Contributors to this issue demonstrate the value of case studies in illuminating the experience of very different groups of workers and their workplaces. We start with Phillip Deery’s discovery that gasworkers in Victoria in the late winter of 1937 undertook an extended “stay-in” strike that caused considerable hardship and provoked internal conflict. In an episode previously unknown to Australian historians, of tactics that were novel for Australian labour, Deery’s account explains what was both new and significant in the strike and its context.
India under the British Raj was a very different context for labour. Continuing the exploration of incarcerated, colonised labour that was the theme of a previous special issue of Labour History, Nabojheet Sen uses the literature of mobility studies and coerced labour to explore a transitional moment in Indian governance and imprisonment. With considerable detail he argues for the insight provided by “mobility” in understanding Indian prison labour in that key period. His illumination has relevance for other colonised people under British rule.
Two articles engage with the issue of workers’ alignment to the Australian Labor Party. The first, by Murray Perks, explores dissensions within the labour movement over the ALP government’s peace negotiations in the final stages of World War I. It highlights the significance of discovering missing primary sources for historians’ ability to reconstruct dissension and resistance by workers opposing a Labor government.
The second article takes up a similar theme of party alignment and worker opposition in the campaign on behalf of asbestos victims, which occurred during the transformative decade of the 1980s as the ALP shifted towards neoliberalism. In reconstructing the creation of the NSW Dust Diseases Tribunal for settling workers compensation claims, James Watson shows workers aligning informally with conservative politicians to change the state Labor government’s scheme of workers’ compensation.
It is unusual and unintentional to have the majority of articles in a single issue concentrate on one state, although New South Wales, as the oldest and largest Australian state, does attract a lot of research. Here it provides two further case studies for this issue. In a focus on the shop committee movement and its significance in the Australian Railways Union, Joseph Stark adds to historical understanding of rank-and-file union activism. Heargues that between the 1920s and the 1950s, when shop committees bargained directly with management, they were central to railway workers’ militancy and the union’s achievements over working conditions. Agricultural workers are the subject of Robert Tierney’s analysis of a little-known strike on the eve of war in 1913–14, which was initiated by wheat and chaff labourers and spread to the wharves and railways. He argues that the strikers sought coverage by an agricultural award but were defeated by a better organised association of farm owners, an ineffective Australian Workers Union, the onset of drought, and the world being at war.
Shifting gears to the period when the non-Labor parties were in government nationally, and the welfare state was being dismantled, Philip Mendes brings another perspective on the issue of resistance. In a Historical Note that condenses the history of the organised advocacy by the Australian Council of Social Services for those unemployed and disabled workers living in poverty, he opens up connections between welfare history and labour history, employed and unemployed workers, and the nature of their respective organisations.
In two extended obituaries of remarkable individuals who made a difference to workers’ lives and our knowledge of their experience, we have case studies of a different order. Fay Marles was a public servant whose own life experience informed her approach to creating equal opportunities for working women. Mary Crooks has written from both a personal and professional appreciation of Fay Marles’ legacy. Les Louis was an academic, a scholarly contributor to this journal, a teacher and researcher who inspired and educated many subsequent labour historians. Publishing posthumously Peter Love’s tribute to Les Louis – written early in case he was “poleaxed” first – enables us to remember and honour them both. Thus is labour history enriched and sustained.
Diane Kirkby