Dock Worker Solidarities in International Perspective

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Embracing Waterfronts: Dock Worker Solidarities in International Perspective

Shubhankita Ojha

In recent years there has been growing interest in the role of the Indian Ocean and its region in world history. Even though the Indian Ocean was important during the earlier centuries as well due to the flourishing trade in that region, it is only in the nineteenth century, according to Michael

Pearson, that “many of the deep structural elements underlying Indian Ocean history for millennia— monsoons, currents, and land barriers are all overcome by steam ships and steam trains in the service of British power and capital; the Indian Ocean world becomes embedded in a truly global economy..”.1 The links and flows by this time contributed to the creation of an interesting

“shared public sphere of the port cities that ringed the Indian Ocean in this period”2 and needs to be explored. It is in this network, that Bombay, as one of the most important ports along the

Ocean’s rim, is unique. What is interesting about Bombay is the nodal position it came to occupy by the nineteenth century not only in the expanding Asian sea-borne trade, rather also in terms of technology like shipping and communications which connected Europe and the Indian Ocean with the rest of Asia. Big steam liners loaded with passengers, cargoes and mail sailed between Atlantic

Europe, the US and the Indian Ocean and charted a fascinating history of global movements.

1 Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 12 2 Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006, p.278

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While maritime history identifies lascars as ‘world’s first global migrants’ for their work on ship and experiences abroad, workers who prepared these ships for its voyage and remained at the docks still need a more careful study. Ports need to be acknowledged more than just transient spaces in the larger narrative of the journey of a ship. Dock workers have been attributed certain stereotypes.

They are usually seen as strong casual workers roughened by long hours of strenuous physical work and hence given to drinking, violence and crime. Dockers have traditionally been seen as militant and strike prone and hence most of what has been written about them pertains to dock strikes and trade unions. A lot of it has also been shaped by their portrayals in cinema like Marlon

Brando’s On the Waterfront which shows dock workers given to crime and the dominance of gangsters at the New York docks or even the Bollywood movie Deewar which is a depiction of the life of a man from being an ordinary dock coolie to being a smuggler.

The recent shift to global histories and transnational studies makes it crucial to enquire into a range of intellectual issues like the possibility of looking at dock work as an international occupation.

The ship was not only the means of communication between continents, but also the first place where working people from different continents communicated. The Ports similarly were not just places where such ships were loaded, unloaded or repaired. There is a need to study them as work sites but also ones that witnessed interactions and experiences of several kinds. As Frederick

Cooper says, “ Unloading a ship, whatever the language in which the labourers talk about what they are doing, is still unloading a ship”3.My paper tries to look at how Bombay dock workers are placed at the intersections of crucial crossroads. This paper combines part of my doctoral work on

Bombay dock workers and my future research plans of locating Bombay in a wider network of

3 Cooper, Frederick. “Dockworkers and Labour history”, Sam Davies et al (eds.) Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790-1970, Vol 2, Aldershot: Ashgate 2000, p. 523.

[Please do not cite] oceanic trade and movements and on looking at dock workers as part of a global working class and dock work as an international occupation. In the first part of the paper I look at two very significant changes in the twentieth century – decasualization and containerization that have had a huge impact on the nature of dock work worldwide. The paper in assessing these two changes also tries to unravel moments of dock worker association at work, neighbourhoods and in a more global imagination. The importance of port workers emanates from the crucial and nodal role they hold in global capitalist relations but also the fact that the concentration of workers with varieties of experiences in a small space also makes it particularly vulnerable to disruption. It is in this context that I attempt to study how the changing labour regimes in the twentieth century have affected these workers. The second part of the paper is still in a nascent stage and tries to locate dock workers as part of an international community which even though divided by seas and oceans, presents a unique form of solidarity. Dockers present an interesting case of various networks and linkages. They are connected both to the urban workers and the lascars geographically and also to villages due to migratory linkages which make them a very interesting case study.

Situating Bombay in the Indian Ocean Network

By the nineteenth century Bombay stood at the crossroads to significant exchanges and interactions in the Indian Ocean region which also established its linkages with the global capitalist economy at large. Apart from the British colonial enterprise and decline of Surat as the most important port of Western India, it was also the sustained economic relationship between China and India that gave rise to Bombay. The one event that was significant in the beginnings of this industrial phase was the American Civil War due to which supplies of textile from American mills dried up and the British had to look towards India. The outbreak of the American Civil War, the opening of the

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Suez Canal and the resulting exponential growth in trade brought Bombay to the threshold of modernity and urbanism. Apart from the cotton boom, what also needs to be emphasized in the growth of Bombay is the role of indigenous shipping in India. Indigenous shipping and the cotton- opium trade were closely interlinked at Bombay and this activity made the port here increasingly busy as also connected with wider networks. There were also other leading Parsi capitalists involved in the Bombay ship building industry eventually. Some of these were the Jamsetji

Jejeebhoy, Dadyseths, Readymoneys, Banajis, Patels, Narielwallahs and Camas. They came to be important shipowners of the time and were involved in the profitable China trade. Apart from the

Parsis, there were also other communities like the Lohanas, Bhatias, Bohras, Khojas and Memons who frequently crisscrossed the Indian Ocean also came from the Kachchha region and as Chhaya

Goswami’s work shows that these communities were both reputed for being engaged as mariners or in the shipbuilding industry and most importantly as traders in the Muscat and Zanzibar regions4.

