United We Stand

Crisis and incorporation

Labour in the 1890s

The nineties brought economic depression, and a vast confrontation between capital and labour. But how closely were economic and industrial developments linked?

Labour historian Brian Fitzpatrick suggested that great industrial battles began in 1890 because ‘this was the time at which, a long period of prosperity having unmistakably closed, capitalists decided that the time for making concessions to the unions had closed also.’[1] Actually social conflicts and economic turning points are seldom quite so neatly juxtaposed.

Raw growth figures for Australia as a whole do show the economy peaking in 1889, but once these are adjusted for inflation the peak shifts to 1891. Stuart Svensen argues that pastoralists’ profits were holding up well in the run-up to the great strikes.[2] Apparently the onset of depression came after the strikes commenced. On the other hand, the years preceding them were full of danger signs. There was certainly a recession in Victoria, where the land boom collapsed and employment began to fall. Even in NSW, the jobless rate rose to 4.7% in 1891 and 7.6% among the industrial work force.[3]

The very discrepancy between GDP trends in current and constant prices reflects the onset of significant disinflation, usually a sign of recession. There was excess capacity in much of industry -- two rival shipping cartels were locked in a ruinous price war -- while at the same time the unions were pursuing aggressive wage claims. These facts undoubtedly encouraged capital to take a harder line with organised labour in 1890, and depression conditions eventually made it possible for them to thoroughly crush union aspirations.

The 1890 maritime strike

Two conflicts loom large when we talk about how the maritime strike started: the clash at the Jondaryan shearing shed, and attempts by marine officers to organise. Jondaryan, as we have seen, was not so much about money as about control of the work process. This was also true of the marine officers’ dispute.

These officers had been asking for better pay and conditions for six years with little result. They were now demanding a £2 pay rise, but would have settled for half that. The money was not a major problem for the steamship companies, the largest of which actually conceded a £1 rise in July 1890. What became the key issue for the employers was the Marine Officers’ Association (MOA) decision to affiliate with the Victorian Trades Hall Council. The MOA’s members were, after all, ships’ officers. Affiliation with the THC might mean their involvement in wider industrial disputes, on the side of the workers. This could jeopardise employer control.

It is true that the Marine Engineers had long been affiliated with the union movement, and the MOA’s affiliation had not mattered much to their employers a couple of weeks before. Moreover the MOA had sought to allay any fears – that’s why it had joined the THC rather than the Maritime Council, a separate body where it would have been more directly linked to other maritime unions. Despite these efforts the ship owners provoked their strike with a fairly insulting letter, after failing to goad them into industrial action on a different issue two days earlier. On this basis Svensen presents the affiliation as ‘a pseudo-issue’, a pretext for employers keen to provoke a conflict.[4] That only makes sense if we focus narrowly on the machinations of a cabal of ship owners. Against the background of a wider class mobilisation on both sides, this clash of management and union rights takes on considerable symbolic importance.

If two apparently unrelated disputes, Jondaryan and the marine officers, awakened very similar fears in the capitalist mind, this flowed from the scale and perceived ambitions of the continental labour movement. In employer circles there was worried talk of ‘federated labour’. What they meant was not so much the politically inspired Australian Labour Federation (never operational outside Queensland), but rather the conspicuous growth of industrial solidarity in practice -- demonstrated by the 1888 maritime dispute and the port blockade over Jondaryan. They also worried about the rise of a national labour leadership:

... an employer had only to touch the lamp of trade unionism and out popped that evil genie, William Guthrie Spence. He seemed to be omnipresent -- hovering over the miners, the shearers, the general labourers, and now the waterfront...[5]

Such developments seemed to raise the spectre of a general strike, or even social revolution, so naturally they made the employers more open to the idea of systematic organisation of their own.

Before 1890 employer organisation was still somewhat fragmentary, so that we cannot meaningfully ask what the capitalists as a class ‘decided’ to do in 1890. The extensive mobilisation of the bourgeoisie behind a coherent leadership and, somewhat later, a fighting program was a product of circumstances, and also of political argument and manoeuver. Capitalist attitudes were initially quite diverse, partly reflecting different economic conditions. Among most groups of employers, as among the pastoralists, there were those who accepted unionism and those who loathed it, with a majority willing to go either way for commercial advantage. Some industries were better placed to fight a strike: most importantly, the ship owners presided over a compact and cartellised industry, so they represented a kind of strike force.

