Organising the Radical Maritime Transport Workers

Maritime workers constituted a multifaceted group, e.g. the seamen and stokers of many nationalities hired on the various national merchant fleets as well as the dockers and stevedores working in the harbours. Working conditions both on board and on land were tough and worsened due to the economic depression from the late 1920s onwards. The organisation of seamen in trade unions, especially, was a challenge as union activity was mainly landbased while seamen worked on ships that seldom called at their homeports. In addition, seamen were for long regarded as an unruly, individualistic and internationalist group who had few interests in organised union activities. Socialist party and labour leaders regarded the waterfront as a secondary field of work – in sheer numbers, the maritime workers constituted but a small portion of the work force.1 Also, as Peter Cole and David Featherstone have underlined, apart from the 1913established Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union, the official maritime labour unions in the USA, Britain and elsewhere where preominantly exclusionary and segregationist.2 It comes therefore as no surprise that many of the leading figures in the radical waterfront both in Europe and the Americas had a background in the ‘revolutionary industrial unionism’ and the radical international syndicalism of the ‘Wobblies’, the Industrial Workers of the World, before and during the Great War.3 A further challenge were the unemployed seamen living ashore. Especially during the 1920s and 1930s, they constituted a problematic group for the existing socialistled maritime labour unions: receptive for radical, i.e., communist, agitation and propaganda, they could turn into a ‘fifth column’ at union meetings and push for a politicisation of trade union activities.