These mercantile communities either settled in Kachchha, Gujarat and Bombay or even in Muscat and Zanzibar and took part in the Indian Ocean trade. These Kachchhi traders had developed a web of service providers and connected the markets of Muscat and Zanzibar to the ports of Bombay and Mandvi. Also important were the Konkani Muslims, a mixed race of Sunni Muslims tracing ancestry to the Arabs who settled along the coast of Western India from Goa to Cambay. They came to Bombay from Ratnagiri, Bankot, Alibag, Panwel, Thana, Kalyan, Bassein, Ghodbundar and other places on the western coast where they had, for years, followed the professions of trading and sea faring5. Along with this trade grew a new section of Indian financiers, rising entrepreneurs and their increasing dominance over the Asian seas. Most of the men employed at the dockyards were

4 Goswami, Chhaya. The Call of the Sea: Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar, c.1800-1880, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011 5 The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, Vol.I, p. 255

[Please do not cite] also said to be direct descendants of workers who migrated from Surat originally6, perhaps due to the prior experience in ship-building etc. Hence, it was common to find a large number of Konkani Muslims from

Ratnagiri, Janjira and Malwan, Goans and Parsis among the skilled labour here like riveters, platers, hammermen etc. There are strong reasons to believe that most of the communities involved in shipmaking and dock building like the Konkani Muslims or also the Parsis figured amongst dock workers and lascars due to their familiarity with the coastline.

Dock Work and The Case of the ‘Casual’

The employment of dock workers all over the world, well into the twentieth century, had problems peculiar to itself. This was due to the fact that port traffic was subject to wide fluctuations which were not necessarily seasonal or otherwise cyclic, rather occurred daily depending upon the number of ships entering or leaving the port on any day, the quantity of cargo to be loaded or unloaded, the nature of the cargo and the manner in which it was received or dispatched, the type of mechanical equipment and facilities available both on board ship and on shore and the rate at which the cargo could be cleared from the shore or made available to feed the ship. Here local conditions varied considerably from port to port, between cargo and cargo, between ship and ship, and even between the holds of the same ship or different parts of the same shed, so that a standard could hardly be laid down. The demands for dock labour varied correspondingly and the employment of workers tended largely to be casual.

6 Burnett-Hurst, A.R. Labour and Housing in Bombay: A Study in the Economic Conditions of the Wage Earning classes in Bombay, London: P.S.King & Sons Ltd, 1925, p.93

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In Bombay, the requirements of labour for port and dock work were complex and it was a rather heterogeneous labour force consisting of different groups and categories of workers skilled, semi- skilled and unskilled employed by various agencies. So far as the loading and unloading of ships and the handling of cargo at the docks were concerned, the labour employed for such work could be broadly classified into stevedore workers who handled cargo in the ship’s holds and were employed by various stevedoring firms, shore workers who handled cargo at the docks, in transit sheds, warehouses etc. and the cranemen employed by the port authorities. Since the demand for labour was subject to sudden and arbitrary variations, it was a common practice among employers to delegate responsibility for the hiring of workers to intermediaries variously known as jobber, mukaddam, maistry or serang. Usually the port authorities maintained a permanent establishment under their direct control, but the bulk of the labour engaged in loading and unloading was casual and employed indirectly through stevedores or other contractors. Moreover, there was no uniform system of employment at the different ports in India itself. While at Bombay, the casual dock labourers were employed through toliwalas who were paid by the Port Trust, in Calcutta, most of the dock labour was supplied by one firm of contractors M/s Bird and Co. and not directly employed by the Port Commissioners.

In Bombay, prior to 1910 all labour required in the docks was obtained by contract7. The provision of labour for the requirements of the docks had since the year 1884 been entrusted by contract to the Firm of Haji Cassum, Karamsi Damji and Dadabhoy8. This contractor maintained a semi- permanent staff of about 25 supervisors to supervise work and 20 mukaddams who supplied the gangs of labourers as required. These firms did not employ the labourers but entered into

7 Secretary Department, Bombay Port Trust, Trustees Resolution no. 169, Meeting of 5th May 1936, p. 130 8 Secretary’s Department, Calcutta Port Trust, File no. 171/III, 1913

[Please do not cite] subcontracts with some intermediaries who were then responsible for bringing in the necessary number. The intermediaries were known as ‘Toliwalas’. In 1910 the old established contractor gave up the contract after the Port Trust declined their demand for higher rates and from 1911, the

Port Trust took upon itself to supply its own labour but did not abolish the method of giving subcontracts to the toliwalas and now employed labour directly through them. This gave rise to the toliwala system where apart from a permanent establishment of workers under the Port Trust, labour was recruited and supplied by registered gangmen known as toliwalas. Most of these dock workers increasingly came from the Ratnagiri district of Konkan and the districts of Poona,

Ahmednagar, Sholapur and Satara in Deccan. The shipping companies or stevedores too employed its labour through foremen, known variously as serangs, mukaddams, gang maistries, jamadars, toliwalas, or sardars. The stevedore labour working on board the ship was mostly recruited from the North West Frontier and Pathans and Hindustanis worked on the ships for stevedoring firms9. Nevertheless, by the twentieth century, a large part of stevedore labour came to be recruited from the United Provinces. In most of the cases, the serangs usually recruited labourers from his own village or from neighbouring villages and therefore knew each of his workers personally. This usually provided the bulk of his gang apart from the daily group of men who presented themselves at the dock gates.

It is interesting to see that Bombay as the most important port on the western coast of India, stood at the centre of the wider oceanic work culture where the entry for migrants into the dockyard labour market was mediated through the influential job contractors known as serangs or toliwalas.