In NSW, class divisions were often raw and bitter; they were less so in Victoria where owners of small manufacturing firms were still close to their working class origins, protectionist ideology had convinced sections of the labour movement that the employers were their friend, and liberal politicians owed their seats to workers’ votes. Consequently the strike was less bitter in Victoria. However by the late 1880s things were changing in Victoria, too, as manufacturing firms grew larger and employers more arrogant. The Victorian Employers’ Union, prodded by the anti-union boot manufacturer John Mair, was reconsidering its original support for the colony’s industrial Board of Conciliation at the time the strike broke out. During the strike itself, Victorian employers took a fairly hard line.

Despite the factors pushing capitalists towards a united stance, they could not have held together without a minority of hawks taking leadership. The most important was master stevedore Alfred Lamb. Lamb owned one of the main firms loading wool for export, served as a vice-president of the NSW Employers’ Union, and was MLA for West Sydney. He collected signatures on a document committing stevedores to load non-union wool, and prevailed on them to put up a cash bond to back up the commitment. Lamb, who was also close to the leadership of the Pastoralists' Union of NSW, next persuaded key members of that body to pledge exclusive support to those stevedores who had signed his agreement. After locking in some other, additional players, he traveled to Melbourne and repeated the procedure. Meanwhile the shipowners were assembling a £20,000 defence fund.

This was an exercise in conscious class organisation, probably based on lessons drawn from the labour movement. There were still doubters, even important ones like Jesse Gregson, superintendent of the Australian Agricultural Company, though Gregson’s reservations were mainly about timing. In addition, there were sectors of industry not yet drawn into the alliance, such as the coal owners. Employers in Victoria and South Australia were generally less aggressive than the hard core of NSW capitalists. However the actual outbreak of the dispute, and the events of the first few weeks, were to overcome most of the remaining hesitation. When mine workers refused to supply coal to scab vessels, the coal owners promptly locked them out. Employer-organised public meetings were well attended, and the bosses’ confidence rose steadily.

As they gained ascendancy in the dispute, the bosses began to focus on a single slogan: freedom of contract. The issue had, of course, been on many individual capitalists’ minds and the term had been used in previous disputes. Now it became a triumphant and vindictive rallying cry. ‘From the point of view of the trade unions the calamity of 1890 was that it provided employers with the key for their policy for the next decade.’[6]

The union leaders weren’t looking for a strike, any more than they had been eager for any of the major confrontations during the eighties. They seemed to have no choice, the events unfolding remorselessly. The ASU leadership believed its membership was shaky, and that the closed shop was the only way to shore it up. Temple and Spence hoped the mere threat of port blockades, as in the Jondaryan case, would be enough to bring about a settlement without the need for any real industrial mobilisation. This strategy relied on keeping the wool issue separate from other grievances concerning the maritime unions, yet in the event, the alliance between unionists of port and bush actually helped bring on a general conflict, whilst also uniting the employers. The MOA would have accepted any reasonable settlement; the trouble was that by mid-August the employers no longer wanted one. A belligerent anti-union letter from the ship owners convinced the marine officers to break off negotiations.

As ships came into port, marine officers and seamen walked off them, and waterside workers joined the stoppage; other groups of workers were either locked out or stopped work in solidarity. The struggle would eventually involve around 50,000 Australian unionists and 10,000 New Zealanders.

Although the union leaders did not want the strike and many worried privately about the consequences, still there was initially a mood of confidence in labour ranks. The impressive growth of working class organisation, as well as the general climate of public sympathy for the labour cause, had boosted workers’ hopes as well as alarming employers. Unfortunately union organisation also had serious weaknesses. Numbers had risen rapidly and the unions had made gains, but the newer unions lacked experience and discipline. Only the coal miners had much recent experience with prolonged strikes. The image of strong, even dictatorial centralised organisation was a mirage. The outbreak of hostilities at the waterfront caught Spence himself unawares. ‘I have often wondered how it was I knew nothing about it at the time,’ he later remarked, ‘but I was taken by surprise to hear the officers had walked out.’[7] An Intercolonial Labour Conference didn’t convene until 12 September, by which time the strike was well on its way to defeat.

