Strikingly indifferent: the myth of militancy on the docks prior to World War II

Abstract

Dock workers have a reputation of being particularly strike-prone, across time and space. This is the spectre of Kerr and Siegel: one of the few things that has survived the passage of time since their 1950s article on inter-industry propensity to strike is the dockers' disposition to stop work. But, Kerr and Siegel's own results show that the dockers' militancy was in fact modest. More recent research has taken as an article of faith the strike-proneness of dockers. True, dock workers and their conflicts have attracted much attention. But, the reason is not the frequency of strikes in the ports but dockers' crucial position in distribution.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments by Peter Ackers, Tapio Bergholm, Deirdre McCloskey and Christer Thörnqvist; my colleagues at the Department of Economic History in Gothenburg; the discussants and participants at the 9th European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow 2012 and at the 6th International Congress of Maritime History in Ghent 2012 and last but not least the anonymous referees.

Notes

Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the 9th European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow 2012 and at the 6th International Congress of Maritime History in Ghent, 2012.

 1. I use the words militant and strike-prone interchangeably, a common procedure in the strike literature, see, e.g. Broeze, “Militancy and Pragmatism,” 170 and Turnbull, Morris and Sapsford, “Persistent Militants and Quiescent Comrades,” 692.

 2. Clegg, Changing System of Industrial Relations, 273; Edwards, “Pattern of Collective Industrial Action,” 222; Hyman, Strikes, 30 and Turnbull, “Dock Strikes,” 295. But note that there was a substantial intra-industry difference in strike activity: the UK dockers in major ports were relatively more militant than their colleagues in small ports (Turnbull, Morris and Sapsford, “Persistent Militants and Quiescent Comrades”).

 3. For a theoretical discussion, see Wright, “Postscript.” For a historical account, see Silver, Forces of Labor.

 4. Wright, “Postscript.”

 5. Barzman, “Dock Labour in Le Havre,” 72; Green, “New Zealand Waterside Workers,” 260; Taplin, “History of Dock Labour,” 450 and Tull, “American Technology,” 88.

 6. Kerr and Siegel, “Interindustry Propensity to Strike.” Their investigation covers the years 1911–1949 although, as Table 2 reveals, the data series in most countries studied come to an end before WWII.

 7. Since it is the most widespread, I will use the concept days lost even though the meaning of ‘lost’ is ambiguous, see, e.g. Hyman, Strikes, 34–6.

 8. Kerr and Siegel, “Interindustry Propensity to Strike,” 193n, 195. Followers of Kerr and Siegel have argued that dock workers not only were more militant, but also had a distinct ‘proletarian outlook’ (Lockwood, “Working Class Images”) and they were more radical than workers in general – supposedly effects of their isolation. The arguments have been disputed, for instance, by Allen (“Class Imagery,” 106) and Turnbull (“Dock Strikes,” 296). A manifest example that any automatic connection between dock workers and radicalism must be rejected has been given by Kimeldorf (Reds or Rackets?, 15): ‘By the 1950s’, Kimeldorf tells us, both US ‘longshore unions had been expelled from their respective labor federation: the [West Coast union] for following the Communist Party; the [East Coast union] for collaborating with the shipowners’.

 9. Kerr and Siegel, “Interindustry Propensity to Strike,” 195.

10. Cooper, “Dockworkers and Labour History,” 539. A similar point is made about miners by Fishback, “Alternative View on Violence,” 433.

11. Edwards, “Critique of the Kerr–Siegel Hypothesis.”

12. Ibid., 553.

13. Perrone, “Positional Power and Propensity to Strike.”

14. Edwards, “Critique of the Kerr–Siegel Hypothesis,” 555.

15. Kerr and Siegel, “Interindustry Propensity to Strike,” 207.

16. Ibid., 189.

17. Edwards, “Critique of the Kerr–Siegel Hypothesis,” 568.

18. Still, ‘the isolated mass thesis has always had its supporters, and it continually re-surfaces, albeit in a less formal manner’, (Weitz, “Class Formation and Labor Protest,” 86).

19. See, e.g. Broeze, “Militancy and Pragmatism,” 170; Edwards, “Critique of the Kerr–Siegel Hypothesis,” 563; Hyman, Strikes, 60 ff.; Kochan and Katz, Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations, 248; Miller, “Dockworker Subculture,” 309–10; Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France, 289; Silver, Forces of Labor, 89; Turnbull, “Contesting Globalization,” 369, 385n; Turnbull and Sapsford, “Hitting the Bricks,” 231; Walsh, Strikes in Europe and the United States, 186 and Weinhauer, “Labour Market, Work Mentality and Syndicalism,” 220.

20. See, e.g. Franzosi, Puzzle of Strikes, 423n; Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets?, 13 and Weitz, “Class Formation and Labor Protest,” 85–6.

21. Statistics New Zealand.

22. Besides the point that two observations do not constitute a good sample, Kerr and Siegel, (“Interindustry Propensity to Strike,” 189) explained that the rubber industry was not included in their aggregated ranking because of too few observations. Rubber or rubber in combination with other industries is to be found in seven countries in their appendix. It does not seem plausible that the authors, in the case of dock work (and shipping) leaned on data from only two countries.

