ABSTRACT
The labour process is central to understanding the lives of dock workers, their industrial organisations and relationships with employers. This chapter considers five aspects of the labour process: the process of hiring; skills and/or specialisation among dockers; foremen and control over the job; the accident-prone nature of the work; and the gradual improvement in tools and machinery, culminating in the radical new technology of containerisation. The characteristics of the traditional hiring process profoundly influenced the dockers' culture, consciousness and attitude to the job, engendering perspectives which could persist even when the employers' control over hiring was curtailed, or the work decasualised. As the process of hiring has illustrated, men who worked on the docks tended to establish a relationship with a particular foreman or stevedoring firm. The new technology of containerisation destroyed many of the dockers' traditional skills and reduced the men's control over the job.
