‘Keeping Each Other Buoyant’: Power, Emotions and Dock Work in Liverpool, c. 1967 – Present


Copestake-Websdell, Emma and Copestake, Emma (2022) ‘Keeping Each Other Buoyant’: Power, Emotions and Dock Work in Liverpool, c. 1967 – Present. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the emotional history and cultural memory of dock work in Liverpool from the 1960s to the present day. During this period, the nature of dock work changed dramatically. Decasualisation, improvements in welfare provisions, changing health and safety regulations, and containerisation created struggles in the Port of Liverpool. These struggles were between dock workers, trade unions and port employers under the operation of the National Dock Labour Scheme. While industrial relations on the docks have been the centre of much academic attention, the importance of daily emotional exchanges that defined and shaped these relations have rarely been recognised. Through analysis of interviews conducted during the course of this project, along with consideration of existing oral histories and archival materials, I demonstrate the importance of emotions to how power relations, particularly class relations, operated in everyday situations at work. My focus on emotions offers two important contributions to our understanding of the experience of dock work in Liverpool. Firstly, emotions provide an insight to the social tools that people used to navigate power relations as they aligned themselves with and against others. These tools functioned as forms of everyday resistance and lay at the heart of class struggle as they shaped understandings of community and solidarity. Secondly, the emotional significance of work and the multitude of ways the dock community remained ‘buoyant’ helps to explain why dock workers remember the 1960s and 1970s so fondly despite the difficulties and divisions of the period. I examine the importance of love, pride, solidarity, humour, fear and hope among men and women who relied upon dock work, and how this ‘emotional community’ was both shaped by, and influenced, the culture of employment. My analysis of oral histories unravels the emotional connections between work, community and memory to outline new and interconnected perspectives on solidarity, industrial masculinity and health and safety. I demonstrate the importance of caring, affection and humour to industrial masculinity which builds upon and complicates existing interpretations of dock-working men as proud, hardworking breadwinners. By focusing on caring and affection, I show that health and safety concerns were central to experiences of class despite there being few formal industrial disputes relating to it. The innovative methodological approach to the history of work in this thesis underlines the power relations that defined positive experiences of work and how these experiences continued to shape memories of loss and nostalgia. Therefore, this thesis argues that experiences and memories of work cannot be fully understood without a consideration of emotions.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 16 Dec 2022 12:08
Last Modified: 18 Jan 2023 20:53
DOI: 10.17638/03160740
Supervisors:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3160740
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