At the same time, those sections of public opinion represented by the middle classes and liberal elements of the bourgeoisie were much less reliably pro-labour than either unionists or employers had realised. Capitalists discovered the power of law-and-order agitation to mobilise the middle layers of society for reactionary ends, and at least neutralise the liberals. The supposedly pro-union Melbourne Age portrayed the strike as ‘an unarmed insurrection of class against class’,[8] while Victorian authorities seized on a gas workers’ strike to panic-monger about what criminals might get up to in the dark streets. Whereas previously society’s middle layers had often sympathised with labour, especially in Victoria, the prospect of general class warfare made them more open to law-and-order sentiments, which in turn supplied the political basis for such liberal politicians as Henry Parkes and Alfred Deakin to deploy troops against the strikers.

Most dangerous of all was the availability of ‘free labour’. Some of this came from the middle classes, or from recent arrivals in the colonies with no local loyalties. But others were unemployed workers, mainly unskilled, whom the unions had too often ignored. That respectable institution, the Melbourne Trades Hall, stood conspicuously aloof from the frequent waves of agitation among the unemployed; it was left to socialists and anarchists to organise thousands of jobless workers at Queen’s Wharf at the start of August 1890. Perhaps the Trades Hall found this element too radical -- the demonstrators did indeed try to throw a police contingent into the harbour. But the unions might have done more to organise the unskilled and build relations with the unemployed; they were to pay a high price for their failures as one employer after another found scabs to replace unionists on the job.

Support for the union cause flowed from as far away as London, where dockers, remembering how Australian donations had helped their strike in 1889, raised £15-20,000 and 4,000 people rallied in Victoria Park. Far greater crowds gathered in Australian centres. The greatest crowd came together in Melbourne on 31 August. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people, in a city of 400,000, assembled at Flinders Park. Despite the best efforts of radical agitators at the fringe, it was a highly respectable gathering with much talk from the main platform about the virtues of arbitration and even the right of blacklegs to work unmolested. The bourgeoisie were undoubtedly relieved; they had been fretting about possible disturbances. On the previous day, Colonel Tom Price had assembled two hundred armed troopers and issued a notorious instruction:

I do not think your aid will be required, but if it is, let there be no half measures with what you do ... if the order is given to fire, don’t let me see one rifle pointed up in the air. Fire low and lay them out ...[9]

Price later claimed he was only citing government regulations, which did in fact require troops to fire low. Union supporters still took his words as demonstrating the authorities’ capacity for partisan violence. The state was certainly mobilising its repressive forces against them: by the end of the strike, 3,283 special constables had been sworn in, drawn overwhelmingly from the middle classes – company clerks, managers, and upper level public servants. Price’s ancestry made him an ideal symbol of repression, for his father was John Giles Price, the sadistic Norfolk Island prison commandant killed by a crowd of convicts at Williamstown in 1857.

Rallies and processions in Sydney were smaller, yet still sizeable, with the Australian Socialist League providing a radical political edge. An initial march only attracted some 7,000 participants; but it was followed a week later by what the Sydney Morning Herald called ‘one of the largest displays of the kind yet seen in Australia’. The lower portion of George Street was ‘filled by a seething mass of humanity. It seemed as though all Sydney were out to participate in or gaze upon the spectacle of labour defying capital.’ Contingents from all the trades seemed to be on the march, which extended for a mile and a half. The anti-union Herald was quick to claim that ‘from the many thousands of sightseers there were no manifestations of sympathy’, reporting that a large majority of the members of the Sydney Stock Exchange had joined the Employers’ Union, along with ‘the Associated Warehousemen in a body’.[10] Whatever the exact distribution of public sentiment, this was a sharply polarised city.

It was a fitting climate for a group of leading Sydney employers to stage their greatest provocation: the transport of wool through Sydney streets to Circular Quay on 19 September. Trolleymen and draymen had struck work and engaged in some determined picketing, but had not stopped the employers transporting wool by lighter from Darling Harbour. ‘A work-gang of wool-brokers, auctioneers, squatters, bankers, lawyers, lackeys and millionaires ... in morning suits, top hats and lemon gloves’ assisted by special constables drove ten trolleys of wool to the Quay amidst wild scenes.

Thousands lined the streets and stared from windows, many hurling abuse and missiles, until finally mounted troopers forcibly dispersed a crowd at Circular Quay itself. The aim was apparently to provoke a riot, leading to the arrest of strike leaders, and perhaps to bring about the deployment of British troops from visiting warships against the unionists; but the union leaders were not involved in the riot and the latter parts of the scheme came to nothing.[11] As a matter of fact, given the size of the conflict, the amount of violence on the part of unionists throughout the strike was fairly small, a fact attested by the NSW Inspector-General of Police[12].

