{"id":7315,"date":"2014-10-13T16:27:12","date_gmt":"2014-10-13T14:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/?p=7315"},"modified":"2014-11-11T15:26:12","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T13:26:12","slug":"workers-of-the-sea-unite-the-internationalist-legacy-of-the-pre-wwi-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/workers-of-the-sea-unite-the-internationalist-legacy-of-the-pre-wwi-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Workers of the Sea, Unite? The Internationalist Legacy of the Pre-WWI Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><em>Seminariet ing\u00e5r i serien Global arbetarhistoria<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Seminarium inom ramen f\u00f6r serien Global Arbetarhistoria, med Leon Fink, University Illinois-Chicago <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We are generally sensitive today to how \u2018global\u2019 or international commerce has become &#8211; as have almost all our economic problems.  Yet, if recent economic activity has generally moved in this global direction\u2014so much so that many call our times the \u2018era of globalization\u2019\u2014the shipping industry, including its labor relations, has always been so.  Perhaps not surprisingly, given recent experience,  maritime labor movements, much like their landed counterparts, have regularly switched back and forth between more protective \u2018nationalist\u2019 and more expansive \u2018internationalist\u2019 responses to the problem of what I call \u2018sweatshops at sea.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>In this centenary of commemoration and reflection on the era of World War I, I look here at the first great pre-WWI initiative by an emergent international maritime union movement\u2014centered in Britain but extending to seafarers on the Continent (including Sweden) as well as North America&#8211;to rely on the self-activity of collective bargaining and even syndicalist, direct-action strategies to advance sailor welfare.  Focused on trade union efforts to impose a single world standard of wages and laboring conditions for sailors and dockworkers via coordinated, international strike actions in 1911,  the paper closely tracks the tactical and strategic dilemmas facing British seamen\u2019s leader Havelock Wilson and the International Transport Workers\u2019 Federation which he had helped birth.<\/p>\n<p>Alas, even as pre-war cooperation and ideals of solidarity pointed towards an egalitarian reconciliation of national and racial differences, a chastened war-time and post-war atmosphere\u2014especially in Britain&#8211;precipitated more nationalist, corporatist, and even openly racist \u2018solutions\u2019 to the maritime labor problem.  In short, in a display of the best and the worst of impulses within the world\u2019s organized labor movement, we are presented here with a microcosm of an enduring political challenge.<\/p>\n<p>Leon Fink is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is a  a specialist in American labor, immigration history, and the Gilded Age\/Progressive Era he is also the editor of Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Plats<\/strong>: Arbetarr\u00f6relsens Arkiv och Bibliotek, Elektronv\u00e4gen 2, 141 49  HUDDINGE (Pendelt\u00e5g: Flemingsberg)<\/p>\n<p>Seminariet h\u00e5lls p\u00e5 engelska, ingen f\u00f6ranm\u00e4lan kr\u00e4vs.<\/p>\n<p>F\u00f6r mer information skicka mail till leos.muller[at] historia.su.se eller Silke.Neunsinger[at]arbark.se<\/p>\n<p>Arrangeras i samarbete mellan Arbetarr\u00f6relsens arkiv och bibliotek och <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historia.su.se\/forskning\/forskningsomraden\/maritim-historia\/cemas-centrum-for-maritima-studier \">Centrum f\u00f6r maritima studier, Stockholms universitet <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ARAB, Global arbetarhistoria. Seminarium med Leon Fink, University Illinois-Chicago <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[794,782,83,348,781],"class_list":{"0":"post-7315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-evenemangsarkiv","7":"tag-global-arbetarhistoria","8":"tag-hamnarbetare","9":"tag-internationalism","10":"tag-sjofart","11":"tag-sjoman","12":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7315"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7488,"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7315\/revisions\/7488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arbark.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}