on New York since the early 1900s. For most of that time, it has been rent by internal quarrels. In 1937, its West Coast locals, deeming the ILA insufficiently class-conscious, split off to form the ILWU. Headquarters had only sporadic control over locals at other ports, including Brooklyn, where the predominantly Italian-American leadership openly ignored dictates from the Irish-Americans in Manhattan. Through the 1960s, the ILA battled constantly with other unions, most notably the Teamsters, for control of vessel loading and unloading (usually with success) and of warehousing and truck loading on the waterfront (usually unsuccessfully). The ILA’s ties to organized crime made it a perpetual subject of investigation, leading the American Federation of Labor to try unsuccessfully to replace it with a new union in 1953. ILA locals in other ports often treated directives from headquarters as optional. As the journalist Murray Kempton once jibed, the ILA was “the only anarchist union.”
Through all of this, individual dockers had to go begging for work each morning, hoping that their connections to a pier boss, sometimes lubricated with kickbacks, would get them a day’s pay. This began to change during the 1960s, as container ships began calling at new terminals in New Jersey. In 1965, the ILA agreed to accept containerization in return for the pledge of a guaranteed income for dockers who lost work due to the new technology, almost all of whom were in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The result was a much smaller but far better paid workforce.
The funding for the guaranteed income came from a tax on each container entering the Port of New York. This tax encouraged the shift of traffic to the South, where Savannah, Houston, Hampton Roads, and Charleston became major container ports. All these ports are in states where contracts cannot require workers to join a union and where political support for unions is weak. To protect the union’s position, some local ILA officers in those places have made side deals with port employers that the parent union has had little choice but to accept.
Daggett’s attack on automation seems to have overcome these centrifugal forces, winning support among ILA locals from Maine to Texas. This is no minor accomplishment. A successful negotiation would likely bolster the position of the central leadership to an extent the union has never known. That could well make the ILA an even tougher bargaining partner for the shipping industry in the years ahead.
Tags: containerization, ports, unions