John Dwyer (1856-1934) was a London docks foreman who emigrated to Australia in 1888. Leaving his London employment on his 'own accord', Dwyer embarked upon a quest for recognition - recognition of his rights as a worker and his identity as an individual. Dwyer and his family arrived in New South Wales to be greeted by the economic depression of the 1890s, and state and employer mobilisation against organised labour and working class radicals. Dwyer was soon reduced to scraping together a living as a boarding house manager in Sydney's poorest districts, as he helped organise the Active Service Brigade, which agitated on behalf of the unemployed. Dwyer's surviving papers - twenty-one boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, minutes, handbills, tracts and newspaper clippings, plus several other volumes - document the life of a working class political radical and autodidact who embraced temperance, and who was fascinated by new ideas in religion and science - Darwinism, Theosophy and occult spiritualism. This thesis places Dwyer in the context of the intense ideological ferment of new ideas in politics, theology and science that characterised the period 1890-1914. Ideas that aggressively challenged the old certainties, and which Dwyer embraced in his project to 'change the face of the world.' Changing the world contested with the need to endure its conditions. Theosophy and temperance appealed to Dwyer's notion of duty, and an instinct to rationalise the social and economic roles he seemed unable to escape. The fragmented nature of his papers, and stop-start bursts of public activism - in politics, theosophy and temperance - reflect the tension between an urge to fight, to understand, to create - struggling against the daily demands of making a living and feeding a family. The thesis explores Dwyer's relationship with fellow radicals and workers, the labour movement and members of Sydney's social and political elite - men and women who shared and contested with his vision. Dwyer's complex and at times apparently contradictory values can be found amongst radicals and labourites alike - for example, William Lane, W.G. Spence and Bernard O'Dowd. Nor was Dywer's interest in theosophy or the occult as unusual as it might seem to modern readers. Dwyer's papers provide important insights into dilemmas that have challenged historians: the problem of alienation, the role of the individual in the historical process, the nature of working class radicalism. Issues often analysed in theoretically abstract terms, or at a broad level of historical inquiry, across a national or class-wide scale. Broad analyses of social forces or ideologies tend to distort their historical impact and meaning, failing to capture the complex relationship of phenomena such as class or ideology with individual experience. Working from Dwyer's experience, this thesis argues that it is possible to build a complex picture of working class life in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia.

John Dwyer (1856-1934) was a London docks foreman who emigrated to Australia in 1888. Leaving his London employment on his 'own accord', Dwyer embarked upon a quest for recognition - recognition of his rights as a worker and his identity as an individual. Dwyer and his family arrived in New South Wales to be greeted by the economic depression of the 1890s, and state and employer mobilisation against organised labour and working class radicals. Dwyer was soon reduced to scraping together a living as a boarding house manager in Sydney's poorest districts, as he helped organise the Active Service Brigade, which agitated on behalf of the unemployed. Dwyer's surviving papers - twenty-one boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, minutes, handbills, tracts and newspaper clippings, plus several other volumes - document the life of a working class political radical and autodidact who embraced temperance, and who was fascinated by new ideas in religion and science - Darwinism, Theosophy and occult spiritualism. This thesis places Dwyer in the context of the intense ideological ferment of new ideas in politics, theology and science that characterised the period 1890-1914. Ideas that aggressively challenged the old certainties, and which Dwyer embraced in his project to 'change the face of the world.' Changing the world contested with the need to endure its conditions. Theosophy and temperance appealed to Dwyer's notion of duty, and an instinct to rationalise the social and economic roles he seemed unable to escape. The fragmented nature of his papers, and stop-start bursts of public activism - in politics, theosophy and temperance - reflect the tension between an urge to fight, to understand, to create - struggling against the daily demands of making a living and feeding a family. The thesis explores Dwyer's relationship with fellow radicals and workers, the labour movement and members of Sydney's social and political elite - men and women who shared and contested with his vision. Dwyer's complex and at times apparently contradictory values can be found amongst radicals and labourites alike - for example, William Lane, W.G. Spence and Bernard O'Dowd. Nor was Dywer's interest in theosophy or the occult as unusual as it might seem to modern readers. Dwyer's papers provide important insights into dilemmas that have challenged historians: the problem of alienation, the role of the individual in the historical process, the nature of working class radicalism. Issues often analysed in theoretically abstract terms, or at a broad level of historical inquiry, across a national or class-wide scale. Broad analyses of social forces or ideologies tend to distort their historical impact and meaning, failing to capture the complex relationship of phenomena such as class or ideology with individual experience. Working from Dwyer's experience, this thesis argues that it is possible to build a complex picture of working class life in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia.

