13-15 November 1997
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Comparative International History of Dock Labour, c. 1790-1970
The workers who loaded and unloaded ships have formed a distinctive occupational group over the past two centuries. As trade expanded with the international development of capitalist production, so the numbers of specialized dock labourers increased and became concentrated in the major ports in the world. A variety of case studies of these workers in different parts of the globe and at various historical stages have been produced by labour historians, sociologists, and anthropologists.
by Lex Heerma van Voss
Very broadly speaking, the dock labourer was seen in the literature until the 1960s as an immovable relic of unmodern labour traditions. Since the 1960s the literature has seen the dock labourer also as the embodiment of working class virtues like spontaneous solidarity. In recent years a more ambivalent picture has been drawn, for instance calling attention to cases both of interethnic solidarity among dockers and to cases in which the opposite was true. Most of the studies which have given rise to these divergent images of dockers have been based on one of a small number of ports in industrialized countries. @07:On 13-15 November 1997, the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) organized a conference on the Comparative International History of Dock Labour. The aim of this conference was to probe beyond these individual studies and develop a genuinely comparative international perspective over a longer historical time-span.
The conference had been prepared in three stages. The first step was the writing of a framework document, which set out in some detail the proposed range of issues to be covered by the conference. The framework document signalled that many historians and social scientists have concentrated their research primarily on dock strikes and trades union. For the purpose of meeting the standards of modern social history, this can be no more than a first step. Taking dock workers (male and female) as a focal point and using a broad social and historical perspective, it is also important to analyse their everyday life (including divisions of gender, race and class, working, housing and family conditions), as well as the economic structures and organizations that have influenced their working and living conditions. Not all the attention should be concentrated on the classical 'casual age' of dock work and its demise, but the earlier artisanal phase should be examined and analysed.
Port reports
On the basis of this framework document, some twenty-five reports on different ports were collected. These were drawn up by experts on the respective ports, along the lines indicated by the framework document. Among the ports covered were London, Hamburg, Hull, and New York, as well as Shanghai, Mombassa, Auckland, Tanga, and Bombay. The port reports have been published as a research paper by the International Institute of Social History.
In the third and final phase leading up to the conference, a number of participants wrote a comparative discussion paper on aspects of dock labour, basing their work to a large extent on the port reports. Themes covered included the formation and reproduction of dockers as an occupational group, the work process, state influence, and ethnic differences.
The broad comparative approach, both in time and geographical scope, proved very stimulating. Before the casual period, for instance, there often was a guild phase, in which specialized workers were responsible for loading and unloading cargo. Guild as a word may have a European ring to it, but the port reports drew our attention to the fact that guilds or guild-like organizations were to be found all over the world. Typical of the guild configuration is that a particular group has a monopoly on loading or unloading. This can be shaped by technical reasons, for instance, because the harbour cannot be reached by sea-going vessels and goods have to be taken on board lighters first. This situation allowed the lightermen of Madras to operate in a guild-like manner in the second half of the eighteenth century. In other cases guilds were established because the city authorities granted a monopoly to an association of workers. When these were also involved in measuring, weighing of packing of merchandise, it was easier to argue that they should be public officials and have a monopoly.
After this guild period the classical phase of casual dock labour set in. This ended around 1960, some time before containers came into use. It is interesting to see how global this change was. Even in the African context, where casual dock labour had connotations totally different from those in ports in the industrialized North, decasualization took place. This decasualization was not motivated by the technological demands of worldwide containerization which can be shown by the example of Shanghai. There goods were loaded from containers into lighters before being brought to shore.
The phase of the classical casual dock worker was limited in space and time, and this limitation extended to the social sphere. In many ways dock workers proved to be an integral part of society, the dockers' wages only a part of household income, and dock labour often a transitory phase in the life cycle. All in all, the image of dockers was shorn of some of its exotism, partly thanks to the inclusion of 'exotic' ports in the analysis.