By this time the unions were already on their way to defeat. Calling out the NSW shearers in late September was an act of desperation. Thousands of unionists who had already made generous donations to strike funds now responded gallantly to the call, but paid a terrible price in lost wages and victimisation; thousands of others found ways to avoid conflict with the employers. Either way it made little difference to the result. On 31 October, the Marine Officers informed the Melbourne Trades Hall they were withdrawing from membership, and different sections of the union movement threw in the towel at different times over the next two months. Some miners did not return to work until January 1991.

Continuing conflict

As the strike front crumbled, hawkish employers set about imposing the cruelest of terms. Bosses refused to even talk to union leaders, militants endured victimisation, workers had to disavow their union to get a chance of employment -- even scabs sometimes suffered as the delights of ‘freedom of contract’ descended on the colonies. ‘Free labourers’ working for the Australasian United Steam Navigation Company went on strike in both Brisbane and Sydney over pay cuts, as did a group of blackleg miners at Mt Kembla.

The leading employers’ merciless stance provoked further changes in outlook among the middle class and liberal elements of the bourgeoisie. Calls from newspapers and politicians for the bosses to moderate their position had little impact on the course of the dispute. However they lent impetus to the growing sentiment for institutionalised conciliation and arbitration.

Squabbling and recriminations were common in labour’s ranks in the face of defeat. By October, the strike leadership in Sydney had already been spending much of its time in personal altercations. In the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, the rank and file accused Trenwith of withholding information, while NSW shearers complained of bureaucratic mismanagement and a situation where ‘fat billets are made for secretaries, delegates, reps and their hosts of relatives’.[13] There was nothing inherently left wing about these criticisms from the members, in fact the shearers were complaining about having to go on strike. However there are some indications that rank and file activists showed greater militancy than the union officials during the maritime strike. J.H. Storey, President of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce, told his annual meeting that ‘the [union] men themselves seem disposed to even throw over their own leaders to achieve their ends.’[14]

The defeat of 1890 was severe, yet by no means absolute. In some places the unions gained membership in the aftermath. The NSW TLC reported ‘a steady persistent advocacy of Unionism which must bear fruit as soon as the existing depression passes away,’[15] while the ASU leaders were still arguing in 1891 that a full season of shearing would allow the union to rebuild its position. Some workers had actually won victories. These included Broken Hill miners and some of the Adelaide unions, who were benefiting from a temporary economic upswing caused by the rapid development of the Broken Hill mines, and whose position was not yet undermined by unemployment. There were also small shipping companies along the east coast that came to terms with the unions, in order to seize market share from their bigger rivals.

It was the severe depression that decisively weakened the union movement, by creating mass unemployment. Even so, the organised workers put up stiff resistance to attacks on wages and conditions in a series of further disputes: the Queensland shearers’ strike of 1891, the 1892 Broken Hill disputes, the 1893 seamen’s strike, and the shearing dispute strike of 1894 were all bitterly fought, even though they mostly ended in union defeats.

The Queensland dispute was in some ways a repeat of the maritime strike, in which Queensland shearers had not been involved. By mid-September 1890, once the outcome of the maritime strike could be clearly foreseen, pastoralists in the northern colony began mobilising under the leadership of George Fairbairn. Once again, they focused on issues of control. They took exception to QSU policies which embraced right of entry for union organisers, and which demanded that shearers alone decide whether sheep were too wet to shear. In addition, the employers wanted wage cuts and ‘freedom of contract’. The QSU and the allied Queensland Labourers’ Union (QLU) would not accept these terms.

Unfortunately for the unions, the strike began early in 1891. General shearing was not until July. The unions considered accepting the bosses’ terms for a few months, then repudiating the agreement in July, but decided this was politically unviable. The consequence, however, was that unionists had begun to exhaust their resources before the most important part of the shearing season. In addition, they were up against a steady flow of strikebreakers, especially from Melbourne where unemployment was high, and a massive show of force by the Queensland government. Finally, fund-raising efforts were disappointing with southern workers less able to help after their own defeats.

