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. Or, more accurately, it challenges longstanding stereotypes by giving a fuller voice to telephonists than popular culture, management propaganda and historical scholarship has allowed. It amplifies the soft, sighing murmurs of Australia’s telephone exchanges to reveal a story of real people operating in and responding to a complex set of class and gender relations.

The interrogation of telephonists’ history in the chapters ahead holds to the thesis that their compliance and resistance were driven by their predicament as exploited subjects.17 As state employees, they were situated within a labour process energised by the political economy of capitalism, where the fundamental objectives were to secure the production of surplus value, the reproduction of capitalist economic arrangements in general and the perpetuation of a particular hierarchy delivering privileges to a managerial elite. Various strategies, most notably the use of workforce segmentation, feminisation, ideological incorporation and technological displacement, were deployed with these objectives in mind. The study investigates how the dynamics of the capitalist labour process and the associated

14 Carmel Shute, ‘"Telegram, Telephone, Tell a Woman": Gender, Communication Technology and Everyday Life in Australia’ in Kate Pritchard Hughes (ed), Contemporary Australian Feminism 2 (Melbourne: Longman, 1997), pp. 242-75. 15 Ann Moyal, Women and the Telephone in Australia. A Study Conducted for Telecom Australia (Melbourne: Telecom Australia, 1989); Ann Moyal, ‘The Gendered Use of the Telephone: An Australian Case Study’, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 14 (1992), pp. 51-72. 16 See Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2001); Michele Martin, “Hello Central?”: Gender, Technology and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ Press, 1991); Stephen H. Norwood, Labor’s Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923 (Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 1990); Steven Peter Vallas, Power in the Workplace: The Politics of Production at AT&T (Albany: State Univ of New York Press, 1993). 17 Exploitation here has a quite specific Marxist definition. It is the appropriation by a class of non-producers of value created by a class of producers over and above what is socially necessary for the latter’s own reproduction as biological and social beings. Under capitalism, this ‘surplus value’ is the consequence of a wage labour system in which capitalists deploy the labour power of hired workers for periods longer than the time required to produce the value equivalent of the wages paid. Ownership of the products of workers’ labour gives capitalists ownership of the surplus value embodied in these products. The surplus is realised as profit when the products are sold at market. For an historical account of the Marxist theory of value and surplus value, see Ernest Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970).

5 classed-interests of the protagonists shaped the workers’ sense of themselves, and how this, in turn, impelled and constrained their responses to their situation. The study places particular emphasis on the role of gender (or more precisely gendering) in the creation of telephone exchange workers as an exploited and resisting group.

It will be argued that this approach opens up a fruitful way of understanding trade unionism. The chapters link unionism to class relations through a history of telephonists as simultaneously employees in the enterprise, agents in the labour process and members of a trade union cohort . By locating trade unionism within this matrix, it enables the telephonists’ unions to emerge as more than institutions of the working class or instruments of mediation between capital and labour. Linked to both structural and ideological dimensions of class at the point of production, they can be seen as agencies for working class resistance in the fullest sense, delivering not only material gains but also redress for some of the psychological deprivations of work under capitalism, what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb have called the hidden injuries of class.18 Conversely, using this approach we can also see trade unions as both energised and constrained by the way working class power is organised at the point of production.

Acquiescence and compliance are obvious themes here. But not in the sense commonly used in the literature on hegemony. The study challenges accounts that represent workers’ industrial passivity as a product of coercion or consent. It will be argued that coercion is ever present in capitalist relations of production but it cannot account for the positive acquiescence that can be found amongst all groups of workers from time to time, including telephonists. Consent, on the other hand, is too strong a description of this acquiescence, implying a level of worker identification with the firm and its goals which is seldom evident in reality. Workers do not in the main consent to their predicament, they begrudgingly accept it, usually because alternative courses of action are perceived to pose too great a risk to their material and social well-being, or because alternatives do not appear to exist. Acceptance of the status quo, however, is always conditional. The work and its material and psychic rewards must meet a basic minimum expectation of what is fair and

18 Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, 2nd edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1993).

6 reasonable. In short, acquiescence is not evidence of consent but of toleration. And as Joyce Williams showed, toleration could be a fragile state of mind. In the right circumstances, tolerance could quickly give way to its opposite; the mild could quickly become the militant. Resistance of one kind or another, individual or collective, was never far away.

This account, then, will be “led” by the telephonists (and their allies and adversaries) but with an ear to what their history has to tell us about questions that are considered relevant in light of our own interests and ideological orientations. It will be both an empirically rigorous and a theoretically engaged historical investigation. While not allowing the telephonists to disappear behind the abstractions and categories of sociological inquiry, it will engage with a virtually dormant discussion about the political economy of state-run enterprises and the classed nature of state employment. It will challenge the terms of the consent/coercion/resistance debate that has flourished in industrial sociology since the 1970s. It will maintain a focus on the role of gender in the politics of production, and it will speak to debates between feminism and Marxism and particularly the literature on women and work. It aims to offer an original contribution to our understanding of the nature of trade unionism, again a longstanding preoccupation in Marxism and industrial sociology. Finally, in its attention to subjectivity and identity, it will offer a contribution to the encounter between Marxism and postmodernism. While rejecting postmodernist accounts which insist that discursively constructed meanings alone or above all else are the key to understanding social phenomena, it will present a Marxism in which subjectivity, consciousness and the volatility of meaning find a significant place.

Chapter Outline

Taking up the themes outlined here, chapter one reviews literature across various disciplines to develop a theoretical framework for the investigation that follows. It also places the study within the field of Australian labour history, arguing that the continuing importance of class and class relations warrants a revival of scholarship on labour movement struggles and organisations. The narrative proper begins in chapter two.

7 Covering the period 1880 to 1901, chapter two examines the creation of telephone exchange work as a new kind of labour-power born of a new industry. In opposition to a large body of rather muddled thinking on the role of the capitalist state in the economy, the chapter will insist that the emergence of telephony as a state run monopoly with a predominantly female and white switchboard workforce makes sense only if the industry is understood in the context of the state as a capitalist entity, driven by the need to support and replicate the exploitative relations of production in the private sector. From this perspective, a study of telephonists provides a valuable means for bringing class theories into sharp relief, and enriches our understanding of class as a relationship and a lived experience of alienation, subordination and of course survival and resistance.

Chapters three through nine trace the history of this relationship with particular emphasis on the role and nature of trade unionism. Chapter three examines the period from 1902 to 1919 when the labour force of telephone exchanges unionised, partly under the aegis of the Melbourne-based women’s movement and more generally under the sway of an ideology that represented switchboard workers as victims of employment sweating. Chapter four covers 1920 to 1938, a period marked by the incorporation of switchboard unionists into management’s agenda, largely through the embrace of an ideology of service defined along Statist, careerist and patriarchal lines, and encapsulated in the identity of the hello girl. This shift was marked by the decline of rank and file activism informed by the ideology of sweating and the rise or at least consolidation of supervisors as the dominant leadership and ideological force in the union. Chapter five takes the story from 1939 to 1949, a decade of war and upheaval in which a fresh flame of resistance was kindled, especially in New South Wales where a more class-aware leadership came to power, only to be snuffed out by the winds of a resurgent conservatism in the postwar years. In chapter six the story begins with Cold War anti-communism and ends in 1968 following the repeal of the ban on permanency for married women in the Commonwealth Public Service. These were years in which instances of resistance on the job were overshadowed by the ideological hold of a public service identity predicated on the notion of career service. These were also years that gave rise to a major shift in management strategy. With the need for living labour declining with each new development in automatic telephony, the Department seized the opportunity

8 to move from an ideological containment strategy to a programme of replacing labour with machines. This approach would dominate class relations in Australia’s telephone exchanges for the rest of the century.

Chapter seven traverses the seven years to the end of 1975, a period of transformation for employer and employed alike. The telephone branch of the Department was re-constituted as Telecom Australia, ushering in a new era of commercialisation, while the wider radicalisation of the times and the union’s own internal crisis of legitimacy created a groundswell of support for rebuilding the union as an independent, fighting organisation. Both developments culminated in a series of dramatic confrontations between the union and Telecom in the years from 1976 until 1984, the subject of chapter eight. From a largely compliant and increasingly moribund organisation, the Australian Telephone and Phonogram Officers’ Association (ATPOA) emerged in these years as one of the most militant groups in Telecom. Imbued with a new identity centred on a producerist valorisation of their own labour, ATPOA members presented themselves to the community as custodians of the common good, a bulwark for service against a corporate agenda driven primarily by profit. Chapter nine, finally, examines the decline of the workforce and the eventual amalgamation of the union in 1988. Although the chapter covers only a five year period, it places the demise of the operators into a broader context by examining the reasons for their defeat against the general themes of the study.

9 Chapter One Labour Theorised: Workers, Unions and the Ideologies of Production

Australian telephone exchange workers were always an enigma. Indeed, if one thing could be said to be a constant in their long history it was their unerring ability to defy simple generalisations and lazy stereotypes. The boys who worked many of the first switchboards, for instance, were expected to build respectable careers in postal and telegraph departments. In practice most were so lacking in discipline that they had to be removed from the job. During the 1910s and 1920s the young women who replaced them became known as hello girls, an epithet laden with connotations of polite and dutiful service. Yet even as the label was finding its way into popular consciousness the women to which it referred and their male colleagues were busy forming a national trade union and imposing work-to-rules in reaction to management bullying and ‘sweating’. In the conservative 1950s the telephonists were lauded as model employees and their photographs regularly adorned the pages of their employer’s public relations propaganda. Many also finished the decade with their names in the fines register for breaches of workplace regulations; some were even sacked. In the early1970s telephonists expressed pride in their work by advocating a no-strike policy. By the early 1980s many were regularly walking off the job to make the same point.

What to make of this history? Clearly, these were not compliant employees in the sense favoured by sociologists of consent. Nor, obviously, did they resemble a revolutionary proletariat straining to burst its chains. They were, in general, workers who resisted within limits. Laborist doctrine would label it a resistance of pragmatic moderation, where a say on the job and a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay served as benchmarks of trade union success. But this, too, understates the complexity of workplace politics and the concerns and motivations of most workers in telephone exchanges.

To make sense of the telephonists’ story, we must first take stock of some basic conceptual tools and theoretical assumptions. This is the central aim of this chapter. In keeping with the politically engaged nature of the study, the chapter begins by affirming the ongoing

10 importance of the labour history project in general and trade union history in particular. It then presents a critique of the relevant literature from labour history, industrial sociology, Marxism, and gender studies, in order to develop specific analytical concepts and a particular approach to labour history as the basis for the historical account that will follow.

The chapter links critique to real history with a set of propositions about what telephonists and their adversaries thought and did, and why. Even at their most acquiescent, it will be argued, telephonists never ceased to experience their work as alienating and never ceased to resist their dehumanisation and exploitation on the job. They and their unions were at their weakest when this will to humanise found expression through management-inspired ideologies of service and career. These were ideologies that held out the promise of a tolerable working life or offered solace for work’s least tolerable features. They were ideologies inevitably undone by the contrary reality of working life itself. At certain junctures, workers’ toleration crumbled and management ideology succumbed to ideologies created collectively by working people themselves. At such moments the desire to humanise sometimes erupted into industrial and political struggle, or what this thesis calls conflictual resistance.

The constraints on this resistance were both ideological and organisational, a consequence of mobilising on an occupational or industry basis where the transformative possibilities tended to be limited. But only tended. As Daniel Bensaid reminds us, every moment of conflictual resistance contains many possibilities, including the possibility of a complete political rupture. “Every instant,” writes Bensaid, “witnesses a confrontation between the rational and the irrational, between possibilities that attain effective history and those that are provisionally or definitively eliminated. The struggle alone decides between them.”1

Acquiescence, then, was never a settled state of affairs. Telephone exchange labour only ceased to be a ‘problem’ for capital when labour ceased to exist, displaced altogether from the labour process by machinery. Until that moment, labour resistance of one kind or another was a pervasive fact throughout the telephone exchanges of Australia.

1 Daniel Bensaid, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, translated Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2002), p. 89.

11 Writing Labour History

This study focuses on the national association formed by telephone exchange operators and supervisors in 1914, a union which eventually became the ATPOA.2 In this regard, the study can be seen as a return to a tradition of union history writing that has fallen out of favour in scholarly circles over the past fifteen or so years. Indeed one of the study’s aims is to reaffirm unions and unionism as a valid and important historical subject. This requires, however, a recognition of some significant limitations within the genre of conventional union historiography. As Bradon Ellem has acknowledged:

Most union histories were indeed inexplicit as to theory and purpose and seemed to be informed by an ‘economist’ version of the past derived from the Webbs’ earliest and narrowest definition of a trade union as ‘a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment’. It was subsequently argued that this scarcely allowed a full understanding of trade unions, let alone class relations.3

These often-commissioned histories emphasised policy, leadership and activity within the formal settings of power - union structures, the state apparatus, the negotiating table.4 Few of them examined the relationship between unions as institutions and the workplaces from which they ostensibly derived their authority and power. White-collar histories were particularly wanting in this regard. From reading Bruce Juddery’s history of the Australian Clerical Officers Association one could easily conclude that unionism was in essence an

2 The term ‘union’ is used quite deliberately in this thesis to refer to the ATPOA and other such associations within the Public Service. While the public service ideology and indeed the various Public Service Acts discouraged employees of the State from identifying themselves as working class and their organisations as ‘industrial’ entities, there is no substantial grounds for conceptualising their associations as anything other than unions. The workers’ own preference for the term ‘association’ to differentiate themselves from trade or industrial unionism is itself taken here as an object of investigation. 3 Bradon Ellem, In Women’s Hands?: A History of Clothing Trades Unionism in Australia (Sydney: NSW Univ Press, 1989), p. 1. 4 See, for instance, Robert Murray & Kate White, Ironworkers: A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), & Bradley Bowden, Driving Force: The History of the Transport Workers’ Union of Australia (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993).

12 interminable clash of leadership factions with little or nothing to do with the rank and file.5 Even among studies of unions with high levels of shopfloor activism, the top down approach was by no means atypical. Frank Waters’ history of the Amalgamated Postal Workers’ Union, for instance, contains all the clash and clamour of twentieth century industrial politics but from the reified perspective of the union office.6

The wider contexts of unionism were not always ignored. Communist intellectuals, in particular, were keen to place trade unionism within the broader march of socialism. Although often institutionally focussed, their work stands within a distinct tradition which we can call proletarian class history. It came in two strands, both falling within a positivist Marxist framework. The first included Communist Party of Australia (CPA) functionaries like W.J. Brown and Edgar Ross who wrote teleological accounts of the working class informed by a Stalinised Marxism wrapped with the ribbon of dialectical materialism. Their subject was a proletariat steadily and inexorably in transition from a class in itself to a class for itself according to scientific laws of historical evolution. Propelling the action, usually behind the immediate scene, was the working class’s historic mission to deliver socialism, ably led by the Party. Ross discovered a particularly dynamic instance of this law in the miners’ union:

By reason of…the character of the industry, the position it occupies in the national economy, the outlook of the mineworkers, the nature of the industrial struggle, the Federation’s influence has been a forward-looking one in terms of working class philosophy – a reaching towards “final solutions” to problems encountered.7

Meanwhile Brown’s history of Australian communism also observed the march of socialism, although it was less clear in his account whether proletarian agency was needed at all. Like all capitalist countries, Australia was engaged in, as he quoted Lenin, “an epoch

5 Bruce Juddery, White Collar Power: A History of the ACOA (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980). 6 Frank Waters, Postal Unions and Politics: A History of the Amalgamated Postal Workers' Union of Australia (St Lucia (Qld): Univ of Queensland Press, 1978). 7 Edgar Ross, A History of the Miners’ Federation of Australia (Sydney: ACSEF, 1970), p. 4.

13 of transition from capitalism to socialism.”8 Stuart MacIntyre has observed in this communist tradition a tendency to trawl history for the lessons it held for future struggles.9 To this can be added a tendency to interpret history teleologically as the unfolding of a narrative culminating in (and therefore justifying) the current party line.

A less programmatic strand of Old Left history was embodied in the work of Brian Fitzpatrick. In radical nationalist fashion he too wrote histories that posited the labour movement as the progressive force in society. The Labor (sic) effort, he recorded, “happens to coincide with an effort towards social justice.” He was quick to scoff at any suggestion, however, that this “simple belief” was derived from anything other than scrupulous empirical research. No preconceptions, he assured readers, were at work.10 When he came to write his history of the Seamen’s Union it would be the historical facts of the shipowners’ belligerence and the seamen’s fight for justice that would carry the argument.11 Standing somewhere between the line-of-march accounts of CPA intellectuals and the empirical scholarship of Fitzpatrick, meanwhile, was Robin Gollan who explained the rise of new unionism, for instance, as the working class “becoming conscious of itself as a class.”12 The New South Wales coalminers’ union, he argued, came to regard itself from the mid 1880s as part of a “labour movement which has sought in one way or another to make profound changes in Australian society.”13 The miners and other workers looked to the idea of a nation-wide political organisation “to represent the workers not as ‘trades’ unionists but as a working class.”14

The Old Left Marxist tradition in general had the virtue of drawing attention to unionism as a movement, an expression of an exploited collective subject seeking redress through

8 W.J. Brown, The Communist Movement in Australia: An Historical Outline, 1890s to 1980s (Haymarket, NSW: Australian Labour Movement History Publications, 1986), p. xvi. 9 Stuart MacIntyre, The Reds (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 12. 10 Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement (Melbourne: Rawson’s Bookshop, 1944), p. 11. 11 Brian Fitzpatrick & Rowan J. Cahill, The Seamen’s Union of Australia, 1872-1972: A History (Sydney: SUA, 1981). 12 Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850-1910 (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ Press, 1967), p. 104. 13 Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales: A History of the Union, 1860-1960 (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ Press), p. 65. 14 ibid., p. 80.

14 industrial and political means. But the reliance of some its more doctrinaire practitioners on a simple version of the base-superstructure model limited its ability to identify the specific causal dimensions of change under capitalism or indeed to understand the alienation at the very heart of the capitalist labour process. For all the talk of masses, unionism was conceived simply as an adjunct to the party. The real fight for socialism was a battle over property relations rather than the relations of production, a clash within the superstructure rather than the base. Exploitation or ‘profiteering’ were taken to exist only where private and typically foreign monopolies dominated. It followed that the solution was not liberation from below through the abolition of wage labour but socialism from above through Communist-led nationalisation of industry. Or at the very least through a popular front- inspired expulsion of foreign profiteers. Such Stalinist and nationalist politics could provide few lasting insights into the nature of unionism in general, let alone unionism among groups like telephonists who already worked in nationalised industries.

While institutional and predominantly masculinist histories of trade unions, political parties and industrial struggles remained the mainstay of Australian labour history into the 1970s, broader histories of social class did not disappear with the decline of Australian communism. On the contrary, the rise of social movements against war, imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia and the surge in industrial conflict from 1968 precipitated a renewed interest in Marxism as a theory of collective self-emancipation. Of the historical works that emerged out of this New Left milieu , the work that broke most new ground for Marxism in Australia was Connell and Irving’s Class Structure in Australian History, a book that owes much to the structuralism-culturalism debate between Althusser and Thompson.15

The strength of Class Structure was its view of class as a relationship in which both bourgeoisie and working class were active. Agency purportedly replaced manifest destiny as the mechanism for change. But ironically the strength of the work was also its weakness. By defining class as a relationship of power within a hermetically sealed totality, and the state as a force embedded in this structure to defend bourgeois interests, the possibility of a

15 R.W. Connell & T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narratives & Argument (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1980).

15 working class that could develop in any way independently of the bourgeoisie and therefore potentially break with the latter’s hegemony, was closed off. Although they insisted, following Thompson, that “class struggle is genuinely struggle” and “no one direction of historical change is guaranteed by natural law”, they presented a history of a social totality from the inside, where the class structure subsumed everything, “fill[ing] up, so to speak, all the spaces”, leaving nowhere for an emancipatory politics to take root.16 Capitalism’s tendency to generate crises which threatened its own ideological and political stability was given short shrift, the emphasis falling instead on the system’s capacity to recover by “displacing” crises into safe spheres.17 Every working class challenge was, it seemed, doomed to failure or at best to succeed only in forcing a more favourable re-ordering of affairs within the system.

Thompson’s criticism of Althusser obviously comes to mind here. Even with the best intentions, a Marxism that applies concepts a priori to social reality can unintentionally become a theory of human unfreedom. Thompson of course advocated that societies and social groups needed to be studied in their specificity and with due regard to empirical detail, ignoring neither their unsuccessful nor successful choices, in order to understand history as the product of real humans rather than of gods or god-like iron laws. When interrogating the past, it is open-ended historical methodology that allows Marxists to avoid determinism. Thompson saw class not as “a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to happen) in human relationships.”18 Connell and Irving, while claiming allegiance to the Thompsonian tradition, ultimately became trapped in a sociology of class that undercut their stress on historical agency.

Their book nevertheless represented a major advance in Australian Marxism by presenting class as a relationship rather than a thing. And although it has been criticised for marginalising gender19, its insistence on interconnectedness, of society as a totality, does

16 ibid., p. 15. 17 ibid., p. 24. 18 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980), p. 10. 19 See, for instance, Louise Walker, ‘Beers, Bed and Board: Industrial Behaviour Around the Victorian Hotel and Liquor Industry Wages Board, 1900-1914' Honours Thesis, Monash University, 1995, p. 6. In the 1992 edition of their book, Connell and Irving briefly responded to feminist critiques, pp. 20-23.

16 open the way for fruitful explorations of the interaction of class with other power relations such as those based on gender and race. Indeed, as Rosemary Pringle has argued, Thompson’s shift away from narrowly defined economic relations allows us “to situate class in a wider pattern of social relations in which gender, sexuality and the sexual division of labour are extremely important.”20 In following Thompson, Connell and Irving offered a superior model to the one encapsulated in the metaphor of class, gender and race as “axes” of power which, by definition, are lines which may or may not “intersect.”21

Other new directions in labour history were also being forged in the 1970s. Feminist scholarship further eroded confidence in the orthodox focus on political parties and trade unions by highlighting their complicity in women’s oppression, although attempts at a socialist-feminist synthesis at least kept alive a dialogue between feminism and Marxism.22 Meanwhile, debates within Marxism over the veracity of the base-superstructure model suggested new ways of seeing class were needed to capture the complexity of class relations. As economist Richard Edwards noted:

The evolution of economic life has tended to segment the working class, but the experiences, ‘social practices’, and political behavior of each fraction cannot be understood as simply an expression of these economic realities. Indeed, as recent scholarship has emphasized…the working class creates for itself a complex and multifaceted reality in which culture, family patterns, ethnicity, and tradition all play important parts.23

20 Rosemary Pringle, Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 199. 21 Joanne Scott, ‘Generic Resemblances’?: Women and Work in Queensland, 1919-1939, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1996, p. 4. 22 See, in particular, Heidi Hartmann, ‘Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex' in Martha Blaxall & Barbara Reagon (eds), Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1976); Michele Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: the Marxist/Feminist Encounter (London: Verso, 1988); Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 23 Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 165.

17 While the strength of Class Structure was its emphasis on relations of power within a social totality, the new social history encouraged trade union scholars to look to the diffuse political, ideological, social and economic contexts in which unionism operates.

Some of the leading work here has come from the United States. James Green’s The World of the Worker took up traditional themes but also attempted “to portray workers’ lives beyond the union hall, the strike meeting, and the political campaign.”24 More recently Dorothy Cobble’s history of waitress unions in the United States offered a nuanced examination of the factors exogenous to waitressing – race and gender oppression in particular - which helped shape the lived experiences of waitresses.25 Venus Green’s history of telephone operators in the Bell System also drew on race and gender themes to demonstrate how management undermined worker resistance by encouraging operators to subscribe to a “white lady” identity.26

Bradon Ellem’s study of Australian clothing trades unions is a particularly insightful local example of the contextual approach. Taking his lead from John Merritt’s injunction not to look at a union as “an entity separate from its total social formation” 27, Ellem’s history eschews the conventional preoccupation with the union bureaucracy and its personalities and the equally uninformative obsession with positioning unions on an arbitration-direct action spectrum of industrial behaviour. While he gives the arbitration system and union leaders their due place, he also explores how changes in technology, the labour process and the divisions of labour influenced and were influenced by the union.28

There is a sense, though, that in the contextualising tradition unionism remains an enigma. To the question, How are unions to be defined?, Ellen responds that his book provides an historical answer. “It asks how members themselves have defined their union.”29 These

24 James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980), p. xiii. 25 Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 9. 26 Venus Green, Race On the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2001), pp. 134-35. 27 John Merritt, source unknown, cited in Ellem, In Women’s Hands?, p. 2. 28 ibid., p. 4. 29 ibid., p. 3.

18 definitions are then explained by reference to the circumstances in which the members found themselves. There would seem to be two unresolved issues with this historicist methodology. First, people exist in an infinite number of ‘circumstances’ or contexts, all of which influence their ideas about any given subject. The historian must choose those which she or he regards as preeminent and in choosing there is inevitably a ranking process in which the historian’s own theoretical model of causation is embedded. Arbitration or the labour process or the labour market, for instance, can be assigned meaning as dominant contexts for union ideas only within a certain a priori model of what unionism is. Rather than foreground the historian’s own role in the process by which one model is ‘selected’ over others, historicism projects the historian’s preconceptions onto the historical protagonists where they re-appear as a naturalistic link between context and consciousness. The metanarrative behind the narrative frameworks of consciousness is thus obscured.

Second and related to the first point is the question of historical specificity. If ideas are formed in certain circumstances will they always emerge in these circumstances? Can workers transcend ‘context’ and if so under what conditions? The failure to address these questions lands the contextual approach in the same determinist bind that entrapped Connell and Irving. The desire to privilege workers’ own definitions, to see them as agents in their own right, is thwarted if the methodological premises see their agency as affective only within capitalism.

These were theoretical problems that could not be solved in the abstract; their answers could only emerge out of real struggles, through the exercise of agency in real conflict. But by the late 1980s such moments were fewer and their character more defensive. Manufacturing employment across the OECD world had been in decline since the late 1970s, union density has begun to slide, and Laborism and Stalinised socialism were waning or had collapsed as political projects that offered at least a notional rallying point for improving the lives of working people. By the mid 1990s state and capital had succeeded in dismantling much of the Keynesian welfare apparatus and had symbolically reconstructed workers as individuals standing alone in the marketplace, unencumbered by

19 the old collective identities of class. Capital had consolidated its own class power by destabilising class as an organising concept for labour.

Within the academy the declining fortunes of organised labour gave rise to an intellectual retreat from class, revealed as a deepening pessimism about or aversion to the possibility of a transformative political project based on the collective power of workers. By the 1990s, Marxism itself was under seige, indicted by postmodernist theorists for claiming that the seemingly disparate aspects of social existence could be understood as a totality. As Joy Damousi put it, the possibility opened up by 1980s social history that the “various webs of oppression” could be integrated into a “coherent possibility of liberation” gave way to the politically pessimistic postmodernism of the 1990s which in many cases “brought into question the very usefulness of class as a category of historical analysis.30

Confronted with this crisis, the remaining card-carrying labour historians found themselves on the defensive. The settings and patterns of class formation identified by the integrative project of new labour history tended to become objects of study in their own right, without reference to any conception of an overarching systemic setting for social relations. Today labour as community is often emphasised.31 Home and family as sources of class identity and memory is highlighted.32 A certain nostalgia pervades the forums of labour history.33

The sense of loss is misplaced and counterproductive. So too is the spurning of ‘conventional’ labour topics. Although social history has opened up valuable new ways of seeing, the vista has sometimes blinded us to the continuing hard realities of political

30 Joy Damousi, ‘Labour History and the New Millennium’ in Phil Griffiths & Rosemary Webb (eds), Work, Organisation, Struggle: Papers from the Seventh National Labour History Conference, Canberra 19-21 April 2001, p. 3. 31 See, for instance, the issue of Labour History devoted to the theme of ‘Labour History and Local History’, in particular Lucy Taksa, ‘Like a Bicycle, Teetering Between Individualism and Collectivism: Considering Community in Relation to Labour History’, Labour History, No. 78 (May 2000), pp. 7-32. See also, Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900-1965 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1998), and Raymond Markey, Labour and Community: Historical Essays (Wollongong: Wollongong Univ Press, 2001). 32 See Elizabeth Faue, ‘Retooling the Class Factory: United States Labor History after Marx, Montgomery and Postmodernism’, Labour History, No. 82 (May 2002), pp. 109-19. 33 See, for instance, Greg Mallory, ‘The Brisbane Rugby League: The Decline of Brisbane Community Culture’ in Bradley Bowden & John Kellett, Transforming Labour: Work, Workers, Struggle and Change, Proceedings of the Eighth National Labour History Conference, Brisbane, 3-5 October 2003, p. 344.

20 economy. As Verity Burgmann reminds us, class is still the fundamental ordering mechanism in the societies about which we write, and the working class remains the pre- eminent force for social change due to the threat it can pose to capitalist class power.34 In this old new world workplaces and trade unions remain central sites for the creation and exercise of class power, both labour’s and capital’s. This study therefore concurs with recent comments by Bradon Ellem in response to Elizabeth Faue’s criticism of institutional histories. Ellem has called for a more balanced approach, arguing that the real question is not whether or not we should study workplaces, organisations and the machinery of class negotiation, but how we approach these topics.35 We need to revitalise interpretive frameworks which allow systemic insights into how power under capitalism is mobilised against and by oppressed and exploited groups. We need a return to trade union history but a return that sees trade unionism more fully as a dimension of class relations. Such a return would draw on the best of Old Left history, but with concepts of class power, domination and resistance resharpened by the debates of the Marxist New Left and the insights of the new social history.

Consent, Coercion and Control: Workers and Workplaces in Sociology

If we seek to situate trade unionism at the site of working class power, we must enter the world of work and take up issues of power, control and conflict as aspects of relations in production. It is not altogether true, as Charlie Fox has claimed, that the workplace is “the ‘foreign country’ of history.”36 Labour historians of the Old Left were early visitors to these shores. Robin Gollan took us underground for a detailed look at aspects of early mining practice in his study of the coalminers of New South Wales.37 Pete Thomas provided similar information about mine work in Queensland.38 Jim Hagan’s history of the printing

34 Verity Burgmann, ‘The Point of Change and the Health of Labour History’, Labour History, No. 76 (May 1999), p. 177.

35 Bradon Ellem, ‘Retooling the Class Factory, Response 1: Making Sense of Institutions?: Class, Space & Labour History’, Labour History, No. 82 (May 2002), p. 121. 36 Charlie Fox, Working Australia (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), p. xi. 37 Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales, pp. 18-26. 38 Pete Thomas, The Coalminers of Queensland: A Narrative History of the Queensland Colliery Employees Union, Volume 1 (Ipswich: QCEU, 1986), pp. 49-97.

