ABSTRACT
Dockworkers were often blamed, deservedly but disproportionately. They resisted compulsory registration or identification schemes that might undermine traditional but anachronistic privileges to choose and refuse cargoes and hours when the nation needed overtime work to win the war. They enjoyed restrictive working agreements that created 'artificial' labour shortages that inhibited 'continuous working of individual vessels'.10 Thus optimistic pre-war assessments of diversion's likely success11 were refuted by failure to move cargoes from ships to recipients expeditiously even though arrivals imposed just half the projected acceptable load in the final third of 1940. Labour and management's stubborn demurral to regimented revision of casual working conditions prolonged an awkward adjustment to wartime needs, but was eventually overridden by aggressive governmental intervention that compares favourably with the response to the shipbuilding crisis.12
