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practice. It wasn't invented by the San Francisco, or any other employers, or by the union in New York. The hiring by a hiring boss who represents the stevedores rather than the union is the way in which gangs have always been assembled for the loading and unloading of ships, and it has a reasonable and proper basis really. You must realize that before the days of radio, and even before the days of trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cables, there was no way of knowing when a ship would come in. When a ship was sighted was when they sent out word, not by telephone, but by foot messenger, to bring in a gang of people to unload her. This goes back to the days before cables when you didn't even know when a ship had sailed from Liverpool, or from Lisbon, or from Marseilles. When she would appear in New York harbor, or San Francisco, as the case might be, was equally an unknown matter. Of course, in the days of sailing ships, long antedating steem, the same thing was even more true. There was no possible way of estimating the length of a voyage.

So the practice of the shape-up was an old practice. The word “longshoreman,” which is used now to designate a trade, actually springs out of the fact that the men who were hired were men who were along the shore, the men that were around - “alongshore.” You find that in the old