Weeks of frustration in strike camps led to minor cases of violence, which the authorities seized on as an excuse for repression. In March 1891 group of strikers at Clermont jostled and abused four employer officials; arrests ensued, and more police and soldiers arrived. Later in the month the main strike leaders at Barcaldine were arrested; by 4 April there had been sixty-one arrests and more were to follow. Eleven unionists received sentences of three years with hard labour. By April, defeat was staring the shearers in the face and divisions emerged in their ranks, with one section calling for more aggressive tactics and others drifting back to work. Some sections of the Carriers’ Union decided not to strike. By June the last shearers were throwing in the sponge.

The Queensland events were rich in symbolism. The romance of mounted and armed shearers, some talking revolution, is compelling to this day, though actually the vast majority of the strikers were determinedly non-violent. More significantly, it was here that the capitalist state showed its full repressive power. Up to 2,000 troops, police and special constables entered the fray, though this wasn’t enough to satisfy some. Judge George Rogers Harding, presiding at the trial after the Clermont events, criticised police for not firing on strikers. ‘There would not have been many who boo-hooed the second time if I had been one of them,’ announced Harding. When a defence lawyer objected that ‘You can’t shoot a man for disorderly conduct,’ Harding retorted: ‘Very probably they could find justification.’[16] Around the time of this trial Henry Lawson’s verse appeared, warning that workers ought not be blamed ‘if blood should stain the wattle’.

Despite deteriorating economic conditions, the unions did better in the 1894 strike which embraced Queensland, NSW, SA and Victoria -- all, by that time, under the banner of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), uniting shearers and labourers. This dispute saw more violence than the earlier ones, with unionists acutely aware by now of what they were up against, and sometimes feeling fairly desperate. At one shed police and strikers exchanged forty rounds of rifle file. A worker died. River steamers transporting strikebreakers became targets for attack, culminating on the night of 6 August with the seizure of the Rodney, which militants burnt to the waterline. Abductions of scabs and brawls in country towns were commonplace. Colonial governments intervened repeatedly on the employers’ side.

While the Queensland section of the AWU pulled out of the strike relatively early, in western NSW and western Victoria the traditionally strongest branches of the union gave the pastoralists a stiffer fight than expected. Their timing was also better than in 1891, as the call-out in these areas came at the time of general shearing. Some employers had chastening experiences with incompetent ‘free labourers’, and had to accommodate the unions. There were numerous compromise agreements, and even though the strike eventually petered out it was probably a partial victory for the AWU, in that it halted the momentum of employer attacks for a time. Unfortunately, steadily worsening unemployment over the next few years made further falls in wages and declines in union membership inevitable, in what Spence called the ‘dark days’ of the AWU.[17]

Meanwhile Broken Hill unions had taken a hammering. BHP had locked out its miners during the maritime strike, ostensibly because of transport difficulties. Unionists thought employers were punishing them for raising funds in support of the strikers, and accused them of insider trading (dumping shares before the lockout, then buying them back on the cheap). However it may simply have been a matter of backing up fellow capitalists, or straightforward material interest – for BHP management had financial links to other key employers. Management soon paid a price for its actions: not only did 5,000 unionists meet to protest; not only did local business call for an end to the lockout; but shareholders were horrified to see a stoppage while silver prices were high. The bosses retreated and the unions pressed home their advantage, pushing up wages and cutting the working week from 48 to 46 hours.

However by 1892, amidst falling silver prices, the mine owners were ready to ruthlessly enforce ‘freedom of contract’. They scrapped all agreements with the unions, provoking a four-month strike. Workers’ organisations were thoroughly smashed amidst fierce repression -- at one point police with fixed bayonets surrounded the union headquarters -- and several strike leaders served time in prison. A year later the seamen failed to resist savage wage cuts, their strike broken within a month by repression and blacklegs.

With trade unionism badly weakened and the depression deepening, the unemployed staged desperate actions. Crowds of ragged jobless gathered regularly at Melbourne’s Queen’s Wharf or Sydney’s Domain. No longer confined to a fringe element in a few slum neighborhoods as the unemployed had been during the eighties, the crowds became more assertive. They marched in the streets, gathering numbers in industrial suburbs and then invading the city centres:

Bearing banners by day and torches by night, they transformed the city into an arena of social conflict. Often they marched in military formation … In May 1892 Melbourne’s unemployed, the self-styled ‘Second Victorian Regiment’ attempted to storm the steps of parliament … Other demonstrators forced their way through the bishop’s gardens, marched on the Governor’s residence, and harangued representatives of the Chamber of Commerce and the Salvation Army.[18]

