New Dock City

In 1960, following three years of discussions and union soul-searching, the ILWU and PMA signed the landmark Mechanization and Modernization agreement. The M&M contract, as it's known, ushered in the age of automation, containerized cargo and superships, and made West Coast ports far more productive — after M&M, it would take only two days instead of two weeks to unload a ship. The pact also made the ILWU a smaller but richer union by stripping it of thousands of manual lifting jobs in return for unprecedented salaries and pension payments. Now, for the second time in its history, the ILWU is facing a sea change in technology that can only result, down the line, in reducing its numbers. The big question is how much longer the ILWU can remain a union powerhouse if the core nature of its members' work changes and the numbers of those workers continue to decline.

Officially there's still a news blackout on details of the contract, with most leaks coming from the PMA and not the chronically secretive ILWU. What seems certain about the new contract is that pensions and health benefits for longshore workers will increase — which could be a sign that instead of asserting its jurisdiction over a new rank of clerical workers, the union is simply padding its coffin as it prepares for further downsizing of the waterfront labor force. How strong the ILWU will remain in the new century, as well as what kind of union it will be, hinges on how many of the computerization jobs it was able to claim jurisdiction over during negotiations.

The word is that ILWU negotiators are happy about the pact, even while it will ultimately cost those 400 clerical jobs, most of them through attrition, not firings. The safe money seems to be riding on the rank-and-file voting for the six-year agreement; still, ILWU locals enjoy a tradition of freewheeling, sometimes cantankerous democracy and, with the International Association of Machinists' mechanics having recently rejected its leaders' recommendation to accept a United Airlines' contract offer, anything is possible. As one veteran harbor worker said, "Everything down here is real. But it's not reality."