Leave it to a queen to come between brothers.
Red Hook dock workers — brothers in the same longshoreman’s
union — will split up on Saturday morning, April 15, one group unloading
passengers and baggage from the glamorous Queen Mary 2, the other taking
lumber and steel off a freighter called the Brasilia.
The long-awaited arrival of the QM2 is a historic moment in Red Hook —
and not just because Brooklyn is welcoming the largest cruise ship in
the world.
It also puts front and center two competing visions for the Red Hook waterfront
— namely, whether Brooklyn’s last working container port will
survive or succumb to the newly arrived cruise ship industry.
Many longshoreman are hedging their bets. Nearly 100 union baggage handlers
will jump to the cruise ship terminal from the container port today.
Two hundred others will remain with the far-less-feted cargo, their fate
in the hands of city officials, who say they will not renew the container
port operator’s lease when it expires next year.
Through it all, the union brothers vow to get along.
“I’m not going to yell at anyone for working over there,”
said one crane operator at the container port. “The cruise ship terminal
is better than the one in Bayonne, better than the one in Manhattan. But
it will only be beautiful as long as we still have our jobs over here.”
