NALSU NEWS: Labour Studies podcast/video - Peter Cole | Dockworker Battles on the Global Waterfront: Unions, Boycotts, and Apartheid.
In the early 1960s, dockworkers around the world stood on the frontline of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. This included workers in Australia, Sweden, Trinidad, the United States of America, and in other countries refusing to handle South African cargo or ships. Like other workers, dockers have organised and unionised to defend their rights and win gains, and have also sometimes deployed their collective power in larger struggles for justice. But, standing at the centre of global trade and supply chains, dockworkers have extraordinary leverage. This seminar examines this important internationalist battle, with a focus on the anti-apartheid movement and dock unions in the USA in the early 1960s.
DETAILS: Recording of a live, online, event in the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) Labour Studies Seminar Series, held on Wednesday, 7 May, 2025.
YOUTUBE: https://shorturl.at/vM1UF
PODCAST: https://shorturl.at/ascyg
SPEAKER: Peter Cole is a Professor of History at Western Illinois University (USA) and Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. He also writes on contemporary politics, especially labour, race, and social movements. Author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (2007) and the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (2018). He edited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (2017, with David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer), Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly (2021, revised), and Herb Mills' Presente: A Dockworker Story (2024).
HOSTS: The Labour Studies Seminar Series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and Economics & Economic History, Rhodes University.
ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) is engaged in policy, research, and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned, and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour, and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.