For what seemed like an instant on Friday, a fit of labor unrest at the New York-New Jersey seaport left us daydreaming about the docks.
The reverie arose after thousands of longshoremen walked off the job to protest either oversight by the state agency charged with regulating hiring practices at the port or a federal criminal investigation into the leadership of their union.
Reality depended on which unnamed union official provided which explanation to which news outlet. “It was totally unannounced and unexpected by anyone,” one of those anonymous sources told the Times, which noted that the reason for the action “remained shrouded in intrigue.”
Apparently some workers felt the same way. They told the local NBC affiliate they didn’t know the strike was happening when they reported for work on Friday and were awaiting instructions on what to do next.
Whatever the grievance, the stoppage caused containers to stack up in Newark and Elizabeth, as well as on Staten Island. The terminal at the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn either shuttered or remained open depending, again, on whom you asked.
By Friday evening the walkout was over. The terminals, the country’s busiest after Los Angeles and Long Beach, would reopen Monday as scheduled, the Port Authority tweeted about nine hours after the strike began.
Still, however briefly, thoughts turned to a modern-day “On the Waterfront,” or to the contents of all those containers. We imagined life as a stevedore. We Googled the dimensions of a ship that can pass through the Panama Canal: maximum length, 967 feet; maximum beam overall, 106 feet; maximum draft, 44 feet.
Some of us looked away from our labors (which take place at screens, mostly) and out through the narrows, toward a curtain of clouds in steel blue that hemmed the horizon.