21 unions examined technological and labour process changes that shaped craft and tradition in the printing industry.39 It is true, however, that within this corpus, work and workplaces generally only provided the settings for the union action front of stage. On the other hand, since the publication of Fox’s Working Australia, history has strengthened its territorial claims with a number of substantial publications that have taken work and workplace relations as subjects in their own right. Raelene Frances’ The Politics of Work and Diane Kirkby’s Barmaids, both books with a focus on women and the workplace, are major contributions to the field.40

The later histories have not only demonstrated a shift in subject. They have often embodied what Lee-Ann Monk has called a ‘turn’ to culture, informed by post-structuralist theories which reject the possibility that class, gender and other categories can exist outside language.41 If the emphasis in structuralist labour history was on the experience of work as a cause of collective organising and struggle, the new histories often display a preoccupation with discourse and identity. As Monk explains, “one task for a cultural history of work is to analyse how the identities of workers were discursively produced and constituted their experiences, rather than exploring the experiences of material or productive relations as the key to consciousness.”42 Yet productive relations cannot so easily be sidelined. As Monk herself concedes, referring to William Sewell’s ideas, workers are “always embedded in relations of power and domination which exist in the wider culture…”43 Monk’s discussion is uncomfortably silent on the phenomenological status of these relations and of the nature of workers’ ‘embeddedness’ in them. In her study of nineteenth century Victorian asylums, she argues, for instance, that “the continued emphasis on the asylum as a family was a rhetorical manoeuvre which worked to legitimate and naturalise particular social relations of power within the institution.” This is indeed

39 J. Hagan, Printers and Politics: A History of the Australian Printing Unions, 1850-1950 (Canberra: ANU Press, 1966), pp, 1-22. 40 Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1993); Diane Kirkby, Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1997). 41 Lee-Ann Monk, ‘Artisans of Reason: Crafting a Gendered Occupational Identity in the Asylum in Victoria, 1848-1886’, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2001, p. 17. 42 Monk, ‘Artisans of Reason’, p. 17. 43 William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1980), quoted by Monk, ‘Artisans of Reason’, p. 20.

22 plausible but it tells us nothing about the origins and function of the social relations themselves. In these relations, she comments, asylum attendants were “expected to be subordinate.”44 No doubt true, but why? For what purpose? Post-structuralist analyses tend to defer such questions or assume without making the case that the answer to them lies in the proposition that power and domination are self-referential, purely ends in themselves. The case made in this thesis is that the causes of power and domination in the workplace (as distinct from the mechanisms for their reproduction) lie in the materialist domain of political economy. Returning, for instance, to the miners in Gollan’s study, while it is true to say, at least in part, that they constructed their identities discursively, there was also a particular reality informing this process. As Gollan writes, “the first miners are created by compulsion or economic necessity. Communities thus formed develop a life of their own, and seek to better it.”45

The notion of interests is a key element here. Miners and mine owners, Gollan tells us, “faced each other as enemies” and fought each other like a “civil war.”46 This was a history articulating two sets of interests defined as conflictual not by linguistic manoeuvre but by the political economy of capitalism. In the workplace these interests find expression in conflicts over the control and content of that most material of work phenomena, the labour process. It is in this area, particularly over the past thirty years, that Fox’s point about history’s neglect does have salience. While the workplace as a site of contested culture has captured the imagination of some in the discipline, few have looked at the workplace as the juncture of political economy and the practices and relations of work. Raelene Frances, for instance, has been one of the few historians to engage directly with the various labour process debates spawned by Harry Braverman’s monumental study, Labor and Monopoly Capital.47 It is to some of these debates that this discussion must now turn. Many writers, including Frances, have taken issue with the absence of any form of worker resistance in Braverman’s account of the proletarianisation of twentieth century white

44 Monk, ‘Artisans of Reason’, p. 77.

45 Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales, p. 1. 46 ibid. 47 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Frances, The Politics of Work, pp. 4-7.

23 collar work.48 For Michael Burawoy, Braverman follows a long tradition in Marxism of reducing workers “to objects of manipulation; to commodities bought and sold in the market; to abstractions incapable of resistance; to victims of the inexorable forces of capitalist accumulation.”49 Unions had no place in this schema, either as agencies of resistance or coordinators of compliance. For his part, Burawoy, one of the leading scholars in this field since Braverman, ignored unions because his original thesis precluded any determinants of the politics of production outside the process of production itself. In the preface to his seminal work, Manufacturing Consent, he makes this explicit:

In contrast to the conventional wisdom among both Marxists and non- Marxists, I propose to demonstrate how consent is produced at the point of production independent of schooling, family life, mass media, the state, and so forth.50

Famously, he identified games played by workers on the job, such as competing for the best wage outcome under the piece rate system (what in the US is called making out), as instrumental in eliciting consent. “The very activity of playing a game generates consent with respect to the rules.”51

Burawoy seems keen to banish the uncertainty of conflict from his schema. He begins by banishing consciousness itself.

[Consent] is to be distinguished from the specific consciousness or subjective attributes of the individual who engages in these activities. Within the labor process the basis of consent lies in the organization of activities as

48 Frances, The Politics of Work, p.7. 49 Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 77. 50 ibid., p. xii. 51 ibid., p. 81.

24 though they presented the worker with real choices, however narrowly confined these choices might be. It is participation in choosing that generates consent.52

The legitimacy of the game, though, surely depends on workers believing it is in their interests to play it. Such a belief may be ill-founded or irrational but it is difficult to imagine how it is not a matter of consciousness. To the extent the game is not in workers’ interests it relies on a substitute gratificatory attraction to survive. With constant economic growth and a paternalistic management regime this may be possible, putting aside for a moment the influence on consciousness of factors beyond the workplace. But such conditions are hardly typical. Capitalism’s inherent tendency to crisis ensures the objective contradiction between workers’ interests and expectations and those of capitalists do eventually erupt into consciousness, and any game playing strategy periodically finds itself at risk from its own crisis of legitimacy.

Burawoy’s counter to this criticism is to insist his thesis is restricted to capitalism’s ‘monopoly core’ where, he argues, the impact of systemic crisis is minimised.53 Even here, however, the theory’s validity is open to question. David Gartman points to the contradictions within the monopoly sector that Burawoy overlooks, “the contradiction between the increasingly qualified working class and the continued disqualification of work, between the sops of work humanization and participation and the rising expectations of workers for greater self-determination, between an ideology of self-gratification in the marketplace and one of continued self-denial in the workplace.”54 Steven Vallas’s research into worker attitudes in the American monopoly telecommunications firm AT&T has found that, rather than a prevailing attitude of consent, “by far the most common world-view is conflictual or oppositional.”55 Kate Mulholland’s more recent study of workers in Irish call centres, where other ethnographers have claimed a high incidence of worker incorporation

52 ibid., p. 27. 53 ibid., pp. 183-85. 54 David Gartman, ‘Ideology in the Labor Process: A Review of Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent’, The Insurgent Sociologist, Vol 11, No 3 Fall (1982), p. 95. 55 Steven Vallas, ‘Workers, Firms and the Dominant Ideology: Hegemony and Consciousness in the Monopoly Core’, The Sociological Quarterly, 32, 1 (1991), p. 66.

25 into organisational cultures, found numerous “silent strategies of collective disengagement from corporate culture.”56

Active, critical consciousness, then, cannot be banished from the ‘problem’ of worker control as easily as consent theorists would suggest. It exists and from a management perspective it must be dealt with directly. In one sense, economic coercion remains management’s mainstay. As Burawoy himself conceded, workers often agree to concessions because of perceived economic threats faced by their firm or industry. To call this consent is hardly convincing. By any definition, the fear and real possibility of unemployment, poverty and loss of social respect are coercive pressures inimical to the idea of willing compliance. Should workers consider collective resistance to their predicament, capitalism holds out the prospect of even severer sanctions. Company and state violence and economic deprivation are no strangers to the labour force of capitalism’s monopoly core; indeed, in the United States, the postwar hegemony of big business was founded on interwar violence against organised labour.57

Yet if the implications of consent theory are unsustainable, coercion as an alternative hypothesis is also problematic. Whereas consent theorists posit a worker subject without any sense of their own exploitation or alienation, the coercion argument tends to rely dogmatically on the notion of a worker subject whose consciousness and actions correspond all too neatly with a set of interests defined by the relations of exploitation in which labour is situated. Consent theory at least has the virtue of drawing attention to the fact that capitalism’s survival in its heartlands has relied on a level of acquiescence from workers that is inconsistent with the claim that they are always and everywhere a belligerent mass held back from revolution only by economic compulsion and police truncheons. In the case of Australian labour, workers have rarely been completely acquiescent but neither have they moved en masse beyond militant economism, as Drew Cottle explains:

56 Kate Mulholland, ‘Workplace Resistance in an Irish Call Centre: Slammin’, Scammin’, Smokin’ an’ leavin’’, Work, Employment and Society, 18, 4 (Dec 2004), p. 710. 57 See William Foster’s personal account of working class struggles in America’s biggest industries prior to World War 2, in William Z. Foster, Pages from a Worker’s Life (New York: International Publishers, 1939).

26 Industrial peace through the arbitration process…has been, since Federation, one of the dominant characteristics of a largely quiescent labour movement and a singular peculiarity of Antipodean capitalism. Australian labour history almost unconsciously has accepted these rules of the game. The possibility that workers may seek to overthrow these rules or move beyond them has historically been no more than the inspirational rhetoric of socialist and communist pamphleteering.58

Paradoxically, it was precisely this possibility that Cottle set out to highlight. He drew attention to moments “out of bounds” when workers in Australia have transgressed the rules and refused to accept the dictates of capital “despite the class consequences of their actions.”59 Radical labour history too, he inferred, should start from a refusal to accept the status quo as normal or eternal.

This study shares Cottle’s orientation but approaches it from the opposite direction. The history of telephone exchange workers was never a history of going out of bounds even in its most combative period. It is precisely this boundedness that must be explained and its limits explored, always with a view that another world was (and is) possible. On the other hand, and contra to the sociologists of consent, it cannot be explained without reference to the workers’ activities as trade unionists, activities which necessarily imply a resisting subject at the point of production.

One alternative to the consent - coercion dichotomy is provided by those who focus on structural mechanisms of control. Here, hegemony is not so much a product of direct ideological manipulation as a consequence of domination over the processes and organisation of production. Braverman of course re-focussed attention on this feature of capitalist hegemony with his emphasis on deskilling. Michael Reich and Richard Edwards, while adopting a similar focus on structural determination, took a different line, arguing that labour market segmentation and the development of labour markets within firms were

58 Drew Cottle, ‘Labour Transformed? Two Key Moments on Workers’ Militancy in Australia, 1969-1975’, Transforming Labour: Work, Workers, Struggle and Change, p. 105. 59 ibid., p. 108.

27 the key developments for they weakened class consciousness and fostered a pro-company outlook amongst employees.60 Edwards called the process bureaucratic control.61 For his part, Vallas has taken issue with both Burawoy and Richards for merely offering variants of the same ‘hegemony thesis’ without adequately recognising worker resistance. In fact, he argues, “little indicates that management has established a pattern of ideological hegemony over workers.”62 Vallas’ own account also emphasises structural factors but in the context of actual struggles occurring on the shop floor. In the case of AT&T workers, he contend that management’s main strategy of control was to deploy new technology to marginalise key groups of skilled and unionised workers in the labour process.63

Vallas’ critique carries important truths. Based on the empirical evidence, he is correct to criticise the one-sided emphasis on ideological domination in much of the sociological literature on the labour process. His criticisms are not, however, without their own flaws. In drawing attention to the existence of “counter-ideology” amongst workers, Vallas leaps to the conclusion that ideology is less a factor in securing managerial domination than other, structural determinants. He points to his AT&T case study as proof. Yet is this conclusion true across place and time? Can generalisations be drawn for the entire history of class relations within a firm from an ethnographic study confined to a particular phase of its history? Venus Green’s account of class relations within AT&T would suggest the answer to both questions is no. Her account bears out Vallas’ claim that in the 1970s and 1980s AT&T management relied on new technology to marginal and remove troublesome workforce groups, particularly operators. But Green found that for much of the firm’s history it relied heavily on ideological co-option to control its workforce.64 By adopting an historical approach, Green effectively collapses the debate over how workers are controlled and capitalist production maintained. The different positions can be seen as theoretical formulations reifying the particular strategies adopted by capitalists at particular times. In

60 Michael Reich et al, 'Dual Labor Markets: A Theory of Labor Market Segmentation', American Economic Review, 63, 2 (1973), pp. 359-65.; Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic, 1979). 61 ibid., p. 132. 62 Vallas, ‘Workers, Firms and the Dominant Ideology’, p. 78. 63 Steven Peter Vallas, Power in the Workplace: The Politics of Production at AT&T (Albany: State Univ of New York, 1993), p. 187. 64 Green, Race on the Line, p. 53.

28 reality, coercion, consent and control all played their part but always in the context of actual class struggle.

As a symptom of this tendency to reify the particular instance, the terms of the debate often become self-referential and accepted without criticism. In this regard, Vallas is guilty of conceding too much to Burawoy’s conception of ideology. Burawoy’s formulation resonates with echoes of Marcuse. It is ideology as body snatcher, permeating every aspect of consciousness until consciousness in any meaningful sense ceases to exist. People simply become the embodiment of bourgeois thinking and feeling. Vallas is correct to take issue with this ‘one dimensional man’ view of workers. But one can recognise the role of ideology without abandoning the notion of workers as resistant subjects. What is required is a different approach to ideology, one more open to the possibility of consciousness as a sphere of contestation, a place where subject identities are formed in struggle.

Ideology, Identity and Class Struggle

Telephonists, it has been said already, were exploited and resisting subjects. They were also exploited and resisting as subjects. Their subjectivity as workers was manifest through work identities which, borrowing from Althusser, were interpellated by ideologies in the context of class struggle.65 Identity in this sense must be regarded as separate to subjectivity. Subjectivity or the self is infinitely more complex and cannot be reduced to the characteristics of identity. The self, moreover, is a unitary concept whereas there are in reality multiple and competing identities, even within the mind of a single individual. Identities are perhaps best understood as ideological types with which workers identify or against which they recoil.

This distinction liberates the concept of interpellation from the Marcusian one- dimensionality of Althusser’s account. Althusser conceived interpellation metaphorically as an act of hailing in which the person hailed recognises him or her self in the Other’s call

65 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso: 1984), p. 44.

29 and is constituted as a subject in the process. The subject is determined completely by an act initiated by the Other. In this study, interpellation can also entail workers acting through the ideologies of their own class to constitute themselves as a collective subject through adopting particular oppositional identities; in effect, hailing themselves. This draws upon Raymond Williams’ concept of ideology as a material practice open to all, not simply a set of obfuscatory ideas emanating from ruling class hegemony.66 It is ideology, moreover, not just in the sense of a body of formal political or social ideas such as Laborism or socialism or syndicalism but in a much broader sense of an understanding of life experience, a representation of social relations, to varying degrees inflected with the views and interests of all class antagonists; what Marx referred to as “an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thoughts and views of life.”67 Or what Williams himself defined as culture.68

In this sense labour produces ideology as it produces all other aspects of social existence. It is part of the material social process itself and its form and content are shaped by the organisation and relationships of the process. Workplace ideologies of this kind, for instance, typically are structured by the division of labour and centre on the labour process of particular occupations. Or they adhere to labour segments, as defined in the theory of labour market segmentation developed by Michael Reich and others.69 These ideologies emerge, however, in a diffuse way (through, in Williams’ famous formulation, a “structure of feeling”), which allows the content to be organised in the mind under the influence of other complementary ways of seeing, other ideologies. A work-based ideology is thus an outcome of the specific material process (a particular kind of production and conflictual relations) in which it arises and also of these kinds of material processes in general (a society-wide mode of production and its relations of power). The ideology’s immediate ‘inputs’ appear as lived experience or practical consciousness, the generalised inputs appear as ideas already in circulation. Once a way of thinking and feeling is systematised and

66 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ Press, 1977), pp. 70-71. 67 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), p. 117 68 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 313. 69 Reich et al, 'Dual Labor Markets: A Theory of Labor Market Segmentation', pp. 359-65.

30 codified as ideology, it is no longer bound to its foundational context. It develops portability in a generalised form and can become an ideological input in other contexts.

The usefulness of this particular concept of ideology in the study of workers and unionism lies in its ability to serve as a tool in explaining agency without reducing it to a mere reflex of workers’ objective interests. As Michael Leach explains, objectivism treats workers’ consciousness as either a direct reflection of their interests defined by their place in the capitalist order, or as a set of false ideas inculcated by ruling class ideology.70 This view, he argues, has “limited utility in explaining forms of political identity and action.”71 In its place he offers the linguistically-informed notion of identity discourses, which at one level roughly plays the same role in his account of workers’ actions as ideology does here. Identity discourses are defined as a “reconstruction, or interpretation of social relations.”72 They are open to contestation and change, and they “shape both the nature and possibilities of political claims, and the identities of the protagonists.”73

While sharing Leach’s orientation to identity as “germane to adequate understandings of political movements and subjects”, his emphasis on the discursive dimension of identity formation, like Monk’s discussed earlier, is inadequate to the task of accounting for relations of power.74 He concedes that “structural relations of power and the practical nature of claims in particular contexts may shape the possibilities for identity construction.” But meaning, he claims, “is not simply ‘determined’ by these contexts.75 This is true as far as it goes. But it is also true that relations of power cannot but shape identity construction. In the case of workers, the realisation that in certain circumstances needs and wants can be satisfied only through collective claims against the employer offers a strong rationale for subscribing to a class-inflected identity. Previous discourse identities may play a part but only in contesting or affirming the lived experience, the practical consciousness of the workers in question. The actual content of their class identity will certainly be formulated at

70 Michael Leach, ‘Discourses of Identity in Australian Socialism and Labourism 1887-1901’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2001, pp. 21, 23. 71 ibid. 72 ibid., p. 26. 73 ibid. 74 ibid., p. 30. 75 ibid. p. 26.

31 a discursive level and will inform and be informed by “symbolic contests over the meanings of social relations” but the point is the content will still articulate interests objectively defined.76 In this sense, a class identity can find expression in ostensibly non- class discourses such nationalism, liberalism and religion yet still lead to political claims of a classed nature. One thinks here of E.P. Thompson’s account of the role of non-conformist religion in the emergence of the English working class as a political entity, or of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s broadening of Thompson’s analysis to piece together the “hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic” from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries .77

Adopting such an approach, this study will identify a number of ideologies created, appropriated and changed by labour and capital in struggle, it will outline the identities interpellated by these ideologies, and it will examine how ideology and identity shaped industrial practice in the workplaces and trade unions of telephony.

Three generic workplace ideologies authored by labour are pertinent to this study. Some work identities, particular ones associated with skilled manual labour, are informed by an ideology of producerism. Producerism’s origins lay in the artisan’s tradition of pride in the social value and quality of his labour. Ronald Schultz has written that American artisan culture was imbued with distinct “moral precepts” that elevated artisans to a central position in society:

At its core was a simple statement of the labor theory of value, or more appropriately for the time, the social value of labor. As early as the twelfth century, English and European craftsmen had advanced the claim that their labor was alone for the fabrication of the myriad goods upon which the civilized society depended. Placing themselves, in this way, at the center of national and community life, by the mid eighteenth-century artisans could claim with utter assurance that their labor represented the true axis of society

76 ibid. p. 27. 77 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker, The Many- Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

32 and the very foundation of community well-being. The artisan felt pride in his labor because his work was indeed vital to the prosperity and proper functioning of his, and all other, communities in the developing nation.78

A variant of producerism, it will be argued here, is found among those who make not goods but services, products which are often consumed immediately they are produced through a direct and often unmediated relationship between producer and consumer. Teachers, nurses, human support workers and telephonists are among those whose ideological understanding of their work could on occasion be described as producerist.

If producerism offered workers a positive sense of their place in production, an essentially negative identity was interpellated through the categorisation of a job or industry as a sweated trade. The terms ‘sweated trade’ and ‘sweating’ arose in nineteenth century Britain to describe certain labour intensive sectors of industry, where outwork was widely practised or where working conditions were particularly onerous, due largely to a combination of an over-supply of labour and a lack of trade union organising.79 This usage of the term continued into the early twentieth century and was broadened to cover any area of employment where an acute sense of exploitation dominated workers’ consciousness because of the extraordinary intensity of the labour process and the poor compensation received. By the 1900s even ostensibly privileged workers such as telephonists were describing their work experience as an example of sweating.80 Despite or perhaps because of the sense of victimhood conveyed by the term, it functioned sometimes as a catalyst for organisation and collective resistance, as the telephonists’ early history demonstrated. A third labour ideology of work can be called proletarian autonomy. Generally associated with groups of unskilled or semiskilled workers, it combines a producerist moral economy

78 Ronald Schultz, ‘Alternative Communities: American Artisans and the Evangelical Appeal, 1780-1830’ in Howard B. Rock et al (eds), American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ Press, 1995), p. 66. 79 Jenny Morris, ‘The Characteristics of Sweating: The Late Nineteenth-Century London and Leeds Tailoring Trade’ in Angela V. John (ed), Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 1800-1918 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 95-124; Jenny Morris, Women Workers and the Sweated Trades: The Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation (Hants: Gower Publishing, 1986), pp. 10-20; Sheila Blackburn, ‘Interpreting Sweating and Women’s Paid Work at Home’, Labour History Review, 56, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 11-12. 80 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission into the Postal Service, Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers, Vol. IV, 1910, p. 1741.

33 with an anti-wage labour ethic and a deep hostility to authority. Itinerant workers were perhaps the archetypical proletarian autonomists in the Australian context. When Joseph Furphy’s fictional bush worker Tom Collins finds himself “unemployed at last,” it is proletarian autonomy at its most larconic. 81 Painters and dockers and builders’ labourers were perhaps the ideology’s most distinctive urban ambassadors.82 A slightly more genteel form can be found today in the casualised retail sector and in layers of the public service as proletarianisation has eroded allegiance to a “career service.” Of the three workplace ideologies, proletarian autonomy seems the most likely to lead workers beyond the bounds of capital’s hegemony. Yet its anti-authority orientation can just as easily take the route of apolitical larrikinism or chronic absenteeism as a move towards a serious political confrontation with the system. Even so, as Andrew Metcalfe insists, this “larrikin mode of class struggle”, with its habitual absenteeism and hedonism, is a political phenomenon. “If politics is struggle over power,” he writes, “larrikinism is political.83

In opposition to the collectivist ideologies of labour capital offers up ideologies of tolerable subjugation. Quasi-religious notions of a natural social order in which workers are exhorted to know their place is one, although the rise of organised labour and the democratisation of social and political life has more or less consigned this ideology to the past. Today its place has been taken by the equally irrational notion of universal individual upward mobility, an ideology embraced by modern Labor as its defining contribution to the neo-liberal consensus. In this worldview, work is but a means to individual advancement up the ladder of economic prosperity and social fulfilment.

A third ideology of work emanating from capital is the notion of service. Raymond Williams describes service as a version of community created by the nineteenth century middle class:

81 Joseph Furphy, Such is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1975), p. 1. 82 Issy Wyner, With Banner Unfurled: The Early Years of the Ship Painters and Dockers’ Union (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983), Meredith Burgmann & Verity Burgmann, Green Bans Red Union: Environmental Activism & the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation (Sydney: Univ of NSW Press, 1998). 83 Andrew W. Metcalfe, For Freedom and Dignity: Historical Agency and Class Structures in the Coalfields of NSW (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 76.

34 From Coleridge to Tawney the idea of function, and thence of service to the community, has been most valuably stressed, in opposition to the individualistic claim. The stress has been confirmed by the ethical practice of our professions, and of our public and civil service.84

“The servant”, says Williams, “if he is to be a good servant, can never really question the order of things; his sense of authority is too strong.”85 He or she succumbs to an ideology of subordination imbued with acceptance of class relations as the natural and even laudable state of affairs.

Capital’s ideologies derive from its need to respond to resistant labour. Precisely because these ideologies function to contain resistance, they cannot address the root cause of resistance or offer effective remedial programs. Their hegemonic power resides simply in their ability to provide solace: the glory of god’s will, the prospect of future advancement or prosperity, the rectitude of service.

In contrast, labour’s workplace ideologies are grounded in resistance. But it is a truncated resistance, articulating an attitude from inside the existing relations of production. Again using the terminology of Williams, the three working class ideologies outlined above offer oppositional rather than alternative ways of thinking and feeling. An oppositional workplace ideology emerges when aspects of the work experience become intolerable and workers believe this state of affairs can be changed at the level of the grievance itself, as a reform of the current arrangements. An alternative ideology, by contrast, supports the conclusion that the existing relations of production along with the existing State apparatus are themselves the problem, and that the means exist to create an alternative. As Cottle has shown, in periods of sharp class conflict, generalised political ferment and strong alternative ideological forces, pockets of workers taking action through traditional trade unions can start to move beyond oppositional stances towards ideas that are radically counterposed to capitalist relations of production.86

84 Williams, Culture and Society, p. 315. 85 ibid., p. 317. 86 This is not to say that alternative ideologies facilitate the refashioning of trade unionism into a force for realising radical agendas. The New South Wales builders’ labourers of whom Cottle writes were indeed

35 The workplace ideologies outlined above can be represented schematically in relation to the class from which they arose and the political attitude they offer. Mostly they express a subordinate or an oppositional orientation within the bounds of capitalist relations of production. There have been periods, though, when ideologies have taken root which offer an imagined alternative to the very system of alienated wage labour (see Table 1A).

Table 1A: Workplace Ideologies by class origin and critical orientation. Work Ideologies Class Origin Critical Orientation • Natural Order Capital Subordinate • Upward Mobility • Service • Sweating Oppositional • Producerism Labour • Proletarian Autonomy • Workers’ Control Labour Alternative • Socialism

It is a central contention of this study that the history of telephone exchange unionism in Australia was a movement over three phases which can be characterised by particular ideological orientations. The first phase (1905 – 1929) saw telephonists preoccupied by the conditions on the job which were frequently seen as proof of sweating. The second phase (1930 – 1966) was marked by an ideology of service, a period notable for the domination of the union by supervisors and the weakening of support from telephonists. The third (1967 – 1988) saw the rise of producerist ideas centred on the workers’ role in the heart of the telecommunication process. In terms of the politics of production, the history is a movement from an oppositional to a subordinate and then back to an oppositional stance.

“proletarian impossibilists”, not because their idea of workers’ control was impossible but because their means were inadequate. Not only were they isolated within the union movement, they lacked a strategy to deal with the repressive power of the capitalist state. Mass industrial action and mass political organisation were (and are) required to mount any serious challenge to capital’s right to rule. Cottle, ‘Labour Transformed?’, p. 108. Tom O’Lincoln, Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism (Sydney: Stained Wattle Press, 1985), pp. 148-49.

36 This is of course a generalisation. Subordination and opposition can be found in all eras and the transition from one era to another defies strict periodisation. But evidence will be presented in the following chapters to validate the schema as a way of fruitfully exploring some of the salient themes in the history of this group of workers.

Ideology and the Politics of Toleration

By invoking a broader, more open-ended concept of ideology, a different approach to Cottle’s vexed question of the limitations of resistance is possible because ideology becomes both a facilitating and limiting determinant of class struggle. How, though, to encapsulate this process? While revolutionary theory can account for workers taking revolutionary action, and the various theories of consent, coercion and control can explain workers who comply or revel in their subordination, how does the concept of ideology adopted here help us understand workers like telephonists who resisted within limits?

What is needed is an associated concept or set of concepts with sufficient theoretical rigour to capture both the resistant and acquiescent dimensions of the worker subject in history. The notion of tolerance will be employed here for this purpose. The concept of toleration is not new in the literature of workplace relations. Barrington Moore Jr used it extensively in his study of the behaviour of German workers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.87 Moore deployed the notion in a pluralist sense, however, implying something akin to consent in his account of the mine workers’ acceptance of the status quo in exchange for a recognised stake in Germany’s old patriarchal social order. In this instance, toleration was the outcome of a kind of implicit social contract reached between the antagonistic parties. Once the contract was accepted, resistance was assumed to have ceased, as each party stuck ethically to its side of the bargain.88

This study, by contrast, propounds the view that labour resistance has a more systemic basis, arising from irreconcilable class interests embedded in the exploitative nature of the

87 Barrington Moore Jr, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978). 88 ibid., p. 234.

37 capitalist labour process. Adopting this perspective in his research on AT&T employees, Vallas has presented empirical evidence that oppositional attitudes and resistance were ubiquitous, only the forms and intensity varied over time.89 This author concurs with Vallas’s rejection of a narrow definition of resistance as collectively organised conflict in pursuit of clearly defined objectives. Only some forms of resistance are overtly conflictual, only some forms are collectively organised, only some have clear goals. Skylarking, game playing, lunchroom complaining, daydreaming, slacking off, low-level sabotage, gallows humour, tempered insubordination, petty theft and absenteeism are seldom collective acts and rarely escalate into open conflict, yet all can be seen as acts which contest the imperatives of maximum productivity and profit signified by the compliant subject. In more formal political terms, negotiated agreements or implicit social contracts may usher in a period of relative calm but this too does not imply an absence of resistance, merely an absence of open conflict.

Such a formulation gives ‘toleration’ a clear advantage over the notion of consent. Whereas ‘consent’ allows of no variations or degrees, ‘toleration’ allows us to see gradations, to consider apparent periods of labour acquiescence in terms of a threshold of toleration that varies through time and place as material and subjective (ie ideological) factors change. Whereas consent implies workers who are duped or ideologically hoodwinked, toleration holds to the notion of workers as agents in their own right, acting with an eye to their own self-defined needs and interests in reaching an accommodation with the employer. Whereas by definition consent gives way to conflict only as a dramatic rupture, which is not usually the way things happen in reality, the idea of a threshold of toleration allows us to provide more truthful accounts of the often slow and uneven shifts leading to outbreaks of conflict.

