New Interest in Dockers and Transport Workers
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997 12:58:59 GMT
From: "LabourNet" [chrisbailey@gn.apc.org]
Reply-To: union-d@wolfnet.com
NEW INTEREST IN DOCKERS AND TRANSPORT WORKERS:
LOCALLY, NATIONALLY, COMPARATIVELY, GLOBALLY
Some real and virtual resources
Peter Waterman
[waterman@iss.nl]
Dockers, other transport workers, and their international
organisation and action, have not been the subject of much past
research or - with the possible exception of truckdrivers and
seamen - of much current political attention. I am not sure
whether this situation is dramatically changing or simply that
the internet is providing us with more information. This note
mentions some items which have recently appeared on my screen or
landed on my desk.
A number of the items concern the ITF. Because of its inability
and/or unwillingness to effectively support the Liverpool
dockers, the International Transportworkers Federation has been
spotlighted by labour internationalists recently. Whilst some of
the criticism has been well informed and targeted, most of the
critics know as little about the history and workings of this
international trade secretariat as about the others - or about
the International Confederation of Trade Unions with which they
are losely affiliated.
ICFTU highlights ITF
The third issue of the glossy new magazine of the ICFTU, Trade
Union World (November 1997) has three pages on the ITF, including
its support to the US Teamsters in their strike against the UPS,
and something on ITF General Secretary, David Cockcroft. None of
this material goes deep, nor is it intended to be anything but
politically supportive. Check out the ICFTU at
http://www.icftu.org. Or email the ITF at info@itf.org.uk for a
copy of Solidarity: The First 100 Years of the ITF.
The ITF talks turkey
The TUW article on him refers to to Cockcroft's presentation at a
low-profile, but very important, Global Labour Summit, organised
by the Danish industrial workers union, SiD, earlier this year.
Cockroft's piece can be found at http://summit.sid.dk, alongside
the main conference document, and those by other participants.
This is a less propagandistic piece, and it makes fascinating
reading. Cockcroft criticises the nature of existing
international unionism, proposes democratisation, flexibility and
computer networking and praises the `enthusiasm which exists
amongst rank and file unionists for international contacts' -
here making specific reference to the Liverpool dockers! It
becomes evident from Cockcroft's piece that the major obstacle to
effective ITF solidarity activity is its inevitable subordination
to the national trade unions, that at best give it but $2 per
member per year! (I was impressed by much of the ITF argument,
since I have been making these kinds of remarks for the last
10-15 years, sending them to the ITF, and getting as reward
either a resounding silence or a public rebuke). But, as an
international confederation of national (and customarily
nationalist) unions, the ITF exists a long way away from actual
workers. It can respond only with the greatest difficulty to the
kind of initiative being shown by the Liverpool dockers. And
Cockcroft does rather spoil the new image by talking of the
favourable climate for the international unions created in part
by `governments in place in the US and UK which share many of our
values'. (Can he possibly be talking of `Climate Saver' Clinton
and `Mother's Mate' Blair?).
A history of the ITF - without
dockers
A new book has been produced in English by the venerable
International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Edited by
a well-known Dutch labour historian, Bob Reinalda, this is
entitled The International Transportworkers Federation 1914-1945.
I found it in my institute library so I do not have the price to
hand, but it looks expensive. Get one for your local library.
Unfortunately, the cutoff years means that it misses the dramatic
role of dockers before 1914 and after 1945 - and even more
recently. Indeed, it does not have an index reference to dockers!
The period 1914-1945, however, reveals clearly enough how the ITF
was both dominated by and then self-subordinated to the logic of
the nation-state and inter-state relations. But Reinalda's
orienting introduction fails to give the necessary
political-economic background and shows no knowledge of recent
theorising on labour internationalism. It is a very institutional
history. You can't find `worker' or `strike' in the index either.
It records rather than criticises. But the 20 or more case
studies none the less provide us with more information than we
have had before, and they are contributed by serious labour
historians. It just all needs placing within a broader, deeper
and more critical theoretical model. There is also no indication
in the book that past history relates to today's problems, and
that labour history is meant to empower contemporary workers.