Even though the casual labour problem was faced by a number of ports worldwide including major

9 D/o Industries and Labour, Labour Branch, F.no. L-3001(34), 1935

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European ones, India and the Kenyan port of Mombasa show how the informal networks forged at the workplace invaded into the social space. The various stevedoring, shipping and warehousing firms in the city of Mombasa hired workers through intermediaries and headmen known as

‘serangs’.10These serangs organised gangs of workers, often twenty to twenty-five in number, in turn relying on their intermediaries called ‘tindals’. The serangs collected the workers, supervised them on the job, and received and distributed a sum of wages representing the earnings of the gang as a whole. Bombay too saw the recruitment of workers mediated and determined through influential job contractors called ‘toliwalas’ also known variously as ‘serangs’, ‘mukaddams’ etc.

It is interesting how apart from striking similarities in the recruitment process of the labour market, the serang remained a dominant feature at both these ports. There was no uniformity in the recruitment process as such that ranging from race and ethnicity being important to ports like

Mombasa to religion, caste and kinship in Bombay docks which kept the dockers together and

London docks where race and ethnicity have not really played a major role. However, underlying this is the phenomenon of casual labour that was common at all of these ports and in the process an irregular pattern of recruitment where some men were more preferred than the others at the dock gates by the contractor/intermediary.

A lot that has been written by historians about these recruiting agents and the seasonal patterns of these workers has been influenced by colonial perception and discourses about them. While casual labour especially in the docks was seen as an anomaly in late nineteenth century London and

10 Cooper, Frederick. On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 30,37

[Please do not cite] something that needed urgent regulation11, there seemed to be nothing wrong with the employment of casual labour in the colonies. In Mombasa, casual labour appeared to European officials as too typical of Africa and hence here too, port companies were content in recruiting dockworkers through intermediaries known as serangs12. Similarly at the Indian ports, the workers were said to be engaging in the ‘annual trek’ to their villages to visit families, attend marriages or to attend to their fields at certain times of a year13. This period was said to be clearly corresponding with the crop sowing and harvesting periods of the kharif and rabi crops respectively and it was believed that labour migrated back to the villages for several reasons, the most important being the tending of their fields. This was considered as one of the main reasons why port work went through periods of surplus labour and then a deficit which lent a seasonal character to the industry as a whole. The colonial discourse saw the institution of the intermediary as archaic, traditional and indigenous and rooted in Indian traditional or pre-capitalist culture and responding to the “needs of labour for familiar relationships in an unfamiliar environment”14. This view relegated workers as being averse to the rhythms and disciplines of factory life which made them aspire for casual and temporary engagements in the city to be able to return back to their villages at the very first instance. This kind of work then required agents who were familiar with and could recruit such men who usually moved in and out of jobs.

What is interesting to note, however, is that underlying the seasonality discourse is first of all the assumption that the Indian factory worker was essentially an agriculturist. Secondly, we need to

11 Jones, Gareth Stedman. Outcast London: A Study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society, Oxford:Claredon Press, 1971. 12 Cooper, Frederick. On the African Waterfront 13 Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India, June 1931, p. 13-14 14 Roy, Tirthankar. “Sardars, Jobbers and Kanganies: The Labour Contractor and Indian Economic History”, Modern Asian Studies, 42,5 ,2008, p. 973

[Please do not cite] draw our attention to the phenomenon of ‘seasonality of production’ itself which rendered a number of workers unemployed when there were no ships at the docks. The Chairman of the

Bombay Port Trust himself agreed to the fact that a number of workers were let off easily during the monsoon months because this was a slack period at the docks15 . It was, hence, the ‘seasonaility of work’ itself rather than ‘seasonality of labour’ which rendered labour casual and forced him to migrate back to villages or other industries when there was no work.

At the very outset it is important to mention that the institution of the intermediary was not only specific to Indian industries. Infact these agents were also found in British industries and in the recruitment and organisation of labour in Africa, China and Japan16. In London docks, although there was no formal institution of the intermediary and the dock companies provided the required labour, the actual recruitment of the casual labour at the call-stands was entrusted to ‘foremen’. In a description of how these men were selected at the gates, the old process of “calling-on” dock workers at the usual open air stands, and the consequent scramble for work have often been described. Most of the description resembles what Vernon Jensen has to say about the labour recruitment process at London docks:

“The foreman stood on the raised ledge of a warehouse and eyed the crowd all over as if it were a herd of cattle. Then very deliberately he beckoned a man with his finger, and after a considerable interval, a second and a third until he had taken ten in all. There was an evident enjoyment of a sense of power, understandable enough as human nature goes, and the whole proceedings were horribly suggestive of the methods of a slave market... It is during the latter stages of a heavy call that disturbances are most frequent. The men begin to fidget and push; those who are small and weak are shoved aside by the more burly, and sometimes a struggling mass of men may be seen elbowing and fighting to get to the front, and to attract the foreman’s attention... the foreman distributes the metal tallies which are the token

15 Royal Commission on Labour, Oral Evidence, Bombay Presidency, Vol.I, part II, p. 392

16 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940, Cambridge: CUP, 1994, p. 100

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17 of engagement. The spectacle of some scores of men struggling violently is by no means infrequent here.”

While employment was restricted due to the power of intermediaries in certain ports like Bombay, it was also mediated through ‘unions’ in other ports. These ‘unions’ were nowhere close to unions that represented labour demands, instead were the creation of shipowners themselves. At the San

Francisco Port, inorder to get steady work, longshoremen had to join a company union which the shipowners had organized since 1916 after breaking the American Federation of Labour18. This was the ‘Blue Book’ and it was designed to prevent a bona fide union and the shipowners had signed a closed shop contract with it. Whoever was not part of the Blue Book went through the same process of standing around infront of the docks and waiting for whatever work was available.

At the heart of such an arrangement was the logic of the control employers exercised over labour time. A situation where there were always a large group of men standing outside the docks, ready and willing to take up the place of those who were not working fast enough, suited the employer’s need for cheap labour and steady work. Since labour was indirectly employed, it also meant that the employer did not feel the need to provide any sort of housing, welfare benefits etc. to labour.