The concept of toleration in effect offers a theory of worker subjectivity without the pitfalls of essentialism identified by Leach. It posits an ongoing and open-ended struggle within consciousness over how objective interests are articulated and acted upon. It thus provides a framework for understanding the reception and impact of the contending ideologies of production outlined above.

89 Vallas, Power in the Workplace, p. 181.

38 Class, Ideology and Gender

As already noted, subordinate and oppositional work ideologies do not originate entirely in the workplaces or labour processes where they are manifest. They are a composite phenomena comprised of ideological and structural forces entering the workplace from the outside to shape the practical consciousness of workers and the strategies of capital and labour as they go about furthering their respective class interests. Work ideologies thus formed often crystallise as a particular occupational identity to which workers are encouraged to subscribe. In the case of telephonists this identity was, for many years, the ‘hello girl.’ If the first part of the term connoted service, the second drew attention to the quite critical role played by gender relations in and beyond the workplace in the formation of subordinate and oppositional orientations among Australia’s telephone exchange workers.

In attempting to deal with how and why gender was implicated in significant ways from the beginning of the story, this study acknowledges the feminist scholarship over the past decade dealing with the gendered subject. But more pertinently, it acknowledges the danger of reifying feminised subjectivity, of removing it from other contexts of social power. Reviewing the academic field of industrial relations, Barbara Pocock has complained that “While construction sites and mines are almost never analysed in their maleness, feminised workplaces are always preceded and saturated by their femaleness – indeed, the prism of femaleness appears to eliminate other categories.”90 Pocock aimed her critique with some justification at the sexism of her male colleagues but her point applies cogently to feminist scholarship as well. Judith Butler has warned,

The urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism’s own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorical or

90 Barbara Pocock, ‘Analysing Work: Arguments for Closer Links Between the Study of Labour Relations and Gender’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (December 2000), p. 13.

39 fictive universality of the structures of domination, held to produce women’s common subjugated experience.91

If the worker as the universal subject of classical Marxism was male (and white), the female as the universal subject of a substantial body of feminist history has been bourgeois (and white). The saturation of femaleness has smudged away class differences. For Marilyn Lake, the equal pay campaigns waged by labour women constituted but one feminist discourse alongside many that made up a broader history of Australian feminism. The equal pay struggles from 1940 to 1970 were, she argued, a manifestation of “equality feminism,” a descriptor which places these struggles squarely in the frame of bourgeois politics and obfuscates the specifically trade union (working class) context of many of the campaigns. 92 Susan Margarey’s study of Australia’s first wave feminists found the utopianism of the late nineteenth century labour movement was one of “a wide variety of routes into the Woman Movement,” a formulation which similarly downplays the class tensions between labour and middle class activists.93

Where trade unions have entered the pages of feminist history they have been represented more often than not as impediments to progress. Despite critical reappraisals from Ann Curthoys, Melanie Nolan and others, it has remained something of an axiom since the publication in 1975 of Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon’s Gentle Invaders that women and men in the labour movement have held incompatible interests over issues such as the basic wage.94 “Only when unions wished to safeguard their men from onslaughts of gentle invaders who, receiving less, might appear more attractive in the boss’s eye were women permitted to receive equal pay,” they concluded.95 Likewise Margaret Power argued that

91 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 6-7. 92 Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St Leonards (NSW): Allen & Unwin, 1999). 93 Susan Margery, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (Sydney: Univ of NSW Press, 2001), p. 31. 94 Edna Ryan & Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work 1788-1975 (Melbourne: Nelson, 1975); Ann Curthoys, For and Against Feminism: A Personal Journey into Feminist Theory and History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 127-28; Melanie Nolan, ‘Sex or class? The Politics of the First Equal Pay Campaign in Victoria’ in Women, Work and the Labour Movement in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, eds Raelene Frances & Bruce Scates (Sydney: Aust Society for the Study of Labour History, 1991), pp. 101-22. 95 Ryan & Conlon, Gentle Invaders, p. 89.

40 “union opposition to women took the form of demands for equal pay.”96 More recently Lyndall Ryan, writing of Edna Ryan’s struggle for equal pay in local government in the 1950s and 1960s, claimed that trade unions failed to use the 1958 New South Wales equal pay legislation because “they feared the introduction of equal pay and used every possible strategy, including collusion with employers, to prevent its implementation.”97 In Robin Joyce’s formulation of the incompatibility thesis, many Western Australian labour women suppressed their “real” interests as women to fight for socialism, “or at least better conditions for the working class in general.”98

In these terms, women’s allegiance to class-based organisations appears irrational or a consequence of ‘false consciousness’, leaving us to ponder why working women continued to join, support and lead trade unions, often alongside men, in even greater numbers after the rise of the women’s liberation movement. If we reject the proposition that they were simply deluded, we must reassess the inference that sexist practices within and by particular unions is proof of an irredeemably patriarchal essence of unionism. More importantly, we must reject formulations that patronisingly attribute women’s commitment to trade unionism to something less than a well-founded understanding of their own ‘real’ interests. Perhaps in this ressessment we can find one explanation of “the great silence about the experiences of women in unions” highlighted by Lyndall Ryan herself.99

It is easy of course to blame Lake’s and Margarey’s class silences on the nature of writing history with a national scope. More specialised studies have often engaged more adequately with class. Melanie Nolan specifically addressed the class versus sex question in her study of Victoria’s first equal pay campaign, while Zelda D’Aprano’s biography of Kath Williams is rich with detail of trade unions in the equal pay struggles.100 Game and

96 Margaret Power, ‘Women and Economic Crises: the Great Depression and the Present Crisis’, Women and Labour Conference, 1978, unpaginated. 97 Lyndall Ryan, ‘Challenging Equality Masculinism: Edna Ryan’s Struggles for Equal Pay 1958-1973’, in Phil Griffiths & Rosemary Webb (eds), Work, Organisation, Struggle: Papers from the Seventh National Labour History Conference, Canberra 19-21 April 2001 (Canberra: Aust Society for the Study of Labour History, 2001), p. 221. 98 Robin Joyce, ‘Women’s Labour, Women’s Power?: Women in the Western Australian Labour Movement from the Early 1900s to the Depression’, MA Thesis, ANU, 1999, p. 209. 99 Ryan, Challenging Equality Masculinism, p. 215. 100 Melanie Nolan, ‘Sex or Class?’, pp. 101-22; Zelda D’Aprano, Kath Williams: The Unions and the Fight for Equal Pay (Melbourne: Spinifex, 2001).

41 Pringle’s Gender at Work and more recently Joanne Scott’s thesis on Queensland women at work in the 1930s have employed frames of reference which have allowed them to compare the experiences of women from various class and racial positions undertaking work in a variety of formal and informal arrangements in both public and private spheres.101

Studies with a broader scope, however, are not inevitably blind to the salience of class. The books Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History and Creating a Nation both take a national approach to their subject.102 But Rebel Women, unlike Creating a Nation, is not a ‘national history’ and does not write of women as a universal category “in relation to the nation state and their condition as citizens.”103 It focuses instead on the class lines that fracture Australia’s female citizenry. Dennis Deslippe’s study of what he described as working class feminism amongst women in the US labour movement covers similar terrain, albeit with a less polemical style. He draws particular attention to divisions between union women and the National Woman’s Party, a middle class group which denounced sex-based protective legislation and refused to endorse equal pay. “Unionists viewed the NWP position as elitist and out of touch with the daily difficulties wage-earning women faced.”104 They saw their own efforts, on the other hand, “not as separate from those of organised labor but as central to its ongoing goal of shaping and defining the liberal state.”105

This takes us back to the question of identity and interests. “Gender is constituted through people’s lived experience within continually redefined and contested social activities and institutions,” writes Ava Baron106 In the context of wage labour, “gender is created not simply outside production but also within it.”107 Judith Butler makes a more fundamental

101 Ann Game & Rosemary Pringle, Gender at Work (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983); Scott, ‘Generic Resemblances?’. 102 Sandra Bloodworth and Tom O’Lincoln (eds), Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History (Melbourne: Interventions, 1998).; Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath & Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994). 103 Marilyn Lake, ‘Feminist History as National History: Writing the Political History of Women’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 27, No. 106 (April 1996), p. 154. 104 Dennis A Deslippe, Rights Not Roses: Unions & the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980 (Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 29. 105 ibid., p. 12. 106 Ava Baron, ‘Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, looking to the Future’, in Ava Baron (ed), Work Engendered: Towards a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell Univ Press, 1991), p. 36. 107 ibid., p. 37.

42 point. Identities, interests and allegiances are not generated separately by relations of class, gender and race and then sometime later brought into contact. They are, at all times, in complex interaction:

If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a preconditioned “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.108

Butler’s insight offers a valuable corrective to the essentialism of earlier feminist theory. It too though is not free of problems. As Leslie Salzinger points out, Butler’s work was at the forefront of a new feminist literature that challenged essentialism by shifting the focus from gendered subjects to gendered meanings. For Salzinger, this shift had certain costs:

In the process of questioning conventional gendered categories, these theorists fell into recounting the categories’ history in isolation, as if they existed in a universe filled only by language. This analytic focus misses the question of how such categories are built and practiced in daily interaction.109

Salzinger’s own ethnographic research on the gendering of workers in Mexican factories situates the process in the material practices and imperatives of global capitalist production. In the quest to control labour and maximise output, plant level managers draw on national, racial and gender tropes to construct local versions of the “paradigmatic transnational worker – cheap, docile, dextorous, and female.”110 The precise meanings accruing to these “productive femininities” vary from region to region, even plant to plant, but they all

108 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 6. 109 Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2003), p. 22. 110 ibid., pp. 15-16.

43 articulate a preoccupation with converting local Majority World communities of women and men into stable, compliant, productive workforces.

In understanding the formation of gendered work identities, Salzinger’s emphasis on the connection between distinct discourses of gender, race, nationality and work, on the one hand, and the imperatives embedded in the material practices of capitalist production, on the other, is helpful. It builds on Butler’s critique of the sociological essentialism of earlier feminist theory while providing Butler’s insights about the integrated nature of meaning with a more sophisticated theory of the connection between discourse and the material world.

Like much theorising inspired by Foucaultian postmodernism, however, Salzinger tends to see social relations principally in terms of power and domination, rather than of exploitation. “…gendered meanings and subjectivities,” she writes, “are connected both directly and necessarily with male power and frequently with capitalism and science and other systems of power as well.”111 It is true, as Salinzer’s study of Mexican factories attests, that domination is essential to capitalism’s reproduction. But if, as Salzinger also asserts, “subjects emerge from economic processes”, there will always be an economic dimension to the relations of domination and subordination in the world of production.112 This study contends the economic dimension is in fact paramount. The raison d’etre of capitalist power lies not with capitalist power itself but with the basic fact that coercion is required if one section of society is to live free of the necessity to produce its own social and material necessities of life.

Like the women in Salinger’s study, the gender identity of female telephonists was carefully constructed within the context of the workplace. But it was not the only act of identity construction happening. Telephonists were simultaneously interpellated as workers in an enterprise run on the basis of alienated wage labour, and as self-aware agents deploying trade unionism to ameliorate or overcome aspects of their work experience. Class relations in this context were refracted through the prism of gender, while gender

111 ibid., p. 169. 112 ibid., p. 163.

44 entered the workplace as a dimension of class power. Out of the fusion materialised the hello girl, a normative work identity imbued with bourgeois values of service from which the telephone exchange workers garnered social respect as compensation for their generalised subordination to the dictates of management. From Venus Green’s accounts of workers in the American and British telephone systems and Michele Martin’s history of Canadian telephone workers, we learn of striking similarities in the gendering of switchboard staff across western telecommunications systems.113 In these pages we trace the process in Australian conditions.

In the United States and Britain the gendering process was defined also by race. In fact, according to Green’s seminal history, in America race played an even more decisive role than gender in creating a politically ‘safe’ occupational persona for telephonists. Operators were invited to define their skills, sense of social respectability and company status in terms of a racial hierarchy. Defining themselves against an Other of Black and (later) Latino women, the ‘white ladies’ of the telephone exchange could believe they were privileged employees with a stake in the status quo.114

In Australia the role of race was similar but the dynamics somewhat different. Australia’s hello girls were generally white. This fact, however, must be set against a broader racial exclusiveness rather than the specific dynamics of a labour market in which people of colour were a significant minority. Unlike African American women in the United States, Indigenous women and other women from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds (NESB) did not form sizeable and visible segments of the Australian workforce prior to the 1950s, except in certain small rural communities. This prevented management representing non- white workers as a plausible economic threat to telephonists. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of racist ideology in Australian society meant that the very act of creating a workforce almost exclusively of Anglo-Celtic Australian women ensured race became the great un-stated component of the hello girl identity. This was subtly reinforced by a diction test which effectively screened out Aboriginal and NESB women for many decades.

113 Green, Race on the Line; Venus Green, ‘Race, Gender, and National Identity in the American and British Telephone Industries', International Review of Social History, Vol. 6, Part 2 (2001), pp. 185-205; Michele Martin, “Hello Central?”. 114 Green, Race on the Line, pp. 134-35.

45 If the following narrative does not devote significant amounts of space to this process of racialisation, it is not because it is regarded as insignificant. On the contrary, this thesis maintains race was extremely important in the ideological struggle within telephone exchanges. So important in fact that it was invisible. In government and management discussions and propaganda about telephonists, race was seldom mentioned. The argument here is that it was not necessary to do so. So pervasive was the ideology and practice of racial exclusiveness in Australian society during the first half of the twentieth century that managers could rely on its divisive power almost by default.

Workers and their Trade Unions

Returning finally to the role of trade unions, we are now in a position to conceptualise unionism more precisely in relation to the ideologies of the workplace and the politics of production. As already noted, trade union historiography has been heavily influenced by the narrow economistic view of unionism popularised by the Webbs. Even socialist sociology has tended to import the Webbs’ formulation and its conservative implications. Orthodox Marxism, as Richard Hyman has observed, has always equivocated, even within the writings of individual theorists, between optimistic and pessimistic assessments of unionism’s revolutionary potential.115 But the general consensus has been negative. As Gramsci bluntly put it, “union action is incapable of bringing about the emancipation of the proletariat, of leading the proletariat towards that exalted and universal end that it had originally proposed.”116

The theoretical literature within Marxism has explained unionism’s revolutionary shortcomings by reference to its function (a cartel for sellers of labour-power), its functionaries (a group materially self-interested in maintaining the labour market), and its form (sectional and exclusive groupings). As valid as these critiques are, their sociological

115 Richard Hyman, Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism (London: Pluto Press, 1971), p. 3. 116 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Trade Unions and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy & trans. Virginia Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1994), p. 123.

46 rigour cannot be applied historically without the risk of falling into a crudely mechanistic understanding of how unions actually function in the lives of workers. In the place of historical analysis of unionism in practice, we find schematic representations of unions as entities abstracted from real relations. Typically they are depicted as products of that most abstract of social phenomena, the labour market. Gramsci again provides a particularly succinct example of this thinking. Workers, he argued:

…have become traders in the only commodity they possess: their work- power and their professional skills. As they have become more exposed to the risks of competition, the workers have brought this commodity of theirs together in ever larger and more comprehensive ‘firms’, and they have created this enormous cattle-market, this apparatus for concentrating labour.

Workers’ councils or soviets, by contrast, organise workers as producers rather than as traders in the labour-power commodity. 117 Gramsci’s point comes straight from Lenin’s distinction between economistic (trade union) and social-democratic (communist) consciousness. “Democracy,” Lenin wrote, “leads the struggle of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour-power, but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich.”118

This is without doubt a definitive formulation of the principal function and chief limitation of unions under capitalism, couched in the sharpest of terms for the purpose of emphasising the role of the revolutionary party. It is hardly adequate, however, as a comprehensive description of what unions can and do mean for workers. The conception of unions as brokers at the market place has obscured their role at the site of production, in the heart of the labour process itself. Trade unions do allow workers, albeit in an attenuated way, to formulate and express common interests as producers. Indeed, as Harry Cole has argued, a producerist ideology developed in many parts of the Western world to valorise manual labour against the parasitic ‘other’. “Even without any form of organisation most manual

117 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Unions and Councils’, in Pre-Prison Writings, p. 117. 118 V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947), p. 57.

47 workers understood that they had at least their labour in common.”119 In turn, the ideological valorisation of work has given a positive form to working class resistance. Recently, for instance, Melbourne construction workers responded to Government attacks on their union by adopting the slogan, “We built this city”, thereby counterposing the moral economy of producers to the political economy of parasitic capital.

Such a view of trade unionism takes us beyond the limitations of a Marxism that would reduce class conflict purely to a struggle over material resources. It allows us to link the sense of material deprivation experienced by workers whose labour produces more than the value it attracts in wages, to the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of this process. Under capitalism, Marx theorised, workers are alienated from the products of their labour. But this means, he argued, they are also alienated from the process of production. “The activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity,” but rather, belongs to another and confronts the worker as “the loss of his own self.”120 Workers encounter this aspect of alienation in various forms: as an affront to their sense of what it is to be a free human being, as a compromise to their dignity or respect, as humiliation, as a lack of recognition, even as a kind of social death. Writing of American workers, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb noted that:

Dignity is as compelling a human need as food or sex, and yet here is a society which casts the mass of its people into limbo, never satisfying their longer for dignity, nor yet so depriving them that the task of proving dignity seems an unreasonable burden, and revolt against the society the only reasonable alternative.121

Yet seldom are these profound effects of capitalist relations of production acknowledged as a motivation for resistance. According to Axel Honneth, disrespect was a foundation

119 Harry Cole and Drew Cottle, ‘Forgotten Labour Beliefs?: Producerist Ideas in Australia’, in Transforming Labour: Work, Workers, Struggle and Change, p. 81. 120 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)’, in Loyd D. Easton & Kurt H. Guddat (eds), Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 292. 121 Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, 2nd edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 191.

48 concept in Marx’s analysis of alienation and resistance but one he took for granted in many of his own writings. “For Marx, who followed the working class’s attempts at organizing from the closest distance, it was beyond doubt that the overarching aspirations of the merging movement could be brought together under the concept of ‘dignity’.122 Modern sociology, on the other hand, has ignored completely the salience of the “loss of self.” “The motives for rebellion, protest, and resistance have generally been transformed into categories of ‘interest’, and these interests are supposed to emerge from the objective inequalities in the distribution of material opportunities without ever being linked, in any way, to the everyday web of moral feelings.”123

It this thesis, it will be argued the history of the ATPOA (and implicitly trade unionism in general) must be placed in a framework in which the union is not reduced simply to an instrumentalist role in the struggle over material well-being, a broker of price in the labour market. Workers have seen and continue to see unions as a positive expression of their place in the labour process. By affirming unionism as theirs, an expression of their workplace ideologies, their values, identities and interests on the job, workers are able to recover a sense of sense, and find something of a negation of their own alienation. This is not to say, however, that the struggle for recognition is the principal rationale of organised labour. The danger of Honeth’s formulation of disrespect as a lost and alternative tradition in the sociology of social conflict is the tendency to over-correct. This is evident in his rebuttal of the notion of interests. For Honeth, rebellion occurs when human’s deeply rooted expectations regarding recognition are violated.124 Because he grounds this need in the universalist claim that humans have a specific vulnerability “resulting from the internal interdependence of individualization and recognition”, the meaning of social struggles can never be found in the interest-specific claims of the actors.125 They are always moments of Hegelian transcendence; a reaching towards a normative self-image based on a positive affirmation by others of one’s own worth.

122 Axel Honneth, The Struggle of Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 160. 123 ibid., p. 161. 124 ibid., p. 163. 125 ibid., p. 131.

49 Whatever the nature of humans’ desire for respect, dignity or honour, the content of these concepts have varied over time, however. More importantly, actions which are considered to violate these norms are always historically conditioned. Under capitalism, violations are endemic because the survival of one social class requires the systematic subjugation and exploitation of another in the process of production. The loss of self is the consequence of an ongoing act of appropriation of the means to produce, the products of labour, and the capacity to control history. Thus for Marx alienation was both a process and a consequence of real human beings acting in quite specific ways under the sway of their own interests. Alienation was multi-dimensional, at once material and moral, and its various dimensions were inextricably linked.

The contention here is that unionism in this light can be seen as a multi-dimensional response. Often underpinning even ostensibly mundane trade union struggles is a desire for dignity. Andrew Metcalfe’s found this the case in New South Wales coalmining communities. “The wage-labour/capital relation,” he observed, “involved a relentless struggle for self-respect.”126 Meredith and Verity Burgmann’s history of the New South Wales Builders’ Labourers Federation made a similar point about construction workers, customarily regarded as occupying the lowest rung on the building industry hierarchy. “The gaining of human dignity through struggle was an important ingredient in the development of their political consciousness.”127 In these accounts, trade unionism becomes one of the principal means by which labour ideologies of the workplace are valorised, affected and transcended, and the subjective limits of workers’ tolerance of wage labour negotiated in any one time and place. The union becomes the organised, corporate form of production’s resisting subject as he/she/they is/are constituted within the limits of the capitalist order in general and the contexts of specific regimes of capitalist production in particular.

What, though, of the relationship between unions as work-based entities and the bureaucracies that officially manage them? Conventionally, this problem has been ignored

126 Metcalfe, For Freedom and Dignity, p. 72. 127 Burgmann & Burgmann, Green Bans Red Union, p. 119.

50 or been formulated as a tension between unions as movements and organisations.128 A union in this view is both an institution under the day-to-day control of an officialdom outside the workplace who operate within a set of constraints imposed by state regulation, and a collective of workers at the point of production. There are, in short, two nodes of power, and two separate sets of often conflicting interests.

The argument in this study is that the behaviour of union hierarchies, like capitalism itself, rests either on workers’ tolerance or their organisational and political weakness. The limits of this ‘consent’ – if it can be called that for the moment - are neither static nor infinitely flexible. Unions go through periods – or moments – of heightened activity, militancy, even periods of radicalism, which can be explained only with regard to the consciousness and activities of their rank and file often thinking and acting in the context of broader social upheavals. The changes to unions over time reflect, above all else, the eruption or contraction of class energy emanating from the worksite. Unionism is shaped by labour market forces, state action and the separate material interests of its bureaucracy but it can never escape the “politics of production,” the domain of working class power. In essence, this thesis returns to some of the ideas of Ian Turner:

The limits of the actions of labour leaders are set by the masses of the labour movement – primarily the working class – in a way which distinguishes them from other elites. It is of course true that the actions of all elites are limited by the readiness of the masses to conform, however reluctantly, to their decisions, and are shaped to some extent by the prevailing climate of opinion. But the labour movement is considerably different: its primary concerns affect the masses of the movement very directly and immediately; these are matters on which the masses feel themselves competent to pronounce and act, if necessary without or even against their leaders.129

128 Most famously by Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Dover, 1959). See also Allan Flanders, Management and Unions: The Theory and Reform of Industrial Relations (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). 129 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900-1921 (Canberra: ANU, 1965), p. xvii.

51 In stressing the power of masses, this study is at heart a history from below. But Turner’s words also remind us that history from below imposes its own obligations on the historian. The notion of masses, as Raymond Williams has observed, is an abstraction that places us both with and against our subject:

The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know. Yet now, in our kind of society, we see these others regularly, in their myriad variations; stand, physically, beside them. They are here, and we are here with them. And that we are with them is of course the whole point. To other people, we also are masses. Masses are other people.130

To stand with the masses as an historian requires never forgetting that beyond the abstractions are people. It is hoped, then, that in sustaining an analytical interrogation of the history of telephone exchange workers and their union, this study can also give voice to the people themselves as they worked, organised and grappled with the complexities of work and union life. For while we must approach our subject with theoretical rigour in light of our own concerns, in the end it is a history lived by people and we must do justice to it as it was lived, with all its uncertainty and passion, with all its victories and defeats.

130 Williams, Culture and Society, p. 289.

52 Chapter Two Creation, 1880-1900

Among the industries that emerged in the nineteenth century, telephony was one of the few that was born a fully fledged capitalist enterprise. It confronted no pre-capitalist craft traditions which first had to be destroyed. It fought no struggles against a pre-capitalist work culture. Rather, from the beginning it was created in capitalism’s image. Telephony’s earliest switchboards mirrored the mass industrial arrangements of the late nineteenth century factory. Its first labour forces were shaped overwhelmingly by the economic and technological needs of capitalist production. As a consequence telephony’s workers were defined at the outset by their powerlessness while telephony’s inaugural managers and planners enjoyed an almost unfettered ability to determine who and what the new workers would be. Managers’ power to construct their own work force was constrained only by the limits of the labour market and their own ideas and social prejudices as to what groups in society would offer them the most advantages.

The creation of Australia’s switchboard workforce in capitalism’s likeness is the subject of this chapter. It begins by arguing that telephony emerged in the context of a new phase of global capitalist expansion but survived only by finding a niche market as a tool of the urban mercantile and professional elites. Unlike telephony in the United States, Australia eventually settled on state ownership as the most desirable arrangement for its phone network. The reasons for this are explored at some length as part of an extended argument concerning the nature of the Australian state. It is the contention here that not only was the state in Australia a servant of private capitalist interests but that it was a capitalist entity in its own right, especially in sectors engaged directly in economic activity. The chapter then sets out criteria and evidence to test the proposition that relations of production in telephony are most accurately categorised as capitalist. Telephonists’ lack of choices, their systemic powerlessness and the exploitative nature of their employment are highlighted as defining features of a quintessentially working class experience.

53 The main body of the chapter comprises an account of managers and planners use of their class power to create a workforce that they believed would meet customer expectations of service while delivering maximum productivity at a minimum cost. The failure of boys to achieve all but the last of these objectives, it will be argued, led managers to experiment with women in the role. While low female wages were a necessary condition for the feminisation experiment, it was the ideological perception of women as more naturally efficient, compliant and socially adept, coupled with their expendability, itself a product of an ideology that subordinated their paid labour to their reproductive roles within the family, that gave them their ‘break’ in telephony. In the economically straitened 1890s and faced with intense competition from other women in the labour market, it was not an opportunity female telephonists were about to let slip away. Over the course of that decade and into the new century they would prove their mettle ‘on the boards’, in the process consolidating a dominant place for women in telephony that would remain a feature of the industry for as long as telephonists were required.

The Rise of Telephony

Telephony as a technology and an industry arose in what Humphrey McQueen has labelled Globalisation Mark III, a third wave of colonial expansionism precipitated by the rise of the modern nation states from around 1860.1 Eric Hobsbawm has called it an “age of empire”, an era of global capitalist development characterised by “an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and movements of goods, money and people linking the developed countries with each other and with the undeveloped world.”2 Like the earlier waves of globalisation, Mark III was a period of intense imperial rivalry in which the prosperity and the very survival of firms, nations and empires rested on accurate and speedy intelligence across vast distances. Effective communication systems were essential. But unlike earlier globalisations, Mark III saw the emergence of dedicated

1 Humphrey McQueen, ‘Federation, Globalisations and the Environment’, Overland, 165 (Summer 2001), pp. 10-11. McQueen’s typology includes Globalisation Mark I covering the era of the Iberian seaborne empires of the 15th and 16th centuries, and Globalisation Mark II dating from the emergence of the triangular trade of slaves, molasses and rum in the 17th century. 2 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p. 62.

54 communications technologies which enabled messages to be transmitted independently from the transportation of people and goods. Through the wired networks of telegraphy and then telephony, communications was reinvented as an industry in its own right.

This had two notable consequences. Once the nexus between transport and communication was severed, delivering messages was no longer a general function of those who could ride horses, drive carriages or sail ships. A new labour force was needed, and telegraphists and telephonists emerged as history’s first specialist communicators. Second, the new technologies meant that communications could be developed not just as a separate enterprise but as a distinct capitalist market. Communications became a commodifiable service in its own right, and communications enterprises sprang up to meet the market demand of the state-run or private organisations which constituted the industry’s main customers. It was this capacity to make profit from meeting communication needs which seems to have stimulated the enthusiasm of the telephone’s inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Even before commercial applications were realised, Bell prophetically surmised how his ‘scientific wonder’ could turn a profit:

A fixed annual rental could be charged for the use of wires, or a toll could be levied. As all connections would necessarily be made at the central office, it would be easy to note the time during which any wires were connected and to make a charge accordingly – bills could be sent periodically.3

True to Bell’s impeccable capitalist thinking, the entire subsequent history of telephony would turn on this Janus-like dualism. The face of service looked out upon society’s needs, the face of profit looked inward towards the shareholders or a revenue-hungry Treasury.

It is likely both facets contributed to the surge of experimentation in Australia after Bell published details of his invention in October 1877. W.J. Thomas of the Geelong Customs House began trialling home-made telephones and wired up telephone links to some houses in his area. Tasmanian Alfred B. Biggs, a noted amateur astronomer and one-time head

3 Telecom Australia, The Switching Place, n.d.

55 teacher of Campbell Town Public School, made several telephones from Huon pine and used the telegraph line to transmit messages 80 kilometres between Launceston and Campbell. In December 1877 New South Wales’ Superintendent of Electric Telegraphs, E.C. Cracknell, used telegraph wires to transmit songs over the 224 kilometres between West Maitland and Sydney. Similar more-or-less official experiments were conducted in South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland.4 In more entrepreneurial style, John Edwards left the Victorian telegraph department in 1877 to set up his own company through which he developed, patented and sold telephones until 1885.5

But for many the early antipodean experiments with telephony seemed frivolous, both from a practical and a commercial point of view. The telegraph and Morse’s system of coded communication had already ‘solved’ the bigger problems of distance created by colonialism and empire. Telephony seemed to have little to offer. Brought to the colonies in 1853 by Canadian entrepreneur Samuel McGowan, the telegraph began operating over a line from Melbourne to Williamstown in March 1854. By 1869 telegraph services were established in all colonies, and when the submarine cable from Darwin to Java was completed in November 1871, it remained only to link Darwin to Adelaide for Australia to enter a new era of global communication. When the north-south Overland Telegraph Line became a reality in August 1872, messages from London could reach Melbourne in 24 to 48 hours rather than the 44 days they took in the fastest of the steamships.6

In an age of imperial capital, the most immediate and celebrated effect of the intercolonial and international telegraph services was closer integration of colonial industries and markets into the metropolitan economy. By the 1840s, Britain was burdened by an annual capital surplus of some ₤60 million which could find no avenue for productive investment in the domestic economy, and British firms were looking abroad for opportunities. By 1870, something like ₤700 million of British capital was invested in foreign countries, more

4 Telecom Australia, The Palace of Winged Words, 1980, pp. 3-5. 5 Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984), p. 73. 6 ibid., pp. 16, 30 & 51.

