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In Memoriam
It is very fitting that the International Labor and Working Class History journal marks the passing of Peter Waterman given his long and remarkable record as global labor thinker and activist.
Peter Waterman was born into a middle-class Jewish family in London and was a member of the Young Communists. This activism led him to become the English language editor of the monthly journal of the International Union of Students in Prague during the second half of the 1950s. In the early 1960s, he studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University via Ruskin College. He returned to Prague to work for the World Federation of Trade Unions information department but left after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He then did a Masters in West African studies at Birmingham University and began working at Ahmadu Bello in northern Nigeria in the early 1970s. He became interested in African labor studies through contacts made at WFTU's Africa desk. From 1972 to his retirement in 1998, he taught at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague from where he published the Newsletter of International Labour Studies in the 1980s, and launched his "real" career as a global labor scholar and activist.
The "early" Peter Waterman was part of a wave of British academics doing their PhDs in West Africa. Peter did his on the dockworkers in Lagos at a time when the "labor aristocracy" debates were raging. Were these organized workers playing a conservative and self-interested role or might they play a leading and radical role organizing the mass of workers? While his PhD never attained wide circulation, an article in Development and Change (6 (3): 1975) on "The 'labour aristocracy' in Africa" nicely sums...