In the case of Bombay as already mentioned above, apart from recruiting at the gates, it was common for these labour recruiters to go down into their own villages and bring along men into the new city who sought work at the cotton mills, docks and other emerging industries. Hence, this

17 Jensen, Vernon H. Hiring of Dock Workers & Employment practices on the Ports of New York, Liverpool, London, Rotterdam and Marseilles, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964. p. 185-186. 18 Larrowe, Charles P. Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labour in the U.S., New York, Westport: Lawrence Hill & Co., p. 8-9

[Please do not cite] labour agent as in many standard Indian examples “represented a convergence of three distinct intermediary roles –supervisor in the production site (the foreman), recruiter or labour contractor, and headman of communities”19 and hence was indispensible. Apart from his role at the worksite, also significant as pointed out by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, was the intermediaries’ involvement in the social organization of urban neighbourhoods20. The jobbers or toliwalas most of the times recruited men from his village and brought them to the city. Once in the city, these intermediaries then looked into the general well-being of these workers. Payment of wages was made through the toliwalas who acted as small agents with the advantage of having a personal interest in and some measure of confidence among the men. In many cases, the labourers were not paid in cash at the end of each day, rather the toliwala kept it with himself in the account of the individual labourer, who was allowed to withdraw an amount sufficient only for his maintenance. Thus they functioned also as bankers to their gangs. According to Cholia, the foreman‘s objective in extending credit was to resist the tendency amongst labourers to migrate from one gang mukaddam to another when there was a rise in the daily rates of wages due to a sudden rush of work21. A number of times, a gang of workers resided with the toliwala in lieu of rent and so these intermediaries also acted as landlords to workers who had no place to stay in the new city.

On the other hand, this did not always mean a very peaceful relationship between the workers and the intermediary. There were chances also of the illiterate dockworkers getting cheated by the toliwalas who demanded bribes from these workers to procure work. Also workers frequently complained of a part of their salary being withheld by the toliwala inorder to ensure that the

19 Roy, Tirthankar. “Sardars, Jobbers and Kanganies: The Labour Contractor and Indian Economic History”, MAS 42,5 ,2008, p.971-998. 20 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the working classes in Bombay, 1900-1940, Cambridge: CUP, 1994 21 Cholia, R.P. Dock Labourers in Bombay, Bombay: Longman, 1941, p.59

[Please do not cite] workers turned up for work regularly. In fact, many resorted to police or law courts to recover unpaid wages22 and even went on occasional strikes as a result of what they alleged to be a reduction in wages and victimization on the part of the contractors who engaged them23. Hence, it would be wrong to assume that the workers were simply passive victims of serang dominance. It is important to highlight this dialectical relationship between the intermediary and the workers which reflected interdependence and patronage but also at the same time prevented possibilities of absolute control.

Employers considered it of little gain to maintain a regular and permanent labour force and they adopted the policy of recruiting and dismissing the workers at will. Infact the practice of getting labour recruited through intermediary suited them best as the labour recruiters were familiar with where labour could be found and what rates. It becomes extremely crucial and interesting, however, to examine why and when such an arrangement proved to be less lucrative to port authorities. I argue, until the time the toliwalas and serangs were capable of organizing labour through personal networks and neighbourhoods, the arrangement remained profitable to the employers. However, it was the failure of the intermediary to do so in the face of emerging labour radicalization of the twentieth century that led to its eventual demise.

‘Regulating’ the Casual

It was during the early decades of the twentienth century that the port employers looked at the institution of the ‘intermediary’ with great suspicion and there were efforts towards regularizing

22 Times of India, Aug 2, 1905 23 Times of India, Mar 14, 1932, pg 7; Times of India, Nov 19, 1937, pg 12.

[Please do not cite] dock work. Similar pieces of legislation emerged for various other industries at eliminating casual labour and they have been mostly seen as responding to labour demands during this time. It is perhaps the linkages, proximities, neighbourhoods that workers lived in, which explains why decasualization at ports coincided with as Ralph James’ work on cotton mills or Arjan de Haan’s work on jute mills24 would suggest, several other industries in India. So we clearly know that decasualization was not peculiar to the docks.

Post the Great Strike of 1889 in London by dock workers, authorities were forced to acknowledge the casual labour problem at Britain ports and the ‘precariousness’ associated with the industry.

The occupation of the dock worker was classed as a dangerous trade, and it came to be governed by special regulations which were known as dock regulations. A system was introduced whereby permanent labour was allocated work and then further labour needs were met by preference men in the A, B and C category. Nevertheless, a legislation to regulate casual labour globally was encouraged only during the World War I when ports faced immense labour shortages. The recognition of the evils of this situation and of the inability of individual action to overcome it led to concerted efforts by employers and port workers’ organizations in some ports to establish registration schemes as a precursor to their eventual decasualization. In Great Britain the Liverpool

Docks Scheme of 1912 was the first large scale experiment in the direction of decasualization and soon a number of ports followed suit25. However, the decasualization of labour as a legislation was given effect to only after the Second World War at most of the ports. In India, decasualization

24 James, Ralph C. “The Casual Labour problem in Indian Manufacturing”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 74, No.1, Feb1960 Haan, Arjan De. “The Badli system in industrial labour recruitment”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol.33, 1999, p.271. 25 Port Labour Inquiry Report, London, 1931, p.13-16

[Please do not cite] came about with the passing of the Dock Workers (Regulation of Employment) Act 1948.

