ABSTRACT
In the middle of the 1960s there were more than 700 members of the dockers' union in Aarhus. In 1970 a container terminal was in use, but in the early 1980s, when the amount of cargo passing through the port was much larger than in the 1960s, there were no more than 281 union members. Dock work was a free enterprise, and foremen simply entered the ships and made a contract on the spot. By Danish standards and the standards of the time Aarhus was a big town. Around 1850 Aarhus was a relatively small provincial town in an overwhelmingly agricultural country, which relied heavily on the export of agricultural products to England. Denmark was a tradition-bound agrarian society and still had a relatively static economy. During the whole period 1870-1970 there was a constant surplus of labour on the maritime labour market.
