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Reviewed by:
  • Citizen Docker: Making a New Deal on the Vancouver Waterfront 1919–1939
  • Peter S. McInnis
Citizen Docker: Making a New Deal on the Vancouver Waterfront 1919–1939. Andrew Parnaby. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. 304, $27.95 paper

For many, the phrase on the waterfront evokes a certain exoticism and intrigue – perhaps the brooding performance of Marlon Brando in the eponymous film or the ‘wharf-rats and sun-fish’ of Montreal’s portside as depicted in Peter DeLottinville’s celebrated account of Joe Beef ’s Canteen. To this list we might add Andrew Parnaby’s Citizen Docker. A nuanced analysis of race and gender within the broader perspective of class relations at the port of Vancouver, it provides an intimate view of a world often hidden in plain sight. To secure a meagre living for themselves and their families, those men who made their livelihoods on the Vancouver waterfront did so by enduring constant physical risk [End Page 798] and petty acts of managerial tyranny. The work was dirty and perilous, as harried longshoremen rushed to meet the vagaries of shipping company schedules. Ships’ holds were loaded by these men, often using little more than a strong back and a small iron hook-like grappling claw. Little surprise, then, that this precarious world engendered a combative and pugnacious attitude among those who survived a ‘life on the hook.’

Parnaby takes up the story in 1919, the apogee for working-class consciousness following the end of one war, and carries the analysis to the outbreak of another war in 1939. The two wartime periods that bookend this study are only briefly sketched, and so for a more comprehensive understanding of state formation or labour militancy Citizen Docker should be read along with the extant literature. During the 1920s and 1930s dockers alternatively pushed for improvements in wages and conditions or fought back company initiatives to curtail their militancy and fracture their solidarity. In a dichotomy familiar to historians of North American labour and working-class history, the Vancouver dockers alternated between consent and coercion. At times they understood the importance of collective action and the vital need to overcome internal divisions of race and skill fragmentation. In other instances dockers were pragmatic to the point of cynically casting off the perceived weaker elements of their ranks, actions often tinged with racial overtones.

The implementation of welfare capitalism on the Vancouver docks centred on competing definitions of citizenship. Employers sought to instil a ‘good citizen policy’ consisting of modest workplace gains for those dockers willing to renounce the more radical options of militant unions. This emphasis on securing worker cooperation with their employers’ managerial vision was widely evident by the 1920s. The decasualization of the waterfront – the move away from ad hoc hiring policies of the daily ‘shape up’ to the formation of smaller regular work crews – was key to the vision of the Shipping Federation of British Columbia. No longer would informal press gangs rove the Vancouver dockside in search of rummies to fill out the crew rosters because preference was now given to white, married men of sober bearing and sufficiently malleable demeanour.

The definition of this new citizenship and its constituent features were subject to an intense struggle. Appeals were made to the Vancouver dockers by various labour organizations ranging from the Industrial Workers of the World, to the International Longshoremen’s Association, and the International Longshoremen’s and Warehouse-men’s [End Page 799] Union. These organizations competed openly against company unions intent on confining workplace activities to greater efficiency and self-discipline. In addition, organizers representing various strains of socialism and communism forayed to the dockside during the early decades of the twentieth century. The failure of the communist-led Workers Unity League in the early thirties demonstrates the challenges of organizing any broader, class-conscious movement striving for a national agenda while remaining attentive to the particular local issues of the West Coast shipping sector. As in many other instances, Stalinism did not serve the workers well.

While Parnaby provides a thorough description of the daily activities on the docks, this history also takes us off the waterfront and into the dockers...

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