Accordingly and under the provisions of the Act, the Government of Madras, Bombay, and

Calcutta drew up their respective Dock Workers (Regulation of Employment) Schemes on the lines of U.K. Dock Workers (Regulation of Employment) Scheme 1947. Under each scheme a tripartite body in the form of Dock Labour Board (DLB) was constituted. The DLBs were now to employ stevedore labour . They were to register workers under the two categories of ‘ monthly’ and ‘pool’ workers. Similar Schemes like the Casual Labour Scheme of 1954 in Mombasa or the enactment of the New Jersey- New York Waterfront Commission Compact in 1953 brought about regulation at other ports too. The National Dock Labour Board in Britain established under the

National Dock Labour Scheme in 1947 acted as a precursor and a number of such tripartite boards like Mombasa’s Port Labour Utilization Board and the several Dock Labour Boards in India with participation from the state, employers and labour were created in other countries as well. In San

Francisco, the strike of 1934 had been helpful in changing the hiring process significantly and here too, introduction of the ‘A’ group of registered workers along with a reserve ‘B’ list of workers was achieved.

There is a discourse which sees the role of technology as crucial in determining the need of a permanent labour force. According to Gareth Stedman Jones, changes in technology that the turn of the century offered required work discipline of a different kind. The encroachment of steam, according to Jones, disrupted the habitual pattern of seasonal employment. The more leisurely pace of labour before the coming of steam was replaced with “increased casuality” and “intensified work”.26 The big steam ships pushed the shipping companies to cut short the time needed for

26 Jones, Gareth Stedman. Outcast London: A study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1971, p 121.

[Please do not cite] loading and unloading these expensive ships. With steam ships sailing in and out of the port round the year and the ports world over facing stiff competition there was no room for delays. This urgently called for structural changes in the number and composition of the dock workers. One of the concerns worldwide regarding the port industry became of coordinating the irregular demands of port employment and of regulating the supply of labour which was seen as hindering the process of providing adequate welfare to the workers. It came to be realised that the complex problems of casual labour required more than just a restructuring of some of the organizational features of dock work and instead involved the fundamental alteration of the life of the worker. Degenerate conditions resulting from chronic underemployment and the widespread corruption by intermediaries or hiring agents in the form of bribery etc. needed urgent correction. I argue, however, that it was not the ‘disorder’ of the casual labour that bothered the port authorities as much as their getting ‘ordered’ or ‘organized’ in anyway which would possibly bring about the disruption of work that called for reforms in the labour regime.

While the nineteenth century and the introduction of steam ships did lead to a change in the nature of work with huge shipping lines ringing the oceans, the fact that it led to a ‘concern with the casual’ cannot be over emphasized. The change to steam ships did introduce immense changes in the port infrastructure but it was not as sudden as it has been made to appear so. The steam ships come in by the early nineteenth century and gain prominence by the 1830s due to big steam liner companies like the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, British India Steam

Navigation etc. Nevertheless, even during this time and till as late as the end of the nineteenth century, sailing ships continued to be made in Bombay dockyards and were engaged in coastal shipping along the coasts of the Indian Ocean. What this change in technology did, however, was

[Please do not cite] to make dock work increasingly casual due to the volume of trade passing through the ports and with increasing number of migrations into the city. With the transition to larger, steel hulled ships, work of loading and unloading became less skilled and more casual in nature. As Roy Mankelow mentions in the case of the London docks, by 1865 the dock companies’ perms had largely been replaced by casual men and contractors, and piece work rates were being introduced in some docks to encourage the casual labour force to greater effort27. Hence, while technology had a major role to play in making the volume of trade happening at any port larger which also demanded better infrastructure, its role in determining the decasualization needs to be questioned and the reasons need to be found beyond it.

Imposition of order on increasingly global systems of labour through regulation had become a grave matter of concern by the twentieth century. The 1930s present a new chapter in the industrial relations at docks world over where imperatives of World War II and increasing agitations by labour obliged the government to look at demands of labour seriously. Wave of communist movement was influencing large parts of working class across the globe which was also advocating the organization of labour into formal trade union associations. The scope of law and worker’s resistance both broadened significantly which affected newer legislations directed towards the cause of labour. Ports provided possibilities of volatile clashes due to their position between land and the sea and the constant flocking of migrants into it both from the city and the sea. Emergence of labour leaders like Jack Dash in London docks, Harry Bridges at the San Francisco port, Placid

D’Mello in Bombay and many similar leaders was a response to this movement in various parts of the world. Labour was certainly getting restive. World War II was an impetus for state intervention

27 Mankelow, Roy. “The Port of London, 1790-1970”, in Sam Davies et al (eds). Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790-1970, Vol. I, Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 370

[Please do not cite] in planned production and labour control in many parts of the world. This was supported by the colonial struggles which raised the stakes of the capitalist states to contain potential for disorder.

In Bombay, clashes between the laboring population in the city and the authorities by the late nineteenth century had already caused serious concern. The strike at the end of the nineteenth century in 1898 by dockers and cartmen28 in solidarity against the authorities for their plague measures made the leading European employers advocate the need for an amendment in the system of employment of labour at docks. It was the inability of the intermediary to ‘produce’ and

‘discipline’ the kind of labour that changes in the twentieth century demanded that led to the eventual decline of the influence of toliwalas and labour contractors at Bombay docks.

