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metropolitan Baltimore were tied into the Port’s international
lines of commerce. Today, offshoring and the erosion of America’s
manufacturing base have enfeebled America’s export base and
contributed substantially to America’s staggering trade imbalance.
Black & Decker, a global leader in power tools, is among the
handful of great American manufacturers still standing.
Ports ride the big shoulders of their workforce, the longshore-
men. Nothing moves on the waterfront of Baltimore’s public marine
terminals without the support of the International Longshoremen’s
Association, founded in 1913. Baltimore’s private marine terminals
are moving in the opposite direction; their use of non-union labor
has grown over the past three decades.
Ports are among the few remaining union and blue-collar
bastions in America. If the longshoremen are not working, neither
is the global supply chain, and as lean inventory management
becomes the operating standard of an industrialized world
economy, dockside shutdowns and slowdowns become the worst
nightmare of the global trade community, fully capable of bringing
nations large and small to their knees overnight.
Organized labor on Baltimore’s waterfront has avoided corrupt
work practices which have plagued other ports in the past, most
notably New York.
The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 enabled the Port
to move westbound cargoes more cheaply and easily than its
East Coast competitors up north, and also increased intercoastal
traffic, resulting in more stopovers in Baltimore and more money
in the pockets of area businesses.
Big ships generate significant business all along the water-
front whenever they dock — work for the longshoremen who
handle cargoes and the stevedores who direct longshoremen, for
bay pilots and tugboats who escort the ships, for chandlers and
others who supply ships, and for repair and refueling — not to
mention retailers patronized by ships’ crews. Today’s ships pay
$3,000 to $7,000 a day for a berth at the Port, whose marketing
department adds value by inducing customers to bring high
volumes of cargo through Baltimore.
Longshoremen who“work a
ship”in port performone of the
most hazardous and grueling
jobs in America’s workforce,
whether unloading bananas by
hand along Pratt Street’s piers
in 1945, left, or when operators
of cranes and trucks, above, do
much of the hauling.
