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The Mass Strike of 1917 in Eastern Australia

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‘The Active Chorus’: The Mass Strike of 1917 in Eastern Australia Robert Bollard This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. School of Social Sciences Faculty of Arts Education and Human Development Victoria University September 2007 ii I, Robert Bollard, declare that the PhD thesis entitled ‘“The Active Chorus”: The Mass Strike of 1917 in Eastern Australia, is no more than 100,000 words in length including quotes and exclusive of tables, figures, appendices, bibliography, references and footnotes. This thesis contains no material that has been submitted previously, in whole or in part, for the award of any other academic degree or diploma. Except where otherwise indicated, this thesis is my own work. Signed ____________________ Date ____________ iii Contents Acknowledgement iv Abstract v Synopsis 1 Chapter One: The Active Chorus: 4 Chapter Two: The Causes of the Strike 25 Chapter Three: The Explosion 49 Chapter Four: ‘We have been sold!’ 79 Chapter Five: A failure of leadership? 127 Chapter Six: Was Defeat Inevitable? 147 Chapter Seven: Revenge 167 Conclusion 195 Bibliography 202 Annotated Glossary 212 iv Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Phillip Deery, for his guidance, advice, and unfailing support. I would also like to thank Dr Marc Askew, Dr Julie Kimber, Jeff Sparrow and Mick Armstrong for their advice and help. To Ping, Stephen and Daniel: all I can say is that I will forever be in your debt for your love, support and patience. v Abstract This thesis is a study of the Great Strike of 1917, arguably the biggest class conflict in Australian history. For over two months up to 100,000 workers confronted an enraged and belligerent combination of conservative state and federal governments, employers, the establishment press and a middle class which was organised against them on an unprecedented scale. The thesis assesses the strike from a ‘history from below’ perspective. In doing so, it challenges the existing historiographic consensus that the strike was doomed to defeat and that the consequences of that defeat were wholly negative. It argues that the leadership of the strike was primarily responsible for defeat and that the failure of leadership was a product of a conservatism inherent in the trade union bureaucracy. This conservatism was, moreover, underlined by the prevailing faith, predominant within official circles of the Australian labour movement at this time, in arbitration as an alternative to industrial confrontation. It analyses the connection between the defeat in 1917 and the revival of the movement in 1919, concluding that anger at the betrayal of the 1917 strike by its official leadership played a significant role in shifting the movement to the left, motivating key sectors of the working class to seek revenge in 1919. 1 Synopsis The New South Wales General Strike as it is commonly, but misleadingly, referred to (it was neither general nor confined to NSW), was clearly an event of great historic significance. The appellation of ‘The Great Strike’, applied by contemporaries, underscores its profound impact on a society transformed by the carnage of World War One and convulsed by political tumult on the home front. Australian labour historiography is only beginning to break from the institutional focus that characterised labour history in the Anglo-Saxon world before the movement of ‘history from below’ redirected the attention of historians to the men and women who actually compose the working class. Chapter One explores the impact of this incomplete revolution on the historiography of the Great Strike in particular, and of the labour movement during World War One in general. Symptomatic of that impact is a failure to appreciate the significance of differences between the rank and file and bureaucracy of the labour movement. Too often the Australian labour movement has been understood by historians as an undifferentiated whole, or to be more precise, as a movement divided between political and industrial wings. Political divisions, particularly between reformists and revolutionaries have also been recognized and analysed in detail. These horizontal divisions have been understood, but vertical divisions have been ignored. The distinction between rank and file and bureaucracy within trade unions is, of course, a controversial one and Chapter One surveys some of the historical literature surrounding this question – particularly the ‘rank and filist’ debate. It is not simply that this debate, which involved a critique of the ‘history from below’ approach around this very question, impinges on the thesis. Chapter One also speculates on the manner in which a study of the Great Strike may contribute to the debate. Before undertaking a narrative analysis of the strike, it is necessary to place it within its historical context. Chapter Two attempts this by addressing the question of the strike’s