Thinking Beyond the Workplace: Unions, Logistics and International Solidarity in a British Port

This project will investigate the extent to which dock workers engage with international causes through industrial action and the forces that either propel or prevent them from doing so. To do this, I will use a combination of archival and ethnographic research, focusing on the Port of Felixstowe in Suffolk, England. Historically, dock worker sand their unions have been fundamental to struggles around international issues. This is due to their positions within key nodes of a global system of logistics, giving them a unique power as workers to meaningfully engage in international politics through the derailing of a nation's supply-chains. Peter Cole documents this in his analysis of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in San Francisco and their refusal to handle goods from apartheid South Africa. Recently, dockworkers' organisations in Genoa and Livorno, Italy, have refused to handle goods from Israel. In Britain, dockworkers and their unions have gone on strike to aid international causes as they did in1920, refusing to board arms for the Polish army in the Polish-Soviet War. They have also done the opposite, as when the National Union of Seamen (NUS) colluded with the state to ensure that Indian sailors could not settle within the United Kingdom in the 1920s. It is this variegated history that makes Britain an interesting case study, and Felixstowe - the busiest port in the United Kingdom with a largely unionised workforce -the most vital site for this project.