On the Waterfront

To fuel, feed and arm the Allied fighting machine, some 6,000 tons of war materiel must be funneled daily through the port of Saigon. The labor is usually done by Vietnamese stevedores; the men of the U.S. Army's 4th Transportation Command seldom lift anything heavier than a clipboard as they direct the flow of goods. But last week the Saigon Dock Workers Union went out on strike. To keep things moving off the ships, 800 U.S. soldiers stepped in to do the heaving and toting ordinarily done by three times that many Vietnamese. From cannon barrels to C rations, from barbed wire to frozen beef, each day's cargo was somehow swung from ship to shore.

The G.I.s' yeoman performance, vital as it was, did nothing to cool the tempers of the striking longshoremen. At issue were 288 jobs at the U.S. port facility named Newport, being built four miles up the Saigon River to handle military shipments and relieve the choking congestion of Saigon port proper. From the beginning, Newport was planned as a wholly U.S.-operated military port, with American soldiers of the 71st Transportation Battalion doing the stevedoring and all the other work. The idea was to minimize pilferage, the chances of sabotage, and the risk of U.S. military equipment's falling into enemy hands.

But some of Newport's facilities were ready for use last August before the 71st arrived in Viet Nam. So the Army asked six Vietnamese stevedore companies to run Newport on a temporary basis with Vietnamese stevedores. To provide for transportation and meal allowances, the stevedores were paid from 50% to 60% more than the going rate in Saigon. The union, which supplied the men for the jobs, found this so attractive that it rotated the 288 jobs among some 2,000 of its members. And when the temporary, four-month contracts expired, the union decided that Newport was far too good a thing to let go. As the Dock Workers Union's Secretary-General Nguyen Hoang Tan put it: "The Saigon River ports belong to the Vietnamese dockers. It has always been so, under the French and also the Japanese. Why should the Americans be able to change it?"

To give his question added impact, all 5,000 Saigon stevedores went out on strike. The G.I.s undertook only to offload the necessary military supplies, leaving dozens of ships with civilian goods and USAID cargoes stacking up in the river. To bring pressure on the Army negotiators, the Dock Workers Union summoned all 50,000 union members in all of Saigon's industries to a one-day general sympathy strike. But few responded, and at week's end the pressure was coming from the other side: Premier Ky applied some pressure of his own, asserting that "strikes and sit-downs should not take place in wartime" and the strike was quietly settled.

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