This thesis examines how the stevedoring industry at Fremantle was absorbed into a national framework of port cargo-handling services during the first half of the twentieth century. The process of change compelled a local industry with its own peculiarities to conform to standards imposed by central authorities with priorities which were not necessarily in harmony with local practice or custom.In part this was the result of the inexorable forces released by Federation. After the creation of the Commonwealth, there was no isolation for anyone from the Commonwealth government's powers to legislate change if it was deemed to be in the national interest. Power, therefore, would flow towards central authorities: for the shipowners and their stevedores this meant to a central organisation, the Association of Employers of Waterside Labour (AEWL); for the labourers it meant, eventually, to the national executive of the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF).The Commonwealth government had the power and the will to intervene in stevedoring when the national interest dictated. The Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court started the process in 1914. The Commonwealth government in the War of 1914-18, in 1928, made further inroads into curtailing the levels of local autonomy. In the 1939-45 War the process was completed by the creation of government stevedoring industry commissions and boards. The final impact to local autonomy came in 1950 when the policies of a new conservative Commonwealth government forced the Fremantle Lumpers Union to seek the protection of a national union, the WWF.This thesis follows the path taken by the Fremantle stevedoring industry on its way to complete integration and absorption into the national port cargo-handling service. It examines the resistance to the changes brought about by centralisation and the part played in that struggle by both ++ / employers and employees at Fremantle to retain some control over their respective destinies.

This dissertation examines the livelihood strategies of African dock workers in Durban, South Africa, between the Anglo-Boer War and the 1959 strikes. These labourers did not conform to common conceptions of radical dock workers or conservative African migrant workers. While Marxist scholars have been correct to stress the working class consciousness of Durban’s dock workers, this consciousness was also more ambiguous. These workers and their leaders displayed a peculiar mix of concern for workers’ issues and defences of the rights and interests of African traders. Many of Durban’s dock workers were not only wage labourers. In fact, only a minority had wages as their only source of income. The Reserve economy played a role in sustaining the consumption levels of their households and, more importantly, more than half of the former dock workers interviewed for this research engaged in some form of commercial enterprise, often based on the pilferage and sale of cargoes. Some also teamed up with township women who sold pilfered goods while the men were at work. This combination of commercial strategies and wage labour has often been overlooked in the literature. By looking at these livelihood strategies, this dissertation considers how rural and urban economies interacted in households’ strategies and reinterprets the reproduction of labour and the household in order to move beyond dichotomies of proletarian versus rural consciousness. The dock workers’ households were neither proletarian households that were forced to reside in the countryside because of apartheid, nor traditional rural homesteads with a missing migrant member. The households were reproduced in three geographically separate spheres of production and consumption, none of which could reproduce the household on its own. These spheres were dependent on each other, but also separate, as physical distance gave the different household members some autonomy. Such multi-nodal households not only bridged the rural and the urban, but equally straddled the formal/informal divide. For many, their employment on the docks made their commercial enterprises possible, which allowed them to retire early from urban wage labour. Consequently, the interests of wage labourers could not be divorced from those of African small-scale entrepreneurs. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-26 17:14:17.474

L’expédition maritime peut se diviser en deux phases complémentaires, et dépendantes l’une de l’autre. Sans ordre de primauté on peut observer une période qui voit le navire en mer et une période qui voit le navire à quai. Chacune de ces phases sont tour à tour le précédent et le corollaire de l’autre. Le navire marchand ne saurait naviguer sans faire escale, et ne saurait faire escale sans avoir navigué.Pourtant face à ce qui semble une évidence, la chronologie des faits dans sa réalisation, ne permet pas aisément d’arrêter la fin de la navigation et de faire débuter la période de l’escale. Les règlementations internationales et locales qui régissent le transport maritime influencent l’approche du navire marchand vers le port d’escale, son accueil une fois accosté, et ses activités commerciales. Ces mêmes activités qui seront à leur tour encadrées par un contexte contractuel particulier, le concours d’intervenants, tant publics que privés, qui auront néanmoins le même objectif : que le navire et sa marchandise soient en sécurité une fois à quai.Mais l’escale du navire marchand se trouve être également un théâtre où des évènements parfois inattendus se produisent et viennent bouleverser les opérations prévues, retarder le navire dans ses manœuvres, ou tout simplement l’empêcher de repartir du port.Les différentes phases de l’escale, les règlements, les contrats qui s’y attachent, et ceux qui les exécutent ainsi que tous les évènements, parfois fortuits, qui peuvent se produire durant le séjour du navire marchand dans le port, amènent à nous demander s’il existe une unité dans la notion d’escale du navire marchand / Maritime forwarding can be divided into two complementary phases, and dependent one on the other. Without order of primacy we can observe one period which sees the ship at sea and a period which sees the ship at quay. Each one of these phases are in turn the precedent and the corollary of the other. The trading vessel could not sail without making call, and could not make call without have sailed. However in front of what seems obviousness, the chronology of the facts in its realization, does not easily to permit to determine the end of navigation and to make begin the period of the call. The international and local regulations which govern the maritime transport influence the approach of the trading vessel towards the port of call, its reception once she is accosted, and its commercial activities. These same activities which will be in their turn framed by a particular contractual context, the intervention of some participants, as well public as private, who will have nevertheless the same objective: that the ship and its goods are in safety once at quay. But the stopover of the trading vessel is being also a theatre where sometimes unexpected events occur and come to upset the operations envisaged, to delay the ship in its operations, or quite simply to prevent it from setting out of the port. The various phases of the stopover, the regulations, the contracts which are in relation with, and those which carry out them, as all the events, sometimes fortuitous, which can occur during the stay of the trading vessel in the port, bring to ask to us whether there exists a unit in the concept of stopover of the trading vessel