With the NSW Labor government promising to oppose any decent pay rises for public sector workers, it's worth reminding ourselves that NSW workers have a proud history of defiance. Tom Orsag recounts 82 days that shook the NSW government to the core 90 years ago.

This month marked the 90th anniversary of the nine-week General Strike that rocked NSW during World War Two.

Although the strike was defeated by a combination of a ruthless State government, organised scabbing and repression, and by union leaders unwilling to lead the strike, rank and file workers showed their readiness to fight given the right conditions.

While the strike began over a seemingly trivial issue—timecards as a form of ‘speed up’ at the railway and tram workshops in Randwick and Eveleigh—it escalated to involve around 75,000 workers across many industries in the major industrial centres of the day, including Sydney, Newcastle, Broken Hill, as well as Wollongong, Lithgow, Bathurst and Goulburn.

Around 20,00 workers interstate, mainly in Victoria and Queensland, joined the fight to defend wage standards and union rights.

Background

Perhaps surprisingly, the strike was begun not by the most repressed workers but by 5,000 skilled metalworkers, organised by a union regarded as moderate.

However, the metal trades unions were affected by several long-term problems. Before the war semi-automatic machines began to be introduced into metal shops. With them came new management methods, such as piecework and bonus payment schemes.

During the war, employers used more semi-skilled labour, which was seen as a ‘dilution’ of skilled metal work.

A week after the strike began, 30,000 workers were off the job, including 21,000 on the railways. Two weeks later there were 50,000 workers on strike.

As the strike spread to coalmining and transport. Coal provided 97 per cent of Australian manufacturing industries' energy and NSW coalfields supplied over 80 per cent of the national demand for coal, so the impact of the strike was enormous.

The strike came against the backdrop of rising anger and political generalisation. Working class resentment over a series of economic grievances created by the War had built up to overflowing. Concerns included unemployment, spiralling prices, low wages and massive profiteering.

Shipping profits increased by twelve-fold between 1913-1916. In 1907, wage earners received 56.2 per cent of national income. By the War, this had fallen to a low point of 48.4 per cent.

In the four years from November 1914 prices rose by 29 per cent, 12 per cent alone in the first year of the war.

One example of the fall in living standards is the annual consumption of meat per head in NSW, which fell from 260 pounds in 1913 to 162 pounds in 1917-18.

Big surprise

Socialist historian Ian Turner wrote, “The rapid spread of the strike took the union leaders by surprise.” Labour Council Secretary, E J Kavanagh, also head of the Union Defence Committee (UDC) that led the strike, showed the union leaders’ conservatism: “The difficulty was not getting men to come out, but to keep them in.”

For example, the UDC refused to call strikes in so-called “essential services”.

During the first three days, unionists across different industries joined in the strike—the this was generally the result of rank-and-file initiative rather than official call-outs.

Sydney wharf labourers had their own separate pay dispute and joined the strike. That spread to the Newcastle waterfront. The Seaman’s Union called an Australia-wide strike.

Coal lumpers struck against any coal being used on the railways, even on military transport trains.

The first railway and tram mass meeting was held three days into the strike. But there was no official mass meeting of all unions called, no publicity in the form of strike bulletins, leaflets or papers.

No responsible official appeared on a platform to explain the state of the strike to the strikers.

With this lack of leadership it is not surprising some rail and tram workers began to drift back to work after five days into the strike. Two weeks later 2,000 had drifted back to work.

Even so, 75,000 were still striking five weeks after walking off the job—an amazing display of rank-and-file initiative.

State crackdown

On 16 August, three leaders of the UDC—E J Kavanagh and A C Willis, of the Coalminers, and Claude Thompson from the Rail and Tram Union, were arrested by the Fuller State Government on conspiracy to incite strikes.

Later, A W Buckley, Labor MLA, was arrested on the same charges, as were the Wharf Labourers leader, T W McCristal, and Seamen’s union leaders, W Daly and Thomas Robinson. The trials took place in mid-November after the strike was over. But all of the charges were quashed.

