ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the connections and differences of dockers around the globe. It focuses on who these dockers were, and how they procured and retained jobs on the waterfront. The chapter provides the artisanal, casual, and decasual periods. The demise of the artisanal period is linked to the casualisation of the workforce as trade expanded throughout the nineteenth century, the advent of steamship lines, and increasing migration of cheap labour into port cities. The artisanal phase was a period where dockers enjoyed extensive job control. The decasualisation period, generally following World War II, was to have a remarkable effect on the formation and reproduction of the work force. Paternalistic structures were intended to wed the docker to the occupational group. The ability of dock companies to impose the casual system was predicated on an abundance of flexible and cheap labour. Colonial governments dabbled with a series of decasualisation schemes throughout the twentieth century.
