Dock Strikes and the Demise of the Dockers' ‘Occupational Culture’

Abstract

Throughout the post-war period dockers have vied with coal miners as Britain's most strike-prone occupational group. The dockers' ‘occupational culture’ was believed by many to be a principal factor behind this militancy, but this alone cannot account for the pattern or level of conflict on the waterfront. Furthermore, following decasualisation in 1967 and the progressive unitisation of cargo handling operations in the 1970s and 1980s the occupational culture of the dockers was progressively undermined. By the late 1980s the National Dock Labour Scheme had become the central pillar of what remained of the dockers' occupational culture, and as the 1989 national dock strike illustrated, without the support of the Scheme the dockers were unable to mount any effective resistance to the attack on their terms and conditions of employment initiated by the employers and fully supported by the state. It is only by integrating the sociological study of working class imagery and consciousness with an industrial relations analysis of the institutions, processes and structural conditions of workplace negotiations over the wage-effort bargain that it is possible to explain the nature and causes of dock strikes per se, the intensity of conflict on the waterfront, and the consummate failure of the dockers in the 1989 strike.