More than looking at decasualization as a welfare measure, we need to situate it as a strategic one in the face of changing global circumstances at the port which necessitated quicker turnover of cargo and labour regulation. We also need to assess the fact that it was not so much a need to legislate to bring about welfare to the workers as much as the need to ‘regulate’ them which lay at the heart of such measures. Apart from regular employment, decasualization introduced a number of social security benefits to a job which was both dangerous and tedious and is looked upon as one of the reasons why Bombay port and dock workers happen to be one of the best paid working class today in India. And yet, besides providing for regular and better working conditions for registered workers, decasualization had peculiar effects at ports and it is very significant to understand it in comparative perspective. In the process of its implementation to make work regular, it gave way to a ‘structured casualness’ perhaps because of the restrictive nature of the

th 28 Times of India, 15 March, 1898, p. 5

[Please do not cite] legislation that did not apply to a large chunk of workers. The effect of legislation has always been such that it while it legalizes a particular category, it also renders others as absolutely illegal.

Casual workers continued to be employed by employers either as break legs or replacements and were increasingly used as ‘strike-breakers’. Welfare and work benefits were not extended to them as they remained an invisible category of workers. The decasualization legislation froze categories like ‘casual’, and ‘permanent’ and made the registered worker increasingly ‘casual’ towards work.

There now existed workers who were more permanent than the others. As noted in the case of

London docks, the conception of the idea of decasualization was different for labour leaders on the one hand and employers and dock companies on the other29. On the one hand, the unions looked at the labour movement against casual employment as something that would enable the restriction of dock employment to dock trade union members and also, as far as possible, equalize the opportunities for employment among trade union members. On the other hand, the employers visualized it primarily as a means that would enforce the separation of the ‘respectable’ working class from the residuum, restrict employment to a few and weed out the residuum from being a potential political threat. It was perhaps this dichotomy that the decasualization schemes had succeeded in bringing about by creating a hierarchized structure of permanent, semi-permanent and casual workers who also stood divided in their demands. Also, under the garb of regularizing work and removing intermediaries, it also took away the linkages, networks and support mechanisms that were so central to the dock and working class neighbourhoods. This division within the workforce was a common a feature of the decasualisation experiment at other ports too.

Decasualization in Mombasa led to a growing differentiation of the African workforce detached

29 Jones, Gareth Stedman. Outcast London, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1971, p. 317.

[Please do not cite] from the “‘enervating’ connection to tribal Africa”30 and cut off from their specific connections to hiring and work due to which gangs lost their collective identity and role in the labour process.

Even in the case of New York, while the core of the permanent workforce had retained and improved their position in employment, decasualization did not really make lives better for a sizeable group which still found infrequent work at New York docks31.

Containerization and the Return to the ‘Casual’

Yet another change in the mid decades of the twentieth century was that of Containerization. The first container ship was built in 1956 by the American trucking entrepreneur Malcolm Maclean.

Containerization rapidly spread throughout the 1960s and by the 1970s the container had become the dominant mode of global transport. The concept of containerization was introduced since the

1960s across the world and it is essentially a system of consolidating cargo in boxes and then its transportation. This change in technology has not only reduced employment opportunities of the workers but also brought to an end to the kind of work that had given dock labour its particular character. The earlier arrangement which required a gang located at each hatch, capable of stowing or unstowing individual items of various shapes suddenly ended due to containerization and this has made a big difference to dock work ever since. What this change brought about was the disassociation of cargo handling from the docks into the container ships. According to Roy

Mankelow, “it heralded the demise of the traditional London docker with his hook, and the arrival of the docker-technician operating sophisticated equipment to load and unload containers from the

30 Cooper, Frederick. On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 158 31 Jensen, Vernon.H. “Decasualization of Employment on the New York Waterfront”, Industrial and Labour Relations Review, Vol. 11, No.4, July 1958, p. 550

[Please do not cite] new dedicated container vessels”32. This has had a huge influence on the shared experiences about

‘work’ across the ports and encouraged global solidarities among dock workers.

Containerization demanded uniformity in dimensions of freight containers to facilitate compatibility with various modes of transport for smooth and quick movement of goods across the international borders. One begins to hear about proposals for container berths in Nhava Sheva in

Bombay and at Haldia in Calcutta by the late 1960s in order to adapt Indian ports to the new technological development33. Containerization is said to have arrived in India by 1973. The number of containers handled at the Bombay port increased from a mere 133 in 1972-74 to over

100,000 in 1980-8134. By 1970s the pressure on shipping companies to speed up the process of containerization at Indian ports was immense35. Simultaneous to this process grew worker’s agitation and the All India Port and Dock Workers’ Federation’s main demands at this time remained higher wages, increased bonus, compensation to cargo-handling workers for loss of earning owing to containerization, permanency of temporary workmen and subsidized housing36.

However, not much was done by the port authorities in terms of housing and the percentage of cargo handling workers housed by the port trust remained extremely low. Even within the Bombay

Port Trust employment, a mere 9.03% of shore labour was allotted housing by the Port Trust37.

Compensation for the loss of earning was finally given in 1981 to cargo handling workers employed by the Port Trust, registered stevedores and the Dock Labour Board38. However, the

32 Mankelow, Roy. “The Port of London, 1790-1970” in Sam Davies et al.(eds). Dock Workers: International Explorations in Comparative Labour History, 1790-1970, Vol. I, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, p. 365 33 Times of India, Dec 13, 1968, p. 7 34 Times of India, June 17, 1981, p. 5 35 Times of India, Sept 25, 1976, p. 13 36 Times of India, Aug 3, 1978, p.3 37 Bombay Port Trust, Administration Report 1988-89 38 Times of India, June 17, 1981, p. 5

[Please do not cite] casuals and workers employed by other agencies remained invisible and their plight has worsened under containerization.

