Word: longshoremen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Marlon Brando starred in On the Waterfront (1954), the morning shape-ups of New York dock workers were pretty much as the movie portrayed them-noisy, brawling scenes of men fighting for the jobs available. No longer. Now longshoremen "badge in" at 7:30 a.m. at local hiring halls by inserting a plastic card into an IBM computer and lounge around for a while. By 9 a.m. the unlucky ones have gone to work; the others can go home to watch TV or moonlight on a second job-and still collect full base pay ($64 per day). That undemanding...
...trend threatens to make longshoremen as redundant as pick-and-shovel coal miners. It once took 100 longshoremen working around-the-clock for a week to load and unload cargoes on a conventional freighter; 40 to 50 men can do the same job on a container ship in less than a day. Although U.S. cargo traffic has soared by 276% since container ships first appeared, the number of longshoremen working the docks nationwide has declined from 150,000 to 90,000. In New York, I.L.A. membership has dropped from...
...union rolls. Locals in each port negotiate the size of the guarantee. The money comes from a tonnage charge levied by port employer associations on all cargo that crosses the docks. In the Port of New York, through which about a third of all U.S. container traffic passes, longshoremen are guaranteed pay for 2,080 hours annually-40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. In ports with less container ship traffic, guarantees are smaller-1,500 hours a year in Boston, for example...
...agree on a common response. In New York, the lowliest longshoreman "earns" a minimum of $16,640 a year yet can often wind up doing no work for weeks at a time, though when he does work the job is a grueling grind. At the top, 354 New York longshoremen make $40,000 to $56,000 a year. Because of upside-down seniority rules, some older longshoremen never have to work at all. The rules provide in some cases that when there is actual work to be done, it must be assigned first to the most junior longshoremen; only when...
...companies who today paid tribute to Bridges, used extraordinary measures to break the longshoremen's strike, enlisting the aid of National Guardsmen who killed and wounded scores of workers...