A history of dockers - without the
ITF
The same IISH has just organised a major conference on
Comparative International History of Dock Labour, c. 1790-1970. I
picked this one up on http://www.iisg.nl/dock.html. This was held
in Amsterdam, November 13-15, and will no doubt lead to another
expensive book. This conference was clearly about dock labour and
labourers, rather than about their national or international
organisations. The programme works its way systematically
through: dockers as an occupational group, the labour process,
(de)-casualisation, employers, the state, ethnicity, etc. Only
one session deals directly with actions/strategies. Once again,
there is no indication that there is any relation between the
subjects of the conference (most of them dead) and any living
dockers (refusing to lie down and die so they can be safely
dissected by historians). There is, however, one last session on
historiography - historical theories and research methods. The
session specification ends with the question: `Where do we go
from here?'. Well, they could always do some oral history with
some dockers in movement...
A Marxist interview with Liverpool
dock leaders
And this leads us to something rather different...
This is the fascinating interview with two internationally active
Liverpool dockworkers' leaders by Peter Kennedy, from the
academic Marxist journal, Critique. This is to be found on the
website of Chris Bailey's LabourNet, at
http://www.gn.apc.org/labournet. It is one of two such interviews
by Kennedy, the other being with a couple of Women of the
Waterfront. Read this one, also. Wow, indeed! The responses here
do not give quite as much attention to the international aspect
as I would have liked. But the interview does suggest the kind of
new thinking and acting taking place amongst these dockers, who
actually think one can and must fight neoliberalism, rather than
having a cup of tea and compromise with it. Although Kennedy is
hoping to get our local heros to express themselves in class
terms, they have a broader view and ambitions. And, as a serious
scholar, Kennedy gives them their head. Mike Carden and Terry
Teague evidently feel they have to learn, and have have been
learning things, from the ecologists and `Reclaim the Streets'
activists who have been supporting them! They are beginning to
question whether wage labour is good for human beings, thus
reminding us that the historical slogan of the labour movement
was not `a fair day's pay for a fair day's work' but `the
abolition of the wages system'. The world on their lips is
`justice' - the injustice of the war on labour and on the
environment, the necessity for a common programme of social
justice. This connects up the Liverpool dockers with the London
unionists who, in 1896, heard there was a conflict in Rotterdam,
took the ferry over, started organising dockers there, and laid
the basis for the ITF...
Situating dockworker
internationalism
This last point is made, and expanded on in my own forthcoming
book. (Mentioning it is hardly advertising it, since the
publishers tell me it is likely to cost 50 quid, and I have never
paid that price for anyone else's book.) This one is called
Globalisation, Social Movements and the New Internationalisms.
And it is about a related broadening to that revealed above -
from a class to a more general internationalism (which has to
include a working-class one within it). It is supposed to be
coming out with Mansell/Cassell, London and Washington, June
1998. Chapter 4 is entitled `Beyond the Bureau: The Waterfront
Internationalism of the Spanish Dockers'. This deals with an
earlier attempt at creating a dockworkers' international, in the
Europe of the 1980s. Liverpool dockers were involved in this
experience also. The point of the chapter is precisely to
contrast the institutional internationalism of the ITF with the
self-activity of these workers. Reference is made to the two
Liverpool dock disputes of recent years. And even to the role of
computer networking. I guess that one note I strike that is
different from those mentioned above, is that a new labour
internationalism, whilst obviously dependent in the first
instance on flesh and blood workers, will be created by a
dialogue and dialectic (including conflict) between workers at
the shopfloor, the institutionalised unions, and the new
internationalist social movements. Information about this book
can be found, I am told, on the Web also, in the labour bookstore
provided on his highly professional site by Eric Lee,
http://www.solinet.org/LEE/labour04.html. Actually, I myself only
found it by going one level further, to the Amazon electronic
bookstore in the US, with which Eric Lee is collaborating. But I
understand it will be shortly in his bookshop also. Check it out
and let me know?
Peter Waterman (London, 1936) is a
semi-retired Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Studies
in The Hague. He did his Ph.D. on the relation between dockers
and port authority workers, in Lagos, Nigeria, in the 1970s. In
the late-1980s he did a study on the international communications
strategy of the Spanish dockers in relationship to the European
dockworker network of that period.
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