Despite assurances by the government in the wake of liberalization that more and more dock workers would be decasualized and the avenues of promotion would be broadened to various categories of port and dock works, there was a general decline in 1980-90 in permanent employment at all the ports, and contract employment had doubled. There were as many as 12,500 contract workers working in the Bombay Port Trust due to which regular workers did not get employment39. Contract workers were easy to get, had to be paid nothing towards welfare and security funds etc. nor demanded extra allowances to carry on work, and hence were more economical. Liberalization brought in its wake a number of private ports which posed competition to existing ports. Mumbai Port has ever since faced stiff competition from the Jawaharlal Nehru

Port. The setting up of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), also known as Nhava Sheva in

1989, which was earlier conceived of as a satellite port to divert sea cargo traffic and thus reduce congestion in Mumbai, further pushed the informalization of labour. The JNPT had its own independent labour handling system through private developers. The work of stuffing and destuffing containers was not done by port trust workers, but contract workers employed through private contractors and labour cooperatives. Moreover, increasingly the bulk of cargo was being diverted to Nhava Sheva, and the employers saw no incentive for decasualizing a number of workers who still worked at the port without any job security. A constant demand was to treat the

Nhava Sheva port as an integral part of the Bombay Port Trust40. The Nhava Sheva port authorities

39 Noronha, Ernesto. “Bombay Dock Labour Board 1948-1994: From Insecurity to Security to Insecurity?”, Economic and Political Weekly, p. 4856 40 Times of India, Oct 15, 1991, p. 6

[Please do not cite] have repeatedly been called upon by the trade unions to make provisions for a permanent workforce instead of exploiting the workers through contractors.

By the 1990s BDLB appeared to be in a huge financial crisis and there were several agitations against the Board for withholding the payment of minimum guaranteed wages and attendance allowance to registered workers. As a result of this, on February 25, 1994, the BDLB got itself departmentalized and merged with the Port Trust which brought an end to an institution responsible for regulating work and conditions of work. A number of schemes for encouraging voluntary retirement were encouraged and re-training and re-deployment were practised to meet operational requirements instead of recruiting additional men.

There is again a global trend that can be seen with this new wave of modernization at ports. The struggle by the Liverpool workers against the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC) stands very close to the case of Bombay41. The National Dock Labour Scheme, which protected terms and conditions, benefits and wages of dock workers all over the country was abolished in

1989. This paved way for new employment contracts and attempts by the company to accumulate as big a reserve army of casual workers as possible to crush the permanent workforce. Liverpool dockers have resisted it ever since and have been supported by international actions, against ships and lines using the port of Liverpool as their existed among dockers a deep empathy against similar processes worldwide. The Modernization and Mechanization agreement at some of the major U.S. ports which surrendered the hard-won job control in return for generous retirement bonuses and pensions is again a reflection of a similar process. Quite obviously, the experiences of labour in the face of such technological advances may not be similar across the ports as for in regions of

41 Sharma, Mukul. “ ‘The Flickering Flame’ of 500 Liverpool Dockers”, Labour File, Vol.3, No. 9, Sept 1997

[Please do not cite] high underemployment, increased productivity and mechanization on the dockside translated into something quite different from what it meant to regions where there are other activities capable of absorbing labour. And yet, workers response to ‘labour rationalization’ measures in the twentieth century is worth a study.

Forging Local & Global Solidarities

Positioned between the land and the sea, dock workers interacted not only with other workers in the city but sailors who arrived at the docks in ships. Being the first to work in a globalized workspace and hence the “forerunners of today’s migrants”42, these lascars and seamen brought stories and languages from world over which influenced the dock workers in several ways of its own. “The presumption that Indian seafarers were undependable peasants drawn from villages who turned to the sea for seasonal employment prevailed for a very long time and the maritime labour market was indistinguishable from the wider casual labour market at Indian ports”43. A number of dock workers were in fact working at the docks waiting to get a chance to explore the seas as lascars. In this respect too, the system of owing allegiance to a gang leader helped. These gang leaders were mostly very influential and known to the gang leaders recruiting lascars. Most of the time these men were also part of the same neighbourhoods that the seamen used to retire into after a journey.

42 Ghosh, Amitav. “Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail”, EPW, Vol. 43, No.25, 2008, p. 58 43 Balachandran, G. Globalising Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870-1945, New Delhi: OUP, 2012, p. 10

[Please do not cite]

Thus, the neighbourhood itself became an interesting space where different kinds of solidarities, linkages and networks were forged. These solidarities were constantly reflected both at the worksite and neighbourhoods where workers working in a gang often chose to live together or a gang leader chose men out of the same neighbourhood. Infact the worksite and the neighbourhood also many a times came to be intertwined as reflected in areas like Girangaon, Mazagaon etc. which lent the city’s working class consciousness a unique dynamics of its own. Dock work provided for a unique kind of solidarity among various gangs to each other, gangs with their leaders and among the gang members themselves. Social relationships were built on ties of kinship, language, hometown, religious practice, and city experience which were further reinforced by the shared use of residential common spaces. Quite evidently, this solidarity is not attributable solely to the trade union movement which is sometimes understood as the single movement that shaped and lent voice to the several solidarities.

Apart from living near the docks, dockworkers also lived in mixed neighbourhoods in various parts of the city. Although migration into the city mostly occurred within the social networks of kinship, caste, village etc., it were spaces like these where the worker took on newer urban identities. There were several instances when the whole working class struck work together. Ravinder Kumar in his work on the Textile Mill Strike of 1919 clearly shows how an isolated group of strikers who were mill hands at the Century Mills, was suddenly transformed into a substantial crowd of militant workers44. He says that this was possible not only because of the proximity of the mills to each other but also because of the mixed neighbourhoods in which these workers lived which offered

44 Kumar, Ravinder. “The Bombay Textile Strike, 1919”, IESHR, 1971, Vol.8

[Please do not cite] ideal conditions, given an accumulation of grievances and a piling up of frustrations for a working class explosion. The discontent spread from the mill workers to other workers in the city. Even the workers employed at the Royal Indian Marine dockyards and by the railways struck work and demanded an increase in wages. The General strike of 1928 and most of the labour unrests of the

1920s and 30s saw workers in various occupations expressing their grievances, organizing unions and taking industrial action. The strike began from a particular industry and it was only a matter of little time when it became a general one. Bombay docks became a common site where such solidarities were both shaped and played out.