Melbourne’s wives and mothers marched on the city’s parliamentary buildings, pleading for work for their husbands and sons, but also demanding work for themselves, besieging the labour bureau and asserting their right to register. In September ‘police noted the effect three female orators had upon a crowd gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral … Their audience numbered 600 people, at least fifty of whom were women.’[19]

The new Labor MPs offered precious little help. W.A. Trenwith, whose election campaign had appealed specifically to the jobless, forgot about them once in office. When questioned, he said the government should be approached ‘in the proper spirit’; when this provoked outrage he pontificated about the ‘indecent excesses’ of unemployed demonstrators.[20]

The unemployed, on their own, couldn’t sustain an effective political movement and were sometimes diverted into destructive dead-ends. Anarchist proposals to solve the employment crisis by bombing rich people’s homes were relatively harmless, as long as no one acted on them. The same couldn’t be said for four hundred women who marched along Melbourne’s Russell Street, ‘tapping rather heavily with their umbrellas at the glass windows and doors … of Chinese laundries’ and ‘loudly groaning’ at any Chinese they passed.[21] These were symptoms of weakness and despair in the wake of labour’s defeat.

Why had the unions lost so many strikes so badly? Economic conditions were an important factor, especially in the later disputes. Unionists also reflected on their failure to adequately organise the unorganised or establish solidarity with the unemployed. But the greatest issues in union activists’ minds were politics and the state. Governments claimed to be a neutral party upholding the law, but they had stepped in to back the employers again and again. Even supposed ‘friends of labour’ among liberal MPs had supported this. A minority of politicised workers was turning to radical politics, and the emergence of the Labor Party was at hand, though that topic is beyond the scope of this essay.[22] In industry another solution became a fad – institutionalised arbitration.

‘This knock-kneed thing’

Schemes for resolving industrial disputes were nothing new, and neither were plans to regulate wages and conditions -- but they had always met resistance from unions and employers alike. The crisis of the nineties, which unleashed a hunt for solutions to social problems, made both sides think again. In New South Wales, Henry Parkes embraced arbitration for the first time, even giving his Royal Commission on Strikes terms of reference which pointed in that direction. By the middle of the decade, serious moves were underway. Some colonies relied on factory legislation and wages boards, while New South Wales adopted the arbitration system that became the national model after federation. A look at Victoria and NSW will highlight differences, while also demonstrating important elements of common ground.

The Victorian system emerged from campaigns against sweating. Victoria had more women and children working in factories, and the depression had both increased the numbers and worsened their conditions. This horrified respectable society, from genuine humanitarians to stuffy moralists who thought it improper for females to work in industry. Accordingly, the Turner government’s Factory Act regulated labour and provided for a minimum wage in certain industries. Wages boards, comprising elected employer and employee representatives, were to administer this under a supposedly neutral chair. The Act was modest in scope but important in its longer term implications, because Labor MP George Prendergast successfully moved to extend the minimum wage to males, and the wages boards were later extended to other industries.

Being very popular, the reforms went through with a minimum of fuss, despite obstruction from the Upper House and sections of employers. Although Trades Hall was supportive, the reforms, like the anti-sweating movement itself, were not primarily a labour initiative. Leading Anti-Sweating League figures included clergymen and respectable ladies full of condescending devotion to the downtrodden. Similarly, it was liberal middle class politicians who pushed through the Factory Acts. Colonial liberals had previously shied away from state intervention, but many changed their minds in the nineties.

While some capitalists resisted the boards, others accepted or even supported them – well over a hundred employers in the cigar, saddlery, marble mason, printing and tanning trades signed petitions in their favour. Country employers were generally exempted and therefore did not object, while some urban manufacturers had good grounds to endorse reform. Free trade interests had long argued that tariff protection fostered uncompetitive sweatshops, claims that grew louder amidst the misery of the nineties, so that manufacturers sought to deflect criticism by championing regulation and the minimum wage. Some hoped, in fact, that a minimum wage might discipline their less scrupulous competitors.

Manufacturers also looked to the labour movement as a political ally. They lacked the social prestige and institutionalised political power (through the Upper House, for example) enjoyed by pastoral or financial capital, and consequently needed the voting base that labour supplied. This was especially important with federation on the horizon, and tactical manoeuvres already underway to set the tariff policies of a future federal government.

