Process and change in the Newfoundland fishery : the Trawlermen's Strike of 1974-5

Macdonald, David A. (1979) Process and change in the Newfoundland fishery : the Trawlermen's Strike of 1974-5. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The subject of this thesis is a labour dispute that took place in 1974-5, when unionised trawler fishermen in Newfoundland struck against fish companies, initially in support of a demand for higher fish prices. More specifically, the thesis deals with the rhetorical behaviour of the president of the union, Richard Cashin, during the course of the strike. The material upon which the study is based is drawn from contemporary press accounts of the strike, from interviews with key personnel involved in the strike and from other documentary and secondary sources. The successive chapters of the thesis introduce the participants in the strike, describe the historical background of unionisation in the province, give a history of the union involved, the NFFAW, recount the events of the strike and the rhetorical battle which accompanied it and, in the final chapter, the material presented in the previous chapter is analysed. The organisation of the thesis is based upon the scheme proposed by Hymes (1972) for the analysis and presentation of the ethnography of communicative behaviour. -- The central problems to which the thesis is addressed are the question of what part the union's publicity campaign played in the achievement of the final settlement of the strike and what implications this bore for Cashin's role as leader of the union. The theoretical framework for use in this thesis was adapted from Paine (1976), in which transactions are seen as communicative events. A novel concept, that of championship, was introduced to describe Cashin's relation to his followers. The thesis concludes that the publicity campaign worked in favour of the union side in the dispute, and that it was a positive factor in delineating the grounds upon which any settlement of the strike could be effected. It was also an important factor in normalising relations between Cashin and his followers during the strike.

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