causes – one which has also been the subject of controversy. It assesses, in particular, the 2 validity of Taksa’s linkage of the introduction of the Card System (the strike’s trigger) with Taylorism, whilst seeking to resituate this analysis within a broader understanding of the wartime radicalisation and the strike wave that had been building since 1916. This chapter also investigates the financial situation of the NSW Railways and assesses the possibility that the strike was triggered by a deliberate provocation by the State Government. Chapters Three and Four form the narrative core of the thesis. The narrative is deliberately divided into two parts: Chapter Three charts the rise of the strike and Chapter Four its decline, the dividing point being the decision made to end the strike on the railways on 9 September 1917. Although this is a logical delineation, there are more fundamental reasons for structuring the narrative in this way. The most compelling impression arising from any close analysis of the strike is of the contrast between rank and file enthusiasm and official timidity. Before 9 September, the rank and file prevailed; after 9 September it was fighting a losing battle against what large numbers bitterly regarded as a ‘sellout’, and what was, for many workers, a strike turned into a lockout. This is not to suggest that there were no weaknesses in the strike movement before 9 September, but they were much less evident. These early weaknesses are dealt with in Chapter Four. Thence, the delineation of the narrative is not purely chronological. Nevertheless, a discussion of the strike’s weaknesses and eventual defeat is inevitably dominated by events after 9 September. The extent to which such a discussion is shaped by subsequent events justifies that date as the delineating marker. Chapter Five, extending from the analysis of the strike’s official leadership, involves a discussion of the role played by those officials in the strike. It attempts to analyse the failure of their leadership by placing their behaviour in the context of their class location and of the historical development of trade unionism in Australia. It involves a discussion of arbitration (itself an area of controversy amongst Australian Labour Historians), locating it within a traditional Classical Marxist analysis of the trade union bureaucracy. It makes use of the evidence provided by the research embodied in the narrative chapters to enrich this discussion. In doing so Chapter Five will attempt to use the empirical 3 material provided by research into the Great Strike to contribute to the ‘rank and filist’ debate. Chapters Six and Seven deal with two questions of fundamental importance to any assessment of the Great Strike. Chapter Six addresses the central strategic questions facing the strike movement. It deals therefore with the assertion, first made by Vere Gordon Childe, that the strike’s defeat was inevitable primarily due to the large stocks of coal available to the NSW Government. It also deals with the problem of mass scabbing and addresses the problems of dealing with such an extensive mobilisation by the Government and by the middle and ruling classes. This is important, as the notion that the strike was doomed to defeat has been central to constraining criticism of its reluctant official leadership. Chapter Seven explores the connection between the defeat of the Great Strike and the dramatic revival of a significant section of the movement in 1919. It attempts to answer the question, posed in Chapter One, why such an apparently disastrous defeat was followed, within a little over twelve months, by the biggest strike wave in Australia’s history. This would appear to be surprising: NSW was, at the time, the principal battlefield of the class struggle in Australia, and the defeat of the strike involved the best organised and most militant groups of workers in the country. This is again important, as the 1919 strike wave suggests that 1917 was a defeat from which lessons were quickly learned for future struggle. The Conclusion revisits the aims of the thesis as set out in Chapter One and outlines, in the light of the research material and arguments set out in the preceding chapters, the extent to which the thesis has met those aims and what conclusions have been drawn. 4 Chapter One: The Active Chorus The strike movement that gripped the Eastern states of Australia in the latter months of 1917 has received little attention by historians in general, and labour historians in particular. Nearly 100,000 workers struck for periods varying between a few days and nearly three months. For around five weeks the core of the organised working class in NSW, and a number of strategically important groups in Victoria, were out. The strike was accompanied by scenes of enthusiastic and energetic protest. There were several demonstrations in Sydney involving tens of thousands of strikers and their supporters, at times even exceeding 100,000 in number.
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