Like many other African colonies, the Sudan experienced a period of sustained industrial unrest during the late 1940s. The Workers’ Affairs Association (WAA), the representative body for Sudanese railway workers, led a two year campaign of strikes during 1947 and 1948. The escalating labour unrest provoked considerable unease among British officials in the Sudan Government. Not only was there a fear that the strikes might escalate into broader anti-colonial protest but the sustained campaign of industrial unrest also caused significant disruption to the economy. During the strikes the export of cotton - the Sudan Government’s principal source of revenue - was delayed and the movement of other essential goods was severely restricted. The thesis argues that the economic dislocation caused by the strikes, which coincided with growing concerns about rising anti-colonial nationalism and imperial decline, meant that labour discipline among key sector workers was the primary objective for the late colonial state. Although the protests in the Sudan were part of the broader strike wave that was sweeping through the African continent in the late 1940s, it has largely been excluded from the historiography of this period – primarily because of the Sudan’s unique status as a ‘Condominium’ of Britain and Egypt. Through an analysis of the Sudan Government’s labour policy, the thesis challenges this notion of exceptionality, demonstrating that the British officials of the Sudan Political Service (SPS) were animated by similar concerns and motivations to their counterparts elsewhere in colonial Africa. With this in mind, the thesis aims to address two broad research objectives. Firstly, to examine the causes of the industrial unrest: investigating the relationship between the structure of the economy, social organisation, and post-war economic conditions. Secondly, to analyse the Sudan Government’s response to the labour protests, documenting how immediate economic concerns, combined with post-war ideas relating to industrial relations management and social welfare, shaped colonial labour policy.

The South African economy experienced slowing economic growth in the late 1970s, as a result of the international economic recession and the oil crisis of the early 1970s, and the system of apartheid was declared a crime against humanity in 1973. The 1970s saw the country experiencing renewed industrial and collective mass action, most notably the Durban strikes of 1973 and the student uprisings of 1976. The Wiehahn Commission was established in 1977 to respond to African labour militancy through a reconstruction of the then dual labour relations framework. The Commission’s stated goals were the stabilisation of labour relations and the facilitation of economic growth. This reform process led to the liberalisation of labour legislation in South Africa and additionally to the inclusion of African trade unions into the state collective bargaining system, provided these unions registered. By positioning itself within the ‘School of Continuity’, the paper disputes the notion of the discontinuation of colonialism as a result of the ‘Democratic transition’ of 1994, by proposing that this transition was but a logical progression of colonial social engineering achieved through the co‐optation of African labour in the 1970s. The research proposes that the Wiehahn Commission succeeded in creating a Black middle class that continues to act as a buffer from the rest of the African population. In addition, the long‐term objectives of the apartheid state were fulfilled with the institutionalisation of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution macroeconomic policy of 1996. / Mini Dissertation (MSocSci (History))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / Historical and Heritage Studies / MsocSci (History) / Unrestricted

