The Dockers Next Step

This book provides the first book-length study of the political and economic ideas of the British left’s Alternative Economic Strategy in the 1970s and early 1980s. Discussing the AES’s approaches to capitalism, the nation state and the working class, it argues that existing academic accounts have significantly overstated the radicalism of the strategy. Perhaps more notable, especially in the light of its stated ‘revolutionary’ aims, was the extent of its moderation – its continuities with post-war Labour revisionism, its marked reluctance to look beyond the market economy, the degree of its preoccupation with Britain’s global-economic status, and its inability to break with Labourist politics of class co-operation in the national interest. While the book argues that the AES was the last ‘class politics’ socialist initiative in mainstream British politics, it also explores the ways in which its ideas perhaps prepared the way for New Labour in the 1990s, and its relationship with 'Corbynism' since 2015.

Workers who loaded and unloaded ships have formed a distinctive occupational group over the past two centuries. As trade expanded so the numbers of dock labourers increased and became concentrated in the major ports of the world. This ambitious two-volume project goes beyond existing individual studies of dock workers to develop a genuinely comparative international perspective over a long historical period. Volume 1 contains studies of 22 major ports worldwide. Built around an agreed framework of issues, these 'port studies' examine the type of workers who dominated dock labour, their race, class and ethnicity, the working conditions of dockers and the role of government as employer, arbitrator and supporter. The studies also detail how dockers organized their labour, patterns of strike action and involvement in political organizations. The structure of the port city is also outlined and descriptions given of the waterside environment. These areas of investigation form the basis for a series of 11 thematic studies which comprise Volume 2. Drawing on the information provided in the port studies, these essays identify important aspects and recurring themes, and explain how and why particular cases diverge from the rest. The final chapter of the book synthesizes the various approaches taken to offer a model which suggests several configurations of dock labour and presents suggestions for future research. This major scholarly achievement represents the most sustained attempt to date to provide a comparative international history of dock labour. An annotated bibliography completes this essential reference work.

As a port city, Dublin owes much to the labourers who strove against the heavy-duty tide of imports and exports; a league of thousands who were hired on a day-to-day basis for generations, defining the bustle of Dublin city centre – a cornerstone of the urban industrial working class in Ireland. The Dublin Docker is a sumptuously illustrated history that determines the dockers’ and stevedores’ importance as an industrial subculture within the Dublin that they navigated. The authors excavated the archive of the Dublin Dockworkers Preservation Society to discover a wealth of photographs, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, that capture the dockers’ arduous labour and the energy of Dublin port. These evocative images bring this beautifully designed social history to life, complementing the inimitable voices revealed in interviews with the dockers themselves. How they negotiated working hours and pay, the changes that came with epochal events – the Dublin Lockout, the First World War, the Easter Rising and War of Independence – and the innumerable myths and ‘dark stories’ that shrouded their image: The Dublin Docker is a history of the dockers and their deep-woven connection to the city.