Undoubtedly, the casualised and subcontracting nature of the labour regime was the primary factor in the low productivity.9 A 1953 report from the docks of Kuwait clearly recognised that a better-managed port could not depend entirely on subcontracted labour. The report added that ‘with the growth of mechanisation it is desirable that the handling of mechanical plant should be confined to directly employed labour’.10 However, subcontracting gave the shipping companies and ports the alibi they needed to not provide their workers with basic wages and benefits. Once citizenship became a norm of governance, with its attached rights – however minimal – nationals began to draw on an expanded repertoire of claim-making for better wages and workplace conditions. Foreign workers (with carefully graded hierarchies of nationality and foreign citizenship) did not have access to this expanded repertoire. As long as foreign workers were cheap, abundant, and deportable, they could be used to build and run the transport infrastructures, instead of expensive heavy equipment and machinery. Walter Rodney had seen the same pattern in the European exploitation of Africa, where, instead of capital-intensive equipment, ‘sheer manpower had to take the place of earth-moving machinery, cranes, and so on’.11

What distinguishes many strikes at docks on the Arabian Peninsula is not only the depth of worker grievances about workplace conditions (as in the story that opens this chapter), but also the weaving of these workplace protests into political demands. Whether mobilising against colonial masters or authoritarian monarchies, strikers often justified their demands for better working conditions, rights, and dignity as being not only about bread-and-butter issues but also about politics. This perhaps explains the extent to which the Gulf monarchies were so terrified of workplace agitation.

Oblique accounts offered in the archives show that workers were deeply aware of the strategies of racialisation and hierarchies of labour meant to keep them in place. In Aden, during an Aden Port Trust dockers’ strike, the workers demanded paid transport to Britain once every five years. While the colonial officers dismissed this as a case of impudence by the natives, it was clear that the workers themselves saw their labour on an equal plane with their British counterparts, for whom paid transport was a perk. This demand for equality arose wherever the British or US companies had imported racialised regimes of labour, and led to worker protests and strikes. Housing, the quality of food, and the dramatically unequal rates of pay were often the source of grievances of the indigenous workers.53

In Kuwait, after the 1956 Suez War, workers at Ahmadi port brought oil transport and loading of British and French tankers to a halt, and protests and sabotage were so extensive that a nightly curfew was instituted.57 In Aden the same year, when Antonin Besse made a large donation to Oxford University, his workers went on strike to ‘protest at the donation to England of so large a sum of the firm’s money’.58 Adenese workers appear in the archives as some of the most persistently mobilised workers in the Peninsula. March and April of 1956 saw over 100,000 work-days of strikes in Aden, most of them in ports or shipping. A US consul described the leadership of the unions as young Arab men ‘imbued by the spirit of nationalism’.59 By October 1956, when the Suez War began, the protests and strikes reached a fever pitch.