Using local primary sources, this work answers two questions. Firstly, is there a transnational political connection, reflected ideologically or materially, between the readership of Robitnytsia in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928? Secondly, what are the interests of the readership of Robitnytsia, as reflected in the Letters section? The answers to these questions are relevant to social historians because their focus is on content generated by the female readership of the journal, not the content generated by the male activists and political leaders who both contributed to and edited it. This work also highlights the value of Robitnytsia as a historical source of Canada, labour, gender, women's, and transnational 1 2 3 Ivan Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada: A History (Toronto, 1975), 7. Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada [...], 7. Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada [...], 9. histories; one that has been under-utilized to date and is readily available to researchers in Winnipeg and other cities across Canada. To evaluate and provide an analysis of Robitnytsia as a source of primary evidence, a brief introduction to the ULFTA, Robitnytsia, and the Soviet Cultural Revolution is helpful to the reader. After addressing the relevant historiography, the three chapters that follow provide analysis and the relevant context for the source work, including photographs and illustrations from the journal. Photographs featured on the covers of Robitnytsia provide insight into the imagery of the journal, as well as to the rhetoric associated with well-known images and icons within the working class Ukrainian community in Winnipeg. Discovering the answer to the second question posed in this work was straightforward, as the priorities and interests of the working women in Winnipeg were highly localized and specific, including recognizable and accessible priorities to even those readers who are not familiar with the work of the ULFTA. These interests included basic literacy, education, labour organization, and participation in political and social activities. The evidence regarding a transnational link to the Soviet Union, the first question of this work, was even more clear: at the grassroots level, there was no such transnational link between the Ukrainian Left in Winnipeg and the Soviet Union in 1928. / October 2016

Abstract: This is a study of the influence of anarchism and syndicalism (a variant of anarchism) on the left and labour movements in South Africa between the 1890s and the 1920s, but with a focus on the first two decades of the twentieth century. Internationally, this was a period of widespread working class unrest and radicalism, and the apogee, the “glorious period”, of anarchist and syndicalist influence from the 1890s to the 1920s. The rising influence of anarchism and syndicalism was reflected in South Africa, where it widely influenced the left, as well as significant sections of the local labour movement, as well as layers of the nationalist movements. This influence also spilled into neighbouring countries, fostering a movement that was multi-racial in composition, as well as internationalist and interracial in outlook. These developments are today almost entirely forgotten, and have been largely excised from the literature: this thesis is, above all, a work of recovering the history of a significant tradition, a history that has significant implications for understanding the history of left and labour movements in South Africa and southern Africa.

This essay will present the driving forces behind the liquidation of log-driving from 1930 to log-drivings end in 1980 in Umeälven. The debate about the log-drivers status in the river was multifold. The locals saw log-driving as an inhibiting process where, besides work, nothing good came. The hydroelectric stations saw the log-driving as an unnecessary tool because the hydroelectric stations had a larger purpose and were more prosperous than the log-driving. The underlying factors that evoked the log-drivings dismantling were several. Local people, fishing, hydro, but also the increased demand for forest and technology development. The timber became less ”float-friendly” and the forest road network was developed so that trucks became a more efficient and cheaper alternative, which led to the fact that log-floating was an unnecessary tool for the forest industry.

In recent years a number of studies within Scottish labour history have added to the discipline’s understanding and knowledge of the history of the labour and trade-union movements of several Scottish towns/cities hitherto neglected by a historiography traditionally dominated by research into the West-Central Belt. These studies, of which this thesis forms part, provide data against which generalising narratives which purport to describe the development of the labour and trade-union movements in Britain can be read - a process which ultimately must improve these now orthodox narratives or see them replaced. The thesis also provides a historical description of the progress of the labour and trade- union movements in Perth, c. 1867 to c. 1922. This study of Perth is unique in that Perth’s labour and trade-union movements have been almost entirely neglected and thus the thesis provides a substantial body of fresh observations and data in the form of a critical and comparative history of the Perth labour and trade- union movements, c. 1867 to c. 1922. Comparative considerations within the thesis revolve around existing studies of the labour and trade-union movements of Scotland’s main industrial towns/cities/areas including Paisley and the Vale of Leven which shared common features with Perth. In gathering evidence use has been made of an array of primary sources. Both qualitative and quantitative methods feature throughout the thesis which is arranged using a thematic and chronological structure. The thesis also examines the Perth co-operative movement and the city’s working-class housing, in so far as they offer an understanding of the reasons for the historical development of working-class consciousness and support for Labour in Perth. The thesis provides an example of a development of class consciousness and support for Labour that shows strong deviation with those (according to conventional Scottish labour history) found in many other parts of Scotland. In particular, the thesis considers why a significant proportion of the Perth working class either remained loyal to Liberalism or shifted allegiance to Conservatism in the very early 1920s at which point the death agony of the Liberal Party had become deafening and the rise of Labour inexorable. In addition, the thesis examines the slow development of trade unionism in Perth and its failure to make any substantial headway until almost the conclusion of the Great War. The thesis when placed alongside studies such as Catriona Macdonald’s work on Paisley adds to the case for a fragmented development of class and trade-union consciousness across Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The motor for the deviation between Perth and elsewhere is shown to be due to a ‘local identity’ - in particular a lingering and powerful industrial paternalism, the absence of a sizeable and powerful branch of the Independent Labour Party, and an insular craft-union dominated trades council. Additionally, the Perth working class is shown to have played a significant role in its own subordination going so far as to act to maintain the local industrial order even as Perth’s industrial paternalists and Liberal elites were abandoning the consensus upon which it was built.

