International records / OpenAlex research

Consciousness, organisation and action amongst Lagos portworkers

This paper examines the relatively well‐paid and relatively secure workers employed by the state sector in a peripheral capitalist society. The state sector is of particular importance in Africa as one of the earliest and most stable sources of wage employment. In Nigeria the earliest manual worker unions were based on the public corporations, and many such unions existing in the 1970s could trace their history back 30 or 40 years. Public corporations provide a high proportion of wage employment in Nigeria even today, and they are responsible for such strategic sectors as energy supply, transp…