In this Labour Studies Podcast, Peter Cole presents "Against Apartheid, For Civil Rights: Dockworkers and Social Justice Movements in Durban & San Francisco."
The podcast is provided by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), Rhodes University, South Africa.
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A copy of the slides for the talk can be downloaded HERE
Dockworkers have enormous structural power, as they can disrupt the ports so vital to capitalist economies in their respective cities and countries -- and militant dockworkers have often exerted this power for overtly political ends. This talk explores how dockworkers in Durban (South Africa) and the San Francisco Bay Area (United States) have built working class and anti-racist solidarity and committed themselves to struggles well beyond their narrow workplace interests. Durban dockworkers repeatedly went on strike from the 1940s through the 1970s, for example, contributing to the antiapartheid struggle, and the revival of black unions from the 1970s. In San Francisco, dockworkers played a key role in US movements for racial equality. Workers in both ports also engaged in many transnational solidarity actions. Durban dockworkers refused to unload military supplies for the Mugabe regime, in solidarity with the Zimbabwean labour movement and opposition. In San Francisco, dockworkers helped the global fight against apartheid, flatly refusing to unload cargo from South Africa. Given that dockworkers and their unions have been decimated in many places by changes in technology and the economy, can they still preserve some of their power, and remain a potent force for change?
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” (2013) and the multiple award-winning “Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (2018), and editor of “Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly” (2021, revised) and “Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW” (2017, with David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer).
This talk was originally given on 24 February 2016 at Rhodes University, Makhanda. The Labour Studies Podcasts are from our popular Labour Studies Seminar Series, launched in 2015. We cover "labour studies" in the broadest sense: labour and left history, policy and political economy, unions and popular struggles. NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Economics, History and Sociology, it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, 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. https://www.ru.ac.za/nalsu/