The Decline of Stevedoring Labour in Durban: 1959-1990
The movement of commodities around the world has been a crucial way in which
capitalist and colonial economies have functioned. Ships and harbours have been the
focus of the transportation of commodities for many centuries, and today, while there are
faster means of transporting lighter cargo, such as mail, shipping remains at the centre of
relations of the production and exchange of heavy commodities. Technological
innovation has made globalisation possible across the world, and likewise technological
change has accounted for massive changes in sea transport and in carrying of cargo.
During the age of imperialism, harbours facilitated the exchange of commodities
between the coloniser and colonized. Yet during those times, facilities in colonized
countries had to be developed and controlled by the colonial powers to allow the easiest
possible utilization of colonial extraction. It is evident that the facilities in different
countries differed, according to the specific resources of individual countries. While the
transportation of cargo has necessarily been of an international nature, port authorities
and workers in the stevedoring industry have reflected the politics and culture of the
countries and social systems of which they are a part. During the 1970s, new
technological changes in the transportation of cargo that can broadly be called
containerization, radically changed the positions of ports and harbours worldwide.
This paper outlines the changes that have occurred in the stevedoring industry
from the later 1950s until the early 1990s. I aim to show how world technological
changes have had a profound effect on local social conditions, structures and struggles
and that in many instances, local initiatives (both progressive and reactionary) have been
destroyed by global imperatives. The most profound of these has been the changes that
containerisation has brought to the carefully developed systems of labour control and
coercion developed under Apartheid. Yet while undermining Apartheid controls of
stevedoring workers, containerisation has also smashed important local initiatives to
secure and develop a labour force.