U.S. Business: Beyond Toleration

To the men who run the U.S. merchant marine, the slow erosion of union membership was at best a point of academic interest last week. A four-week-old strike by the International Longshoremen's Association had laid off 62,000 dockworkers from Maine to Texas, left 600 ships lying useless at anchor in Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports, and backed up some 14,000 freight cars under a pier embargo.

The strike's cost to the U.S. economy was already estimated at $600 million. The biggest losses were caused by the interruption of commodity shipments. In New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, as sugar refineries ran out of...

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