Introduction

Introduction “There is a soft sighing murmur in the room and one could easily imagine the spare forms to be automatic figures,” wrote a journalist in 1887 after observing the workers operating the Melbourne telephone exchange.1 Some 114 years later retired telephone exchange worker and union official, Joyce Williams, sounded a quite different note on the world and worldview of telephonists: “I just learnt that you’re never going to get change if you’re going to be tolerant. You’ve got to be totally intolerant about things to get change…”2 It is difficult to imagine two more discordant observations about the same subject. One, an outsider’s perspective recorded near the beginning of telephony’s existence, depicts a workforce somehow less than human, bereft of independent thought and action. The other, a view from the inside during manual telephony’s dying days, signifies a mood of belligerence common amongst telephonists of that time. Chronologically and thematically they would appear to represent the two magnetic poles of the telephonists’ history. Taken at face value they invite an understanding of this history as a movement from unconsciousness to consciousness, a slow class awakening, perhaps even a germination, to use Zola’s allegorical naturalism.3 Such a conception is not altogether flawed. There is no disputing that the telephonists of the 1980s were an altogether more organised and combative group than their counterparts from a century earlier. And certainly some of the militant operators of the latter period saw themselves as torch bearers of a new, higher stage in the union’s history. Yet in fact the story of Australia’s telephone exchange workers and their trade unions is more complex than the evolutionary approach would allow. The quotes above do represent relevant historical insights but not as landmarks in the uniform development of consciousness, not as pointers to the unfolding of a class for itself from a class in itself. Rather, they are entry 1 Town and Country Journal, 10 September 1887, quoted in Telecom Australia, The Palace of Winged Words, 1980, p. 8. 2 Interview with Joyce Williams, conducted by author on 10 August 2001. 3 Emile Zola, Germinal, trans Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1954), p. 499. 1 points into a world in which compliance and resistance often existed side by side, and where the spare forms of 1887 and the rancorous unionists of 2001 represented constant possibilities rather than the beginning and end of the story. This study will reconstruct the telephonists’ world in narrative, telling the story of Australian telephone exchange workers and their unions from the rise of manual telephony in 1880 until its demise in the 1980s. In pursuing compliance and resistance as parallel themes, the chapters will be framed by some basic questions about the way workers in telephony were organised and managed, and how they reacted to their situation. Who were they in fact and how were they constituted as a group? How do we characterise and explain their workplace behaviour through time? What concepts do we employ to make sense of their trade union, its policies and practices? These are questions that will take us beyond appearance and description to a more fundamental understanding of these workers as subjects of history, in the process generating approaches and insights with wider relevance in the field of labour history. The study will rely overwhelmingly on primary sources for there are few secondary accounts available. In fact, as historical subjects telephonists have been among the most neglected of occupational groups. In the 1970s a BBC television comedy The Hello Girls portrayed the working life of a group of British telephone exchange workers, drawing its humour from their interactions with each other and their customers. For Australian audiences it was something of a revelation. Here, city telephonists have occupied a place in popular memory merely as a homogenised, disembodied voice, a social identity reduced to a simple function of the telecommunication process. Their country counterparts have found expression in the equally one-dimensional caricature of the town eavesdropper and gossip. More generally, the switchboard operator in film, television and literature has had no name, only a crisp tone and an efficient manner, or even less, a voice we must imagine in a dialogue in which we hear and see only one party. The voice, when we do hear it, is invariably female, thereby gendering the telephonists’ occupational identity and rendering doubly invisible the male minority who were always present in the industry. 