Building a labor anthropology

Abstract

At the port of Charleston, South Carolina in January of 2000, members of the predominantly African-American Local 1422 of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) picketed a ship being unloaded by nonunion workers. Their picket turned into a police riot, and in the aftermath, five dockworkers were arrested and charged with a felony. On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5 by writer and former union organizer Suzan Erem and anthropologist E. Paul Durrenberger is an account of the successful international campaign on behalf of these workers. I attended an event sponsored by the New York City Charleston 5 Defense Committee in 2001. Defense committees were formed throughout the country, and there were dozens of meetings like this one. At the New York event, held in Brooklyn's Lafayette Presbyterian Church, an institution well known for its support of progressive causes, I listened to Local 1422 president Ken Riley and Bill Fletcher (then assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO) explain that the dockworkers were under house arrest and faced five years in jail. They also told us that the small, 600 member local was being sued for millions by both the shipping company, Nordana, and the union-busting stevedoring firm, WSI. As I learned that evening, and as Erem and Durrenberger masterfully show in On the Global Waterfront, this was not an ordinary labor-management dispute. The stakes were so high that they suggested class interest and struggle that went well beyond the particular conflict. The political ambition of the state Attorney General Charlie Condon was on the table. Condon pushed the Charleston police to up the riot charges to a felony so he could summon South Carolina's racist and anti-union legacy as he used this case to pursue higher office. Also at stake was the intense pressure for capital accumulation in the global shipping industry, a sector that used containerization for decades to