Strikingly indifferent: the myth of militancy on the docks prior to World War II

Abstract

Dock workers have a reputation of being particularly strike-prone, across time and space. This is the spectre of Kerr and Siegel: one of the few things that has survived the passage of time since their 1950s article on inter-industry propensity to strike is the dockers' disposition to stop work. But, Kerr and Siegel's own results show that the dockers' militancy was in fact modest. More recent research has taken as an article of faith the strike-proneness of dockers. True, dock workers and their conflicts have attracted much attention. But, the reason is not the frequency of strikes in the ports but dockers' crucial position in distribution.

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