Worlds of Labor on Georgetown’s Waterfront: Work, Freedom and the Labor Question in Guyana, c. 1890–1966

Abstract This article examines conflicts over the meaning and organization of work on the waterfront of Georgetown, Guyana. In the Anglophone Caribbean, “free” wage labor was a key component of the post-emancipation civilizing mission. Afro-Caribbean peoples, however, had their own ideas about the place of wage labor in their individual and collective lives. For many freed peoples and their descendants, wage labor was often one “livelihood strategy” among many, and it did not always take priority over other individual needs, or familial and communal concerns. This article investigates how these different understandings of wage labor shaped the multifaceted worlds of Georgetown’s Afro-Guianese waterfront workers. The first part examines the social relations and hierarchies that mediated the organization of work on the waterfront, influenced waterfront workers’ attitude toward wage labor and its relationship to other aspects of their lives, and facilitated episodes of industrial protest, including strikes when Afro-Guianese and Indo-Guianese workers co-operated in defiance of British Guiana’s racialized political economy. The second part focuses more narrowly on the workplace and the colonial authorities’ ongoing search for answers to the labor question. The article contends that decasualization—which complemented the wider post-1945 development and welfare agenda—represented a new iteration of the post-emancipation project to organize Afro-Guianese peoples’ lives around wage labor. Against the backdrop of rising anti-colonial sentiment and the subsequent split within the nationalist movement, the article demonstrates that although the colonial authorities had some success in creating a cohort of regular waterfront workers, decasualization was no panacea for the labor question.