56 than a quarter of it in the United States.7 Australian mining, railways and pastoralism emerged as important markets to absorb some of the excess, especially once speedier communications enabled investors to minimise some of the risks entailed in offshore operations. Geoffrey Blainey claims that “once the telegraph linked London and Melbourne, and charges for each telegram became cheaper, British speculators began to gamble heavily in Australian mining shares for the first time.”8 In the 1890s, London replaced Melbourne as the centre for investment in Australian mines, and British capital helped Australian goldmines to even higher outputs than in the 1850s. More generally, speedier business intelligence facilitated greater planning and therefore confidence. “For Australia,” Blainey observed, “ the international telegraph perhaps served the same useful function that a long-range weather forecast would have served for farmers.”9

In these circumstances the new voice communications offered by telephony, burdened by high costs and poor transmission quality over all but the most modest distances, struggled to find a place. W.C. Kernot, Melbourne’s Professor of Engineering, summed up the prevailing view in Australia. “I think if a prediction of coming achievement had been made to any intelligent person in 1837…of all modern inventions, the telephone would have aroused the greatest scepticism.”10 All the same, the telephone did find a niche. While it could not hope to compete with telegraphy over longer distances, it was a feasible solution to the problem of the intra-city communication needs generated by the separation of managers from the site of their operations, a division characteristic of the managerial capitalism emerging in the last third of the nineteenth century. In Melbourne, the engineering firm Robison Bros installed a telephone link in 1879 between their Flinders Street office and their foundry in South Melbourne.11 In Brisbane, brewers Quinlan, Gray and Co organised a telephone connection between their Queen Street office and their brewery at Milton.12

7 E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 112 & 118. 8 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968), p. 140. 9 ibid., p. 140 10 Quoted in Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 71. 11 ibid., p. 73 12 PMG Dept Files, National Archives of Australia, Brisbane (hereafter NAA (Bris)): Postmaster General’s Department (hereafter PMG Dept): J3088, QPT25.

57 Traditional commerce also seized the opportunity. In January 1878 Melbourne hardware importers McLean Bros and Rigg installed a phone line from their Elizabeth Street office to their Spencer Street store, while in Sydney a group of merchants and businesspeople pressured E.C. Cracknell to agree to trial a phone line between the Exchange Building in Bridge Street and the General Post Office (GPO) in George Street.13 The Sydney Morning Herald, reporting on the trial, concluded the telephone “offers great convenience to businessmen and the project is likely to be taken up.”14 The other prominent Australian consumer of telephony in its infancy was the state, most notably in Brisbane where the first exchange opened for business in 1880 as a conduit for communication between government offices around the inner city.15 The Perth exchange too provided a service to government administration, and by 1 January 1890 was servicing 22 government departments.16

The advent of telephone exchanges in fact marked the beginning of a new phase of telephony, enabling an individual subscriber to contact any other person connected to the exchange. The inherent limitation of a simple point-to-point connection was eliminated, opening the way for telephony to emerge as a general means of communication rather than a mere one-to-one tool of business or government. As the Melbourne Telephone Company put it in their start-up submission to government in May 1880, “The advantages of this easy and instant communication can scarcely be appreciated by those who have not seen the system in operation.”17

Even so, the only early hint that telephony could and would serve a wide social purpose was the willingness of some medical practitioners and hospitals to subscribe, thus allowing the sick or injured quicker access to treatment. Three hospitals and a fire brigade were among the first 100 subscribers to the Melbourne exchange. Costs, however, remained prohibitive. In the main, telephony in the nineteenth century remained the preserve of the urban business, political and professional elites. If not quite the tool of empire and

13 Telecom Australia, The Palace of Winged Words, p. 4. 14 Quoted in ibid., p. 12. 15 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Bris): PMG Dept, J3088, QPT25 16 PMG Dept Files, National Archives of Australia, Melbourne (hereafter NAA (Melb)): Postmaster General’s Department (hereafter PMG Dept): NAA: PMG Dept, B6286/9, 340/22/3 17 Telephone Company and the Government, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9.

58 international capital that the telegraph was, it served the bourgeoisie’s local representatives in micro-managing their affairs and fostering their social cohesiveness as a ruling class. As early telephone enthusiast Alfred B. Biggs had predicted, “This system will bring the entire community of business and professional men together. Subscribers can sit in their offices and transact business, buy and sell goods, give and receive orders etc. in every quarter of the city.”18 Such a convenient and discrete service had many benefits to the leading men of the time. In Melbourne it enabled local brothels to be linked, heralding the arrival in 1891 of one of the world’s first call-girl networks.19

Telephony as an industry effectively began in Australia with the Melbourne Telephone Company’s successful approach to the Victorian government to establish and operate a “Telephone Exchange for the city of Melbourne and its suburbs.”20 Under licence, the company opened Australia’s first exchange in a section of the stock exchange building in Collins Street in September 1880, just over two years after the world’s first exchange began operating in Connecticut, USA. Brisbane followed quickly but unlike Melbourne its exchange opened under state control. In October 1880 five Queensland government offices were linked by the exchange located in the GPO in Queen Street, other offices followed as the lines were laid, and the existing private telephone operators such as Quinlan, Gray and Co were soon induced to subscribe.21 In Sydney, the Royal Exchange coterie convinced Superintendent Cracknell to allow them to privately operate an exchange, beginning in November 1880. In 1882 the Postmaster-General’s Department opened its own exchange in the GPO and in 1883 took over the Royal Exchange operation after a fire in the latter’s switchboard room.22 In May 1883 the Adelaide telephone exchange was opened with 48 subscribers and in September an exchange began in Port Adelaide.23 Hobart witnessed the launch of a government-run exchange in 1883, and in December 1887 Western Australia became the last of the colonies to enter the telephonic age when an exchange operated by

18 Quoted in Telecom Australia, The Palace of Winged Words, p.4. 19 Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 78. 20 Telephone Company and the Government , NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9. 21 NAA (Bris): PMG Dept, J3088, QPT1 22 Telecom Australia, The Palace of Winged Words, pp. 12-13. 23 The Personal Touch, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9.

59 the Department of Public Works commenced servicing seventeen subscribers, and a second exchange began in Fremantle in January 1888 with a subscription list of nine.24

The State and the Political Economy of Australian Telephony

The early involvement of the state to the extent of controlling all colonial telephone operations by 1890 marks the Australian industry’s most significant departure from its US counterpart where private firms fought over market share until the Bell System emerged with a virtual monopoly.25 On the one hand, the Australian experience reflected the relative weakness of private capital in Australia. Local capital lacked the cohesion and more importantly the surpluses required for long-term planning and investment in major infrastructural projects.26 On the other hand, many local capitalists questioned whether infrastructure as important to the colonies’ future as transport and communication should be left to the vagaries and self-interest of private investors. In Sydney, liberals urged the government to take over the existing railway companies, reflecting a statist tendency in economic policy which R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving argue marked the consolidation of Australia’s urban mercantile bourgeoisie:

The plantation ideal of the pastoralists was weakened as the public sector legitimated the ideology of development and pastoral capital was absorbed into mercantile capital as the economy expanded on the bases of government activity. The mercantile capitalists emerged as the leading fraction of the reconstituted bourgeoisie. Thus the term ‘public’ in public sector really meant ‘system- maintaining’; economically and ideologically, the constitutive role of the state was prominent in this period.27

24 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9, 340/22/3. 25 For accounts of the development of the telephone industry in the United States, see Venus Green, Race On the Line: Gender, Labor, & Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2001, and Stephen H. Norwood, Labor’s Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923 (Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 1990). 26 N.G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900 (Canberra: ANU, 1972), p. 293. 27 R.W. Connell & T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narratives and Argument (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1980), p. 112.

60 In the specific cases of telegraphy and telephony, system maintenance also entailed a state commitment to bourgeois ‘nation building’ within the aegis of the British empire and its web of international economic, political and cultural ties emanating from London.

From a different ideological orientation, the emergent Australian labour movement also endorsed the liberals’ statist agenda. Pre-eminent pioneer of Australian trade unionism, W.G. Spence, contended that “fortunately for Australia Governments realised at an early stage that it was wise to have the ownership and control of such business undertakings as railways and posts and telegraphs vested in the people.”28 His view was shared across the labour movement. State-run utilities were considered “socialistic enterprises” and no late nineteenth century socialist group worthy of the name failed to demand nationalisation as a key objective in the march towards a workers’ Australia. All assumed the existing state apparatus was good enough for the purpose and that the primary task was simply to wrest state control from the capitalistic minority by capturing a majority of seats in parliament.29

Little thought was given to the precise nature of the state apparatus or the social relations between the many thousands of individuals who went under the generic title public servant. In historiography and sociology too, as Marian Simms writes, “little systematic work has been done on state workers as a category and even less on the relations between the state and its employees.”30 In tracing the history of telephonists as an occupational group and as a body of trade unionists, these are key questions, going to the heart of any analysis of telephone workers’ position in the class structure, their self-identity, the nature and meaning of the grievances that emerged, and the kinds of strategies the workers believed were available to them. Some detailed discussion of the nature of the state and its internal social relations is therefore necessary.

28 W.G. Spence, Australia’s Awakening: Thirty Years in the Life of An Australian Agitator (Sydney: The Worker Trustees, 1909), p. 448. 29 In this view socialism and control of the existing state went hand in hand. The Labour (sic) Party’s second objective, as confirmed by its 1905 conference, for instance, was “the securing of the full results of their industry to all producers by the collective ownership of monopolies, and the extension of the industrial and economic functions of the State and Municipality.” Cited in Brian McKinlay, A Documentary History of the Australian Labor Movement 1850-1975 (Richmond: Primary Education, 1979), p. 43. 30 Marian Simms, Militant Public Servants: Politicisation, Feminisation and Selected Public Service Unions (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1987), p. 1.

61 Spence himself implicitly identified a paradox in his own view of state-run utilities, claiming that state controlled business undertakings were more or less socialistic on the basis of who was in government. “Under capitalistic Governments,” he wrote, “it was inevitable that the administration should be unsympathetic, and that consequently the results would not have been equal to what they would be under more interested and efficient control.”31 This implied state enterprises might be run on capitalist lines or at least in the interests of private capitalists. But Spence chose to emphasize a much narrower point that in New South Wales under conservative rule, surpluses generated by utilities such as railways, tramways, and water and sewerage were absorbed into consolidated revenue rather than re-invested in improved services and lowered rates.32 In other words, the problem was unfair distribution of profit rather than any inherent capitalist logic of the enterprises themselves. Consistent with his overall view, Spence saw the state as a neutral force which could be bent to the whim of whichever class held parliamentary power. A Labor government could (and presumably would) bend it towards socialism on behalf of the proletariat. Australia’s first Labor Prime Minister, Chris Watson, went further, suggesting that Labor’s state socialism benefitted all, even its class enemies:

The very people who objected to socialism were immersed in it. They rode in socialistic railways, sent their children to socialistic schools, received their letters through a socialistic pot-office, read them by a socialistic light, rang up their friends on a socialistic telephone, washed in socialistic baths, read in socialistic libraries, and if through studying the advantages of individualism they became insane, they retired to a socialistic lunatic asylum.33

This benign view of the state as a neutral force has had remarkable longevity in the labour movement. It was, of course, a natural bedfellow of the pluralist philosophy underpinning Laborism, and can be found threading its way through the Laborist notion of a welfare state that ameliorates material inequality in the national interest, and the Labor Party’s presentation of ‘a fair go’ as its particular take on the liberal ideology of equality of

31 W.G. Spence, Australia’s Awakening, p. 450. 32 ibid., p. 451. 33 Quoted in Ross McMullen, So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the World’s First National Labour Government (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2004), p. 154.

62 opportunity.34 ‘Modern Labor’ under the leadership of Mark Latham relied on it to promote the concept of an ‘enabling state’ as the party’s defining contribution to the pro-market consensus.35

The neutral state can also be found in the various currents of socialism outside the Labor Party, from the class-inflected rhetoric of nationalisation, to the promises of class peace proffered by supporters of industrial arbitration. Even the notionally revolutionary left has accommodated the proposition that the Australian state could be a tool of socialism. After thirty-four years in the Communist Party of Australia, Ralph Gibson concluded that it was possible “in certain conditions, on the basis of a powerful mass struggle, for the people to win power peacefully, take over the basic means of production and turn parliament into an instrument of their own will.”36

Across this spectrum of positions, one element remains constant. Whether one views the state as playing a constitutive or complementary role with respect to Australian capitalism, or as offering the means for a socialist alternative, capitalism itself is always conceived as a separate entity. Boris Frankel has observed that the state is generally defined in terms of its relationship to ‘the economy’, where the latter is conceptualised as a distinct sphere encompassing capitalist activities to do with “income, property, business or public finance.”37 Thus state and capitalism stand apart, even where they reinforce each other. Ironically, the same relational framework is reproduced in Frankel’s own analysis. Australia is a capitalist society, he argues, because its economic life is dominated by what

34 For Labor leader Gough Whitlam, equality of opportunity was a defining objective of the party, and the existing state apparatus the primary instrument for its realisation. In the speech launching his 1972 election campaign he linked this “drive for equality of opportunities” to a conceptualisation of the national interest based on a “new vision of what we can achieve in this generation for our nation and the region in which we live.” Cited in McKinlay, A Documentary History of the Australian Labor Movement, p. 242. Whitlam of course fell victim to non-elected forces within the state and civil society which found his vision incompatible with managing a capitalist economy in a world downturn. For a contemporary analysis of the structural limits of the state as a tool for progressive reform, see Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 27. Callinicos points to the fact that “the tale of reformist governments defeated by economic constraints imposed notably through the flight of capital on the financial markets is almost as old as social democracy itself.” 35 Peter Botsman & Mark Latham, The Enabling State: People Before Bureaucracy (Annandale: Pluto Press, 2001). 36 Ralph Gibson, My Years in the Communist Party (Melbourne: International Bookshop, 1966), p. 15. 37 Boris Frankel, 'The State and the Private Sector: Towards a Political Economy of Socialisation in Australia' in F.J. Hunt (ed), Socialisation in Australia (Melbourne: Australia International Press, 1978), p. 204.

63 he describes as “private property commodity exchange production.” From this position, he claims the “public sector is a capitalist state, because it is actively and primarily devoted to the private enterprise system.”38 In a similar vein Bob Jessop writes:

State intervention is not just a secondary activity aimed at modifying the effects of a self-sufficient market but is absolutely essential to capitalist production and market relations. For commodities must be produced before they can be distributed via the market and/or political action. Thus, given the institutional separation between the economic and the political, the state must ensure that capital accumulation occurs before it can begin its redistributive activities.39

Frankel and Jessop’s conclusions, this thesis contends, are accurate but incomplete, for they overlook the state’s internal relations and modus operandi. For Frankel, the problem lies in his use of a notional definition of capitalism which places undue emphasis on the private ownership of capital. He deploys Marx’s concept of mode of production but reduces Marx’s emphasis on the social relations of production to a mere question of legal relations over property. For Marx, though, the defining feature of capitalism was not who legally owns the means of production but the way in which surplus value is extracted from producers. In this view, capitalism differs from slavery, feudalism or socialism principally because under capitalism the producers are separated from the means of production and are forced to labour for a wage.40 Capital itself derives from the wage labour relationship: “capital presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other.”41

Jessop is clearer on this point. He recognises “the centrality of the capital-labour relation in the valorization of capital and to the state’s role in securing the wage relation and capital’s

38 ibid., p. 213. 39 Bob Jessup, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 43. 40 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), p. 209. 41 Karl Marx, ‘Wage Labour and Capital’ in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), p. 82. The analysis here is heavily indebted to state capitalist theory. For an overview, see Tom O’Lincoln, State Capitalism and Marxist Theory: A Survey of the Literature (Melbourne: International Socialists, 1984).

64 right to manage the labour process.”42 However he too fails to extend his analysis to an examination of the internal character of the state. While it is correct to insist that private sector commodity production is the dominant arrangement of capitalism, the state is not capitalist only because of its functional support for the private sector. It is also capitalist because this support requires it to replicate the wage labour system within its own structures. It creates internal hierarchical systems of power with overall operational and personnel control vested in the hands of a small managerial minority; it maintains a regime of wage compensation for its employees commensurate with national labour market rates; and in all cases it deploys labour in ways which augment the profitable production and circulation of commodities, including the labour commodity itself.

Class Relations in Australian Telephony

Taking these one at a time, we begin to see a picture of state-run telephony in Australia as an enterprise deeply embedded in capitalist relations of production. First, no one can dispute the hierarchical character of the public sector. It is, after all, a much lampooned feature of the public service. At the heart of this hierarchy is a massive inequality in power and control. On the job, the earliest telephonists, many of whom were mere boys, did have some scope for using their own discretion. Percy Howe, appointed as New South Wales’ first switchboard attendant on 22 March 1882, recalled how, on his first day, he was taken to the switchboard by G.A. Kopsch, Telegraph Mechanician, shown how to use it and left to his own devices.43 Western Australia’s first switchboard operator, Connie Carter, described a similar experience:

…she arrived at the exchange at 8 a.m. and was met by the Superintendent. He asked her to sit down at the switchboard while he explained how it worked. At first she was very nervous, but the Superintendent was patient, and she was soon able to operate the board. She was then asked to call the firm of Sandovers and Mayhew,

42 Jessup, The Future of the Capitalist State, p. 44. 43 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 5643, p. 31.

65 and the exchange was officially open. Mrs Carter had a little under an hour’s instruction before she was placed in charge of the board.44

This autonomy, though, had no tenure beyond the narrow sphere of the switchboard; the boys and young women were ultimately among the most powerless employees in the public service. In any case, whatever control they enjoyed over the labour process was soon removed, as were the boys themselves, once complaints of poor and impertinent service began to surface, and telephony came to be seen as a domain of work ripe for more systematic management. As will be discussed later, the switch to women across the country had many causes but one theme dominating managerial thinking at the time was the need for greater control in the interests of efficiency and service. Feminisation was closely associated with a tightening regime of discipline imposed through closer physical monitoring and the imposition of rules covering every aspect of the telephonists’ work.

By 1901, telephonists were labouring under a vast list of instructions. Instruction 18 decreed that:

Operators on duty are required to face the switchboard at all times, and the attention of each operator must be concentrated upon her own work. The operators must not indulge in conversations with each other when on duty, neither must they engage in conversation with subscribers or with operators at distant offices apart from what may be necessary for the transaction of the exchange business.45

As Instruction 17 made clear, the speaking that was allowed was heavily regulated:

Operators must speak quietly and directly into the transmitters in an even tone of voice, and should say as little as possible consistent with politeness. Every effort must be made to avoid noise in the exchange.46

44 APO Magazine, Oct-Nov 1955, p. 31. 45 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 6264, p. 136. 46 ibid.

66 The Departmental endorsed the view that humans in the labour process should be managed as an aspect of the apparatus of production. A Committee of Inquiry into the Telegraph and Telephone systems in 1901 strongly expressed the opinion that:

For the successful operation of any telephone system it is practically impossible to separate the management and operating from the technical branch. For this reason [the Committee] recommend that the whole of the management and the operating of the telephone branch should be under the control of the Chief Electrical Engineer.47

One of Queensland’s early telephonists, Bertha Cleminson, described working life under such a regime:

The girls would hear in [Supervisor] Mrs Dick’s stentorian tones, “Take that call”, if a second elapsed before a calling subscriber’s shutter dropped. Perhaps this wasn’t surprising, for Mr John Hesketh, Electrical Engineer, expected perfection and missed no detail…48

Hesketh, she recalled, “gave one the impression of a caged lion as he walked up and down the length of the switchboard and one had a feeling one would see a lashing tail had one dared to look around.”49

Within a few years of telephony’s inception, most workers, then, had little individual control over their own jobs let alone the overall direction of the enterprise, and were dominated by a coterie of male engineers specifically appointed to senior management positions to control labour as if it were part of the machinery.

47 ibid., p. 37. 48 Bertha Cleminson, Reminiscences of Service in the Commonwealth, typescript, 1971. Held by the National Office of the CEPU, Melbourne. 49 ibid.

67

A Regime of Regulations and Close Supervision: Telephonists at Work, 1890 (NAA: Image J2879. QTH666)

Telephonists’ wages also reflected the hierarchies of capitalist power. Wage rates were determined by various political, social and industrial factors which allowed for a range of wage outcomes but never a fundamental challenge to prevailing principles of remuneration. For management, the price of the labourer’s upkeep not her real needs nor the value of her effort or contribution was decisive. To put the point in its most striking form, regardless of the value of telephonists’ work, they were never paid more than their managers whose productive contribution to national wealth and social well-being was technically nil. In Queensland, switchboard attendants were placed in the lowly ‘unclassified division’ along with letter sorters and carriers, line repairers, battery keepers and apprentices.50 In New South Wales in 1901, a female switchboard attendant on the maximum wage received ₤60 per year, ₤90 less than the Department’s bicycle mechanics. In Victoria the top female attendants received ₤78, while linemen received ₤110 and labourers ₤120. The manager of the telephone exchange, meanwhile, drew a minimum salary of ₤378.51 In 1904 the Public Service Commissioner upheld this pattern of inequity by classifying telephonists in the new Commonwealth service at the lowest level, and allocating them a minimum annual wage of

50 Queensland Parliament. Votes & Proceedings, Vol.1, 1892, p. 502. 51 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 6264.

68 ₤30 and a maximum of ₤84.52 Moreover, from around 1909 to 1949 women were debarred from sitting the examination for the Commonwealth Public Service’s Clerical Division, leaving them trapped in the poorly paid General Division. Individual telephonists were rarely in a position to accumulate sufficient capital to leave the public service and live independently of a waged-job. They had, in classical Marxist terms, nothing but their labour power to sell.

The hierarchical and oppressive control over Australian telephonists, coupled with the structural impediments to upward mobility and a lack of alternatives to wage labour as a source of economic independence, placed them in the same predicament as operators in the private Bell System in America. Yet by virtue of being state employees, Australian telephone exchange workers sometimes have been categorised as different. Desley Deacon has argued that employees of the state in Australia are part of a “new middle class,” a third class “standing rather uneasily between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” and consisting of “those workers who depend on the sale of educational, technical and social skills, or ‘cultural capital.’”53 Women, she argued, form an important component of the group but generally are relegated to a secondary sector, where “pay is much lower, promotion prospects are poor, and work is routinized.”54 In contrast, after examining the position of (male) telephone technicians employed by Telecom in the late 1970s, Claire Williams concluded that some layers of the public service were part of a “new working class”.55

Adopting the position of Dianne Fields and her co-contributors to Class and Class Conflict in Australia, that workers’ class position is defined by lack of access to capital, reliance on a wage and no autonomy on the job, this thesis argues that relations of production in Australian telephony paralleled those in private enterprise and consigned switchboard operators to an unambiguously working class position.56 They did not possess the “cultural

52 Commonwealth Arbitration Reports, Vol. 11, 1917, p. 304. 53 Desley Deacon, Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930 (Melbourne: Oxford Univ Press, 1989), p. 4 54 ibid., p. 11. 55 Claire Williams, Blue, White and Pink Collar Workers in Australia: Technicians, Bank Employees and Flight Attendants (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 44. 56 Dianne Fieldes, ‘Still Here, Still Fighting: The Working Class in the Nineties’, in Rick Kuhn & Tom O’Lincoln (eds), Class and Class Conflict in Australia (Melbourne: Longman Australia, 1996), pp. 22-39.

69 capital” referred to by Deacon yet, as will be outlined, they possessed valuable yet undervalued technical and social skills. In keeping with Deacon’s description of the state’s secondary labour market, telephonists’ pay was low, prospects poor and work routinized yet arguably these factors placed them closer to female factory workers than to a new middle class of knowledge workers. As public servants they enjoyed a status higher than that accorded to many private sector female occupations yet their formal conditions and treatment in the workplace were generally every bit as oppressive as those endured by women workers elsewhere. And although they were not employed solely for the production of profit, they endured an exploitative relationship with managers whose own status, income levels and promotional prospects hinged on extracting maximum efficiency and maximum standards at a minimum of cost, and who therefore had a vested interest in maintaining hierarchies of power and domination. Above all, this relationship ensured telephonists contributed mightily to healthy revenue surpluses over the decades.

On this last point, the purported economic differences between private and public sectors are not as marked as Frankel’s or Deacon’s analysis would suggest. In the case of state-run utilities, the state in Australia developed enterprises which the private sector needed but could not or would not raise capital to develop profitably itself. Noel Butlin notes this was a feature of colonial railways and communications. Governments accepted responsibility for these services because private investors found “more profitable alternatives.”57 Nevertheless, private investors were the largest beneficiaries of government utilities. As Butlin puts it, “by their ability to limit, even to disregard, profits in railway operations, governments were in a position to provide even greater external economies for particular areas or enterprises. Through freight reductions or discrimination, all or some consumers of transport services could – and did – gain at the expense of the rest of the community.”58 Labour employed in railways could thus be said to contribute to the generation of private sector surplus value conjointly with the workers directly employed in private enterprise. Indeed, in the sense that public sector employees in general – clerks, teachers, nurses – help to maintain an educated, healthy, socially integrated labour force, they all indirectly

57 Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861-1900, p. 303. 58 ibid., p. 293.

70 contribute to the production of the nation’s wealth. Their labour is simply one portion of the sum total of socially necessary labour required for capitalist societies to function.

State-run utilities can and do also operate with an eye on their own profitability, especially those that compete with private entities. Telephony in Australia provides no better example. Its origins as a private enterprise in the United States and Melbourne were not completely lost on the earliest Departmental managers, and the history of the Telephone Department as a community service was always tempered by management’s desire to generate and retain revenue surpluses, or at the very least avoid losses which would deepen their dependence on Treasury. As the Queensland Post and Telegraph Department explained in 1896, once its new telephone system reached full working order, they hoped “the returns will be commensurate with the outlay.”59

From the beginning, then, telephonists entered an industry predicated on social relations of domination and exploitation, where they had little or no control and were constantly subjected to speed-ups and other forms of harassment in the interests of greater efficiency and revenue. They were regarded merely as a cost against which the Department sought a maximum return. Despite the public service status they enjoyed, their working life was a quintessentially working class experience.

Creating a Workforce

(1) Embodying the Switchboard

The extent of managers’ power in the earliest workplaces of telephony gave them wide scope to determine who the telephonists would be and how they would be formed as agents of production. There were corporeal, cultural and economic factors for them to consider. In the first instance they needed bodies that would complement the new technology. The

59 Queensland Parliament. Votes & Proceedings, Vol II, 1896, p. 77.

71 earliest exchanges were all manually operated, requiring humans to perform both the switching and control functions of telephony. Switching entailed connecting a call to another subscriber. The control function was essentially the mental and physical labour required to “set up” the call, taking into account the desired destination of the call, the availability of the line being contacted, the quality of the transmission, the need to ensure the occupied lines were disengaged at the completion of the call, and, with the advent of trunk lines between exchanges, the most suitable route for the transmission.

Telephonists had to be fit and healthy, with no defect in speech or hearing.60 “Peculiarities in accent” were “errors to be avoided”, ensuring few workers from non-English-speaking backgrounds would find a job in telephony, although Ellen Yorke, a telephonist in Melbourne’s Wills Street exchange from 1906, recalled working with “one lass, a Chinese, [who] later became an international lecturer on Chinese culture.”61 Like telephony in the United States, the Australian telephone network in general was serviced by white, Anglo- Celtic Australian women.62

A long reach was a definite asset – two metres when standing up was considered acceptable.63 From the 1890s, the capacity to endure heavy metal headsets, described by one sympathetic politician as “an instrument of torture” and as similar to a mediaeval “means of punishment for committing grave offences”, was also a decided advantage.64 Needless to say, all of these factors were taken into account before a person was allowed near a live switchboard. No candidate could even sit the entrance examination unless they had supplied a medical certificate. In addition, scholarly attainments were essential. The

60 Regulations for the Examinations of Females for Admission as Switchboard Attendants in Queensland Parliament. Votes & Proceedings, Vol 1, 1899, p. 133. 61 APO Magazine, Aug-Sept 1970, p. 17. 62 Unlike the US, though, race does not appear to have been used consciously by Australian managers to construct a workforce whose loyalty substantially hinged on a shared sense of white racial superiority. This does not mean that the practice of excluding people on the basis of accent did not have this effect, only that evidence has not been found that this was a conscious intention. Given the virulent racism in Australian society it is feasible that exclusionist recruiting practices did in fact inculcate a view of telephony as a white industry in which workers could find common ground with their bosses on the basis of race. For an exceptional exposition of the use of racism in American telephony, see Green, Race on the Line. 63 Transcript of evidence to Departmental Committee of Inquiry into the Telegraph and Telephone Systems of the States of the Commonwealth, 1901, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 6264, p. 143. 64 Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Vol. LXXXVII, 1898, p. 1072.

72 typical entrance examination tested handwriting, reading, spelling, arithmetic and geography.65

This specific cluster of skills and attributes, however, did not ‘determine’ the kind of workforce that would emerge. Management also needed labour with certain social skills and it needed people who were cheap, compliant and expendable. More fundamentally, although management’s imperatives were set by the technology and the political economy of the enterprise, there were various ways in which their labour needs could be interpreted and fulfilled. The decisions they made as they went about constructing a workforce were shaped decisively by forces beyond the enterprise of telephony. There was, in other words, a broader context for creating switchboard jobs. It was the labour market and the economic and social order in which the labour market functioned. The gender order, in particular, had a seminal influence on management thinking.

(2) Feminising the Switchboard

(i) The Cheap Labour Thesis

At least since the time of Alexander Graham Bell’s visit to Australia in 1910, it has been something of an axiom that the new industry ‘created’ new opportunities for women. In a famous letter written to the Deputy Postmaster General after visiting the Brisbane exchange, Bell wrote:

I shall remember with great interest the two sides of the question of ‘Women’s Suffrage” so ably presented to me in the Exchange Room. I am glad that I had something to do with the opening up of a new occupation for women. I do not think that any industry offers more opportunity for the advancement of women than the Telephone Industry.66

65 Regulations for the Examinations of Females for Admission as Switchboard Attendants in Queensland Parliament. Votes & Proceedings, Vol 1, 1899, p.133. 66 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Bris): PMG Dept, J3088, QPT1.

