During the decade that followed the end of World War II, dockworkers in London and New York entered into an extended period of militant industrial action that brought them into direct conflict with employers, trade union leadership, and government. In this innovative comparative study of two leading waterfront occupational communities, Colin Davis identifies the structural and cultural forces that lay behind the emergence of two militant rank-and-file dockworker movements and examines their ethnic and racial profile, dock culture, and the quest for dignity and recognition.

The emphasis is on conflict and militant revolt, centered on workplace issues and the manner in which the rank and file regarded their trade union leadership. Davis seeks to explain the working-class experience through the dockers attachment to their trade union organizations, but also their determined struggle for democracy against the desires and wishes of a powerful and influential—and in New York indifferent and corrupt—trade union leadership. It is here we find the common bond between the dock workers of London and New York, and if the struggle for workplace democracy meant taking on the employers and national government too, then so be it.

Central, municipal, and local government had for generations attempted to regularize class relations on the waterfront, not least when worker rebellions and work stoppages interfered with trade. When trade was at stake the state and the employers sought political alliance with trade union leaders, much to the chagrin of the dockers, but the level of intervention was different in the London context. The British government was critically interested in stable work relations at London, but it was the state and local authorities, rather than the U.S. federal government, who, for whatever reason, took a keen interest in labor relations in New York.

Davis seeks to expand our understanding of political choice by employing a comparative framework to study two analogous work forces albeit in different national and cultural contexts during the emerging cold war period. In both port cities we find multiple groups fighting for control, including rank-and-file, “outsider” Communist-inspired agitators and labor priests, a multifaceted employer class, and national and local government, all largely disillusioned with a trade union leadership. To this we can add a heady mixture of ethnicity and race—a subject revisited in chapter 8—and to a greater or lesser degree, gangsterism, loan-sharking, and pilfering at both ports. Against such a backdrop, attempts to build solidarity among the workforce or to encourage stable work relations across the waterfront would clearly be difficult. Yet, somehow these competing forces could coalesce into a unified posture of rebellion.

Chapter 1 of the book profiles in considerable detail how racial standings determined entry into the workforce, while the following chapter considers workplace culture, the shared sense of skill and danger, and the manner in which pilfering was considered both a perquisite and a form of rebellion. Chapter 3 demonstrates that while union cultures at each port were different, the growing sense of alienation felt by dock workers and their militant response to this held common characteristics. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the strikes of 1948, and the manner in which this wildcat and unofficial action encouraged a culture of rebellion at both ports. The need to protect trade was also paramount, and these chapters chart the responses of the relevant authorities in their attempts to reestablish control in the face of rank-and-file militancy and apparent Communist conspiracy.

The American Federation of Labour was equally committed to ridding the docks of gangsters and marginalizing political agitators, even if this meant expelling the International Longshoremen's Association from the established labor movement. At London, the dockers were on their own, fighting a determined trade union leadership and a hostile central government hell-bent on retaining control. Chapters 6 and 7 detail this struggle but also show that as one group of insurgents were cast adrift others quickly emerged to take on the mantle of opposition. The final chapter returns to the theme of racial conflict and the struggle of black and Hispanic longshoremen for the equal treatment in hiring and promotion as any other docker. This was not a problem of the same order of magnitude at London, but the theme of division was evident there nonetheless.

This cross-national comparative approach reveals the similarities and differences among the struggles of these transatlantic workers and how workers, trade unions, and national-states directly influenced cold war politics and economics. But above all it is about the workforce—the men who worked and died loading and unloading ships—and the solidarity that gave them the power and courage to take on forces determined to control them. This is an ambitious, wide-ranging, and detailed study, and, as Eric Arnesen notes on the dust cover, Davis succeeds admirably in drawing together the narrative strands that highlight both the similarities and differences in London and New York.