Some writers see the wages boards as the outcome of an alliance between male workers, employers and the arbitration system to disadvantage women.[23] The argument is that the arbitration system entrenched gender divisions and the family wage, in ways that benefited male workers to the detriment of females. Males monopolised skilled jobs and used the family wage concept to exclude females from ‘male’ jobs generally. This argument presumes that male unionists exercised power and could enforce their will. But that wasn’t the case.

Firstly, although Arbitration embraced and reproduced sexism like other social institutions, gender divisions were hardly something new. Almost everyone took them for granted, including those who suffered most. Secondly, skilled jobs were a small sector of the labour market which most men couldn’t enter either. Thirdly, male tradesmen were not all that successful at excluding women. Moreover, exclusionary tactics weren’t always directed at women (they were also used to exclude male Chinese or to limit the number of men and boys entering particular trades), nor were they exclusively masculine:

It is well known that tailoresses were elitist in their attitude toward other women workers in the clothing industry … As Frances points out, dressmakers and milliners saw themselves as ‘artists rather than craftswomen’. Separate unions existed for stock and order hands until 1897. Outworkers were excluded from these unions on the grounds that members ‘did not want to be dragged down to the outworkers’ level’.[24]

One reason the Tailoresses’ union declined is that when employers responded to higher factory wages by using more outworkers, the union floundered. Hostility to outworkers who were undermining wage rates led to irrational refusals to admit them to the union. The Tailoresses repeated the error of male crafts, who sought to preserve an elite status by excluding women and the unskilled from jobs and unions. Far from reflecting union power, sectional divisions were both a symptom and a cause of union weakness. The same was true of arbitration itself, which took root nationally in the wake of major union defeats.

The birth of arbitration was no more difficult in New South Wales than Victoria, though forms and processes differed. Premier George Reid dominated the parliament for several years with Labor support, after fighting a demagogic 1895 election campaign around what were actually very modest proposals for land taxation and reform of the upper house. In 1899 Labor switched its support to his rivals, and the Reid government fell. But the 1901 Arbitration Act represented the end of a process begun by Parkes a decade earlier, a process not really the property of any one parliamentary faction.

The Labor Party did play a greater role in establishing arbitration in NSW than in Victoria, but then it was a stronger force in New South Wales generally. Initially, the industrial labour movement expressed considerable opposition to the whole idea -- resistance from both capital and labour was stronger in class-polarised New South Wales. The unions which generally favoured it were those attempting to organise large, far-flung groups of workers employed on a temporary basis (shearers and maritime workers), or with particular local traditions (coal miners), or facing intense antagonism from the employer (the railways).

Most urban unions were not enthusiastic, and had opposed non-compulsory arbitration bills in 1882 and 1888. Industrial defeat undoubtedly increased union support for regulated settlement of disputes, just as it reduced enthusiasm from employers who now felt able to dominate the industrial scene. Yet the unions still held back from support for a similar bill in 1892, and soon felt vindicated: the 1892 Act lost credibility in union eyes when the employers refused to submit the Broken Hill strike to its machinery.

Leftists such as W.G. Higgs, editor of the Australian Workman, and TLC delegates Jamie Moroney and John Dwyer led the opposition inside the labour movement, and in 1900 the socialist journal People and Collectivist was still warning:

...when this knock-kneed thing has become law, the class war will still go on; the worker will still be robbed of the major portion of the wealth he creates; and his great concern is not how he might temporise with the robber ... his great concern is rather how to get rid of the robber.[25]

Not until 1898 did NSW Labor include arbitration in its fighting program. By this time the Labor Party was in the hands of the AWU and urban politicians -- some of the latter with a socialist background but increasingly remote from the rank and file. Thus the Labor Party elements which helped introduce arbitration were somewhat similar to the middle class reformers of Victoria, or the lawyers who populated all colonial parliaments.