73 In even more determinist fashion, the APO magazine of August-September 1970 recounted how “the establishment of a telephone exchange in Melbourne meant the introduction of a new profession for women.”67 Ann Moyal’s history is more circumspect, referring to the feminisation of telephony as a pattern and a trend. Nevertheless, in her account, the pattern appears at times to forge ahead under some hidden momentum of its own. “The trend, begun with the economic move of employing postmistresses in country towns and extended gradually to telephony, found an unrepressed outlet in the employment of women in the telephone exchanges.”68

Unrepressed or not, feminisation of telephony occurred neither of its own accord nor out of the munificence of management. Workers and employers played a part, each group acting on its own perception of its interests and prospects. But as already noted, management’s needs set the agenda. Operating a switchboard was originally regarded as a job requiring few pre-existing skills and little training. The colonial postal department planners who were given responsibility for the new service considered its labour process in the same light as delivering telegraph messages or mail; as at most a mere entry point into the postal and telegraph branches, a stepping stone to a technical or clerical career. Since women were not expected to have ‘careers’ of this kind, they were not initially considered as contenders for work in telephone exchanges. With the notable exception of the Melbourne and Perth exchanges, telephony was launched as an essentially male occupation. Indeed, it was often the same boys who delivered the messages who were called upon to operate the switching equipment.

While this arrangement had considerable cost advantages to the postal administrations, the boys quickly earned a reputation as inefficient, unruly and impertinent. Management alarm grew, for in these early years, the success or failure of the telephone service depended on selling it to the urban commercial and professional elites who expected the same degree of subservience and quiet efficiency from switchboard operators as they demanded of their own office employees and domestic servants. Moreover, as US historian Venus Green has observed of the early years of American telephony, until engineers resolved technological problems that caused delays and

67 APO Magazine, August-September 1970, p. 17. 68 Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 79.

74 connection difficulties, operator personal service was the primary means of winning customers away from other, proven forms of communication.69

It was under these circumstances that managers turned to women. Two points about this process need to be emphasised at the outset. First, feminisation of switchboard work was a change initiated by managers and government ministers. It thus provides no support for the hypothesis that labour market segregation by gender is caused by, to use Sylvia Walby’s words, “patriarchal intervention in the labour market” by male trade unionists seeking “to better their own position at the expense of female workers.”70 No evidence has been found that male workers in other areas of the postal service’s internal labour market or elsewhere actively played a role in the original decision to employ boys on the switchboards or in the subsequent decision to replace them with women.71 Second, although the managers’ own thinking drew deeply on an ideology that could be described as patriarchal, this did not mean they were organising as a “patriarchal force” in the sense conveyed by Walby’s use of the term.72 For Walby the concept of a patriarchal force would appear to allude to a particular social phenomenon that is distinct and capable of acting in the world in defence of some normative set of systemic interests of its own. It is, quite literally, a force for patriarchy. It must therefore be capable of imposing itself on other social forces, including those that derive from capitalist relations of production. This was not the case in telephony. Some managers did make decisions that appeared to put their own sexist prejudices and gendered privileges before the interests of the enterprise. But over time sexist views and practices (the gendered segmentation of the workforce, in particular) were allowed to prevail only to the extent that they furthered managers’ (classed) interest in

69 Green, Race On the Line, p. 53. 70 Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at Work: Patriarchal and Capitalist Relations in Employment (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), pp. 81 & 85. 71 In any case, whatever the views of male workers with a direct stake in the issue, they were hardly in a position to impose their preferences on a recalcitrant management. Jonathan Zeitlin makes a similar point in relation to job segregation in Britain: “It is undeniably true that trade unions often seek to exclude women from access to certain jobs. Alongside other disadvantaged groups in the labour market such as ethnic minorities, younger workers or the less skilled. But can this fact explain the observed pattern of occupational segregation in advanced industrial societies? Is it really the case that trade unions have generally been strong enough, even in Britain, to compel employers to exclude women across a wide range of industries and occupations? Arguably not.” Jonathan Zeitlin, ‘Theories of Women’s Work and Occupational Segregation’ Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History’, 54, 1 (Spring 1989), p. 6. 72 Walby, Patriarchy at Work, p. 81.

75 developing an effective and profitable telephone service. Patriarchy, as understood by Walby and others, had no social purchase outside this context.73

Other unitary theories of feminisation are challenged as well. Women did not enter telephony as the result of a process of de-skilling, in the manner described by Harry Braverman, nor was it about a gendered de-valuing of skill in the manner argued by Braverman’s feminist critics.74 Degradation of skills certainly occurred but unlike clerical work, it did not precede or precipitate feminisation, as Braverman’s thesis would require.75 Furthermore, the central rationale for feminisation in the Braverman thesis – lower wage costs – simply did not apply. There were few if any direct cost advantages in replacing boys with women – although as we shall see, labour costs were a factor in the feminisation process. In fact, there is some evidence from the Brisbane exchange in 1906 that amidst the trend towards feminisation, some managers may have sought to reduce wage costs by reverting to young men.76

(ii) Suitable Skills, Gendered Behaviour: The Socialisation Thesis

There were reasons apart from wages for Department managers turning to women to staff their telephone exchanges. By virtue of their gender women came to be regarded as more appropriately skilled for the job. In Queensland, female switchboard attendants were introduced on 5 June 1899 in the hope “that an improvement will be noticed in the working of the Brisbane

73 Steve Taylor and Melissa Tyler take up this point in relation to their study of the airline industry. Looking at airline companies’ exploitation of “gendered emotional labour” and “production of sexual difference” they argue that Walby’s notion of patriarchal structures is inadequate. “The power of managerial prescription,” they contend, “is related to the way it is embedded within the structural and inequitable capital-labour relation.” They place the process of gendering “inside class relations, and stress the need to empirically interrogate the historically-specific ‘lived experience’ of gendered power relations…” Steve Taylor & Melissa Tyler, ‘Emotional Labour and Sexual Difference in the Airline Industry’, Work, Employment and Society, 14, 1 (March 2000), pp. 78-9. 74 See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974. For an excellent summary of the Braverman de-skilling debate see Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1993), pp. 2-9. 75 For a valuable account of the feminisation of clerical work, see Gregory Anderson, ‘The white-blouse revolution’ in Gregory Anderson (ed), The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers since 1870 (Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1988), pp. 1-26. 76 Commonwealth of Australia. Parliamentary Debates, Vol. XXXI, 1906, pp. 330 & 440.

76 exchange.”77 Twelve months later, the Department reported their hope had been fully realised.78 For some, ‘female skills’ were the decisive factor in this transformation. Henry Templeton, Brisbane’s Acting Deputy Postmaster General, told the 1910 Royal Commission into the Postal Service that girls were better than boys at switchboard work because they were more suited to the mechanical routine.79

But gendered notions of technical skill or mechanical dexterity were not the full story either. Sydney Monaghan, Assistant Manager of Telephones at the Melbourne GPO, informed the 1910 Royal Commission he knew of men in Sydney and Melbourne who “give just as good a service” as women. For him, technical skill was not the issue. The problem with boys, he claimed, was they did “not seem to be able to restrain themselves as well as girls” and were more willing to talk back to subscribers.80 The Department’s Electrical Engineer for Queensland in 1910, John Bradford, agreed, telling the Royal Commission, “I consider that girls make far better attendants than boys, because they are more polite and civil…As a rule, young boys are not fond of discipline and, generally, they are not polite.”81 His view echoed the reasoning of the Postmaster-General Department’s own Committee of Inquiry into the telephone service in 1901, which recommended women over men for day duty because “girls or women, if carefully selected, are as quick, more polite, and generally give a more satisfactory service than boys or men.”82

There were dissenting views, however. In 1898 the Member for Victorian state seat of Talbot and Avoca, Mr C.C. Salmon, rose in Parliament to complain about the state of the Melbourne telephone service, singling out the female operators who, he claimed, “showed scant courtesy, in fact, scarcely any courtesy at all, to the subscribers, and …did pretty much as they liked.” The fault, he said, “was due to the want of proper discipline, and to the scandalous way in which the

77 Report of the Post & Telegraph Department of Qld for 1898 in Queensland Parliament. Votes & Proceedings, Vol. 1, 1899, p. 893. 78 Report of the Post & Telegraph Department of Qld for 1899, Queensland Parliament. Votes & Proceedings, Vol. 5, part 1, 1900, p. 63. 79 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission into the Postal Service, Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers, Vol. IV, 1910, p. 38. Hereafter referred to as 1910 Royal Commission. 80 ibid., p. 2098. 81 ibid., p. 1471. 82 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 6264, p. 37.

77 department was managed.”83 But in the chamber that day his view did not find a sympathetic hearing from the majority. The opinion of the Member for Melbourne East, John Anderson, seemed more in keeping with the general feeling, and certainly with the strengthening consensus of the Department’s own managers. “He and his friends,” Anderson informed the House, “had always received the greatest courtesy and civility from the young ladies at the other end of the line.”84

“As a rule, young boys are not fond of discipline and, generally, they are not polite.” Telephonists at Central Telephone Exchange, Brisbane GPO, 1890 (NAA: Image J2879, QTH29)

There is little doubt that such opinions drew upon a widely held notion that women outshone men in all forms of work which relied on measured, polite social intercourse; skills that could be viewed simply as an extension of the emotional labour demanded of women in various roles within the family household. Some historians have taken statements and other evidence of this outlook as a starting point for their own analysis, arguing that women’s purported suitability for certain work roles rested on the gender ideology of separate spheres. Desley Deacon develops the point in her thesis that the Commonwealth Public Service was constructed around primary and secondary labour markets with women confined largely to the latter. Their segregation, she

83 Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Vol. LXXXVII, 1898, pp. 3554-5. 84 ibid., p. 3557.

78 argues, shows the influence of “the two ideologies concerning women’s work, that women’s place was in the home and that women were inherently incapable of filling positions of responsibility…”85 Women’s workforce roles were thus aligned to their devalued role in the private sphere of the family.

This ideological explanation, however, can be misleading. As Janey Stone observes, jobs were often constructed as ‘feminine’ on the most spurious grounds because it helped employers keep down wages. For example, it was argued in the nineteenth century that typing was like playing the piano and therefore eminently suited to women. But as Stone points out, this link was made only after women entered the occupation in large numbers; initially typing was performed by men.86 In telephony, while gender ideology was obviously influential in management’s thinking about who was suited to switchboard work, and indeed in women’s own thinking about what work they were suited to, two points should not be overlooked. First, the turn to women telephonists was initially regarded as an experiment, not a fait accompli as one would expect if the decision was based solely on a fixed view that women held obvious and unassailable natural advantages over men. In fact, in New South Wales, a sceptical Superintendent Cracknell held out against the introduction of women on the grounds that, “the experiment has been tried…in other parts of the world and has proved an utter failure.”87 Not until 1896, three years after Cracknell’s departure and sixteen years after the Melbourne exchange had opened with female operators, did the New South Wales Public Service Board decree that, “switchboard attendants in the Telephone Department shall be exclusively females, as it is found that in these positions girls are superior to young men.”88 Even then there were reservations. In 1898 the Postmaster General, Joseph Cook, is reported to have stated, “I am of the opinion that the employment of girls instead of boys was an error.”89

85 Desley Deacon, ‘Women, Bureaucracy and the Dual Labour Market: an Historical Analysis’, in Alexander Kouzmin (ed), Public Sector Administration: New Perspectives (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1983), p. 177. 86 Janey Stone, ‘A Different Voice? Women and Work in Australia’, in Rick Kuhn & Tom O’Lincoln (eds), Class and Class Conflict in Australia (Melbourne: Longman, 1996), p.81. 87 Cited in Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 82. 88 New South Wales Parliament. Votes & Proceedings, Vol. II, 1896, p. 13. 89 Typescript of a history of the telephone service in NSW, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 5643, p. 9.

79 Second, in proving themselves suitable, women telephonists were responding to economic imperatives as much as if not more than gender socialisation. Melanie Nolan has alluded to these pressures in her investigation of nineteenth century gender demographics. Natural population growth, increased female immigration and the emigration of men after 1860 created a more even balance of the sexes and eventually a surplus of unmarried women.90 “By 1881,” she found, “33 per cent of women aged 25 to 29 were “never married” in Victoria, compared with only 15.1 per cent in 1861,” giving rise to the late nineteenth century middle class problem of “what to do with our girls.”91

(iii) Gender and the Labour Market: the Economic Origins of the Hello Girl

The origins of telephony as a women’s industry can be seen in this context. In the 1880s, the higher status occupations of teaching and nursing absorbed some of the ‘excess’ women, and a number found employment in some states as post mistresses and telegraphists. But by the end of the decade Australia was mired in a severe economic downturn and a new pattern in women’s employment emerged. Female workforce participation rose, but new opportunities did not. From 1891 to 1901 the female workforce as a percentage of total female population grew from 15.9 per cent to 18.8 per cent in New South Wales, 17.3 per cent to 22.1 per cent in Victoria, 15.2 per cent to 17.7 per cent in South Australia, and 11.9 to 18.9 per cent in Western Australia. Only Queensland registered a slight decrease in the rate of female workforce participation.92 Despite the influx of women into paid employment, few new sectors of industry were feminised. As Raelene Frances notes, “in both printing and bootmaking the increasing proportion of women employed reflected expansion in established women’s occupations.”93 For educated women, some old opportunities actually disappeared as particular male-dominated unions and employers reacted to the contraction of the labour market. In 1892 the New South

90 Melanie Nolan, ‘Uniformity and Diversity: A Case Study of Female Shop and Office Workers in Victoria, 1880 to 1939’, PhD thesis, ANU, 1989, p. 40 91 ibid., pp. 37-40. 92 Glenn Withers et al, Australian Historical Statistics: Source Paper No.7, Part 2 (Canberra: ANU, 1985), p. 110. 93 Frances, The Politics of Work., p. 182.

80 Wales Post and Telegraph Department banned the appointment of married women to offices with residences attached. By June 1895 the Postmaster General could report there were no known married women still serving in the postal service.94 In 1893 the managers of the state’s teaching services began suspending the recruitment of married women.95 The few areas that did open up to women in the 1890s were in the private white collar sector – commercial clerks, retail assistants and insurance officers. But there were not enough of these positions to absorb the available supply of women, let alone men. As the economic depression deepened the educated young woman found herself in a buyers’ market.

Not surprisingly, she jumped at the opportunity of a public service job in the emergent telephone industry. Even pupil teachers abandoned the prospects of a career in education when telephony was opened to them. It was reported that all six of the first female switchboard attendants in New South Wales were former teachers.96 In Victoria, concern was raised in parliament that pupil teachers earning 5s to 15s per week were moving into telephony and taking jobs from “young women of education who could not earn 1s a week at all, and who had no employment whatever.”97 Candidates were often very well educated. Pioneering Melbourne telephonist Ellen claimed at least two of her female co-workers had Arts degrees and several others had partly completed degrees. Another played first violin in an orchestra, and then there was the Chinese woman mentioned earlier who became an international lecturer on Chinese culture.98

In the 1890s, a throng of such educated hopefuls desperate to secure a switchboard position competed for limited positions. When the Victorian Public Service Board called for candidates for the switchboard attendants’ examination in December 1896, 800 young women presented themselves for the test despite the costs of mandatory medical certificates, birth certificates and examination fees. 600 of them passed. By 12 October 1899 only 21 had been given jobs.99 Indeed up to that time, only ten of the 290 women who

94 New South Wales Parliament. Parliamentary Debates, 1895, pp. 7008-9. 95 Deacon, Managing Gender, p. 149. 96 Typescript of a history of the telephone service in NSW, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 5643, p. 8. 97 Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Vol. LXXVII, 1896, p. 3707. 98 APO Magazine, Aug-Sept 1970, p. 17. 99 Victorian Parliamentary Debates , Vol. LXXXVII, 1898, p. 2192.

81 had passed the 1890 examination had been appointed.100 In Queensland, aspiring switchboard attendants fared little better. 162 candidates sat the state’s inaugural examination on 2 May 1899. Only 35 were passed and of these only 18 were appointed over the coming year.101

The human dimensions of this labour glut came to public attention in 1898 after Victorian MLA David Methven began championing the cause of eight women telephonists sacked from the Melbourne exchange. They had been appointed by the Public Service Board from a register of candidates who had passed the examination. At least three of them had given up good jobs elsewhere on the understanding their appointments were permanent; several had moved to Melbourne from country districts; one “from a distance of several hundred miles.”102 However two months into their service, their appointments were annulled after other candidates complained the women had not been selected according to the register’s order of merit. An investigation found in fact they had been chosen ahead of people higher on the list because they had prior switchboard experience. That the Board felt it could pick and choose telephonists at will regardless of its own regulations and then sack them without compunction to rectify its own mistake serves to highlight the power of capital over labour in these years. As Methven told Parliament, the eight workers “felt their position very keenly” because unless justice prevailed they would be cast adrift to “swell the ranks of the unemployed.”103

Their concerted efforts to lobby parliamentarians remind us of the value placed on steady employment in economically precarious times. A position in the public service could mean the difference between dire poverty and a semblance of financial security for the individual and her family. As John Hancock, Member for Footscray, told the Victorian Parliament:

It has often been stated that the man was the bread-winner, but, in consequence of the scarcity of employment, the woman in a good many of these cases was now the bread-winner for the family. [ I ] know cases…in which women in the postal

100 ibid. 101 Qld Public Service Board Annual Report 1899, Qld V&P, Vol.1, 1900, p. 1208. 102 Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Vol.LXXXVII, 1898, p. 3548. 103 ibid., pp. 2183-84.

82 service, who from their years of service and their efficiency ought to be receiving the maximum of their class, were still remaining at this miserable minimum of ₤54 a year.104

A telephonist’s job could also mean independence from the pressures of family. The chance to escape the family household seems to have attracted some women to the occupation. As noted above, several of the eight sacked by the Board in Victoria had moved to Melbourne from the country. The history of another worker, Teresa Flanagan, gives a sense of the mobility available to young women in the nation’s telephone service. Flanagan was appointed to the service at the age of eighteen in 1900. Promoted to Monitor in 1910, she gained a temporary transfer to Bendigo in 1913 before swapping jobs for three months with another Monitor from North Sydney. In 1916 she returned to Bendigo, only to move to Central Exchange in Melbourne in January 1917 and then back to Bendigo as a Supervisor in August. 1920 saw her return to Central on two six-month swaps. She made two moves in 1921, first a transfer to an un-named destination, then to Ballarat. In 1924 she moved to Adelaide for three months. Her wealth of experience obviously paid off, for in 1928 she was appointed Inspector of PBX’s for the Melbourne metropolitan area. Two years later we find her working as a Supervisor in Brisbane. The last entry on her staff card records her taking one month’s furlough from 11 September 1933, a hard earned reward indeed for 33 years of dedicated service across four states.105

A myriad of economic and social forces, then, and not simply gender socialisation, shaped the workplace behaviour of telephony’s pioneering women. They may have had few prospects of higher careers within the public service but the lower echelons at least offered relatively secure, steady employment in an environment superficially far superior to the factory or shop. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that women knuckled down and delivered the self- restraint, civility and efficiency demanded of them by the employer. The price for delivering anything less was simply too high. Even religious scruples had to be subordinated to the needs of the Department, as nine probationary attendants in Victoria discovered to their cost in 1901 when they were sacked for refusing to work Sundays. The Postmaster General warned the remaining female telephonists that if they did not volunteer for Sunday work, they too would be

104 Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Vol.LXXVII, 1895-1896, p. 5244. 105 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9, 3303.

83 replaced by male telegraph messengers.106 Ideology may have given women their ‘break’ in telephony but it was class pressure that compelled them to live up to the ideological expectations.

(iv) Gender and Expendability

Paradoxically, a third factor behind management’s construction of a workforce of ‘hello girls’ was expendability. Management realised quite early that the technological and psychological conditions they imposed on telephonists in a bid to maximise revenue created high levels of burnout. They needed workers who would stay longer in the job than itinerant boys but who would eventually move on or could easily be replaced should they fall victim to the range of physical and mental ailments that came with the job.107 In fact, opponents of women in the workforce often seized on this feature of telephony to support their call for a ban on female telephonists. Commonwealth Medical Officer Henry Leschen claimed the nervous strain of telephony had rendered many a young female telephonist “entirely unfit for the duties of motherhood” which in his eyes was far more important than running the nation’s telephone system. Notwithstanding his recommendation of a three year limit on women serving on switchboards, he ruled out ever allowing any daughter of his to even enter the telephone service.108 The Department, however, appeared more sanguine about putting at risk women’s national and racial duty as the mothers of a White Australia. “They are generally content to retain their positions longer than [male] youths,” the Department found in 1901, even though the salary was relatively poor.109

106 Claire McCuskey, ‘The History of Women in the Victorian Post Office’, MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1984, p. 116. 107 In this sense, the employment of women as telephonists appears to refute Michael Piore’s dualist theory of labour market segmentation, which claims that in order to maximise efficiency firms tend to develop higher paid and more secure workforces to run the “specialized productive resources”, leaving the less specialised, peripheral technologies to a lower paid and insecure secondary workforce. Suzanne Berger & Michael J. Piore, Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1980), p. 79. In telephony, however, the switchboard was the specialized productive resource and its effective operation required skilled engineers, technicians and operators. In fact, as noted elsewhere, the success or failure of the entire enterprise in its founding decades depended on the technical and social skills of its telephonists, yet they were among the worst paid and least secure employees in the industry. For a useful summary of Piore’s theory see Jonathan Zeitlin,‘Theories of Women’s Work and Occupational Segregation’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 54, 1 (Spring 1989), p. 8. 108 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9, 3303. p. 997. 109 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 6264, p. 37.

84 Ideally, the Department wanted women to think of switchboard work as more than a brief interlude but less than a career. As John Bradford explained:

The girls remain… until they leave to get married, or happen to be successful in passing the clerical examination, and leave to take up a better position. When lads go into the telephone exchange they know they are only going to be there for a time, and that they are birds of a passage….The females are less liable to be changed about, and consequently the public get a better service.110

The women themselves often had other ideas about their jobs. When they did resign, it was often not for marriage but to pursue jobs elsewhere. And by choice or circumstances, hundreds of them did make careers of telephony spanning decades, including married women who often worked for years as so-called temporary or exempt staff. Figures from New South Wales in 1914 reveal in fact the beginnings of a two-tiered workforce in which a significant number of long term veterans similar to Victoria’s Teresa Flanagan worked alongside or in charge of a mass of young rookies. Of the 873 women telephonists in permanent positions across the state, 44 per cent had worked for the public service for more than two years, and seven per cent had worked for more than five years. The average length of service of the 62 women monitors was ten years, and all three of the women in supervisory jobs had careers spanning more than ten years.111 These were clearly not women working simply for pin money.

All the same, working in a telephone exchange was carefully constructed as a dead-end job. Young men, it was argued, should not waste their talents in telephone exchanges, and the Department should ensure they did not. The Acting Senior Inspector for New South New South Wales explained why in 1911:

Should [the male telegraph messenger]…be engaged nearly all his time upon the switchboard, his opportunities of learning any of the duties mentioned [in postal and

110 1910 Royal Commission, p. 1479. 111 Figures calculated by the author from Commonwealth Public Service Seniority Lists.

85 telegraphic work] are very limited…yet the Department is, to a great extent, dependent upon this class of boy to eventually fill higher positions in the service.112

To fill the switchboard jobs, management skilfully constructed a secondary, feminised labour market by manipulating the prevailing social attitude that women did not have long-term career aspirations, were not breadwinners, and were content to treat work as a mere transitionary bridge between adolescence and wifehood. As is evident in the following testimony of a certain Mr Howard, Assistant Telegraph Engineer in Victoria, the workforce structure emerging in the telephone exchanges was intended to balance the need for stability and continuity with the benefits of high staff turnover. While giving evidence to the 1901 Departmental inquiry into the telegraph and telephone services, Howard was pressed on the question of compulsory early retirement for female telephonists. He refers favourably to the British Post Office and the National Telephone Company of England:

Howard: As a rule the girls [in the National Telephone Company] do not remain in the service longer than five years. They get married or go into some other business or retire altogether. In New York three years is the average length of time. The older females are not so good as operators.

Question: Would you think it advisable in Australia to fix an age at which females should retire?

Howard: No, I think not. But I should certainly fix an entering age. I should say between 16 and 22; any over the latter age would not be eligible.113

The young age of entry for telephonists, coupled with the long scale for junior wages, ensured the Department could receive up to six years labour from young women before needing to pay

112 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP 273/1, 1911/712 113 Transcript of evidence to Departmental Committee of Inquiry into the Telegraph and Telephone Systems of the States of the Commonwealth, 1901, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 6264, p. 143.

86 them even the paltry adult rate.114 By the same token, feminising the workforce meant the Department could rely on broader social mores and gender roles to facilitate a high staff turnover which guaranteed them a mostly young, injury-free and enthusiastic army of switchboard workers.

Looking to the future, the high turnover also diminished the workers’ ability to develop a strong industrial organisation with experienced rank and file activists and officials. And with the advent of automatic exchanges in Australia from 1912, the Department’s engineers could see that their interests were best served by averting the emergence of a large, permanent, long-serving, career workforce which would be relatively difficult and costly to reduce as the need for labour diminished, as a memorandum from Henry Templeton, Deputy Postmaster General for Victoria, dated 10 February 1915, made clear. Reporting on his project to estimate “staff necessities before and after the cut over to automatic exchange working in the Metropolitan Network, exclusive of Central,” he stated the object was “to avoid as far as possible excess permanent officers when the change is effected by arranging for positions from a certain date being filled by temporary officers.” (emphasis in original)115 By 1919 the Department was equating temporary officers with youth. An unpublished letter to the Daily Telegraph and the Age in Melbourne stated that “the age limit fixed for telephonists was formerly 16 to 25 years, but, owing to the advent of automatically operated exchanges, the demand for telephonists lessened, and, in consequence, it was found possible to reduce the maximum entrance age from 25 to 19 years.” Lest this be considered too calculating, the letter was quick to add “it has been found that girls between the ages of 16 and 19 make the most satisfactory telephonists.”116

Finally, if the obvious advantages of employing young women were not enough to allay management’s fears of such a step, they always had the overseas experience to bolster their confidence. Managerial statements on the matter often mentioned the fact that feminisation of telephony was a global trend. This gave them kudos as pioneers on the cutting edge of international developments in telephony emerging from New York and Europe, while at the

114 At times the Department was quite explicit about employing girls under 21 years of age so it could obtain a “reasonable return” on their investment. See internal correspondence dated 16 April 1919, PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP341/1, 1919/4236 115 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP341/1, 1915/2613 116 Internal correspondence, 24 April 1919, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP273/1, G1926/4214

87 same time silencing those who might wish to argue it was a rash, parochial experiment. Above all, it showed the move was ‘safe.’ New South Wales managers justified their decision to introduce women with the explanation that “in Europe and in some other colonies, females had been employed as telephonists with great success.”117 The new PMG Department used similar reasoning in 1901, pointing to the successful example of the “girls” employed in America, England and Continental Europe.118

The Hello Girl as New Woman

Out of the conflicting social and economic imperatives at play in Australia’s embryonic telephone industry, a new segment of the Australian workforce took shape. In giving prominence to the role of female workers, it became inextricably linked to the late nineteenth century social phenomenon of the ‘new woman.’ Alison Bashford has noted the connection of this development with changing attitudes towards paid employment, arguing that “financial, emotional and often sexual independence characterised the new woman. Her capacity and desire to work and draw an independent income, rather than her need to do so, were central to most representations.”119

While not disagreeing in general with this claim, it is necessary to qualify Bashford’s formulation of desire and economic need as counterposed motivations. On the one hand, it could be taken to imply the new woman was only a middle class phenomenon, whereas in fact, the ideological shift also applied to women for whom economic need remained a pressing consideration. Raelene Frances has observed a changing definition of femininity at work in the emergence of the Tailoresses’ Union in Victoria. In the 1880s and 90s, she notes, the tailoring factories “seem to have attracted and fostered a more outspoken and independent type of woman.”120

117 Typescript history of the telephone service in NSW, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 5643. 118 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept , B6286/2, 6264, p. 37. 119 Alison Bashford, ‘Starch on the Collar and Sweat on the Brow: Self Sacrifice and the Status of Work for Nurses’, Journal of Australian Studies, No.52, 1997, p. 70. 120 Frances, The Politics of Work, p. 35.

88 Conversely, Bashford’s emphasis on desire over need might indicate a level of freedom for educated women that did not exist. Work gave them a modicum of independence but not independence from work itself. As already noted, most women workers relied on their wages for survival; most of them were not working in waged jobs for the love of it. They clung tenaciously to the opportunities they created in the workplace, and they organised politically to defend their right to be there. As Deacon has argued, in one respect 1890s feminism emerged as a response to bad economic times. She observes that “feminist organizations emerged to press for equal political, social and economic rights, joining the numerous interest groups which developed during this period of economic instability and political change.”121 The ideal of the new woman thus represented a struggle for freedom and security as much as a reflection of it.

Telephonists exemplified this duality. The industry, it could be said, both attracted and helped create a public service version of the new woman. The availability of so many educated young women clearly influenced management’s decision to experiment with organising their telephone exchange workforce as a secondary, feminised sector of the public sector’s internal labour market. In this sense, the new opportunity lauded by Bell was created less by the industry than by the women themselves. It was the women too who used the opportunity provided by the job’s status and modest material rewards to carve a social space outside the workplace for more independent lifestyles. Nevertheless, the success of the feminisation experiment ultimately rested on whether or not the women could adjust to conditions set down by management. As individuals, single, female telephonists could enjoy some independence as a result of their wage and opportunities for transfers but they were powerless to negotiate improvements in pay, working conditions or promotional opportunities. Their freedoms outside work were predicated on toeing the line in worktime. The new woman as telephonist was thus a contradictory figure; liberated from some of the constraints of the family, she was browbeaten and dehumanised on the job under the weight of close supervision and bureaucratic control. No longer just a daughter or sister, she found herself treated as a minor in need of constant surveillance and discipline. Workplace control drew upon the ideology of the family. Supervisors were sometimes

121 Deacon, Managing Gender, p. 153.

89 known as matrons, their intimidating discipline tempered only by the occasional display of motherly protectiveness.122 Managers policed performance and appearance. “She would a good operator,” one male manager is supposed to have remarked of a Junior, “it’s a pity she doesn’t mend the holes in her stockings.”123

First female telephonists in Queensland, after commencing at the Brisbane Central Exchange on 5 June 1899. (NAA: Image J2879, QTH159)

So it was with (mostly) neat stockings and a pacing boss behind their backs that dozens and soon hundreds of young women took their places at the nation’s switchboards. Men continued to staff suburban and rural switchboards well into the twentieth century, and, except in Adelaide, they continued even longer to work the night shifts, for it was not seen as safe or socially acceptable for women to do so.

