Labor: An Expensive Education

Education is a wonderful thing, but a $750 million education is expensive by any standards. That is the estimated cost to the U.S. economy of the longshoremen’s eleven-day walkout, which broke last week when New York longshoremen voted 2 to 1 to accept a new contract amounting to an 80¢-an-hour package over four years. Education was at the heart of the matter, since the longshoremen had first turned down the new contract without really knowing what it was all about, gone on strike, and decided to approve the contract in a new vote only after International Longshoremen’s Boss Teddy Gleason launched an educational campaign to convince them that it was the best ever.

With New York’s 24,000 longshoremen returning to the docks to resume work, the rest of the nation’s 60,000 longshoremen were almost certain to fall in line in short order.