Living and working in the Belgian transport industry, 1913-2013

Rough sea dogs, tough dockworkers, hardened truckers: the cliché goes that working in the transport industry is reserved for "heavyweights." Their lives are fodder for tall tales, always dangerous and rarely well-paid. Yet, in the past 100 years, nothing has changed as quickly and visibly as transport: the ships, the ports, the roads, the cars. And the working man, he adapted. Early photographs defy the imagination: a poor family pulling a boat from a towpath along the canals, a bargeman's wife holding her child on board by a leash, in the harbor, men dragging grain sacks weighing 70 kilos or more. The contrast with today's photos is immense. This book tells the life stories of the workers, their wives, children, and friends in a remarkably vivid way, in the spectacularly rapidly changing world of transport, from 1913 to 2013.

Donald Weber
BTB/Amsab-ISG/Tijdsbeeld & Pièce Montée, Antwerp/Ghent:, 2013, 239 p., ill., soft cover

There is also a French version: Vivre et travailler dans l'industrie du transport en Belgique, 1913-2013