Beyond the Waterfront
Few workers hold as much potential power as dockworkers. Studying the history of those workers, both in the San Francisco Bay Area and Durban, South Africa, shows how such workers can continue building that power into the twenty-first century.
Old port area along Mission Bay, San Francisco, CA in 2015. (Robert Gumpert)
Almost alone among unions, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) employs a full-time librarian and archivist. In my seventeen years as organizing director, I would often take my lunch down to the third floor of the union’s headquarters in San Francisco and gab with librarian Gene Vrana or his successor Robin Walker. Beyond maintaining the union’s archives, books, newspapers, clippings, and oral histories, they were both a treasure trove of knowledge about the union’s history and traditions.
Perhaps no other union in the United States besides the United Auto Workers has been the object of so many histories, articles, and speculation. Peter Cole has added a fine volume to that pantheon with his comparative study of dockworkers in the Bay Area with their counterparts in the Port of Durban, South Africa.
A Tale of Dockworkers on Two Continents
Cole focuses his examination of the two dockworker groups on their often unheralded contributions to the struggle for racial justice. He also examines their responses to port automation, the introduction of containers (“containerization”), and their participation in international solidarity actions.
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