2 Telephonists have fared little better in more scholarly genres. On the rare occasion that their industry’s contribution to Australian economic and social development has been acknowledged, their own contribution has rated only a cursory mention. “Telecommunication has played, and will continue to play, a central role in our national productivity and development,” wrote Ann Moyal in her commissioned history of the Postmaster-General’s Department (PMG) and its successor, Telecom.4 But her account furnished only a respectful nod to the operators at “the nerve centre of the system”, in contrast to the star billing awarded to the engineers, managers, and, to a lesser extent, the linesmen and technicians.5 The story of the PMG’s switchboard workforce, she conceded in 1993, was “yet to be examined.”6 Moyal implicitly defended her original omission with the claim that that her brief for the book did not allow for a thorough treatment of distinct occupational groups. “A commissioned work…must to some extent emerge as ‘history from the top’,” she noted.7 Yet even this does not go to the heart of the problem. Top down history is biased not simply in the selection of who’s in and who’s out of the narrative but in the assigning of historical value to these choices. To marginalise telephonists in the historical record is to accept their lowly status within the Department’s structures as a true index of their significance. From the point of view of political economy or even basic service provision, however, no group in telephony played a more important role. Over many decades telephonists’ labour power sustained the credibility and reliability of the service and contributed to its substantial financial surpluses, all prominent departmental objectives. In this light the fact of their ‘insignificance’ is rich in meaning. It suggests a process of deliberate cultural and social devaluation aimed at, in the terminology of Michael Burawoy, “obscuring and securing surplus value.”8 Moyal’s history has unwittingly aided and abetted 4 Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1984), p. 385. 5 ibid., p. 79. 6 Ann Moyal, ‘Women and Telecommunications in Australia: Pointers to a Research Field’, Australian Journal of Communications, Vol 20, No. 1 (1993), p. 150. 7 Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. xii. 8 Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 81. 3 this process. The celebration of the Department’s progress as largely a succession of events around the central theme of technological development has helped mystify the Department’s exploitative relations of production and the real contribution of telephonists to the expansion of Australia’s telecommunications network. Nowhere in her book is the irony of this mystification more pronounced than in Geoffrey Blainey’s foreword where he describes the Department’s history as a “miracle” of “how people who were far away came closer and closer.” 9 In truth, there was nothing miraculous in the intense labour regime, sharp discipline, poor wages and associated health problems telephonists endured for many generations to keep business humming and people connected. With her duties as institutional historian behind her, Moyal has urged scholars to tackle gender and telecommunication in Australia as a field “of intrinsic historical and contemporary importance, of increasing scholarly and cross-cultural interest, and a field in search of authors.”10 In particular, she has drawn our attention to telephonists and called on historians to probe the rich source of data that “underlines the importance of this committed yet exploited female workforce and their, as yet, unrecognised contribution to Australian commercial and national growth.”11 Again, the representation of the workforce as exclusively female overlooks the men in the ranks and invites the reader to naturalise the feminisation of telephony by equating the occupation with a single gender category. The gendering of occupations should be, as Annette Fitzsimons reminds us, the object of inquiry, not the taken-for-granted starting point of a celebration of women or men’s particular contribution as workers.12 Still, the call for research on telephonists is valid and some work along these lines has been done. Louise Thornthwaite has examined some of the union organising and campaigns of Queensland telephonists in the 1970s.13 Carmel Shute has explored the more general 9Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. vii. 10 Moyal, ‘Women and Telecommunications in Australia’, p. 144. 11 ibid., p. 149. 12 Annett Fitzsimons, Gender as a Verb: Gender Segregation at Work (Aldershot (UK): Ashgate, 2002), p. 13. 13 See Louise Thornthwaite, ‘Union growth, recruitment strategy and women workers: Queensland Telephonists in the 1970s’, Labour and Industry, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1996), pp. 87-112; Louise Thornthwaite, ‘Union Strategy and Labour-Community Alliances: the Telephonists' Exchange Closure Campaign, Queensland, 1978’, Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 39, No. 2 (1997), pp. 244-62. 4 relationship between gender and telephony in a piece on communication technology and everyday life in Australia.14 Moyal herself has written extensively on women and the telephone.15 But unlike their American and Canadian counterparts, Australian telephonists have not been the object of a major scholarly investigation.16 As a work of empirical history, then, this study helps rectify an omission.

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