Those union officials who backed arbitration often did so out of a conservative impulse. Aware of worker bitterness after the great strikes, they feared that without institutions to channel industrial disputes, when the next upheaval occurred, ‘it would be perfectly impossible for any leaders to control it’.[26] It appears that by the nineties, Australian labour already displayed a tension between conservative leaders and rank and file rebels which is so common in trade union movements, as Antonio Gramsci explained:

[Under capitalism], when individuals are only valued as owners of commodities, which they trade as property, the workers too are forced to obey the iron laws of general necessity; they become traders in their sole property -- their labour power and professional skills. More exposed to the risks of competition, the workers have accumulated their property in ever broader and more comprehensive ‘firms’, they have created these enormous apparatuses for the concentration of work energy, they have imposed prices and hours and disciplined the market. They have hired from outside or produced from inside a trusted administrative staff expert in this kind of speculation, able to dominate market conditions, to lay down contracts, to evaluate commercial risks and to initiate profitable economic operations …

[T]he union bureaucrat conceives industrial legality as a permanent state of affairs. He too often defends it from the same point of view as the proprietor. He sees only chaos and wilfulness in everything that emerges from the working masses. He does not understand the worker's act of rebellion against capitalist discipline … [27]

As in Victoria, the capitalists were divided, with some in the countryside prepared to support arbitration. The hard-liners who had mobilised the employing class during the maritime strike couldn’t repeat their success on this occasion. The employers’ disarray found expression in the contradictory and opportunistic arguments the anti-arbitration forces put forward around the turn of the century. They opposed federal legislation as ‘an encroachment upon the rights of the States’, yet they thought the NSW legislation undesirable ‘inasmuch as conciliation and arbitration ... is specifically reserved in the Federal Constitution for the Federal Parliament’. Having made voluntary arbitration unworkable, they nevertheless opposed compulsion on the grounds that ‘voluntary arbitration worked extremely well’.[28]

Arbitration and Victorian-style wages boards were originally seen as incompatible alternatives; the former being understood as a mechanism for settling disputes rather than for regulation. However just as the wages boards grew far beyond their original domain, so arbitration expanded to include awards that set wages and conditions. In both colonies, moves to institutionalise class collaboration pointed towards introduction of the aged pension and assistance to the unemployed, since critics of labour market regulation warned it would create unemployment, especially among older workers. In both colonies, arbitration also encouraged wider organisation of both capital and labour, since neither wages boards nor arbitration tribunals could deal with each workplace or employee separately. Dozens of new unions sprang up, including some bogus outfits sponsored by employers, and the capitalists’ own organisations flourished as well.

In neither colony, nor anywhere in Australia, did wages boards or arbitration achieve much for workers. Bosses found no end of ways to safeguard their interests. When the wages board for the Victorian fellmongering industry fixed standard hours at forty-eight per week, all its employer representatives resigned. After an ensuing court battle went against them, a majority of the employers closed their businesses and sacked their employees. As a consequence, the 1902 factory act effectively gave the bosses a right of veto. Moreover the Victorian system gave no special place to trade unionists. Non-union employees also served on the boards. Employers might even pressure worker representatives; in fact four out of five employee members of the jam industry board lost their jobs after voting to increase wages.

Arbitration did give the unions formal standing, but this was a mixed blessing for workers, since it also further increased the authority of the full time officials who were becoming increasingly dominant in the union movement. Billy Hughes, for example, emerged as the dominant figure in the Wharf Labourers’ Union and sought to confine its efforts to the arbitration system rather than taking strike action. Hughes hoped that the federal Arbitration Court would ‘enforce upon the men the very necessary lesson that unionism has responsibilities’.[29]

The federal Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904 didn’t establish any wage-fixing principles based on sex. It was the Arbitration Court itself that established these through cases such as the 1907 Harvester Judgement and the Fruitpickers’ Case, in which Justice Higgins established a ‘family wage’ benchmark. Contrary to the conventional view blaming organised labour for sex discrimination, the union demanded equal pay in the Fruitpickers’ Case -- but Justice Higgins decided otherwise, on the grounds that a man had to support a family.

Arbitration and the wages boards were neither a bosses’ plot nor a triumph for the labour movement, but rather the institutional form for social peace which emerged from the crisis of the nineties. It’s no mystery, from the Marxist perspective, that neither of the two main classes in society made the running in the debates around industrial regulation and wage fixing, and that the initiative fell instead to middle layers: liberal reformers, professional politicians, full time trade union officials. These are precisely the elements that most yearn for industrial peace.

With no consistent opposition from either capitalists or workers, they were able to shape institutions for administering and preserving capitalist industrial relations. Including, of course, the ultimate power of the boss -- for as the employers reminded that great advocate of arbitration, Alfred Deakin: ‘The fundamental principle of our social system is inequality, and on that its health depends.’[30]

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