Uncharted Waters: Social Responsibility in Australian Trade Unions
By Greg Mallory
Boolarong Press, Brisbane, 2005
243 pages, $35 (pb)
REVIEW BY JIM MCILROY
In his foreword to Uncharted Waters, former NSW Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) secretary and co-founder of Green Bans Jack Mundey accurately notes that Greg Mallory's book "has made a positive contribution to the history of trade unionism in this country".
"It is trail breaking as it explores social responsibility by two of the most progressive and militant trade unions — the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF) and the BLF.
"The book traces militant trade unionism through much of the 20th century, including through the arbitration system, basic wage cases and the penal powers of the Arbitration Act, and, from the 1930s through to the end of the century, the vital role of the left in Australian unionism. The Communist Party in particular, but also other strands of socialist, anarchist and social democratic thought and organisation, played a significant role during most of the century."
At this crucial moment in the history of unionism, as trade unions face the biggest assault in decades on their right to organise, it is timely to consider the tradition of class-struggle unionism in Australia.
From the eight-hour-day struggles of the 1850s, to the great shearers' strikes of the 1890s, to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) revolt of the World War I years, to the CPA-led Militant Minority Movement (MMM) in the unions during the early 1930s, to the upsurge around the jailing of Clarrie O'Shea in the penal powers dispute of 1969, militant and political unionism has a vibrant history in this country, which continues to this day.
Two famous cases are highlighted in Mallory's book: The pig iron dispute of 1938, when the Waterside Workers Federation banned loading the tramp ship Dalfram because its cargo was bound for Japan to be used for ammunition in support of the brutal Japanese military occupation of China, and the Green Bans movement in the early 1970s, when the NSW BLF imposed bans on building work on selected environmentally endangered sites in Sydney.
As Mallory observes: "The Pig-iron Dispute of 1938 and the Green Bans of the 1970s were situations in which sections of the trade union movement became involved in struggles that were not solely concerned with wages and conditions. Both the WWF and the NSW BLF argued that their actions resulted from concern about broader social issues affecting society, and that the trade union movement had a responsibility to act when they recognised a perceived injustice. For wharfies in 1938, it meant they should have a right to refuse to load materials that might be used by an aggressor nation. For builders' labourers in the 1970s, it meant they should have the right to refuse to demolish historic buildings or to destroy the homes of inner-city residents and replace these with high-rise office buildings. Both unions were concerned with the effects of the product of their labour on society."
According to Mallory, these disputes raise a number of fundamental questions, "most notably — what were the ideological influences on [the workers] that led them to take actions that did not simply involve wages and conditions? Furthermore, did the actions of these two unions represent a new concept of unionism that took these industrial and political activities into a new dimension?"
Mallory quotes Mundey when he refers to the campaigns undertaken by the new CP-influenced, militant leadership of the BLF to win significant gains in wages and conditions for its members: "If it wasn't for that civilising of the building industry in campaigns of 1970 and 1971, well then I'm sure we wouldn't have had the luxury of the membership going along with us in what was considered by some as 'avant-garde', 'way-out' actions of supporting mainly middle-class people in environmental actions. I think that gave us the mandate to allow us to go into uncharted waters."
In the case of the pig iron dispute, Mallory quotes Ted Roach, former secretary of the NSW south coast branch of the WWF: "We met the reactionary [Menzies] government and the monopolies head on and, in the process, we struck heavy blows for democracy ... We concluded the battle with no physical casualties and emerged as a much stronger organisation. We won a political victory of enormous national and international importance."
The WWF went on to play vital progressive roles in a number of other industrial and political struggles, from banning Dutch ships in support of the Indonesian independence war of 1947, to workers' control campaigns, to actions during the Vietnam War, to the titanic waterfront dispute of 1998.
Mallory provides an interesting and illuminating account of the history of political organisations and their links to the unions over many years. However, in drawing out his main theme of the development of a new concept of "socially responsible unionism", he appears to make an oversimplified counterposition of "political party" influence versus "participatory" unionism.
Explaining his concept of "social responsibility" in unionism, Mallory traces three elements: concern with the end product of labour, as outlined by Karl Marx; a "fundamental orientation [to] the trade union, rather than the working class party, ie, the essential interests of the wage labourers"; and "the importance of democratic and local decision-making. These three concepts tended to merge together in the framework of the New Left politics of the 1960s and 1970s, and led to trade unions taking action which demonstrated a sense of social and moral responsibility for the benefit of all citizens and the preservation of the environment."
Mallory contrasts the roles of two CPA elected officials of the WWF in 1938: general secretary Jim Healy and Roach. "Reflecting their traditional CPA and MMM backgrounds, these officials were concerned with firstly 'capturing' leadership positions in the union movement and secondly, politicising the rank and file.
"Concentrating on this first aspect led to a 'top-down' view of left-wing leadership which was to be challenged by developments in the CPA in the early 1970s." Mallory implies that Healy, directly representing the Communist Party, necessarily had a more "bureaucratic" role in the federal union leadership, whereas "Roach's militancy [in the Pig Iron Dispute] was more in line with syndicalist activity than communistic democratic centralism, as he set the agenda and the branch operated independently of other organs of the federation".
For Lenin, the original author of the theory of democratic centralism as the basis of a revolutionary party, the organised involvement of communist party members in all the struggles of the oppressed was essential. "Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse — no matter what class is affected", he wrote in What Is To Be Done? in 1902. Lenin would no doubt have been fully in support of CP members taking the lead in the Green Bans movement, for example.
This issue raises the much bigger question of what happened to the CPA and its trade union officials after the 1930s. Clearly, the "top down" approach was one — eventually predominant — tendency, whereas the "socially responsible" militancy of the NSW BLF in the 1970s was another. The relationship between the development of the Green Bans movement and the Euro-Communist trajectory of the later CPA leadership is much more complex and controversial, however.
Nevertheless, recent critical events in the early stages of the current fight-back against Howard's anti-union laws underline the crucial role of militant, progressive union officials as catalysts and leaders of a mobilised and politicised rank-and-file union membership. The important role of union officials belonging to, or sympathetic to, the Socialist Alliance in the preparation of the June 30 mass workers' rallies is a case in point.
Mallory has done us all a big favor in publishing his book on social responsibility in Australian unionism. Uncharted Waters is a must read for those seeking to grapple with the history and future of a militant union movement in this country.
From Green Left Weekly, September 14, 2005.
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