Résumé À travers l’étude des dessins parus dans La Voix du peuple , organe officiel de la jeune CGT, l’article s’interroge sur la représentation que le syndicalisme français donne de lui-même dans les premières années du siècle. Il met l’accent sur les difficultés à rendre graphiquement l’action syndicale mais surtout le syndicat lui-même, dont, paradoxalement, l’image n’apparaît que très rarement. À côté des foules abondamment représentées (le « peuple »), les petits groupes de militants ouvriers qui s’en distinguent dans les dessins reflètent bien, en dehors des contraintes du genre et de l’idéologie syndicaliste révolutionnaire, la faiblesse du syndicalisme français d’avant 1914.
Nothing predisposed the ports, where random hiring-and-firing practices reigned supreme and anyone could turn up in the hope of a few hours’ work, to become bastions of trade union strength able to perform the astonishing feat of forging a distinction between flexible work and casual labour. Yet this is what happened in the immediate post-war period when ports and docklands entered the third age of cargo-handling services, a phase characterized for the dockworkers by guaranteed terms of employment that marked the completion of a long process of struggle for recognition and definition of their specific occupational status. Whether in relation to hiring procedures or the tasks performed, the dockworkers of 2010 have little in common with those of the 1950s or 1930s; little, that is, except for a culture that continues to form the basis of a collective identity in which trade unionism is still very much a live force. These developments have received, curiously enough, scant attention, no doubt because the highly specific features of work in the ports made it extremely difficult to export elsewhere what was a unique set of sectional corporatist gains. And yet this experience does raise questions that transcend sectional occupational considerations in the search for alternatives to contingent and precarious labour practices.
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