122 Typescript history of the telephone service in NSW, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/2, 5643, pp. 6-7.; Bertha Cleminson, Reminiscences of Service in the Commonwealth, typescript, 1971. 123 Cleminson, Reminiscences of Service, typescript, 1971.

90 But over time the number of male telephonists declined as a proportion of the total switchboard workforce. Feminisation of the switching function, an experiment begun in the 1880s and 90s, was a settled matter by the end of World War One. In 1917, the Department’s 422 male telephonists accounted for 22.6 per cent of the total workforce performing switchboard duty. For the rest of the twentieth century women would comprise an even greater majority of this entirely new segment of the national labour force. It would not take long after Federation, however, before telephony’s “petticoat workforce” would prove less compliant than management had anticipated.

91 Chapter Three Unionisation, 1901-1919

Australia’s telephone exchange workers entered the twentieth century without a union of their own. By the outbreak of World War One, Sydney telephonists had produced two, and by the end of 1914 telephone staff in Melbourne had formed the nucleus of a national association. Over the next five years union activists and advocates successfully built a genuinely national organisation, secured an arbitration Award for members, sank deep roots into the workforce, and mounted campaigns with enough disruptive impact to attract press attention and management condemnation.

The emergence of these unions and the political-industrial character of telephone exchange unionism in this formative period are the subject of this chapter. While attention will be drawn to the broader contexts for these events, in particular the general revival in Australian unionism and the politics of the wider public service, the chapter concentrates on the regime of class pressure that developed in the telephone exchanges themselves as the political economy of the national, state-run telephone industry took shape. It will be argued that the first telephone exchanges unions were founded on the lived experience of exploitation and oppression of workers on the job, and drew their moral power from an ideology that cast the workers as ghettoised victims of sweating. Giving evidence before the 1910 Royal Commission into the Postal Service, a succession of union witnesses demonstrated beyond doubt that the notion of sweating provided a valid conceptual framework for understanding working life before a switchboard.

The chapter then traces the emergence of the first national union, commonly known as the Commonwealth Telephone Officers’ Association (CTOA). A possible link between this body and an earlier tradition of feminist trade unionism amongst state and Commonwealth public service women in Melbourne is examined. It will be argued that the CTOA’s emphasis on arbitration marked a departure from the political orientation of the feminist unions and a dilution of the anti-sweating ideology of the earlier switchboard unionism in Sydney. Sweating remained a powerful theme, however, evident in much of the CTOA’s

92 discourse and in its 1917 arbitration case for reduced hours, more frequent breaks and lower workloads. The case will be analysed in some detail for what it revealed of the views and interests of the antagonists and for its contradictory outcome. While it delivered some important concessions for the workers, its lasting legacy were the lower rates of pay and restricted job opportunities that flowed from the court’s decision to classify manual telephony as “women’s work”.

The CTOA and its flawed achievements were part of a pattern found across all association- style unions. But it will be argued here that there are more fruitful ways to represent this history than as yet another example of white collar conservatism. Such a position, it is contended, all too often assumes that members of white collar unions are invariably conservative, either because they are not “real” workers or because they are workers duped by capitalist ideology. The chapter develops an alternative hypothesis that telephone exchange workers (and by implication others as well) were workers who resisted within limits created by a combination of objective and subjective factors. The emphasis here is on the interplay between the class impetus to resist and the factors which made certain forms of resistance appear feasible while others were seen as irrational or were prevented from being seen at all. From this perspective, the telephone exchange workers’ embrace of arbitration was not evidence of a dis-engagement from class resistance but of a resistance finding expression in ways that made sense in particular circumstances.

Among the subjective factors, ideology played a key role in determining perceptions of the possible and the preferable. Labour ideology articulated the reality of exploitation as a particular kind of problem or set of problems which resistance could address; the ideologies of capital operated to ensure this resistance was channeled into non-conflictual forms. Resistance, though, was never negated. Contrary to some theories of false-consciousness and consent, the industrial conservatism of CTOA members cannot be taken to mean that they did not regard their working lives as a source of anxiety and dissatisfaction and a cause for dissent. The evidence suggests they did. And it suggests they saw unionism as their mechanism for effecting change. This is a point which cannot be underestimated. From where the members’ sat, the CTOA’s arbitration gains, however qualified, however

93 ideologically compromising, still represented a meaningful check on management power and an affirmation of the workers’ own sense of self and collective ability to resist. Future generations saw it this way too. Despite the limitations of what was actually achieved in wages and conditions, and the role that arbitration played in consolidating the gendered segregation of telephony, the CTOA’s history from this period remained a source of inspiration for the rest of the century.

Telephony under PMG: A Regime of Class Pressure

The unionisation story begins with Federation. By the time an Australian nation was created in 1901, bringing together into one body the separate colonial Postal and Telegraph departments, around 33 000 offices and homes across the country were equipped with a telephone.1 By 1911, the number had reached 100 000.2 While this expansion signalled the burgeoning commercial and public interest in the new technology, it bore no relation to the health of the vast, new PMG Department. For a decade governments and central management struggled unsuccessfully to mould an integrated, efficient bureaucracy out of the different structures, technologies, development priorities and management philosophies and practices inherited from the colonial departments. The difficulties were magnified by the resistance of many senior managers at state level, resentful of their loss of power in the federation and defensive of their fiefdoms, and by tight expenditure discipline exercised by Treasury.

In 1908 the Deakin Government relented to pressure from the Labor Party to appoint a Royal Commission into the Department. The inquiry found an organisation in disarray. No fixed accounting practices were in place, no uniform pricing structures existed, no principles of political economy were formulated, no clear resolution reached on the question of the appropriate sources for funding the department’s role in supplying crucial national infrastructure. At least one manager, William Blackstone, was prepared to argue to

1 Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984), p. 83. 2 ibid., p. 97

94 the Commission that in the telephone area of the Department the current flat rate pricing structure was benefiting the subscribers at the expense of the Department, an undesirable situation in his view.3 The revenue losses, Treasury parsimony and the moribund state of the administration meant the Department was not keeping up with developments in technology and the rising demand for services. Managers and workers alike testified strongly that much of the equipment in the telephone exchanges, especially in the large centres, was obsolete and unable to meet the demands placed on it.

The exchange workers bore the brunt of the crisis. Expanding workloads in city exchanges combined with long hours of duty without breaks in poorly ventilated rooms caused serious physical and mental strain on telephonists. Manager Blackstone opined that “telephone attendants should not handle more than four or five calls per minute,” yet conceded, “in Sydney the girls are sometimes handling twelve and thirteen calls per minute...”4 Lillias McLeod, telephone attendant at the Sydney GPO, provided a more vivid account of the situation:

[The] system carries a larger load than was expected, and under the present circumstances the attendants are working over and above what is expected of them. Some one has termed the work of the telephone attendants as “sweating” – it is even worse than that; it is white slavery. It cannot be called sweating. It is physical exhaustion. 5

The pressure from overburdened equipment and inadequate levels of staff was intensified by the tendency of subscribers exasperated by poor service to personalise their grievances as outbursts of abuse directed at telephonists. As telephone attendant William Fitzpatrick explained, “It is a common thing to hear complaints of “bad connexions” for which the staff are blamed and for which they are in no way responsible.”6

3 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission into the Postal Service, Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers, Vol. IV, 1910, p. 1177. Hereafter referred to as 1910 Royal Commission. 4 ibid., p. 1180. 5 ibid., p. 1741. 6 ibid., p. 1767.

95 From the other direction, senior managers through to the supervisory staff developed a relentless regime of monitoring and discipline, policing every aspect of the telephonists’ working life, from clothing and demeanour to productivity and customer service, and fining them for the slightest breach of the regulations governing the minutiae of switching procedures and protocol. The Department’s preoccupation with imposing the tightest possible control over the switchboard workforce was evident in three ways. First, management went to great lengths to create a uniform supervisory structure across the country. In small country centres, the chain of command was revised in 1906 specifically to impose greater discipline on operators. Chief Electrical Engineer Hesketh agreed to implement the following request from the Public Service Commissioner:

In view of the fact that in country post offices Telephone Attendants are a class of officer who, as a rule, appear to require very close supervision, which the Instrument Fitter, who is nominally in charge, is unable to give, owing to frequent outside duties, I have the honor (sic)…to inform you that it would be an advantage of in the absence of the Postmaster, who is often engaged in other work, it were understood that the senior Telegraphist on duty is to immediately supervise the Telephone Attendants, particularly as to attendance and discipline, and their communications with the public.7

There is some evidence that male attendants in the country areas were the main source of management’s concern. On 10 March 1909, Queensland’s Deputy Postmaster General, H.B. Templeton, wrote to country postmasters that “complaints are becoming frequent respecting want of attention and incivility on the part of male Telephone Attendants.” Postmasters, he warned, “will be held responsible for any remissness on their part in this respect.” He directed them to “take measures to secure from the male attendants such satisfactory and efficient service as will obviate all cause for complaint.”8

In the cities and larger centres, the need for a uniform supervisory structure presented itself to management as a choice between the Instrument Fitters and the specialist monitors and

7 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP341/1, 1906/3748. 8 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP341/1, 1910/3075.

96 supervisors drawn from the ranks of the switchboard staff. In the Melbourne metropolitan area, Instrument Fitters supervised the telephonists; in Sydney exchanges, the specialist supervisors were in control. Management opinion was divided over the issue. The Victorian Deputy Postmaster General took the view that for exchanges other than Central or Main, “male officers who have passed through the ranks, or who possess a close knowledge of instrument fitting, are likely to be more satisfactory as Supervisors than those who have been recruited from a purely operating staff.”9 In contrast, his counterpart in New South Wales concurred with a report from that state’s Electrical Engineer, J.Y. Nelson, that “there is no question that the most suitable officers are obtained from the traffic portion of the staff.”10

The latter argument seems to have won the day, possibly because it helped clarify management thinking on the benefits of segmenting the workforce into primary and secondary labour markets along gender lines. Nelson skilfully drew attention to the efficacy of separating telephone traffic work from the mechanical and other areas of responsibility. On the one hand, he insisted that “years of training as Instrument Fitters would be lost to the Department” if these workers were placed in charge of exchanges. More presciently, he argued that appointing supervisors from the ranks of telephonists “would also limit the avenue of promotion of attendants who have no mechanical bent and would consequently not be suitable for transfer to the Mechanical Branches.”11 Under Nelson’s plan the very attribute that made for an effective monitor or supervisor – a specialised knowledge of the switching process – would ensure those who held the position had nowhere else to go in the Department. A stable regime of control in the exchanges would rest on the fact that monitors and low ranking supervisors were part of the same labour market ghetto as the telephonists.

Tight control was also imposed through a strategy of breaking the labour process into discrete parts governed by an array of detailed regulations. As noted in the previous chapter, from 1901 instructions and rules were introduced to cover most work practices.

9 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP341/1, 1909/2262. 10 ibid. 11 ibid.

97 The aim was to achieve optimum performance through a ‘scientific’ approach to organising humans as part of the work process.12 As was so often the way in management strategy, the leading ideas came from abroad. In 1905 John Hesketh returned from a tour of the United States and Europe where he had investigated the latest developments in telephony and telegraphy. His report shows the impact of the current trends in managerial control:

If an operator is over-loaded, she cannot give a good service to all the subscribers. On the other hand, if she is under-loaded, she gets ‘slack’, and gives inefficient service. Between the two extremes of over and underload there is an efficient mean, varying with the class of service.13

Determining an efficient loading, of course, depended upon the standard of service. Hesketh argued that on the basis of his investigation of what was attainable in any “well- conducted telephone system”: I. All calls should be answered within an average of five seconds. II. Connexion should be completed with the called subscriber – If connected to the same exchange – in 30 seconds If connected to another exchange joined by junction lines – in 35 seconds If connected to another exchange by toll lines, periods varying with the traffic over such lines. III. On the conversation being concluded, and the proper signal given, it should be possible to call the exchange again in 10 seconds.14

12 There is a case that these measures represented one of the earliest examples in Australia of ‘scientific management’, a movement initiated in the 1890s by American engineer Frederick W. Taylor. The rise of Taylor’s ideas in Australia is normally dated from the 1910s but there were definitely aspects of Taylorism in Hesketh’s practice of breaking down tasks into constituent elements which were then measured by the clock and codified as instructions and time standards to maximise efficiency. Telephonists’ bodies were also measured to ascertain the optimal balance between reach and dexterity. For an account of the rise of scientific management in Australia, see Christopher Wright, The Management of Labour: A History of Australian Employers (Oxford: Oxford Univ Press, 1995), p. 26-8. 13 Reports by John Hesketh, Electrical Engineer, PMG Dept, Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers, Vol. II, 1905, p. 1466. 14 ibid.

98 On the strength of such formulas, a revised set of operating instructions was introduced in 1906, and in 1909 telephonists were issued with a list of standardised replies to subscribers, leaving them with little opportunity for exercising any discretion on the job, even in their interaction with consumers of the service.15 Set responses, much later known as standard phrases, were to become a feature of operating work for the rest of the industry’s history and a forerunner of the automated and voice recognition technology of the current era.

Finally, the close supervision and the rules of the job were brought together in a punitive regime that provided line managers and their superiors with a schedule of penalties to wield against anyone infringing the regulations. It was the severity and pettiness of this form of discipline in the face of telephonists’ efforts to deliver a high quality service despite the obvious organisational and technological limitations beyond their control that most inspired a sense of injustice in the exchange room. “There have been times,” complained Lillias McLeod, “when it has appeared that the administration of the exchange aimed at detecting the attendants in faults rather than in assisting them to give the best possible service.”16

The attendants singled out the use of the disciplinary Departmental Regulation 40 as a particular bone of contention. Its provisions for laying charges against staff and fining them were used widely, often vindictively. In a hierarchical organisation which encouraged punitive financial sanctions as a mechanism for ensuring absolute compliance from its switchboard workforce, Regulation 40 was an inevitable source of tension in the relationship between telephonists and their supervisors. William Fitzpatrick made the point succinctly: “regulation 40 puts a subordinate officer in the hands of a superior officer, who may show some spleen against him.”17 Vindictive supervisors aside, applying such a weapon against staff who committed minor breaches under pressure from overwork was unjust by definition. Even displaying one’s humanity could result in a fine, as Edith Jones discovered to her cost. Jones claimed to hold a world record for answering 780 calls in an hour, yet early in her career she too was fined. “My chief offence was talking and smiling,” she recalled in 1909.18

15 PMG Dept Files, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP341/1, 1910/3075. 16 1910 Royal Commission, p. 1739. 17 ibid., p. 1771. 18 Ibid., p. 1766.

99

Life on the Boards, Central Telephone Exchange, Brisbane, 1906. (NAA: Image J2879, QTH30)

First Unions

Few telephonists would have demurred with Fitzpatrick’s comment that Regulation 40 “has perhaps done more to cause bitterness and ill feeling than any other similar regulation.” 19 It also provoked resistance. The first known association of female telephonists, the Women Telephone Attendants’ Association (WTTA), was formed by Sydney exchange workers on 22 April 1907 so that, in the words of Lillias McLeod, “The girls as a body could fight the injustice inflicted upon them by an officer who has since been removed to another state.”20 His name was Mr Monaghan and he was said to have gloated, “Now we have Regulation 40, we will put the fear of God into your hearts.” According to McLeod, “He did more than that, he put the fear of man into our hearts as well.”21 Fear, however, was a catalyst to action. Monaghan’s practice of luring telephonists into breaches of the regulations and then

19 ibid., p. 1767. 20 ibid., p. 1749. 21 ibid.

100 fining or in some cases dismissing them galvanised support for a collective response.22 His transfer to Melbourne was celebrated as a victory for the Association, the first for exchange workers. As McLeod demurely put it, “He found that the girls in Sydney had obtained their weapon of defence, and, perhaps, he thought the better course was to retire.”23

Other early successes proved more elusive as the Association struggled with the effects of the broader departmental crisis. In response to the heavy telephone traffic through the Sydney Central Telephone Exchange in 1906, the Department adopted the ad hoc solution of installing an auxiliary switchboard which the workers argued would disorganise traffic even further. Despite protests from the Association the board was erected, leading to worse conditions for telephonists:

After the erection of the auxiliary board the Department found it necessary to bring on a special staff of the smartest attendants in the exchange. These girls worked 22 weeks from 9 to 5 pm, and at the end of that period were so broken down in health that they had to go off on sick leave. Although they protested in the first instance the girls showed their loyalty to the Department by working the auxiliary board until they broke down in health.24

Two years after the Association’s formation, its President Mildred List expressed the view that it had not succeeded in forcing the Department to consider attendants’ grievances in a more serious light.25

Still, some representations by the Association were successful in achieving changes which alleviated the strain. The Association convinced management that details of callers only - not the subscribers called - should be recorded, thus substantially reducing the workload per call.26 And their forceful appearance at the 1910 Royal Commission suggests they remained determined:

22 ibid, p. 1760. 23 ibid, p. 1750. 24 ibid., p. 1740. 25 ibid., p. 1765. 26 ibid., p. 1758.

101

McLeod: For general protection we came together, as we believe union is strength. Question: Has it proved so?

McLeod: It has. That officer [Monaghan] said we would rue the day we formed an Association, but that day has yet to come.27

By 1910, the Association had 160 members and President List was confident the forty or so non-members “intended to join.”28

As a collective with an organising impulse grounded in the exploitative experiences of the workplace, the union’s members sought to give meaning to their grievances by drawing on the ideology of the anti-sweating struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the telephonists, sweating took on a precise definition. Lillias McLeod referred to the telephonists’ conditions as worse than sweating but she clearly meant conditions on the job rather than levels of pay. “We have not raised any objections on that score [salaries], and in that respect the attendants are quite contented with their lot,” she told the Inquiry.29 But the system that allowed telephonists to be fined up to 11s out of a weekly salary of 12s 6d and the physical conditions in telephone exchanges, she maintained, would fail the provisions of Shops and Factories Act if they were to be applied.30

Telephonists’ sense of injustice as sweated workers was heightened by the manifest unfairness of blaming them for systemic failures beyond their control. In their eyes, their importance to the enterprise stood in stark contrast to the powerlessness they experienced on the job. This too places these pioneer unionists of telephony in the anti-sweating tradition. Typically, workers in the sweated trades found themselves outside the structures, protective arrangements and even the physical sites of regulated industry. They were often constructed as the Other vis a vis the unionised, mostly male workforce employed in

27 ibid., p. 1760. 28 ibid., p. 1765. 29 ibid., p. 1762. 30 ibid., p. 1764.

102 registered factories, mines, ports and offices. They were, by definition, ghettoised.31 Although government-employed telephone exchange workers were not part of the sweated trades in this sense, they shared with the archetypal sweated worker a position of powerlessness and ostracism in a secondary labour market, symbolically devalued despite the value they produced. This contradiction between powerlessness and ostracism, on the one hand, and indispensability on the other weighed heavily on telephonists, giving their allegations of mistreatment a sharp ethical dimension. On a moral standard of fairness, they felt they were right to see themselves as victims of sweating, in some cases quite literally:

During the summer months the telephone attendants are almost overcome with the heat, and covered with perspiration, and cannot get a breath of fresh air or a cool breeze. We are not allowed to take our collars off under Regulation 40. If during that season of the year the staff were to collapse, the commercial business of Sydney would be paralyzed.32

McLeod returns to the indispensable role of telephonists repeatedly in order to emphasise the injustice of their treatment. She concedes that monitors could lend a hand on the boards but in rush periods, she insists, “the attendant is the only hope, and is the salvation of the Department.”33

These workers’ sense of ghettoisation, of otherness, was also sharpened by the gender segmentation of the switchboard workforce which at first encouraged women and men to organise separately. There were in fact two telephone exchange unions in Sydney. In 1903 the male telephonists from branch exchanges in Sydney founded the New South Wales Telephone Exchange Association. The exact circumstances of its formation are unknown but its representatives’ evidence to the Royal Commission indicates membership was open to male attendants, monitors and supervisors. In those years there were still more men than

31 Jenny Morris, ‘The Characteristics of Sweating: The Late Nineteenth Century London and Leeds Tailoring Trade’ in Angela V. John (ed), Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 1800-1918 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 96-7. 32 1910 Royal Commission, p. 1746. 33 ibid., p. 1752.

103 women working on exchanges in metropolitan Sydney. Of the 500 attendants, 286 were men.34

Male supervisory staff could be found in all exchanges day or night. Seventeen male and only seven female monitors were based at Sydney Central Exchange in 1909 and most supervisory staff in the 27 metropolitan branches and numerous country exchanges were men.35 Among the telephonists, the women were concentrated in the Central Exchange (male attendants generally worked in Central only at night), while most of the men were based in the branch and country exchanges. Consequently the main strength of the men’s Association lay outside Central. In 1908 it had 221 members including 40-50 in the country districts.36

This gender-inflected vertical and horizontal segmentation was evident in the different sets of issues raised in evidence by the two unions at the Royal Commission. Whereas the women’s Association concentrated on the pressure cooker atmosphere in Central Exchange, the men’s Association President, William Fitzpatrick, dealt more with branch exchanges and issues arising from nightwork. Potentially the most damaging point of divergence lay in their respective views on disciplinary matters. The female telephonists’ strong stand derived from their position as victims of the notorious Regulation 40 while the men’s Association’s more nuanced attitude to discipline reflected their broader classification coverage of both the victims and the immediate perpetrators among the monitors and supervisors. This faultline between supervised and supervisors would remain a feature of telephone exchange workers organising throughout their history even after a combined union was formed.

In 1910, however, both Associations were at pains to appear conciliatory and united in public. Lillias McLeod argued that female monitors were more severe than their male counterparts, adding that her Association had no grievance towards monitors: “Our only trouble is that we are overworked.”37 For his part President Fitzpatrick emphatically

34 ibid., p. 1176. 35 ibid., p. 2057. 36 ibid., p. 1766. 37 ibid., p. 1762.

104 endorsed the Royal Commission evidence from the women’s union and condemned the impact of Regulation 40 on all attendants.38 Both found common ground in their complaints about obsolete equipment, staff shortages, poor amenities and Departmental hostility towards unionism.

No evidence has been found of exchange workers forming separate associations in other states at this time. That Sydney was home to the best-established if not the only telephone exchange unions prior to the outbreak of the war is not surprising. Conditions in Sydney were particularly tough. Although staff in Sydney Central Exchange worked fewer hours per week than their intercity counterparts, this did not adequately compensate them for the greater intensity of their work. According to the figures of Sydney Telephone Manager William Blackstone, in 1909 attendants in Perth answered 68 calls per hour, in Hobart 71, Brisbane 113.27, Adelaide 122.3, Melbourne 126 and in Sydney 145.16.39 Telephonists themselves claimed that in busy times some officers in Sydney Central answered 400 calls per hour. In addition they were required to record details of calls, deal with faults and respond to reports.

As much as if not more than other main exchanges Sydney Central Exchange resembled the industrial regime of the factory system, characterised by a large concentration of workers performing the same repetitive tasks in shifts and subject to speed-ups, managerial harassment and other forms of exploitative pressure. A common set of problems among workers labouring in close proximity provided the soil from which a collective workplace identity could grow. It took root in opposition to management in general as the source of the problems but it could easily take the personalised form of indignation with particular representatives of the Department such as the infamous Mr Monaghan. Anger with an individual became the catalyst for creating a collective will from a collective identity centred on the notion of sweating.

Sydney’s role in pioneering switchboard unionism may also have been influenced by the broader industrial context. The city had been a stronghold of craft and industrial unionism

38 ibid., p. 1766, 1767. 39 ibid., p. 1176.

105 in the late nineteenth century, it was a centre of the class upheavals of the 1890s, and its industries and labour traditions were crucial to the reformation of strong national working class organisations from the turn of the century.40 Such a combative urban working class culture in all likelihood was the source of Lillias McLeod’s slogan, ‘in union is strength.’ But it was a defiance engendered by shared alienation on the job that would compel her and her colleagues to test the slogan in practice, ensuring their place in history as the pioneers of telephone exchange unionism in Australia.

A National Union Takes Shape

The organisational, technological and financial crises revealed by the 1910 Royal Commission persisted into the second decade of federation despite initiatives to unify and upgrade the service. When the first complete balance sheet and profit and loss accounts for the Department were produced in 1912-13, they revealed a total departmental deficit of ₤407 102 and a loss for the telephone branch of ₤221 758.41 The problem continued into the war years. The telephone branch did not record a profit until 1916-17, and even then it was touch and go, the surplus amounting to a mere ₤17 234.42

Postmaster General Josiah Thomas analysed the stagnation as “largely the outcome of the bad system which was taken over by the Commonwealth at the time of Federation, and of the starving of the service for several years since that time.”43 The problem, as management saw it, was that they were not free to act according to the requirements of the Department. If Treasury was not prepared to subsidise the expansion, upgrading and maintenance of the nation’s postal, telegraphic and telephonic services, the PMG Department needed pricing structures that would allow it to become self-sufficient. Department Secretary Oxenham complained that in the telephone branch the rates, “which are much lower than in other parts of the world where anything like similar conditions prevail, are insufficient to make

40 Raymond Markey, In Case of Oppression: The Life and Times of the Labor Council of New South Wales (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1994), pp. 31-6, 71-6. 41 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1912-13, p. 10. 42 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1914-15, p. 30; 1915-16, p. 17; 1916-17, p. 13. 43 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1910-11, p. xii.

106 the service self-supporting.”44 By the end of the war, relations between the PMG Department and the Treasury had deteriorated even further, the Postmaster General William Webster referring in his annual report to Treasury’s “systematic starvation policy” which he contended was “mainly responsible for the position existing today.”45

All the while, demand for telephone services continued to rise. The number of connected telephones increased from 32 767 in 1901 to 102 654 by the end of 1911, and the number of exchanges from 116 to 927.46 In July 1907 trunk services commenced between Melbourne and Sydney and a trunk line between Melbourne and Adelaide was opened in 1914. Wartime shortages and continuing Treasury parsimony curtailed growth over the next four years, leaving the Department with a huge unmet demand at war’s end. By mid 1920, the number of connected telephones stood at 224 000, well over double the 1911 total. In 1919-20 alone, a record 18 728 telephones were added to the network, yet a backlog of 11 000 applicants remained unconnected.47

Under the direction of Electrical Engineer Hesketh, the flat rate system of telephone charges was gradually replaced with a measured rate system designed to bolster revenue. Superficially this amounted to a shift from Treasury subsidies to a user pay regime. But in practice the move to reduce a subsidised service by shifting costs to the subscriber entailed intensifying the exploitation of switchboard operators who now had to record more details of each call. This occurred in conjunction with a more generalised intensification of work often described in the most benign of bureaucratic language. “Every effort is being made to promote efficiency, and thereby reduce expenditure,” declared Secretary Oxenham in 1913. Telephonists reported a marked increase in workloads and levels of responsibility and skills. When Justice Powers of the Arbitration Court inspected telephone exchanges in 1917, he concluded “that during the busy hours at the Central telephone Exchanges, no other officers in the Public Service are made to work at the same pace, or under the same

44 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1912-13, p. 11. 45 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1918-19, p. 27. 46 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1911-12, p. v. 47 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1919-20, p. 19.

107 pressure as the telephonists.” 48

The drive to maximise the Department’s return on its investment in labour spurred Hesketh to embark upon a new investigation of the merits of automatic telephone switching equipment. His thinking was characteristic of management’s attitude at the time. The 1911 national census revealed there were 1173 female and 845 male ‘telephone officers’ operating the telephone network across the country.49 For Hesketh, this workforce was merely a problem for which automatic switching provided a solution. His 1912 report emphasised the role of automation in minimising labour costs and maximising control over the labour process:

The question of staff has a very important bearing in arriving at a decision as to adopting an automatic switching mechanism. In this regard, not only the cost, but also the difficulty of discipline and the difficulty of obtaining an adequately trained staff immediately the necessity arises must be taken into consideration. Calculations as to the cost of the staff present no difficulty. The weighing of the associated questions of discipline and recruiting is not so easy. Whatever the causes may have been, the fact is pronounced that in the Commonwealth Telephone service, the difficulty of obtaining a well-disciplined staff is increasing.50

Trials of the first public automatic telephone exchange began in Geelong on 6 July 1912. By 1924 the Department boasted 20 automatic and three semi-automatic exchanges, servicing nearly 20 per cent of the total subscribers connected.51 Although the intervening years witnessed an absolute increase in telephonists, as a proportion of the subscribers serviced, their numbers in fact declined. In 1911 there was one telephone exchange staff member per 50.8 subscribers, by 1921 the ratio was roughly 1:72.52 The process of

48 Commonwealth Arbitration Reports, 1917, p. 300. Hereafter CAR. 49 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1911. Vol. 1, Statistician’s Report, pp. 1390 & 1492. 50 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1912-13, p. 36. 51 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1923-24, p. 15. 52 Ratios are calculated from subscriber figures provided in 1911 and 1920 PMG Department annual reports, and occupation statistics from 1911 and 1921 Commonwealth Censuses.

108 obliterating first skill then labour itself was to be a continuing theme of the history of telephone exchange workers, culminating in the massive job losses of the 1980s and 1990s.

