Never a White Flag: The Memoirs of Jock Barnes, Waterfront Leader
Edited by Tom Bramble
Victoria University Press
Available from One World Books
Box 68-419, Newton
Auckland NZ
e-mail <books@oneworld.org.nz>NZ$36 (includes postage)
Review by Maire Leadbeater
I have known Jock Barnes for the last 10 years or so. Now 91, Jock retains a formidable ability to engage, challenge and amuse. He tells his appreciative audiences — at May Day rallies and public forums — that the battle for justice for working people and the fight against US imperialism are linked, and that the only way to build a better life is "to fight back and never surrender".
Jock spends little time on his own story in these memoirs, but his feisty spirit and indomitable intellect emerge unmistakably. Never a White Flag is essentially a political account of the 1951 waterfront lockout and the struggles in the '30s and '40s that led inexorably to that 151-day showdown.
As president of the Waterside Workers Union, Jock played a key role in this momentous period, when the clash of interests between boss and worker was sharply exposed.
During the postwar years, militant organised labour was under attack throughout the west — on the waterfront of London, Liverpool and Sydney, as well as on the railways in France and in the Nissan factories in Japan.
Jock's analysis — that the forces of capital, implacably opposed to the interests of workers, use any means to maximise their profits — may not be current orthodoxy. But his account is the hidden story, the flip side of the ferocious union bashing and red-baiting prevalent at the height of the Cold War.
The faithful documentation and interspersed letters, pamphlets and cartoons give the account a lively immediacy.
The militancy of the wharfies was honed in battles for elementary rights: for safety, decent wages and humane working hours. Victories could be savoured only briefly before the next attack, and the enemy, through control of the mass media, had an upper hand in the propaganda war.
The class solidarity, loyalty and sacrifice that the wharfies inspired spurred success, while betrayal to government and boss from within the union movement was the greatest threat.
Jock was demonised at the time, and the wharfies' decision to continue the fight to the bitter end remains a controversial issue. He repeatedly stresses democracy within the union and membership participation at every step.
I marvelled at the amount of the underground media generated during the lockout, the size of the public meetings where the wharfies put their case and the extent of financial support from unionists overseas. Local supporters supplied food, and efficient networks saw to its distribution — all this under emergency regulations which brought New Zealand to the point of being a police state.
The Australian Waterside Workers Federation gave financial assistance and imposed a black ban on all New Zealand ships worked by servicemen or scab labour. The union's Melbourne and Sydney offices were raided by federal investigation officers when the Menzies cabinet resolved to force a showdown with "communist wharfies".
Never a White Flag is a clarion call for a militant, uncompromising brand of unionism — the reverse of the worker-employer "partnership" model. It is a tradition that still has a strong echo within the Maritime Union of Australia and those who rallied to its support this year.
Even after so many years, fears of defamation suits delayed the publication of this book. Editor Tom Bramble deserves credit for what must have been a judicious pruning job, and for what he describes as a "light" editing hand, which leaves Jock's inimitable rhetoric largely intact.