End of the Dock Strike

As the first of New York's 25,000 longshoremen swarmed back to the piers last week, signaling an end to the walkout that had tied up the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Virginia for ten days, a hiring official summed up their delight that it was all over: "They were hysterical."

So had been the infighting that preceded the settlement. The strike was promptly called by the International Longshoremen's Association on the expiration of the

Administration's 80-day Taft-Hartley injunction (TIME, Dec. 3). It was "formally" brought to an end a week before the longshoremen went back to work, by agreement on a contract between the I.L.A. brass and the New York Shipping Association, representing its own 170 members and sister associations up and down the coast. But portly Captain William V. Bradley, I.L.A. President, fell on his face when it came time to deliver his men.

Time and again, Bradley ordered the dockers back to work, then backtracked because powerful Manhattan locals refused to go back until the other Atlantic ports had signed. Reason: the Manhattan leaders had been excluded from the final negotiations, suspected a sellout. Thus, from disunity in the I.L.A. as well as disagreement among the shippers, the strike sputtered on for five more days, was not finally settled until week's end. Cost to the shippers: $3,000,000 a day; to the 45,000 strikers: $9,000,000 in wages.

From the strike the I.L.A. emerged victorious: it had won almost all its demands on contract length (three years), wage boosts (up 32-c- to $2.80 an hour), fringe benefits and, perhaps most important, the union dues check-off system, which will give it more leverage in dealing with recalcitrant locals. But behind Captain Bradley's back there still loomed the figures of his New York leaders, e.g., Manhattan's Harold (Mickey) Bowers, Brooklyn's Anthony ("Tough Tony") Anastasia, always unruly and ever ready to pounce.

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