Governments and the Public Service Commissioner also helped hold down expenditure on labour by pegging wages. Despite rises in the cost of living, the maximum wage for telephonists in 1917 languished at the rate set in 1908, and the 1917 minimum wage was still at its 1911 level.53 As Gerald Caiden explains, wage pegging was part of a service- wide crisis:

The pegging of salaries…by the Act and Regulations, the hardening of the increment system, the 1904 classification, the devices of proportional grading and the lack of promotional opportunities, especially in positions below £200, bad physical working conditions, long hours, regular unpaid overtime, and the de facto reduction of leave and other privileges…had contributed to the decline of the Service relative to its position at federation.54

Commenting on the furore generated by staff evidence to the 1910 Royal Commission, Prime Minister Deakin remarked, “Nowhere have we had such a large body of public servants as discontented with their present lot and future prospects.”55

The Fisher Labor Government which came to power in April 1910 responded by passing the Arbitration (Public Service) Act 1911, for the first time allowing public service associations to submit claims to the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration for the determination of awards, thereby countering the power of the Public Service Commissioner to set the wages and conditions of public servants. Although initially opposed by some Associations which feared the impact of industrial arbitration on their more genteel modes of operation, the new act contributed to a period of growth and consolidation of public service unionism. By the outbreak of World War One, ten unions

53 1917 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 2, copy held by the National Office of the CEPU, Melbourne. 54 Gerard E. Caiden, Career Service: An Introduction to the History of Personnel Administration in the Commonwealth Public Service of Australia 1901-1961 (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ Press, 1965), p. 100. 55 Quoted in ibid., p. 107.

109

had registered and four had decided to apply.56

The intensifying pressure inside telephone exchanges and the wider public service encouraged a new surge of organising amongst telephone exchange workers, culminating in 1914 with the creation of Australia’s first federal telephonists’ union. Details of its early history are sketchy as the first minute books appear not to have survived. A short history in typescript held by the CEPU claims the founding meeting was held at the Ribiras Hotel in Bourke Street, Melbourne.57 The dates on surviving membership application forms completed by the founding members suggest the inaugural meeting was held shortly before September 1914.58 It was registered in Melbourne on 14 November as the General Division Telephone Traffic Officers’ Association and renamed the Commonwealth General Division Telephone Officers’ Association on 6 January 1915. 59 It was usually known as the Commonwealth Telephone Officers’ Association (CTOA), even before it officially adopted the shorter title in 1924.

The CTOA’s rules gave it coverage of all classifications of telephone exchange workers – operators, monitors and supervisors, men and women. It was nominally a national organisation although in an era without mass air transportation, distance played a decisive role in ensuring the federal structures would be dominated by Melbourne where the PMG Department’s headquarters was located and remained even after Canberra became the national capital. Melbourne’s domination was formalised at the Association’s first conference, in June 1916, where, in the shadow of the union’s first Award hearing, delegates from West Australia, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland resolved that the Victorian Branch Committee should be the Executive

56 ibid., p. 114. 57 Author unknown, History of Association, p. 1, typescript held by the National Office of the CEPU, Melbourne. 58 Applications for CTOA Membership, held by the National Office of the CEPU, Melbourne. 59 Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No 95, 21 November 1914, p. 2562; No 2, 9 January 1915, p. 10.

110 Committee and its officers be given full power to act in the interests of all States in the Commonwealth.60

Although the CTOA covered both sexes, it was linked to an earlier history of Victorian public service women organising separately to men, partly in reaction to the men’s reluctance to accept women in ‘their’ workplaces and ‘their’ unions. In 1900 Victoria’s female telegraphists had formed the Victorian Women’s Post and Telegraph Association (VWPTA), while the state’s female teachers founded the Victorian Lady Teachers’ Association (VLTA).61 As the first Commonwealth Public Service Bill passed through parliament, agitation by the VWPTA and the Women’s Political Association (WPA) led by Vida Goldstein had secured amendments to allow equal pay for women and a minimum wage of ₤110. Anticipating attempts to reduce the minimum rate at the Senate stage of debate, the VWPTA reminded all Senators of their obligation “to insist that the Federal Government shall be guided by justice, not by custom and prejudice, in fixing the salaries of its employees.”62 A little earlier Goldstein had convened a meeting of Commonwealth and Victorian government employees to discuss the formation of a general association of female public servants. The idea was obviously well-received for three weeks later, on 20 August 1901, Goldstein and her comrades launched the Victorian Women Public Servants’ Association (VWPSA). Their stated object was “to protect the interests of women employed by the Government – Federal or State – and to provide opportunities for women public servants throughout Victoria to meet together, and confer upon questions relative to the various departments in which they are engaged.”63 The VWPSA played a significant role in maintaining pressure on Parliament as the Public Service Bill continued its slow route through both houses, and it remained an active force in equal pay struggles prior to the war.64

60 Minutes of 1st CTOA National Conference, 29 May-2 June 1916, held by the National Office of the CEPU, Melbourne. All CTOA, CTPOA and ATPOA National Conference, Federal Executive and Federal Council Minutes cited in this thesis are held by the CEPU National Office in Melbourne. 61 Claire McCuskey, The History of Women in the Victorian Post Office, MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1984, p. 95; Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ Press, 1993), p. 31. 62 Australian Woman’s Sphere, September 1901. 63 ibid. 64 The Woman Voter, 15 July 1913, p. 1.

111 The VWPSA may have been the direct antecedent to the CTOA. According to an account of telephone exchange unionism published in The Woman Voter, the VWPSA eventually became a purely commonwealth public service organisation “which ultimately developed into the Commonwealth General Division Telephone Officers’ Association.”65 Although this claim of a direct connection between the two organisations has not been corroborated, it is entirely plausible. Telephonists were prominent in the VWPSA from its inception; Miss Oakley, the founding Treasurer, was from the telephone branch of the PMG Department, as were two of the first committee members, Misses Jacobsen and Milliard.66 Of the larger groups of Commonwealth female public servants covered by the organisation, the telephonists would have numerically dominated by 1914, and only they had no national organisation of their own. Reconstituting the VWPSA as a national telephonists’ union could have made perfect sense. Even if in fact one organisation was not formally transformed into the other, it is likely that the CTOA would have attracted many of the best telephone exchange unionists active in the VWPSA. If not the formal successor, it was a logical next step and natural home for a generation of unionists who had cut their teeth on the equal pay and suffrage struggles of first wave feminism.67

It is not known whether activists from the earlier New South Wales associations played a role in the new national union. On 1 December 1914 an organisation calling itself the New South Wales Women Telephone Attendants’ Association applied to the Industrial Registry in Sydney for registration.68 Was this the same WTTA formed in 1907? Did it subsequently become the state branch of the CTOA? The answer to both questions is plausibly yes but the evidence is not conclusive. The New South Wales delegate to the inaugural CTOA conference in 1916, Mary O’Sullivan, was not among the WTTA witnesses to the 1910 Royal Commission. On the other hand, one prominent Sydney-based member of the CTOA, Edward Graham, was notable in 1910 for his opposition to the earlier associations. He gave evidence to the Royal Commission on behalf of a group of 42 monitors who had broken away from the New South Wales Telephone Exchange Association.69

65 The Woman Voter, 5 July 1917, p. 3. 66 Australian Woman’s Sphere, September 1901. 67 McCuskey, History of Women in the Victorian Post Office, p. 118. 68 Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No 97, 5 December 1914, p. 2617. 69 1910 Royal Commission, p.1726, 1775-76.

112 Whatever its antecedents, the CTOA as a national body represented a departure from both the Melbourne tradition of feminist unionism and the earlier industrial unionism of the Sydney telephonists. On the one hand, the introduction of arbitration for public servants seems to have served as the catalyst for a clean break from the VWPSA’s brand of quasi-political unionism. While the CTOA’s first conference was opened by Labor Party parliamentarian Frank Anstey, it was apparent the union would eschew overt politics. The second conference, held in November 1917, even went so far as to resolve “that no political, sectarian or other improper debate be allowed at Association meetings or in Association rooms.”70 The union’s founding activists were unified around a commitment to arbitration as the primary strategy for regulating the terms under which telephone exchange workers sold their labour power and the conditions under which that labour power was consumed.

On the other hand, if the CTOA represented unionism of a purely industrial kind, it was a different shade of industrialism to that which had characterised the WTTA. The latter was a response to the relations of exploitation in Sydney Central Exchange and its campaigns were imbued with the sense of immediacy and unmediated power of the class antagonists as they confronted one another in the workplace. The union articulated issues of oppression and exploitation in an embodied form – capital was a bullying manager, labour a particular shift of sweated workers. The CTOA, by moving onto a national plane and embracing arbitration, was compelled to create an apparatus and a mode of articulation which muted the power and the passion of the workplace. Union activism became a specialised function of those with expertise in industrial advocacy, creating a tradition of commitment and self-sacrifice by the few rather than self-activity by the many as a hallmark of its pattern of industrial behaviour. It is illustrative that the first person made a life member of the association was not a shopfloor activist or even an elected official but the union’s first industrial advocate, Frank McCart.71 Such was the spirit of dedication to leadership, it was not unusual for office bearers to serve decades. The first federal president, the indomitable Jane Roddy, served as either president or federal secretary for 33 years, long enough to witness the rise of Kathleen Hester to federal secretary in 1942, a position she held until 1965. The earlier WTTA tradition of looking to the rank and file

70 Minutes of 2nd CTOA National Conference, 12-15 November, 1917. 71 Federal Executive Minutes, 14 June 1916.

113 disappeared for decades. When it eventually resurfaced in the1970s it would herald a spectacular revival of unionism in Australia’s telephone exchanges.

Securing a National Award

The CTOA’s first plaint to the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, filed initially in an interim format on 12 May 1916, dominated Association affairs for over twelve months.72 As an Award was the legal bedrock of unionism in the Australian industrial relations system, it is not surprising that the case became the union’s raison d’etre, the fulcrum around which most decisions and most organising activity revolved. Soliciting proposals from interstate, formulating a list of demands covering wages, penalty payments, hours and a comprehensive range of other conditions, and arranging witnesses, were tasks which, in a fledgling union, invariably became vehicles for purposeful organising and branch building. The project was the catalyst for the union’s inaugural federal conference, held at the Austral Salon in Melbourne from 29 May to 2 June 1916.

Among a number of decisions focused on plaint matters, the conference resolved to ask Frank McCart to conduct the case, and Federal Executive subsequently appointed him Executive Officer. McCart was afforded “all the rights and privileges” enjoyed by members of the Executive Committee, and granted travelling expenses and salary plus 15/- per day whilst on interstate work and 5/- per day for conducting state business.73 Such costs were to be funded by a levy of 10/- per member struck specifically for the purpose, and augmented by an anticipated increase in membership due to the statutory union preference clause which would restrict the application of the Award to union members. Conference actively used this to the union’s advantage by encouraging telephone exchange workers to join beforehand:

All persons eligible to join the Association and who have not availed themselves of the privileges before the Award is made should pay contributions as from the time

72 CAR, 1917, p. 295; Federal Executive Minutes, 11 May 1916. 73 Federal Executive Minutes, 19 July 1916.

114 the Association was inaugurated in each State, or from time of appointment to the service, if such appointment were made after the formation of the Association.74

Federal Executive subsequently bolstered the incentive by imposing a ₤3.3.0 entrance fee on any person joining the Association after the opening day of the hearing.75

As amendments and additions to the plaint were submitted from other states, pressure mounted on the Victorians. From 25 September the Executive resolved to meet weekly until the case was concluded.76 By 14 November they believed they had received sufficient input to hold a special executive meeting to discuss amendments.77However the final amended version of the plaint was not filed until 20 February 1917, following delays in the commencement of the hearing and a rift between New South Wales Branch and the Federal Executive.78

The May-June federal conference had placed formal control of the union’s federal affairs in the hands of the Victorian Branch. Confronted with the challenge of a national Award case to be heard by a Melbourne-based arbitration court and in opposition to a Melbourne-based employer, most Conference delegates believed it made sense to give the Victorians a clear mandate to act on behalf of the entire union, which they had been doing by default since 1914. The actual debate and vote on the resolution was not recorded but it would appear from subsequent events that there may have been at least some disquiet about the move. By November, concerns within New South Wales Branch that the case was unnecessarily dominated by Victoria hardened when the reality hit home that no hearings would be held in Sydney. New South Wales passed a resolution to send delegates to Melbourne, clearly with the intention of providing verbal testimony. A series of Federal Executive motions condemning the action, specifically on the grounds that they had not been consulted,

74 Minutes of 1st CTOA National Conference, 29 May-2 June 1916. 75 Federal Executive Minutes, 4 December 1916. 76 Federal Executive Minutes, 25 September 1916. 77 Federal Executive Minutes, 14 November 1916. 78 CAR, 1917, p. 296.

115 followed. The Victorians resolved to ignore any members who attended court without executive authorisation. 79

The dispute degenerated during December, with New South Wales refusing to back down and the federal body threatening to deny them any opportunity to supply evidence. Vice President Charles Pearson was despatched to Sydney with full powers to act as he saw fit.80 By the end of January, the executive appeared to have prevailed. A letter from lawyers Doyle and Kerr was sent to the New South Wales Branch, accompanied by the placatory sentiment that “the Executive has every confidence that the Supervisors had only the good of the case at heart.”81 Evidence from Sydney witnesses was heard in Melbourne. The reference to supervisors is the only hint that the specific grievance of New South Wales was a belief that certain sectional interests were not adequately represented in the plaint. Beneath the overt showdown between centre and periphery, the dispute may well have been yet another tremor along the classification faultline. In any case, it would not be the last time the union’s federal officials would earn the ire of the New South Wales branch. Sydney telephone exchanges, birthplace of switchboard operator unionism in Australia, would retain a reputation for feistiness for the rest of the century.

Executive also was frustrated by delays in hearing the case, to the extent of initiatiating protest resolutions from all branches as a means of pressuring the court. On 5 February Executive decided it would put “the matter be put before His Honor, Justice Powers, and failing a satisfactory reply a plebiscite be submitted to the Commonwealth.”82 The plebiscite proved unnecessary. The hearing commenced before Powers on 22 February.83 A sub-committee comprising Misses Roddy and Cruickshank and Messrs Pearson and McCart was appointed to run the case “with full power to act on all occasions.”84

79 Federal Executive Minutes, 27 November 1916, 4 December 1916. 80 Federal Executive Minutes, 16 December 1916. 81 Federal Executive Minutes, 8 January 1917. 82 Federal Executive Minutes, 5 February 1917. 83 CAR, 1917, p. 296. 84 Federal Executive Minutes, 19 February 1917.

116 Wages and hours lay at the heart of the plaint although it also covered sick leave, overtime, higher duties, public holidays, penalty rates, transfer expenses, appeal processes, first class travel, long service, district allowance, relieving allowance and Boards of Inquiry. These claims were in addition to the entitlements enjoyed under current arrangements secured at the time of federation.85

In keeping with the union’s preoccupation with sweated labour, one significant alteration sought was a reduction in hours and a uniform working day. The union requested an ordinary day that would not exceed six hours, regardless of the size of the telephone exchange or the differences in workloads between localities and times of the day. “We say one telephonist should not be called upon to work any longer hours than another.”86 Consistent with this argument, the union also claimed that no-one should work more than three hours without a break.

The central argument was health-related:

Q. Do you say that at the present time on account of the excessive hours of duty the health of the staff is bad?

A. Charles Pearson. I say it is not as good as it might be, but I do not say it is bad.

Q. Do you think a reduction of hours will give a better condition of health?

A. I believe it will assist.

Q. What have you to support that information?

A. The fact of telephonists breaking down at the switchboard.87

85 CAR, 1917, p. 298.

86 1917 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 116. 87 ibid., p. 117.

117 As witness after witness told of the damage done by excessive hours of intense switchboard work, management advocates tried desperately to discredit the evidence by resorting to sexist slurs and accusations of malingering:

Q. Mr W.J. Skewes, for Public Service Commissioner

Do you say every telephonist suffering from nervous breakdown would not do so had she been at some other occupation?

A. Mary O’Sullivan. Not altogether.

Q. Is it not characteristic of the sex to break down occasionally?

A. I have never known any girl outside the service who had a nervous breakdown.

Q. Have you known of a girl outside the Telephone Service who has not had a nervous breakdown?

A. Yes.88

After cross-examining O’Sullivan on her evidence of pro-departmental bias by the PMG doctor, Skewes made a new allegation:

Q. You realise that all over the world there is a certain proportion of malingerers?

A. Yes

Q. Would you say in a great service like that of the Post Office and the Telephone Exchange there is not also a proportion of malingerers?

88 ibid., p. 305.

118 A. There may be, but they would be treated as very bad cases, as far as I can see.89

Skewes’ final salvo on the matter of health ventured into questions of rationality and lifestyle:

Q. With regard to the communication from the Telephone Manager, the purport of which is a very large proportion of girls in the Department lead irrational lives, that is they do not take sufficient care of themselves in regards exercise, rests and meals; in your experience could not that statement be equally applied to girls in almost every other occupation in life?

A. It could be, I do not think there would be a great proportion of them.90

Justice Powers’ ruling on hours and breaks revealed a receptiveness to gender-inflected arguments but ironically, on the question of telephonists’ health, his own sexism was used against Skewes. “I think it is advisable,” stated Powers, “to allow breaks because girls, generally speaking, cannot continue to stand the strain.” In general he accepted the evidence of excessive, prolonged pressure as a problem. “I do not think any reasonable man could complain of delay in obtaining a reply to his particular inquiry if he saw the telephonists under the strain of answering 240 calls in addition to his own, in the space of one hour during the busy hours.”91 His sympathy, however, was not translated into concessions that satisfied the union. On the evidence, he saw no way to fix shorter or uniform hours, although he appealed to the Department to limit the hours to six in the Central Exchanges “as soon as it is proved to be practicable at a reasonable cost.”92 Management and the Public Service Commissioner subsequently found “no sufficient warrant” for such an alteration.93 Powers’ only concession on breaks was to allow

89 1917 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 313. 90 ibid., p. 314. 91 CAR, 1917, p. 300. 92 CAR, 1917, p. 310. 93 Commonwealth Public Service Commission Annual Report, 1917-18, p. 23.

119 telephonists in the Central City Exchanges a break after three and a half hours or two and a half hours if they were standing continuously.94

The claim for wage increases was the most striking feature of the plaint. In the case of a first year telephonist the claim for ₤84 per year amounted to a 115% increase on the existing rate, while the claim for an eighth year rate of ₤162 was an increase of 47% on the existing minimum for adults set by the Public Service Act. For first year monitors, a 27% increase was claimed, and for first year supervisors 36%.95 The claim was intended partly to address the failure of Treasury and the Public Service Commissioner to maintain real wages against a cost of living rise calculated to be 32.9% between 1904 and 1914. But the union also aimed to rectify what McCart argued was absolutely unfair treatment in the past in comparison with the treatment of clerical and professional officers. It was a work-value claim, calculated against the salaries paid to officers in other divisions of the service for a similar class of work, and against salaries paid by cable companies, insurance companies and banks.96

With women a majority in the telephone exchanges, the gendered principle of the basic wage was a problem for the union’s wage case. In Frank McCart’s opening address, he attempted to counter the likelihood of a wages outcome based on classifying telephony as women’s work, by stressing the number of married men in the union’s ranks. Generally, though, he avoided the issue of gender and emphasised work value. In evidence, Charles Pearson asserted the union was not claiming a different rate of pay for men and women in the service. His intention too seemed to be to support an implicit argument of equal pay based on comparative value.97 However Skewes did not miss the opportunity to press Pearson on the point, asking him to confirm that he was “only asking for the same rate as the woman.” (my emphasis) McCart intervened with the advice that “there is a claim in our Plaint for married men.”98 This additional, gendered claim, of which no documentation can be found, demonstrated the weakness of the union’s position. Although it served as a hedge

94 CAR, 1917, p. 300. 95 CAR, 1917, p. 304. 96 CAR, 1917, pp. 2-3. 97 1917 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 184. 98 ibid., p. 187.

120 against the likelihood that Powers would classify the jobs as women’s work, it conceded the point that their principal claim was only based on work value and the cost of living, and did not rely on the additional ‘family needs’ criteria that would apply if it were a claim made on behalf of married male workers under basic wage principles. By default, the union was conceding that telephony was women’s work which meant it could not attract a higher ‘breadwinner’s’ wage based on a rate deemed sufficient to maintain a family. McCart played to his only strengths, the decline in telephonists’ real wages since federation and the undervaluing of the work.

Justice Powers’ ruling, handed down on 22 June 1917, revealed the sexist assumptions underlying the basic wage framework:

In deciding upon the salaries to be paid – as most of the employees are over 21 years of age – the first thing to be decided is whether the work is man’s work or woman’s work. This is necessary for two reasons:

1. Because the Court does not fix any lower rate for a woman’s wage than for a man’s, if the work done is man’s work; but if the work done is recognised as woman’s work the wages fixed are those determined by the Court as fair, on the evidence submitted, for the class of work in question. 2. Because if the work is man’s work, the minimum wage to be fixed for an adult is a wage sufficient to keep a man, his wife, and a family of three children in reasonable comfort. If it is woman’s work, a wage sufficient to keep a single woman in reasonable comfort.99

Thus the fiction was perpetuated that women as a group were not family breadwinners while men as a group were, even though many women supported families and many men did not.

99 CAR, 1917, p. 306.

121 No independent, objective criteria was presented for classifying jobs as men’s or women’s, the Court relying instead simply on existing practice. As Powers put it:

…the work is clearly woman’s work, not only in Australia, but it is recognised as such in England, Canada, the United States, and in Europe. In Australia, when a lad who is appointed a telephonist reaches 21 years of age he is, as soon as possible, transferred to other work. I therefore treat it as woman’s work, and as the ₤110 is in my opinion sufficient to keep a reasonable woman in reasonable comfort I have only to consider the value of the work done in determining the salary to be paid for it.100

Such reasoning neatly avoided the uncomfortable question of how telephony came to be feminised when originally men outnumbered women in most exchanges. As already noted, the PMG Department arbitrarily constructed the gender segmentation specifically to maximise control and minimise costs, and then set about maintaining this arrangement by undervaluing the work. Powers himself reported that the Department claimed a telephonist was competent in six to twelve months whereas the union insisted it took two years for switchboard competency to be obtained.101 Nevertheless he “felt bound to consider the evidence given by the departmental officers, as to the value of the work.” What these officers had “proved”, however, was no more than that telephonists’ work in Europe and the English-speaking world was also arbitrarily valued much less than clerical or assistants’ work.102

Powers’ logic, then, was doubly inequitable in that he both excluded women from the breadwinner category and deferred to management’s undervaluation of the skills component of switchboard labour-power. His ruling simply conferred state legitimacy on the Department’s strategy of feminisation, entrenching the segmentation as a fundamental mechanism for extracting maximum surplus value from telephone exchange labour and

100 ibid., p. 306. 101 ibid. 102 ibid.

122 undermining the possibilities for women to gain promotion to other areas of the Department.

The negative implications of the women’s work ruling were only partially tempered by the wage increases awarded which fell well below the claim. Powers accepted the Departmental evidence that telephone work was valued at much less than clerical or assistants’ work.103 He raised first year telephonists’ wages from ₤39 to ₤54 per annum, and sixth year wages from ₤110 to ₤126. He awarded a further ₤6 to telephonists with more than six years’ experience who performed trunk line work in the central exchanges. First year monitors’ wages jumped from ₤132 to ₤144, while first year supervisors’ pay was were lifted from ₤168 to ₤180. Although these were substantial increases, especially for the lowest paid, their basis in an unfavourable comparison with clerical or assistants’ work affirmed management’s general aim of turning exchanges into ghettoes of women workers.

For the union, however, securing the first Award to cover telephone exchange employees was a milestone in the journey to organise and generate a collective subject from the variegated backgrounds and experiences of the ‘hello girls’. Its shortcomings were overshadowed by the immediacy of its contribution to improving remuneration and terms of employment, to consolidating a more favourable balance of power, and above all to strengthening the organising impulse among exchange workers. More than an industrial contract, it was tangible evidence that greater control over working life was possible, that workers collectively could refuse the status of automaton imposed by management.

Union Building from Above and Below

The organising impulse flowed in two directions; inwards across the ranks of exchange workers and outwards towards other associations. The earliest evidence of inter-union cooperation is the decision of the Federal Executive to send Misses Cruickshank, Roddy

103 ibid., p. 307.

123 and Messrs McCart and Graham to a meeting of all associations on 9 January 1917.104 On 8 February the next year it sent a delegate to another meeting of public service unions convened by the Clerical Officers’ Association.105 Wartime inflationary pressures and wage pegging ensured salaries headed the agenda, and the unions emerged from the conference with a plan to launch a sector wide campaign to improve the basic wage. In May the CTOA formally resolved to cooperate with the campaign, and a levy was struck to provide financial assistance.106 The campaign itself encouraged the associations to consider ways to facilitate ongoing cooperation, culminating in a proposal to establish a permanent Grand Council of Associations organised around an affiliation structure. In March 1919 the CTOA Federal Executive agreed to affiliate and the September National Conference in Brisbane endorsed the proposal, launching a long and close relationship with the peak body of public service unionism.107

The internal apparatus constructed by the CTOA, meanwhile, reflected the imperatives of operating within an arbitration system. It privileged the role of a dedicated core of leaders skilled in administration and advocacy. However it did not neglect certain basic mass mechanisms such as a members’ journal and a network of dues collectors. On the initiative of the Federal Executive, the 1917 Conference resolved to establish a journal, “The Telephone Echo”, to be edited by Miss E. Yorke in Victoria.108 The first issue was published in early 1918 and a copy distributed free to each member.109 From the beginning, however, the union’s fragile finances plagued the journal. A plan to pay the editor an honorarium was put on hold110 although a sum of ₤10 was found to purchase a typewriter.111 Federal Executive agonised over the options for financing their publication, which in the end came down to a choice between seeking paid subscriptions from interested members or providing it to every member as a service funded by their dues.112 The system

104 Federal Executive Minutes, 8 January 1917. 105 Federal Executive Minutes, 5 February 1918. 106 Federal Executive Minutes, 27 May 1918, 24 June 1918, 26 August 1918. 107 Federal Executive Minutes, 25 March 1919; Minutes of 3rd CTOA National Conference, 22 September 1919. 108 Minutes of 2nd CTOA National Conference, 12-15 November 1917. 109 Federal Executive Minutes, 8 January 1918. 110 Federal Executive Minutes, 5 February 1918. 111 Federal Executive Minutes, 23 June 1919. 112 Federal Executive Minutes, 11 March 1918 & 25 March 1918.

124 of voluntary subscriptions was trialled in the lead up to the 1919 Conference and then endorsed by Conference which also directed each branch to appoint an organiser to collection subscriptions. Conference resolved that the union pay organisers 1/- from each ₤1.0.0 subscription they collected, and the editor, by now Miss O’Sullivan, an annual salary of ₤26.113 No surviving copies of the journal have been found.

Establishing a viable financial regime preoccupied the union throughout the postwar years. The Executive took action to penalise branches who fell overdue with their federal dues and the collection process itself was streamlined by a decision to transfer collected money through bank deposits rather than by money orders.114 The key to financial viability, however, was continuing recruitment and organising. The largest boost to union coffers derived from the combined effect of statutory union preference and securing the first Award. Because Award provisions applied only to Association members, the union was assured of a significant surge in membership numbers, even without an active recruitment strategy. However it seized the opportunity by offering other inducements to join prior to the case being heard.115 Fee collectors were appointed in larger workplaces to recruit and ensure that dues did not fall into arrears.116

In an era when dues were the primary if not the only source of revenue and direct workplace contact the most systematic and efficient method of fee gathering, collectors were the financial veins of the union. But they were pivotal in other ways too. Even when their activity was limited to money gathering, they added far more to the union than simply a healthier bank balance. They served as transmission belts for union information and purveyors of collectivist ideology. On a week-to-week basis they represented the organising impulse in its most selfless form.

Organising was evident on a broader level too and not only as an internal process of channelling issues, support and funds upwards to the union’s leaders and advocates. It took the form of agitation aimed directly at management. Minutes refer to a letter of protest

113 Minutes of 3rd CTOA National Conference, 22 September 1919. 114 Federal Executive Minutes, 2 October 1917. 115 Federal Executive Minutes, 4 December 1916 & 18 September 1917. 116 Federal Executive Minutes, 27 November 1916.

125 signed by all monitors and forwarded to the hierarchy,117 and to a mass meeting of telephonists to discuss grievances.118 The issues were not recorded. The tentative sense of unmediated power felt in the exchanges, the testing of limits, can be gleaned from the responses to questions from branches. Miss O’Sullivan of New South Wales was to be advised to place the matter of the automatic exchange room before the Department and failing a favourable result to call in the Health Officer.119 Aggrieved Victorian members were encouraged to organise a petition of protest against temporary appointments.120 South Australia Branch was to be informed that officers could not refuse transfer to Broken Hill but could object.121

Measured against the archetypal standards of industrial militancy, these incidents were not powerful but they reveal their own power in the context of women (and men) struggling to assert their collective subjectivity against pervasive societal sexism and relations of production that posited the machine as subject and them as object of the production process. As an embryonic expression of the will to resist, the implications of these activities were as every bit as powerful in the circumstances as strikes and other articulations of industrial unionism were for other sections of the working class.

Direct agitation sometimes went beyond these limits too. In May 1919 the union demanded an inquiry into the unsatisfactory workplace conditions and workloads in telephone exchanges.122 By late June, exasperated by departmental stonewalling, the union had declared it would not cooperate with any inquiry and intended placing its grievances before parliament.123 On 5 November 1919, against the background of the federal parliamentary election in which the maladministration of the Commonwealth Public Service was an issue, about 200 Sydney telephonists held a mass meeting over the failure of the Department to increase staff numbers to a level commensurate with the expansion of services. Many similar grievances had been heard before in royal commissions and plaint hearings but this

117 Federal Executive Minutes, 14 August 1916. 118 Federal Executive Minutes, 11 September 1916. 119 Federal Executive Minutes, 31 August 1916. 120 Federal Executive Minutes, 2 October 1916. 121 Federal Executive Minutes, 26 August 1918. 122 Federal Executive Minutes, 19 May 1919. 123 Federal Executive Minutes, 23 June 1919.

126 was an unprecedented public airing of dissatisfaction. The chairperson of the meeting explained she “thought it was time that the public knew what the telephone girls had to put up with.” She herself had answered 369 calls in an hour during one period of that day although regulations stipulated an acceptable hourly workload of 187 calls. The meeting unanimously resolved “that the members of this union from to-morrow, and until our grievances are redressed, abide by the regulations to the letter.”124

The next morning the work–to- rule commenced from 7am in the Sydney central exchange and from 9am in the suburbs. The press reported difficulties in raising the city exchange, the union reported their members had been working at “a comfortable rate during the day.” Postmaster General William Webster publicly attacked the action, describing the workers involved as “a small and unreasonable section of the services.” In a pitch aimed both at winning public support and undermining the workers’ unity by appealing to the principle of loyal service, he argued “the people who pay will be penalised in a manner which I do not think the majority of the officers would support.” His general tone, however, was defensive. He revealed that under pressure from the union he had ordered the provision of extra staff and facilities be expedited. He insisted that in light of postwar difficulties they should be prepared to “suffer [him] a little longer.” 125

The union executive countered Webster’s comments with a statement strongly rebuking his plea and asserting the justice of their case:

Now we are asked to bear with the department a little longer. We have two strenuous and weary years of hard work waiting, killing ourselves, and penalising the general public. We consider that at this stage we are quite justified in taking the action we have. Mr Webster says our grievances are political. We do not live in a political world; his world is quite a different one to ours.

