Longshoremen's Guild

Historical Overview

Founding

In the years before the Crossing Over, The Promenade's Whaling Industry was on the rise. Different neighborhoods of the Seaside specialized in different aspects of whaling, such as blubber in the Tryworks or carving whales in Butchers' Row. As formal industry supplanted the community-focused whaling of the early Promenade, workers began to organize to protect themselves. What started as local groups of specialized workers with common interests would eventually grow into a city-spanning guild.

The Peak

Shortly after the Crossing Over, harvesting of the Coastal Whale steadily increased, whilst the average size of the individual whales decreased. The decreasing size led to increasing demand, and so forth, with the Promenade entering an unsustainable cycle of hunting along the coasts. However, the citizens of the Promenade were unaware of this at the time, and the increased prosperity, coupled with the increasing formalization of the industry, necessitated collective organization. Thus, the Longshoremen's Guild was created out of a conglomeration of smaller, more specialized, neighborhood-based groups of workers.

"There can be too much of a good thing, and as personal enterprise gave way to formal industries, people would inevitably fall through the economy's cracks. Thus, the city's first gangs appeared." - The Promenade

The Guild of this era fought on two fronts. On one hand, the Guild was organizing workers throughout the neighborhoods of the Seaside to fight for wages, fair rent, and other policies. On the other hand, they were also forced to combat the gangs of the early Age of Men. While in the modern Promenade, there are a number of large gangs with designated territory, around this period there were hundreds of up-and-coming groups fighting for power. Life was violent, the the Longshoremen began equipping themselves with their iconic boarding knives for neighborhood defense.

The Boarding Knife, a flensing tool and weapon of the Longshoremen The Longshoremen's Guild introduced a number of social programs during the Peak, but especially as whaling began to decline with the extinction of the Coastal Whale, around 250AM. One such program was Yard Clubs, industry-based sick-benefit societies paid into by workers. When a worker was ill, he was able to collect two-thirds wages provided a Guild official verified the state of his illness. The Guild also negotiated as a group, both with city officials for regulation, and more violently against landlords and managers viewed as unjust.

Self-Defeat

Like the Promenade, the Longshoremen's Guild is a shadow of its former self. Both of these downfalls are tied closely together, however, as the Guild and the city declined around the same time and for similar reasons. The Promenade itself saw its decline come from a failure to ameliorate the effects of overfishing and the gangs that crept up in the subsequent economic downturn. The Guild suffered from the same downturn, but through their efforts to protect their members, they worsened the situation in devastating ways. One of the crucial economic issues that cropped up in the wake of the exhaustion of the Coastal Whale population was the increased distance required for hunting. Journeys further east and west took Promenade whalers into the waters of other houses and regions, or even far north into the Serpent Sea. To haul whale carcasses from such a distance would be both difficult and impractical, while boiling the whale for blubber in boat-based tryworks would be vastly superior. This would, however, devastate the Tryworks district, and all other districts requiring whales to be returned to the city for harvesting.

"Ostensibly in order to stave off poverty, the city council had mandated whaling companies send fifty percent of a sailor's pay to his family, if he had one. In reality, this was most likely orchestrated through the influence of the Redmarks." - Isobard Quickquill, Whale Whale Whale, What Have We Here?

The Pike & Sons Co., owned by House Pike, was well aware of this situation. To increase their profits, and save the whaling industry, they sought to install tryworks upon the whaling ships themselves. Aware of the unpopularity of this measure, the company paid the Redmarks of the Westdock to force the locals to comply. The Redmarks first failed to force the Castworks to construct trypots, and therefore House Pike imported them. Upon the arrival of the imported trypots, the Guild seized them and threw the pots into the exit of the Landside's canals, flooding portions of the district. Faced with such destruction, House Pike relented. However, the Guild had sealed their fate, as the industry would die a slow death. The Guild saw a similar death as well, as the gangs were awakened to the power of collective action. Abusing the Guild's democratic processes, the gangs got their members elected to leadership positions, dismantling the group from the inside. Through a series of bribes and the utilization of internal dissent, based somewhat on the Guild's policy of not holding meetings in pubs, the Longshoremen's Guild was no longer controlled by the workers of the city.

Moving Landward

The Banksdale neighborhood of the Landside is dominated by House Swann and their dependents. Here sits the headquarters of the Merchants' & Traders' Trust, one of the largest banks in Anhara, specializing in insuring merchant shipping. It is locked in fierce competition with the Bank of Anhara, which seeks to expand into the shipping industry. But now, a new competitor rises on the homefront. The Longshoremen's Guild, under the management of the post-Yardarm Pact gangs, began working for House Swann as middle men. Their members collected payments from whaling ships, and forced the enrollment of lower-class captains in the M&T Trust's insurance program. Getting a taste for the new source of income, however, led the Guild to go into business for themselves. Opening an office in the Lanside, the Longshoremen's Trust moved into the insurance and lending business as a front for the Guild, and thus the gangs themselves.

Today

The Longshoremen's Guild of today has fallen far from their altruistic origins. Operating programs beneficial for sailors and whaling industry workers, they have now swung far to the other direction. Through the best efforts of the Guild's leadership during the crucial period of whaling downturn, the Guild doomed themselves through their short-term focus. Today, dominated by the gangs of the Promenade, the Longshoremen's Guild now serves as a front, and risks bringing the ire of the Landside back down upon the lower classes with their move into Banksdale.

Type

Guild, Professional

Location

The Promenade