ABSTRACT
The role of dockers and unions of dockers remains ambiguous in the labour process. It is sometimes said that dockworkers wanted the security of the permanent worker and the freedom of the casual. A careful study of dock labour across time and space can play a healthy role in addressing the problems of labour history generally. The 'modernising' of port labour followed a certain pattern not because history drove it-as the teleological theories of C. Kerr and A. Siegel imply but because official actors had a kind of modernisation theory in their minds. The biggest technological breakthrough of all, in colonial ports as in European ones, was containerisation, for it not only reduced the work force but took away the central importance of the hatch gang from the labour process as much as the hiring system.
