Dockworker Power by Cole Peter;

Author:Cole, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

5

WORKING CONTAINERS OR

GETTING WORKED BY THEM

My soul / has been sucked dry / and suffocated by / the shadow

of a / forty-foot container, / Restored by outrage / at the mindless

technology / unleashed by cash register computers

So logical, / so methodical, / casting aside bent bodies / with

poisoned lungs / to proceed with greed. / So technologically

correct. / A heritage / caved in by the / ponderous pounding / of

some psychopathic / robotonic / beast / clothed in the niceties of

contractual compromise.

—Gene Dennis, “Footnotes to the Glory Years”

Perhaps the most important implication of containerisation to the

container user is that he has become the stevedore.

—Freighting/Containerising Weekly, July 11, 1980

Revolution. This word, so overused, nevertheless accurately describes the effects of containerization, most obviously its signal contribution to the phenomenal explosion of global trade in the last half-century. The impacts on marine transport workers, by contrast, rarely receive attention, though longshoremen in the San Francisco Bay Area have had much to say about it. In 1971, after eleven years of accepting Harry Bridges’s recommendations on containers, 96.4 percent of the rank-andfile, coastwide, voted to reject the third contract of the container era and unleashed the longest strike in US longshore history, spanning half a year in 1971–72. This strike reflected the anger that many dockworkers, especially younger ones, felt about containers and how employers had used them to regain power. Yet despite the impressive commitment of rank-and-filers, led by Local 10, the strike did not alter the terms of earlier M&M agreements. Instead, containerization continued, fewer dockworkers worked on the waterfront, more of them more beholden to employers, and—while well compensated—their union had been weakened, official statements to the contrary.1

Five years later, in 1977, containers officially arrived in Durban. Although the country’s shipping industry and South African Railway and Harbour Administration (SARH) had been quite slow to embrace containerization, once begun, half of all Durban dockworkers lost their jobs in three years. They did not yet belong to a strong union—unions only recently had been legalized for blacks when the apartheid state “conceded” this right—and so employers had not negotiated the transition, and had not imagined doing so. When containers arrived, as the Luddites feared in nineteenth-century England, dockworkers lost their jobs. Hence, though the late 1970s saw a resurgence of black worker militancy, Durban dockworkers no longer marched in the vanguard. They did quickly join unions, which could only ameliorate problems, not solve them. Dockworkers struggled to survive the storm unleashed by a seemingly simple metal box. Ultimately, in 1994, multiracial democracy arrived, arguably the greatest social movement victory of the postwar world. Yet (dock)workers had been contained, as it were, for no second phase of the revolution happened, and dockworkers, like other (black) workers, found themselves dominated by global economic forces beyond their control. In Durban, an increasing number of containers worked by a decreasing number of dockworkers mirrored the reality of a growing number of workers around the globe.

Containers upended workers in both ports, as in every other, but Bay Area dockworkers proved far more capable of responding and shaping the process and its effects.

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