Acting Premier George Fuller mobilised the full forces of the state as he believed that a strike during wartime was mutiny and succour to the “enemy” and had to be crushed.

Fuller issued a manifesto against the strike. Today this reads as a classic expression of the ruling class attitude to nationalism and strikes: “The enemies of Britain and her Allies have succeeded in plunging Australia into a general strike…

“[T]hey have crippled our country’s efforts to assist in the Great
War…Every striker is playing a game for disloyalists…Who is for Australia and the Allies?”

The capitalist press echoed Fuller and branded the strikers as “pro-German”. Rather than openly disagree with this ruling class line of argument, the UDC went to great lengths to convince the broader community that it was not running a “political” strike.

It argued that, “perhaps one third of the men on strike voted for the National Party”.

Meanwhile Fuller began devising plans to smash the strike. At a time when cars were a luxury item, he commandeered all private motor vehicles. Coal stocks were commandeered and all striking railway workers were sacked.

Fuller organised scabbing of country people, university students and schoolboys from Sydney’s ruling class schools, such as Sydney Grammar School.

The SCG (nicknamed the “Scabs’ Collecting Ground”) and Taronga Park Zoo were turned into scab barracks. Later a scab barracks was set up in Newcastle.

In total around 5,000 scabs worked on NSW wharves, railways, transport and coal mines.

Over 1,500 special constables were signed up to protect the scabs and businesses which wanted to use them.

The Federal Government led by Billy Hughes (who left the Labor Party because of its opposition to conscription) made it an offence to hinder or interfere with shearing or the handling of wool.

Despite Fuller's repression and state sponsored scabbing, a general mass meeting of metal trades unions on August 31 of up to 8,000 workers resolved to continue the strike.

Failed strategy

The conventional union strategy for strikes was simply to hold out as long as possible. But sectional strikes, organised by paying strike benefits out of the union funds and imposing levies on members still at work, could only last for so long. Normally, this strategy left thousands of sympathetic workers sitting on their hands.

A mass strike changed all that in a number of ways. The mass of numbers meant that the union fund or levies were depleted quickly.

Also, the full force of the centralised state machine worked at undermining the strike. While Fuller’s Government could not break the mass strike through brute force, it could keep a minimum of services working, always encouraging a drift back to work.

But the top union leaders were not up to the challenge. The mass strike meant doing something that was totally foreign to their political outlook.

Normally, union leaders’ job is to work on behalf of workers to bargain for their immediate economic conditions. In other words, they negotiate the terms of exploitation for a particular industry.

But a mass strike calls into question the validity of the capitalist system. It means challenging the “right” of capital to rule.

But the union officials ran the strike as if it was a narrow industrial dispute, and disavowed the allegation of political motivation. The co-ordination of the State and Federal Government’s, and their joint attempts to smash the strike, made the strike inherently political.

The only way possible to win the strike was to establish organised bodies—workers’ councils—that could challenge for state power. Such bodies had been established in Russia only six months before the strike began.

With no strategy for deepening the strike, and no organised alternative to the top leadership, the UDC advised a return to work in private industries and Government dockyards on September 14.

This strategy proved disastrous. For example, Wharf labourers presented themselves for work—but found themselves locked out.

The Seaman's Union sent its members back to work. But shipowners refused to remove the scabs it had employed. Rank and file seamen refused to work with them.

The last of the strikers returned to work on October 22, 82 days after the strike started.

The main lesson from NSW general strike of 1917 is not how strong and capable workers can be in struggle, important as that is. Rather it is how important the question of political leadership becomes when a social crisis is very acute.

The revolutionary potential of Australian workers was squandered and strangled by the inability of the union bureaucracy to change its mindset.

Today, as in 1917, our political vision cannot be limited by the boundaries of capitalism.