Peter Cole. Dockworker Power

Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area is a sparkling exercise in comparative labor history. Informative and informed, morally anchored, and successfully mastering two sets of literature, it is also a pleasure to read. Peter Cole is also informed by an activist commitment to workers—those in society who bear and have borne the brunt of dangerous and precarious work. This commitment comes through the pages of Dockworker Power strongly and becomes especially evident in the future-oriented conclusion. As the title indicates, Dockworker Power is a history of dockworkers in two port cities: in Durban, South Africa, and in San Francisco. The emphasis on “power” also indicates the concern of Cole to explore the strategies and significant political roles played by dockworkers in both locales, which he claims have not been sufficiently acknowledged in the literature, especially in the case of America. The emphasis in the title on “race and activism” further demarcates Cole’s focus on the role played by dockworkers in South Africa in confronting apartheid, and in the case of San Francisco, the part played by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in confronting racism in the United States and their contribution to the civil rights struggle. Thus, while his perspective is widely cognizant of labor unions that were not overtly antiracist, Cole’s focus is really on these two quite specific examples of dockworkers that married class consciousness with antiracist activism. Part of the salutary engagement in comparative history is the “historiographical intervention” Cole is able to make using the prominence of dockworkers in South African history as a “corrective to the US historiography in that workers and unions rarely appear in accounts of postwar social movements” (54). By extension Cole argues that dockworker activism in both countries should occupy pride of place in their respective histories.

Historiography · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Race (biology) · Racism · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies