The box that changed Britain

BBC Four has a “season” of programmes about the sea all last week and this week, with today an interesting documentary about containers: The Box that Changed Britain. Most of it is about the technology and its development, but it did at least touch on the human side of containerisation. Actually, for a BBC documentary it’s surprisingly honest about the bad effects containerisation had on the dockworkers and industry in general in Britain. Effects that were not inevitable, but the result of deliberate decisions made by industrialists and politicians.

The introduction of containers transformed the backbreaking labour of loading and unloading ships, reducing the small armies of workers needed to a bare handful, which should’ve been a good thing, but cost a great deal of hardship nonetheless. After all, in a world where the workers do not own the means of production, any invention that reduces the need for labour means people getting fired and thrown into inadequate social safety nets. It’s therefore not surprising, as the documentary shows, that the British dockworkers unions were largely hostile to containerisation, at least on the terms of the bosses. Their work might have gotten easier, but fewer people had to be employed and the work itself, while physically easier, was factorised, made less independent and more controlled, again seen in the scenes set in modern container ports showing how rigidly controlled the unloading/loading schedules are.

That’s not even counting the indirect impact of containerisation, as it made international trade so much easier and cheaper it put Asian countries into direct competition with Europe and America. Again, this is not necessarily a bad development, the transformation of national into international industries, but in a capitalist world the only way most of us profit from it is in supposedly cheaper prices and more choice in our consumer tat.