| What is the appropriate scale for port governance in North America? By standardizing freight technology, containerization has transformed freight transportation from a segmented, mode-specific, and regional system into a seamless, intermodal, and global system. The drive to provide global reach, deregulation, and increasing capital costs have concentrated carrier ownership in ocean shipping. These carriers have subsequently expanded the effective area of production for freight delivery by adopting continental strategies for freight movements. This scaling up of organization has permitted carriers to overcome ports' historical geographical monopoly over their hinterlands and initiate competitive bidding to host the carriers' terminal operations. This dissertation examines how this shift led to a particular competition between the ports of New York-New Jersey, Baltimore, and Halifax to host a Maersk-Sea Land terminal in the late 1990s. The case demonstrates that competition results in an unnecessary and unrewarded transfer of wealth from local taxpayers and users to global firms. Having illustrated the destructive nature of interport competition, the paper turns back to containerization's origins in the first half of the twentieth century to identify strategies for countering global carriers' power. The longshoremen's successful struggle against exploitative employers to secure steady and reasonable wages documents the importance of establishing a countervailing geographical monopoly over the effective area of production by scaling organization up from individual ports to entire coasts. The paper thus concludes that port governance must be scaled up to the national or continental scale to more efficiently and equitably coordinate freight transportation in North America. |
