A fair day's work - Nicholas Monsarrat (First edition)

The luxury ship Good Hope, ready for her greyhound dash across the Atlantic and a sun-soaked Caribbean cruise, lay tethered to the rain-swept landing stage, the last of her passengers coming aboard - a proud, immaculate ship held in the grey desolation of Liverpool Docks by bonds far stronger than the hawsers fore and aft. Below decks seethed agitation and unrest, bred from envy and fomented in spite, led by Vic Swann, a discontented, work-shy young steward whose first principle in life was the softest possible job for the hardest possible cash.

Two hours before sailing time Swann, as self-appointed unofficial leader of the stewards, went ashore to the dock-side office of McTeague, equally unofficial union organizer. For McTeague, the union battles of the past had been won too soon; all that was left to him, to justify his existence, was the parrot-cry 'To hell with the bosses'. Now, to strike a blow for the working class, he wanted a dispute. He told Swann to go back aboard, get himself into trouble, accept his punishment, then call a meeting to protest against victimization, and demand a walk-out to prevent the Good Hope from sailing.

Nicholas Monsarrat, in the third novel of his series Signs of the Times, plunges head-down into the contemporary problem of the unofficial strike, choosing for his mise en scène a word in which he is very much at home.