Maritime Men of the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

This book tells a story of how dockworker and seafarer unions across the Asia-Pacific came together in collective actions for their labour rights. Maritime workers’ industrial struggle took place in the context of imperialist ties to Britain, global Cold War alignments, and the dominance of capital in the world’s most internationalised industry. Grounded largely in the experience of Australia where unions and labour standards were established early amid nationalist ideas of regional and racial identity, this study brings a new perspective to a largely Eurocentric history. It explores the tensions that existed between national imperatives for job security and labour’s pursuit of internationalism. From the early twentieth century when the founders of the International Transportworkers Federation lived in Australia, ITF efforts to reach Australian and affiliates in the ‘non-European’ world were persistent.The book centres analysis on organisational struggles for regulation. It starts with British imperial legislation, then traces the efforts of the ITF and the Joint Maritime Commission of the International Labour Organisation to create a Seafarers Charter, which culminated in the passage of the Maritime Labour Convention (2006). Throughout, the book shows unionists driven by the specific character of an industry where shipowners recruited globally and avoided nation-based protections, and stevedoring companies embraced disempowering transformative technology. In linkages between the progressive unionism of Australian-born Harry Bridges on the San Francisco waterfront, and union leaders active in Australian and Asian ports, we can see militant strategies fuelled by opposition to all forms of coerced and exploited labour, complex struggles over racialisation and gross inequalities of power.