Worldwide · mid 1900s
5 ideas
Dockworkers in Durban and San Francisco use strategic control of ports to pursue labor rights, racial justice, and international solidarity.
Just-in-time production, low stockpiles, and longer, more complex supply chains leave less slack to absorb a stoppage. So the same efficiency that speeds up trade also raises how much power the workers who move goods could have.
New machinery is neither for nor against workers; what matters is who controls it and how it is brought in. When container ships arrived, the strong San Francisco–area union made sure no worker was fired because of containers. In Durban, employers facing a weaker workforce under apartheid simply fired half the dockworkers.
A union that controls who gets hired can use that power to break down racial barriers, not just to win better pay. On the Bay Area waterfront, a union that began almost all white drew on its radical roots to recruit many Black workers. In both Durban and the Bay Area, organized dockworkers led their cities' struggles against racism and apartheid.
Dockworkers can turn a local refusal to handle a shipment into political action against regimes far away. Durban dockworkers refused to load meat for an army invading Ethiopia in 1935, and in 2008 refused to unload weapons bound for Zimbabwe's government. Workers in both ports also staged stoppages against apartheid and authoritarian rule abroad.
Workers who load and unload ships sit at a narrow passage in the flow of trade, so stopping work there spreads costs far beyond their own workplace. That gives them power to press for their own rights and for wider social causes. In the two port cities studied, Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, dockworkers became perhaps the most militant and important workers in their communities.