Docks are unique in the way both worksites and neighbourhoods connect workers to a larger community of the working class. It was common to find at ports workers from various parts of the world together. A letter addressed to the Secretary, Government of Bengal would suggest a form of protest by dock workers at the Calcutta port on the arrival of 14 distressed seamen from

Singapore looking for work45. The Shipping Master reported that inorder to alleviate distress and to find employment for seamen, the Board of Trade had recognized the discretion of officials abroad in sending men to ports at which it was likely they may find employment in preference to sending them home, and it was in exercise of that discretion that these men reached Calcutta.

Hence the possibility of finding seafarers from other countries working among dock workers always existed. The Mazagaon dockyard, according to the Labour Investigation Committee Report employed some Chinese fitters for specially skilled work through contractors46. The Chinese presence in Bombay is particularly interesting as a number of them found employment as carpenters in the Bombay docks. The impact that the presence of these groups has on a port city

45 Marine Department, Vol. 56, Compilation 79, 1902 46 Report of an enquiry into conditions of labour in dockyards in India, Labour Investigation Committee, 1946, p.3

[Please do not cite] makes it both cosmopolitan and fascinating in unique ways. The presence of Irish dock workers among the London dockers, or African-American, Irish, German, Scandinavians and Italians as dock workers at New York provided a distinct flavor to the port city and does open up possibilities of studying these port cities as part of global history. These interactions definitely did bring out racial, ethnic stratification which were played out in conflicts between the groups at the work site but it also provided solidarities of a distinct nature where the workers were united not merely by the common experience of a workplace or a single occupation, but by the fact of being ‘workers’.

While positioned between the land and the sea, dock work not only offered an interaction of dock workers with workers employed in the city and the sea faring men at sea, rather it revealed a unique interaction among workers globally. The Seamen’s Docker’s, Inland Waterways and Allied

Workers’ Trade Unions International (Maritime Federation of the World) under the World

Federation of Trade Unions laid down as early as 1949 with the principle of uniting all unions of workers in the maritime industry and to forge close friendship and cooperation among the seamen, dockers and waterways workers of all countries47 is a fitting example of such solidarity. To those who believe that dock workers are no more important as work at ports is highly mechanized, it is important to realize the role they play in the economy. The solidarities that they are capable of building globally are both unique and praiseworthy. Their reaction to any political, social or economic issue worldwide talks at length of their networks and it is significant to also look at the strategies deployed by these workers in global politics. These solidarities have been visible at different moments in history and continue even today. The support by Calcutta and Bombay dockers along with those from China and Australia for the struggle in Indonesia against Dutch

47 AITUC Papers, Subject File no. 331, p. 150

[Please do not cite] imperialism in 1945 was phenomenal48. Similar was the reaction by these dockers during the Indo-

Pakistan conflicts of 1962 and 1972 when they boycotted any ship carrying arms, ammunitions, military hardware to Pakistan49. They were actually responding to an earlier boycott by American dock workers which had led to an imposition of embargo on arms shipment to Pakistan.

Dock workers have also been instrumental agents in struggles against apartheid. There was an immense anti-apartheid pressure by Melbourne dock workers to cancel the South African cricket tour to Australia in 197150. The dockers here unanimously refused to load or unload South African ships while the cricket team was in Australia. One would also remember how dock workers in various countries refused to unload South African goods as a battle against apartheid. Emulating this solidarity against apartheid, very recently in Durban, members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo.51

Dockworkers here were responding to Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza which had left a number of Palestinians dead. In their act, these dock workers reminded us that international solidarity is still not a thing of the past.

Conclusion

This paper in talking particularly about Bombay opens up larger questions like that of similarity/dissimilarity in work processes, labour recruitment, legislative action and labour solidarity across ports. The ‘casualness’ that dock work symbolized was common to every part of the globe and so were events leading up to its regulation. Technology has played a significant role at docks as in other industries. However, instead of simply understanding technology as being the

48 Times of India, Oct 20, 1945, p.7 49 Sagardeep, March 1973, p.7-8 50 Times of India, April 23, 1971, p. 16 51 Mike Marqusee, “Intervention from below”, in The Hindu Magazine, 8th March, 2009.

[Please do not cite] most important factor which brings about a change in labour regime, we need to also acknowledge and understand the conditions it brings to the forth. It is significant to see how changes in dock work itself as also such political articulations like strikes and unionism affected global systems of labour. It is imperative to see technology as giving rise to conditions where labour matters had to be taken seriously. While decasualization led to the formalization and regulation of the recruitment process, another change in the form of container ships reversed the process and encouraged casual and contractual employment. This duality in the labour regimes presents an extremely interesting case and it is only when we analyze it in comparative perspective that a history of connections through dock workers would be possible. It is crucial to see the responses of workers worldwide to legislation and regulation. While Bombay Port Trust claims port workers are today one of the best paid section of the working class, for a chunk of workers at the port and also across the world, the struggle against casual, non-union and low paid employment continues. While every port worked with its own specific labour forms, these workers were united in the nature of dock work itself. These workers were integrated into the community of a global working class in such a way that a piece of legislation, strike or even a small event somewhere created a ripple effect and affected trade and movements across the globe. This realization of a unity not as individuals rather as dock workers offers possibilities of an exciting and incredible global history.