Labour and trade union cultures: the idiosyncratic experience of the European dockworkers in the 19th to the 21st centuries

Nothing predisposed the ports, where random hiring-and-firing practices reigned supreme and anyone could turn up in the hope of a few hours’ work, to become bastions of trade union strength able to perform the astonishing feat of forging a distinction between flexible work and casual labour. Yet this is what happened in the immediate post-war period when ports and docklands entered the third age of cargo-handling services, a phase characterized for the dockworkers by guaranteed terms of employment that marked the completion of a long process of struggle for recognition and definition of their specific occupational status. Whether in relation to hiring procedures or the tasks performed, the dockworkers of 2010 have little in common with those of the 1950s or 1930s; little, that is, except for a culture that continues to form the basis of a collective identity in which trade unionism is still very much a live force. These developments have received, curiously enough, scant attention, no doubt because the highly specific features of work in the ports made it extremely difficult to export elsewhere what was a unique set of sectional corporatist gains. And yet this experience does raise questions that transcend sectional occupational considerations in the search for alternatives to contingent and precarious labour practices.