Shipowners, Stevedores and Foremen: Divergent Management Attitudes to Waterfront Labour in the 1950s

Abstract

The causes of alleged inefficiencies in Australian stevedoring have attracted controversy since the early years of the century. This paper looks at management's attitudes to labour in the 1950s. It suggests that shipowner' blinkered attitudes towards human resources in the ranks both of junior management and of casual wharfies bestowed on future decades a lasting legacy of suspicion and resentment. The paper also points to important differences in attitude not only vertically. between the three management echelons of shipowners; stevedores and foremen, but also horizontally between those firms tightly controlled by cartelized shipping lines and the single, independent firm renowned for its superior effciency. Senior shipping managers making strategic labour policy decisions adopted an authori tarian attitude to labour. They refused either to negotiate with the union or to allow their stevedoring managers to make any significant labour decisions. Paradoxi cally, however, their anxiety to keep their vessels moving led them constantly to undercut their line managers' authority by making unofficial ad hoc concessions to individual gangs of wharfies. Further, resenting what they interpreted as attacks on precious managerial prerogative, they simultaneously fought to nullify the efforts of the federal regulatory agency, which was seeking to maintain waterfront discipline and to support the hard-pressed stevedoring foremen. Such attitudes presented an almost total contrast with those of the nation's most efficient stevedoring entrepreneur who tried to get the best out of wharfies through sympa thetic supervision, and who consequently placed prime emphasis on the key role played by foremen.