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employment of indigenous sailors on USSCo. steamers equally objectionable. Although trading from Australia or New Zealand into the Pacific could not be classed as coasting, in these trades it became the norm to maintain coasting labour conditions and, hence, white labour. In 1884 the USSCo. removed all Islander labour from ships trading between Auckland and islands in the Pacific. The
blunders year after year as we do’. 56 Indigenous workers also influenced the course of this developing industry through demands for improved labour conditions. From the early 1900s, the USSCo., rather than the colonial state, met increasing demands for travel and food allowances to and from Suva and provided housing for men during their employment in town. In 1911 translated
, reciprocating engines and other mechanisms were often described for their technical wonder, it was unusual to read of the living and working conditions of the men who built and operated these vessels, or to see crew members in the photographs and posters of ships which instead emphasised mechanical size and scale. 37 This deflected attention from less than salutary labour conditions on board, particularly in
colonization’. 37 In stark contrast to international accusations of slavery-like recruitment and labour conditions, the official narrative was thus one about the civilising nature of work and the exemplary conditions in which it took place among an estimated 66,000 people transferred from Angola to São Tomé between 1876 and 1904. 38 Work, like religion – which was invoked in other contexts – embodied the transforming nature of the
Kong’s labour conditions attracted the periodic attention of social reformers and manufacturing interests in Britain. In the mid-1960s, Elsie Elliott’s campaigns included visits to London to encourage parliamentary intervention. 57 David Clayton has shown that British governmental pressure was crucial in pushing the adoption of the eight-hour day for female workers in the late 1960s, and London
unknown. 47 Following reports of abuse, Fiji’s plantations were monitored ‘with excruciating exactitude’, as John Kelly discusses, with statistics gathered on work rates, absences, wages, birth, death and crime rates, education and return passages. 48 By contrast, the recruitment processes of lascars in port and the labour conditions on board ship
freedoms. In the steam age, sailors began to forge more regular and stable connections to family, mixed more often with non-seafarers and had the opportunity to compare their labour conditions more directly with workers ashore. As a result, she argues, they challenged the stereotype of the wayward, drunk, irresponsible seafarer and opposed increased state regulation of wage
–1941’, Past & Present 171 (2001): 161–202; Shuk-wah Poon, ‘Dogs and British Colonialism: The Contested Ban on Eating Dogs in Colonial Hong Kong’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 ( 2014 ): 308–28. In addition, ‘sweatshop’ labour conditions were to a limited extent ameliorated in the early 1960s, in part because of metropolitan
was similarly noted in a 1978 New Statesman article that pointed out that nearby Macau attracted two million Hong Kong visitors per year to its casinos. 97 Victorian values and their discontents Hong Kong’s labour conditions attracted the periodic attention of social reformers and manufacturing interests in Britain. In the mid-1960s, Elsie
Labour conditions in cocoa farming have recently come under scrutiny following accusations of child slavery. In April 2001, a ship arriving at Benin was thought to be carrying child slaves from Nigeria. This brought the international spotlight onto the exploitation of child labour, resulting in a pact signed by several chocolate manufacturers, human rights groups and the Ivory Coast government to end