GEP 15/06: Off the waterfront: The long-run impact of technological change on dock workers

Summary

The introduction of containerisation in the UK port industry, which was introduced rapidly between the mid-1960s and the late-1970s, had dramatic consequences for specific occupations within the port industry. Containers require far fewer workers to load and unload cargo, and therefore containers greatly reduced the employment of dock-workers. Containerisation had other impacts on UK ports as well: port activity became much more concentrated in a few locations, rather than being distributed widely around Britain. Containers required deep-water ports and integrated road and rail networks, and many older ports (such as the Port of London) were unsuited to the new technology and declined, while new ports expanded in more suitable locations.

In this Nottingham School of Economics working paper, Upward and his co-author El-Sahli investigate how individual workers and local labour markets adjust over a long time period to a discrete and plausibly exogenous technological shock, namely the introduction of containerisation in the UK port industry. Using longitudinal micro-census data they follow dock-workers over a 40 year period and examine the long-run consequences of containerisation for patterns of employment, migration and mortality. Their results show that job guarantees, negotiated by unions, successfully protected dock-workers' employment until the guarantees were removed in 1989. A matched comparison of workers in comparable unskilled occupations reveals that, even after job guarantees were removed, dock-workers did not fare worse than the comparison group in terms of their labour market outcomes. This result should be interpreted in the light of the unique industrial relations policies which existed for this particular group of workers at the time of the introduction of containers. Dock workers were insulated from redundancy for almost 20 years. This had consequences for the development of new ports in the UK, such that port activity shifted and concentrated in entirely new locations. It should also be recognised that the comparison group (unskilled men who were not dock-workers) experienced very poor labour market outcomes from the 1970s onwards, and so we conclude that rather than doing “well”, dock-workers did “no worse” than unskilled men in general.

Download the paper in PDF format

GEP Discussion Paper 15/06, Off the waterfront: The long-run impact of technological change on dock workers by Richard Upward and Zouheir El-Sahli, April 2015

Authors

Zouheir El-Sahli and Richard Upward

View all GEP discussion papers | View all School of Economics featured discussion papers