23. One country, Czechoslovakia, does not have any category where longshoring reasonably fits.

24. ‘The evidence for the placement of one industry (railroad) is partly from the general knowledge, since it is not often clearly shown by itself.’ (Kerr and Siegel, “Interindustry Propensity to Strike,” 190.)

25. Broeze, “Militancy and Pragmatism,” 171–2.

26. Davies et al., Dock Workers.

27. Cooper, “Dockworkers and Labour History,” 523.

28. Ibid.

29. Chisholm, “Waterfront Conflict,” 718.

30. Andersen, “Danish Dock Workers,” 33–4 and Tull, “Waterfront Labour at Fremantle,” 492.

31. Weinhauer, “Power and Control on the Waterfront,” 505.

32. Chisholm, “Dock Labour in St John's,” 155 and Green, “New Zealand Waterside Workers,” 265.

33. There are actually 13 papers, but one of them deals with the period 1945–1960, beyond the scope here.

34. Johnson, “Dock Labour at Shanghai,” 286; Kenefick, “Struggle for Recognition and Independence,” 332; Lee, “From Guild Membership to Casualisation,” 357 and Nelson, “Longshoremen in the Port of New York,” 401.

35. Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France, 212–3, 374–5.

36. Turnbull, “Dock Strikes,” 295.

37. van der Velden, “Rotterdam Dockers.”

38. Silver, Forces of Labor, 98–9.

39. Ibid., 200–2.

40. Silver, “Labor Unrest and World-System Analysis,” 19–20.

41. Assuming that the drunkenness was properly recorded; paradoxically it may be that drinking was under-reported on the very grounds of its large diffusion in the ports.

42. I would like to point out that the WLG database is an excellent resource for comparing labour unrest. The fact that I think we should be cautious about using unrest as a proxy for strikes in the particular case of dock workers does not change my overall opinion. Also, Silver's book has a holistic approach and it cannot be expected to capture every detail at lower levels of aggregation.

43. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, 204.

44. Cooper, “Dockworkers and Labour History,” 526.

45. Turnbull and Sapsford, “Why Did Devlin Fail?,” 238.

46. Quoted in Turnbull, Morris and Sapsford, “Persistent Militants and Quiescent Comrades,” 696. Similar comments by authoritative bodies and employer organizations can be found in many countries.

47. Taplin, “History of Dock Labour,” 442–3.

48. I have not found any note on this methodological aspect in the issue of Review dealing with the WLG database, see Silver, Arrighi, and Dubofsky, eds., Labor Unrest in the World Economy. Recently Silver commented (Hulden, “Three Cheers for Data!,” 240–1) on the bias of the Times of London and the New York Times ‘against reporting routine events’. The bias is an advantage according to Silver, since:

If you are working from a theoretical perspective that assumes that most important social change happens as a result of non-normative waves of social conflict (rather than during periods of routinized and institutionalized social conflict) then the bias of the newspapers in favour of the latter actually make them a better source for identifying times/places of transformative waves of labour unrest than official strike statistics.

Given the purpose of Silver's study, I have no objections. But at the same time, I believe her remark strengthens my point: port strikes tend be ‘non-routine events’ and they are therefore more likely to end up in the papers.

49. Arrighi, “Crisis of Hegemony”; Arrighi and Silver, “The United States and Western Europe”; Perrone, “Positional Power and Propensity to Strike”; Perrone, “Positional Power, Strikes and Wages”; Silver, Forces of Labor; Wallace, Griffin and Rubin, “Positional Power of American Labor”; Wright, “Postscript” and Wright, “Working-Class Power.”

50. Cooper, “Dockworkers and Labour History,” 536.

51. Wilson, Dockers: The Impact of Industrial Change, 327.

52. Arrighi, “Crisis of Hegemony,” 82.

53. For the complexity of the subject, see Barnes, Longshoremen, 51–4; Green, “Work Process,” 570–1; Miller, “Dockworker Subculture,” 306–7; Taplin, Dockers' Union, 12–3 and Turnbull, “Dock Strikes,” 298–9.

54. Griffin, “Reviewers” Comments,” 425.

55. Silver, Forces of Labor, 100. See also Turnbull, “War on Europe's Waterfront,” 306 and Levinson, “Unionism, Concentration, and Wage Changes,” 201–2.

56. Talley, “Ocean Container Shipping,” 941.

57. See, e.g. Bergholm, “Masculinity, Violence and Disunity.”

58. About violence and the extensive use of strike breakers in Scandinavian and north-west European ports, see Bergholm, “Masculinity, Violence and Disunity”; Flink, Strejkbryteriet and Tidman, Spräng Amalthea!.

59. On the connections between positional power, strikes and the success of striking, see Perrone, “Positional Power, Strikes and Wages”; Silver, Forces of Labor, chap. 3 and Wright, “Postscript.”

60. Miller, “Dockworker Subculture,” 304.

61. Davies et al., Dock Workers.