“A Calculating Blow”: The 1937 Melbourne Stay-In Strike
Phillip Deery
On the evening of 11 August 1937, night shift workers at Melbourne’s two gasworks introduced an industrial tradition unknown to Victoria: an extended stay-in strike. It was to last another 15 days involving nearly 1,000 gasworkers, followed by a brief, second stay-in strike that ended on 2 September. In a community heavily dependent on the regular supply of gas, the strike caused widespread hardship. It was notable for the unwavering solidarity and self-management of the strikers; the refusal of the police to intervene, against the wishes of the company; and the conflict, once the strike ended, between the union and the industrial disputes committee. Despite its significance and novelty, the strike has escaped historians’ attention. This article, therefore, tells for the first time the story of that strike, examining its industrial, political, social and economic ramifications.
Mobility and Labour in the Colonial Prison, India c. 1820–70s
Nabhojeet Sen
This article argues that incarceration in and outside prisons of colonial India represents an exercise in disciplined mobility. Practices of disciplined mobility during the nineteenth century were embedded in local responses to specific challenges of penal governance. They were also part of the colonial state’s pontificatory claims of introducing circulation and movement into the static, tabula rasa of India. At the same time however, these strategies also ensured the difference between stated aims and modest returns of colonial prisons, producing an unsettled prison characterised by substantial porosity of power. Inside prisons, more granular forms of movement were used to inculcate industrial discipline, maintain jail economy, induce adherence to jail rules, and extract desired work outcomes. During the nineteenth century, prisons came to be situated along a circuit of individuals, information, diseases and commodities even as it became part of the larger post abolitionary mobilisation of labour in the colony.
Lost Debates: The Australian Labor Party and World War I, 1918
Murray Perks
During the last 18 months of World War I, the Australian Labor Party committed to support peace by negotiation on liberal-internationalist terms. An alarmed Australian government blamed enemy subversion and stepped-up repression of antiwar voices, including through harsher censorship and legal intimidation of leading dissenters. When in mid-1918 militants in the Labor Party forced the question of whether Labor should cease all support for recruitment of reinforcements for Australia’s military contribution, and argued that continuing the contribution should be conditional on the Allies seriously pursuing a negotiated peace, political sensitivities and fear of legal penalties drove the party’s debates underground. This caused significant gaps in the usual primary sources. Recovering these “lost debates” reveals the strength of serious questioning of the terms of Australia’s military commitment, and seeks to situate the antiwar movement more centrally in accounts of Australia’s war at home.
Compensation Hid Behind Asbestos Walls: Class, Protest, and Justice in the Dust Diseases Tribunal of New South Wales
James Watson
Scholarship on workers’ compensation commonly concludes that workers and unions campaign for publicly-funded compensation instead of trial-based common law compensation, and that they form temporary alliances with labour governments in the process to achieve their aims. The creation of the Dust Diseases Tribunal provides a unique counter example to this trend, with a union informally aligning with a conservative government to remove a previous labour government’s scheme and replace it with common law compensation for asbestos victims. By tracing the 1988 FEDFA workers compensation campaign in the context of the Australian Labor Party’s shift towards neoliberalism in this decade, this article complicates scholarship on workers’ compensation by discussing an informal alliance between workers and conservatives that significantly changed workers’ compensation in New South Wales.
The Australian Railways Union and Rank and File Democracy in New South Wales, 1925–60
Joseph Stark
The shop committee movement in New South Wales (NSW) was central to the militancy of the Australian Railways Union (ARU) during period from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s. Shop committees were made up of shop stewards from each union and work area. These committees bargained directly with management on workplace issues. The formation and spread of shop committees, backed by regular mass meetings, enabled railway workers to develop considerable influence over working conditions on the shopfloor. Despite the importance of the shop committee movement to railway workers, it has been largely overlooked in the current literature on trade unionism in NSW. By focusing on shop committee radicalism, this article addresses that omission and adds a new dimension to our understanding of rank-and-file union activism between the mid-1920s and the late 1950s.
The 1913–14 Dryland Agriculture Strike in New South Wales
Robert Tierney
Unlike the United States and Great Britain, studies of class struggle between landholders and farm-labourers in Australian dryland agriculture, throughout colonial and post-colonial times, are almost absent. This article attempts to fill part of the vacuum. It analyses an important, though hardly known strike in New South Wales in 1913–14. It was initiated by farm-labourers in wheat fields, by chaff-workers in fodder paddocks, and by cart-owners and wheat-chaff lumpers. The dispute eventually spread onto railways and wharves. This article examines wheat and chaff production’s labour processes, which were factors in the emergence of discontent, and considers workers’ yearning for an agricultural award. It traces the strike’s geographical origins and extension across wheat and fodder districts, and proposes explanations for the strike’s ultimate failure. These included the interventions of blackleg labour, the aggressive responses of landholders and their lobby, the Farmers and Settlers’ Association, the failure of Australian Workers’ Union leaders to provide effective strike support, the onset of drought, and the outbreak of international conflict.