This thesis explores the ties between the Australian and New Zealand peak trade union organisations, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the New Zealand Federation of Labour (NZFOL) and its successor, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU) from 1970 to 1990. The parameters for this study define a period in which unions faced an increasingly unstable industrial relations climate and an integrating world economy as globalisation shifted priorities for government and business from the worker to the consumer. This set of circumstances challenged the leaders of the union organisations to develop and evolve their links, confirming a 'trans-Tasman union community'. Underpinned by a common labour market and models of state development the organisations sought to understand the globalising world from a joint perspective acknowledging their shared economic and industrial circumstances. This led to the development of united leadership over international issues, civil rights and trans-Tasman relations. The Australasian industrial relations models diverged in the 1980s and the ACTU and NZFOL/NZCTU reacted by transferring policy across the Tasman in an attempt to develop innovative responses to manage the rise of the New Right.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis seeks to explore how the life histories and the voices of the contract labourers from the Kavango contribute to our understanding of the contract labour system in Namibia. In particular, it seek to ask what light do they shed on migration and on new living and working experiences, their experiences with recruiting organizations and local recruiting agents and the effect of the contract labour system on them? Is it possible to view the migration of the Kavango . workers as a progressive step or does the paradigm of exploitation and suppression remains dominant? Oral interviews were carried out among the former contract labourers and their narratives were used empirically for information about their experiences. Yet this thesis also pays attention to analyzing these narratives for meaning. Archival sources further provided insight into the colonial views about contract labourers and the operation of the system itself. This thesis points to the slow inclusion of the Kavango in the contract labour system. It also draws attention to how there is a silencing of the Kavango in the contract labour system due to the colonial counting of contract labourers earlier where they were often included under the 'Ovambo' label. During the South African colonial rule, traditional chiefs sided with South Africa for continued survival and they supported the colonialists in labour recruitment. Although contract labourers made their own decision to leave home to get recruited they did so because of the compelling social and economic hardships that resulted from the activities of the colonial officials. Labour narratives point to many journeys both within and outside Namibia. Contract labourers aimed to purchase clothing which they lacked locally, as a result of the stringent colonial laws. The 1923 Kavango workers' protest against being sent to the diamond mines in the south, where they heard workers were dying in high numbers, played a role in shaping their labour recruitment and distribution to the copper mines such as Tsumeb, Otavi, and Grootfontein according to their wishes. From the perspective of workers, the contract labour system was nothing but slavery. They felt treated like property to be sold. The naming of employers became a way to deal emotionally with this mistreatment. The memory of the 'missus' lingers on centrally because workers related to their home experience of the submissive role of women and, therefore, they could have found it traumatizing to be shouted at by a woman. The labourers adapted to new colonial times and a new rhythm of labour such as bells and whistles. They developed good inter-ethnic relations among them. Contrary to the literature, the workers' relation with the location residents was not always bad. The impact of the labour system was that there were but small benefits and these were not long lasting and necessitated a return to contract. The thesis points to this cycle of entrapment which led to the mobilizing of workers. The workers' mobilization extended to the Kavango and resulted in rebelliousness against SWANLA and its institutions. While this thesis hopes to contribute to ending silences about the Kavango's engagement within the contract labour system, it points also to the need for future research highlighting women's narratives about life in the Kavango as well as postcolonial labour migration to the charcoal and grape farms which, as narratives of the former Kavango contract labourers show, continues.