Our PMG asks us to consider the people who employ us. We desire to ask, Is the consideration to come from our side alone? We consider that we are giving the

124 Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November 1919, p. 6. 125 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 November 1919, p. 6.

127 people who employ us every consideration, and instead of so much talk it would be better to see our PMG carrying out the duties appertaining to his high office during his stay in Sydney by assisting the telephonists to give an honest and efficient service.126

Sydney telephonists, the pioneers of telephone exchange unionism, were again showing how the union could be an effective weapon of defence. On this occasion, their agitation did not go unheeded interstate. Melbourne telephonists expressed support for the executive’s statement by implementing their own work-to-rule on 9 November.127

Non-Militancy in Context

Such mass direct action, however, was not common. The CTOA’s leaders and members generally preferred arbitration and top-down advocacy. For this they could easily be categorised in conventional terms as conservative or even collaborationist. In turn they might be easily dismissed as typical white collar unionists, exemplifying a pattern found in all unions representing workers of this ‘type’ where type is an attribute of class location, function or status. George Strauss offered the classic formulation of this position as early as 1954:

In recent years white-collar work has become increasingly routine, opportunities for promotion have declined, and in many cases wages have dropped below the factory level. White collar workers…often feel that their legitimate expectations have been disappointed. Then they turn to unions. However…because these middle-class dreams are not completely dissipated, white-collar unions have a character of their own…128

Reproduced enough, such a reading tends to become an axiomatic truth in which the contextualisation of a union as ‘white collar’ is sufficient to ‘explain’ the union’s behaviour.

126 Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 1919, p. 12. 127 Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1919, p. 6. 128 George Strauss, ‘White-Collar Unions Are Different’ in Richard Hyman & Robert Price (eds), The New Working Class? White-Collar Workers and their Organizations: A Reader (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1983), p. 205.

128 From this perspective it is militant white collar behaviour that becomes the problem requiring explanation, as evidenced by the substantial body of analytical work in the 1970s and 1980s accounting for white collar militancy through theories of proletarianisation, deskilling and the like.129

If we start from the position that certain white collar workers employed by the state have always been proletarian, the problem is inverted. It is non-militancy that must then be explained, the assumption being that antagonistic relations of production invariably compel workers to engage in conflictual action against their employer. As argued in chapter one, classical and neo Marxists alike have often ‘solved’ this problem by drawing upon notions of false consciousness or consent, both in essence variants of the thesis that advanced capitalism rules by ideological enslavement. The history of telephone exchange workers points to a more complex, contradictory reality. Despite telephonists’ less than subversive responses to their predicament, the fact they formed a union and continued to press for regulation of their working conditions in itself represented a stand against the absolute imperatives of telephony as a revenue/cost driven enterprise. The CTOA, for all its non-militancy, did increase the cost of labour at the expense of the Department’s revenue. It was always a fetter of sorts.

This in itself points towards the need for a model of the CTOA’s behaviour that breaks with the binary opposition of labour as either enslaved or in revolt, an object of manipulation or a subject in control of its own destiny. Labour is both object and subject. It is never the hegemonic force in capitalist society but it is always resistant. This approach opens the way to seeing workers’ responses to oppression and exploitation on a continuum, and opens up the notion of resistance itself to meanings that are silenced by a narrow focus on conflictual opposition. Resistance takes many forms. In response to their predicament in the wage labour regime, workers create and cohere around their own affirmative work ideologies in opposition to the ideologies of the

129 See R.M. Blackburn, Union Character and Social Class: A Study of White-Collar Unionism (London: B.T. Batsford, 1967); Clive Kenkins & Barrie Sherman, White-Collar Unionism: The Rebellious Salariat (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); Rosemary & Gareth Jones, White-Collar Proletariat: Deskilling and Gender in Clerical Work (London: Macmillan, 1984); Nicholas Abercrombie & John Urry, Capital, Labour and the Middle Classes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983); Desley Deacon, Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930 (Melbourne: Oxford Univ Press, 1989); Claire Williams, Blue, White and Pink Collar Workers in Australia: Technicians, Bank Employees and Flight Attendants (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988).

129 employer. These collective ideologies of the workplace are the basis of symbolic and practical class solidarity. They are the form which objective class interests take as an element of consciousness. While they arise ‘organically’ in the workplace, they are open to ‘outside’ worker ideologies which express workers’ class interests at a more abstract level, ideologies such as socialism and workers’ control. In addition, workers create and join institutions such as unions to address both their material deprivation and their lack of freedom and respect. Workers’ on-the-job cultures and their unions are class responses to the power of capital. But they do not necessarily give rise to class conflict. They can allow workers to compensate for or contest the wrongs inflicted by capital.

Conflict is the course of action least favoured by workers because, first, it involves risk; not only might it fail, its failure might provoke reprisals. The more workers have to risk materially and in social status, the more they are inclined to baulk at “making a stand.” Related to this, conflict usually involves becoming a ‘being in the world’ completely at odds with the bonds and values of the imagined communities with which workers are encouraged to identify. In nineteenth century Australia one such imagined community was the white or British ‘race’. Anglo-Celtic workers were invited to share in what Bruce Scates has called “the project of colonial racism” on the tacit understanding that what the racial in- group shared held far greater social merit than what divided it.130 In this paradigm class conflict could be construed as a shameful betrayal of race loyalty or status. Indeed, it was precisely this accusation that organised labour turned back against white pastoralists and shipowners who initiated a class offensive against workers in the 1890s: “picture the degradation of once more being mated with and thought less of than the Chinamen and Kanakas; do not forget that this is freedom of contract,” warned the Labor Bulletin in 1891.131 The link between racial exclusiveness and class harmony continued with Federation, with the Brisbane Worker warning its readers in 1901 that the alternative to a White Australia was “a mongrel nation torn with racial dissension, blighted by industrial

130 Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1997), p. 162. 131 Quoted in Joe Harris, The Bitter Fight: A Pictorial History of the Australian Labor Movement (St Lucia: Univ of Qld Press, 1970), p. 82.

130 war, permeated with pauperism, and governed by cliques of lawyers and bankers and commercial and financial adventurers.”132

As Venus Green has acutely observed, a similar notion of racial superiority was used by the Bell Corporation in the United States to stigmatise militant unionism as an affront to the respectability of ‘white lady’ telephonists.133 Not only did the operators risk their jobs if they took strike action, they were faced with the consequences of breaking social taboos which were central to upholding the intangible social rewards of their position. When the psychological and physical stress of conflictual action is added to the equation, it is should come as more of a surprise when workers choose not to accept peaceful co-existence with their employer. 134

Bourgeois ideology or strategies of cooption cannot prevent workers’ resistance. They operate instead, in the first instance, to diminish the likelihood of resistance becoming conflictual. Put another way, the employing class and the state in advanced capitalism attempt to increase the threshold of toleration, below which resistance serves to deliver psychological solace and material and social compensation, above which it moves into conflictual forms or even outright revolt against the injuries inflicted by capitalism. From this vantage point, the task of understanding the moderation of telephone exchange workers (or any worker group) and their union is an historical rather than a sociological one. It is to identify the historically contingent factors applying to telephonists that decreased the likelihood they would engage in conflictual (or militant) action, compared to other sectors of the working class. Conversely, periods of militancy can be examined with reference to factors pushing telephonists past the threshold of toleration.

132 Worker, 30 March 1901, quoted in Lenore Layman, ‘Fighting Fatman Fetteration: Labour Culture and Federation’ in Mark Hearn & Greg Patmore (eds), Working the Nation: Working Life and Federation, 1890- 1914 (Annandale: Pluto Press, 2001), p. 68. 133 Venus Green, Race On the Line: Gender, Labor, & Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2001), pp. 87-88. 134 Today, ironically, liberal humanism plays a similar role to racial ideology. Conflict (even of a non-violent kind) is considered uncivilised and debasing, a legitimate activity only if it is undertaken in defence of civilisation itself. People feel motivated to “get on” despite their differences; they are encouraged to seek a common humanity and common interests. This can motivate worthy behaviour such as racial respect and opposition to war but it also encourages people to tolerate class-riven societies, to see them as yet another instance of pluralism or as an unfortunate but inevitable state of affairs for which equality of opportunity provides a satisfactory individualistic solution.

131 For telephonists in the 1910s militant action carried substantial risks; not only was there an abundance of potential replacements in the labour market, there was the prospect of more intangible losses. In a union movement heavily influenced by craft-union ideology, it was common even for workers within low-paid workforce ghettoes to construct their own work identities and status from whatever facets of their labour power they believed might differentiate them from everyone else. This was not simply a bargaining strategy. It also met a social and psychological need to resist the dehumanisation of labour deployed in capitalist relations of production; a worker’s response to “the loss of self” referred to by Marx.”135

Where technically valued skills were not at a premium, workers tended to draw upon notions of efficiency, accuracy or service to recover a sense of self. In the case of telephonists, social respectability was also emphasized as a way of both differentiating themselves and asserting an inherent dignity. Whereas American operators drew heavily upon racial ideology, their Australian counterparts constructed a positive sense of self out of the value of the work and their status as public servants. Operator Mary O’Sullivan alluded to both facets when cross-examined in 1917 on why she did not leave the Department if conditions on the switchboard were as bad and promotional opportunities as limited as she claimed:

Q. Still, thousands of girls are badly wanted in outside employ? A. Not at work I can do; I might get some class of employment which I would not be prepared to take. Q. Is it the fear you would not get as good pay outside as you do at the present time? A. Not altogether that.136

O’Sullivan was on the witness stand for her union as an openly proud agent of resistance. But her concern with holding on to a certain ‘class of employment’ obviously weighed on her mind. Not only did she have much to lose from engaging in conflictual methods of resistance but conflict itself may have sullied the respectability she felt was her due.

135 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)’, in Loyd D. Easton & Kurt H. Guddat (eds), Writings of the Yound Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 292. 136 1917 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 307.

132 On the positive side, O’Sullivan and her fellow unionists appeared optimistic about the brand of unionism they had embraced. In numerous small but poignant occasions, even non-militant unionism had proved useful in the lives of CTOA members, as the following exchange at the Royal Commission hearings illustrates:

Q. Reference was also made to the case of Miss K. Was it not proved that out of 13 charges against her, that seven or eight of them had no foundation as far as she was concerned?

Witness Pearson. It was admitted there was some doubt.

Q. And if that young lady had not had an association behind her she would not have been able to bear the expense of an appeal to the Court and so she would have been put down as a guilty person?

A. Yes.137

These comments also allude to the possibility that the sense of ostracism conferred by telephonists’ own anti-sweating ideology encouraged them to take comfort in a form of unionism that brought them in from the outside to a legitimate place at the arbitration table. In place of sweated conditions overseen by a rapacious and uncaring department the CTOA promised independent regulation of the workplace. And in delivering its members from industrial apartheid and giving them industrial citizenship, the union conferred recognition. “One could easily imagine the spare forms to be automatic figures,” wrote a journalist about the women in the Melbourne exchange in 1887.138 Against this management fantasy, the CTOA, for all its ‘moderation’, produced and celebrated real people: capable, decisive, independent, non-compliant, self-confident, class conscious in a Laborist fashion, and insistent upon recognition of their skills which they rated higher than those needed in other areas of female employment.

137 1910 Royal Commission, p. 180. 138 Town and Country Journal, 10 September 1887, quoted in Telecom Australia, The Palace of Winged Words, 1980, p. 8.

133 There were dangers of course in the CTOA’s modus operandi. State legitimacy carried a price. As we have seen, the arbitration court, especially in its gender-bound 1917 Award, further entrenched the telephonists’ghettoisation. This in turn encouraged individualist approaches to the problem of labour market segregation. At the conclusion of the second federal conference in November 1917, a deputation met with the Public Service Commissioner with the following demands:

1. That officers of the Telephone Traffic staff have an opportunity of qualifying for the positions of Traffic Officer and Traffic Inspector.

2. The question of promotion of telephonists to the positions of Assistant and Typist.

3. Officers acting in a higher position for twelve months.

4. That permanent female officers be allowed to compete at clerical examinations.139

These clearly were not the demands of workers prepared to relinquish their sense of humanity by becoming disposable “automatic figures.” But they were demands that risked conferring legitimacy on the notion of individual advancement as the most satisfactory solution to poor conditions. Over time this careerism would indeed become a significant source of union weakness. But during the war and immediate postwar period, it was the sweated conditions themselves that were the main object of the union’s reforming efforts. Through arbitration the workers felt confident they could humanise their workplaces and win more adequate remuneration without risking all. With governments scrambling to contain the wider working class revolt against war austerity, these were indeed propitious times for winning concessions. The times, however, were already changing. There were processes and strategies in play, some initiated by the union, others by management, that

139 Minutes of 2nd CTOA National Conference, 12-15 November, 1917.

134 would soon leave the CTOA exposed to capital’s cooptive power. Unionism in telephone exchanges was about to enter a new phase.

135 Chapter Four Incorporation, 1920-1938

A superficial survey of the CTOA in the years from 1920 to the eve of World War Two would fail to detect any substantial changes in its style or character. The union began and ended the period appearing to conform to an already settled pattern of public service unionism. A small band of part-time and mostly honorary officials guided a largely silent mass of unionists through a succession of arbitration cases and campaigns over general public service conditions, usually in alliance with like-minded associations and a conservative peak body. These larger events were interspersed with countless local level negotiations over amenities, rosters, individual grievances and so on, and enlivened occasionally by the outbreak of rows between particular leaders or branches.

Such an historical description is accurate enough. But it lacks explanatory power. It assumes what needs to be explained, and explains only insofar as the point of investigation is to locate workers and their unions on a militant-tamecat or radical- conservative spectrum. As the previous chapter sought to demonstrate with respect to the efforts of telephone exchange workers to form unions and secure Awards, easy generalisations about white collar conservatism cannot do justice to labour as a resisting subject. Conversely, in the period of CTOA history covered in this chapter, the conservative label provides an inadequate starting point for exploring the actual processes through which worker resistance was directed towards non-conflictual forms of thinking and acting. For CTOA members the period 1920 to 1939 was certainly a triumph for conservatism if by that we mean a retreat from the class energy which was intermittedly evident in the formative years of telephone exchange unionism. But it was actually more than that. These years cannot usefully be represented as a simple pendulum swinging even further away from militant labourism. Fundamentally, 1920 to 1939 was a period of incorporation when the union came to be identified with the values and strategic goals of the corporation, leaving its majority membership without an effective, independent voice.

The chapter will track the process of incorporation through three developments: the retreat of the wider labour movement in the face of ruling class attacks and economic

136 Depression, the Department’s turn to welfarist labour management strategies and the rise of a career service ideology in union affairs. The third of these, it will be argued, was connected to the growing hegemony within the union of a relatively small group of long-serving, older staff, most of whom had worked their way up the limited hierarchy to become senior telephonists, monitors or supervisors. This group redefined the union in their own ideological image as loyal functionaries, in the process weakening the ties that bound the rank and file to their own industrial organisation.

The officials were far from united themselves, however. The reputation for troublemaking established by New South Wales exchange workers soon after Federation and re-affirmed by their 1919 work-to-rule action, was kept alive in the 1920s by their leaders’ frequent disagreements with the union’s Federal Executive. Given that Sydney telephonists had laid the foundation for the anti-sweating tradition, it may even be argued that the hegemony of career-oriented officials was built partly on the defeats inflicted by the federal body in the 1920s on the New South Wales recalcitrants.

The shift from an emphasis on sweated conditions to a preoccupation with careers was evident in the union’s campaigns. The chapter analyses in some depth the union’s 1920 and 1924 plaint cases, for not only did these expose the workplace conditions endured by exchange workers and the inner thinking of arbitration court judges, management advocates and labour representatives, the cases represented the high water mark of anti- sweating ideology in the union’s history. By the mid 1930s the day to day regime of production that had sustained the anti-sweating critique was attracting less attention from the union’s leaders than the mechanisms and rewards for career advancement. The mass of telephone exchange workers who would not benefit from better career prospects were left to their own devices as workload pressure, wage cuts and economic insecurity closed in on them. Despite some important victories on hours and rest breaks in 1937, by the end of the 1930s the union was struggling to justify its relevance to the great majority of its members.

137 Management IR Strategy in the 1920s

Management entered the 1920s with an expanding and profitable telephone network and a growing sense of disquiet about what the rise of public service unionism meant for the future. Following closely on the bitter wartime struggles over military conscription, Australia finished the war years and began the postwar period with a wave of strikes and protests over wages, conditions and the right to unionise. In 1917 almost 4.7 million working days were lost through industrial disputes, a figure unsurpassed until the wages revolt of 1974. In 1919 working days lost in strikes again soared, reaching 4.3 million.1 Amidst this generalised industrial upheaval, revolutionary ideas initially circulated by the Industrial Workers of the World gained a wide currency in the ranks of organised labour, and, as word of the Russian revolution spread, socialism re-emerged as a force in Australian politics. For their part, Australia’s rulers responded by encouraging a Red menace hysteria and giving succour to far-right organisations drawing street-level support from demobbed and unemployed soldiers.2

The public service was not immune from the anti-communist hysteria. In late 1918 Postmaster General William Webster launched a strident attack on the unions within his own sphere of influence. “Though the service as a whole has been loyal,” he wrote, “there are indications of an active propaganda which threatens its well-being and that of the staff, and which will need to be vigorously dealt with if we are to carry on in such a manner that the public, who pay, have a right to expect.”3 He cited his counterpart in the United States postal service who had declared that postal unions “are fast becoming a menace to public welfare, and should no longer be tolerated or condoned.” It was obvious, intoned Webster, that if unions in his Department did not walk warily, he would be forced to recommend similar sanctions.4

1 Wray Vamplew (ed), Australians: Historical Statistics (Broadway (NSW): Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987), p. 165. 2 See Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance (St Lucia: Univ of Queensland Press, 1988); Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914-18 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge Univ Press, 1995). 3 PMG Annual Report, 1917-18, pp. 33-4. 4 ibid.

138 Along with the big stick approach, the Department also responded to rising militancy and labour costs with co-optive strategies, again taking the lead from American employers.5 As Venus Green records, in 1919 the President of the Bell monopoly AT&T, Theodore N. Vail, wrote to the president of each regional Bell System company instructing them to implement employee representation or company unionism “to re-establish pre-war loyalty and efficiency.”6 Green notes that managers’ reports between 1920 and 1930 “confirmed that by the use of the employee representation discussions, management had been able to reduce wages, take back bonuses and other monetary benefits, and, most importantly, increase work loads and introduce new technology with little overt resistance.”7

Webster’s outburst in 1918 indicates he obviously kept a close watch on developments in the United States. And so, it seems, did his managers. As early as 1905 Chief Electrical Engineer Hesketh had toured the States inspecting automatic telephone exchange equipment. In the 1920s a regular correspondence developed between the Australian Postmaster General’s Department and the AT&T Company on a range of subjects including conditions of and procedures for managing telephonists. On September 1921 AT&T’s Chief Statistician, S.L. Andrew, complied with a request from Australian management to supply a comprehensive report on service conditions of telephone operators in the Bell System. When it failed to arrive, Andrew sent it again in May 1923.8 This generous provision of “management intelligence” to their Australia counterparts was reciprocated by an equally generous willingness to adopt the benefactor’s labour control techniques. On 3 September 1924, Andrew wrote to the Australian Department’s Director, H.P. Brown, with a list of standard phrases used by his company’s operators. Within months Brown had them incorporated into the new set of instructions for Australian telephonists.9

5 PMG was not alone in this. Labour militancy during and after the war stimulated a number of Australian employers to experiment with welfarist strategies developed in the United States. See Bradley Pragnell, ‘“Selling Consent”: From Authoritarianism to Welfarism at David Jones, 1838 to 1958’, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2001, pp. 185-187; Nikola Balnave, ‘Industrial Welfarism in Australia, 1890-1965’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2002, pp. 56-68; Gail Reekie, ‘”Humanising Industry”: Paternalism, Welfarism and Labour Control in Sydney’s Big Stores, 1890-1930’, Labour History, No. 53 (Nov 1987), pp. 1-19. 6 Quoted in Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor and Technology in the Bell System, 1880- 1980 (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2001), p. 137. 7 ibid., p. 142. 8 Correspondence between Bell Corp and PMG Department, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP216/1, 1926/1048. 9 Correspondence between Bell Corp and PMG Department, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP341/1, 1924/12676.

139 After the war, moreover, there was a noticeable shift in Department policy in line with the thinking behind American company unionism.10 The main instrument for the strategy was the Australian Postal Institute (API). The Institute was Webster’s idea. He officially launched it in Melbourne on 15 October 1918 as a state-based body. Its stated purpose was to organise training and activities aimed at “staff welfare.” The more important aim was to undermine the influence of militant and radical unionism. He and senior management hoped that by engendering a view of the Department as an organisation committed to its staff’s wellbeing and individual advancement, the Postal Institute (PI) would draw workers away from the pernicious class-based propaganda of radical labour. Indeed the Institute was set up partly as a direct response to unions forming their own Postal Institute during the war. When the unions asked for Government assistance it was refused. Webster subsequently appointed Edwin Dean to organise an official version. As Dean later recalled, “the Institute formed by the unions was already functioning. My aim was to create an organisation which would absorb this Institute and also make good provision for future expansion.”11

He was true to his word. The unions’ alternative body disappeared and the Department- sanctioned Institute was given one whole floor of the Melbourne GPO, complete with library, a gymnasium, a billiard room and provision for, as Webster told Parliament, “other innocent games.”12 Measures were implemented to quarantine the Institute from radical contagion. Webster reported that although control of the organisation lay with the members, “a veto is….reserved to the Minister to safeguard the Institute from any danger that might threaten its usefulness.”13 Similar Institutes were launched in Sydney in 1920, Brisbane in 1923, Perth 1924, Adelaide 1925 and Hobart 1928. In 1945 the six organisations fused to form the API.

The purported innocence of the Postal Institutes belies the industrial and political context in which they were established. In Webster’s own annual report for 1917-18, he draws a sharp distinction between organisations which “interfere with the discipline and administration of

10 Slavish devotion to American methods was not so easy when it came to union-busting. The Postmaster General’s Department was constrained by its status as a government body. Webster could rail against the militants organising within his empire but he had to rely on his Cabinet colleagues to supply him with the means to crack them. While the Hughes’ Government was no friend of Australian workers, it showed little willingness to launch a frontal assault on unionism, despite its own Red menace hysteria. Company unionism on the US model, moreover, was not a viable option in Australia’s more regulated arbitration system. 11 APO Magazine, Vol. 14, No.5, Feb-Mar 1968, p. 10. 12 ibid. 13 PMG Annual Report, 1917-18, p. 34.

140 the Department” and those which “advance the social and mutual welfare of their members.” He then reports the creation of the first PI, leaving no doubt as to the kind of organisation it was expected to be. He reminds his readers that the PI was introduced for the benefit of staff and the Department. In contrast to the indiscipline encouraged by certain “disturbing elements”, the Postal Institute is linked specifically to the value of a harmonious workplace and a disciplined, compliant workforce. The ₤3,321 spent setting up the first PI, Webster intones, “is the greatest investment any great organization of industry can make, and the return will be reflected in the character and work of the staff generally, making the work of supervision more effective and less irksome.”14

The Postal Institutes thus played an ideological role akin to that of the company unions in the United States Bell System. Bell workers were encouraged to see themselves alongside their bosses as members of one big community. In particular, the metaphor of the family, Green explains, “became a cornerstone for the company’s control over workers in the years following World War 1.”15 We find a similar invocation of community in H.P Brown’s address to the Victorian Postal Institute in August 1927. He told his audience:

I would like you to realize that our organization is not a machine. It is not an inanimate thing, nor can the members of the staff be regarded as cogs in the wheels geared to propel it forward. This great organization is a thing with a soul which functions with sympathy and understanding: it strives to serve and to utilize its resources for the benefit of the whole community.16

On the face of it this was a significant departure from the ‘scientific’ approach that had hitherto dominated management thinking. True scientific management of course prided itself precisely on its attempt to reduce workers’ productive activity to the level of an automaton. But in reality the labour process did not fundamentally change in the 1920s. The management shift was rhetorical only, aimed at mollifying workers, at “obscuring and securing” surplus value, as Michael Burrawoy would say.17 The Postal Institutes may have averred from the science of management in addressing the needs of the soul

14 ibid. 15 Green, Race on the Line, p. 137. 16 Lecture delivered by H.P. Brown at Victorian Postal Institute, 25 August 1927, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9, Box 14, 6415, p. 4. 17 Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 81.

141 but it was precisely because these needs could not be met in the work environment that such Institutes were considered useful. In this sense, employer welfarism and Taylorism were complementary management strategies.18 Whereas the latter addressed itself to the physical mechanics of maximum service, the former aimed to create a subjectivity of maximum service. Indeed service is a theme to which Brown often returns. For him, it was a concept measured by loyalty to the enterprise. Referring specifically to the telephone branch, he inveighed his listeners:

I need not emphasize the value of the service each one of us renders to the life of the nation when we share the privilege of contributing our quota to the provision, upkeep, and operation to this great public utility.19

As Raymond Williams reminds us, such a view offers a version of communality with all the trappings of servitude intact. “The idea of service, ultimately, is no substitute for the idea of active mutual responsibility, which is the other version of community. Few men can give the best of themselves as servants; it is the reduction of man to a function.”20 Yet this was exactly the philosophy underpinning the Postal Institutes. To the extent the PIs diluted any sense of class solidarity amongst workers and diverted them from acting through their unions to advance their class interests, the Institutes’ ‘innocent’ recreational pursuits and opportunities for self-improvement functioned to enmesh workers even tighter into the machine.

An empirical assessment of the impact of the Institutes on the ideas and self-identity of PMG workers is, of course, virtually impossible without sources which give us an insight into workers’ thinking. Unfortunately telephonists of the 1920s and 30s left few personal accounts of their views and attitudes. What we have instead is a record of declining conflictual behaviour across the PMG workforce in the period, alongside the rise of a unionism of career service which resonated strongly with the themes of the PI movement. And although an objective historical assessment might not be possible, the managers themselves certainly believed the PIs were worth the not insignificant impost on the

18 This is contrary to the conventional view that scientific management and welfarism were counterposed approaches, the former a “controlled-based” strategy, the latter based on procuring consent. See Pragnell, Selling Consent, p. 3. 19 ibid., p. 15. 20 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 317.

142 Department's budget. By the end of the 1930s, with PI membership reaching a record figure of 11 000, the Annual Report was claiming confidently that "the educational and social activities of the Institute bodies are of great value to the Department.”21

Of course, PIs and welfarism in general were directed at managing the ‘labour problem’. Eliminating the problem altogether was also a continuing theme of managerial practice in these years. In Brisbane in 1925 the Department opened the first major automatic city exchange, bringing to 22 the number of automatic exchanges in metropolitan areas across the country.22 In 1927 the first rural automatic exchanges were opened.23 But as ominous as these developments appear in hindsight, at the time they made little impression on the large telephone exchange workforce.

In fact it was not employer welfarism or new technology that would inflict the most obvious damage on the union in the postwar period; it was internal conflict generated by the sectional interests of the different classification groups, overlaid with federal-state tensions. Not for the first or last time, the segmentation of the workforce by occupational function and organisational structure would serve as one of management’s most powerful weapons against effective unionism.

Divisions to the Fore

Rank and file agitation during 1918 and 1919 over deteriorating workplace conditions continued to highlight Justice Powers’ failure in 1917 to provide for reasonable working hours and rest breaks.24 With the Department stonewalling on the union demand for staff increases and ruling out altogether any unilateral move to reduce the length of the working day, the union reasoned they could force the issues by securing a new Award which included a maximum weekly hours clause and a provision for more rests. This would immediately alleviate some of the strain on the job and compel the Department to employ more staff. Preparations began in January 1919 with a request to Frank McCart

21 PMG Annual Report, 1939-40, p. 25. 22 PMG Annual Report, 1924-25, p. 19. 23 PMG Annual Report, 1926-27, p. 19. 24 Responding to rank and file pressure in 1919, for instance, the union wrote to the Department and then to the Prime Minister about unsatisfactory working conditions in various telephone exchanges. Federal Executive Minutes, 19 May 1919, 23 June 1919.

143 to serve again as plaint officer.25 The National Conference meeting in Brisbane in September endorsed his appointment and also struck a levy for arbitration purposes.26

After the Conference, however, the relationship between the Federal Executive and the New South Wales Branch degenerated into bitter acrimony which caused serious disruptions to the preparation of the case and threatened the very future of the union. The hours clause in the claim was a major point of contention. In April 1920 the federal body resolved after a long discussion that they would claim a 37 hour week for workers in central and city exchanges and a 39 hour week for all others.27 Sydney Central Exchange staff understandably took umbrage at this because their state management had already agreed to a reduction from 37 to 34 hours for telephonists and monitors due to the “particularly distressing circumstances” at central exchange.28 In response to the Branch, the Federal Executive amended the claim to a 33 hour week for all workers in central and city exchanges and in other exchanges where the load exceeded 225 units, a measurement of workload which weighted the value of calls by their labour-intensity.29 This groundbreaking claim would have benefited all telephone exchange workers but it too fell victim to the increasingly vindictive internal dispute. To the outrage of the Federal Executive, it was revealed New South Wales members had written to the state manager and the arbitration court advising they were satisfied with 34 hours, a move which obviously undermined the union’s claim.30

There is circumstantial evidence that this act of sabotage may have been associated with the diverging interests of telephonists and monitors, on the one hand, and supervisors on the other. State Manager of the Telephone Branch, Victor Butler, later reported that only the lower ranks enjoyed the 34 hour week introduced by management in 1920. The supervisors, “at their own request” according to Butler, continued to work 37 hours.31 This reveals that although supervisors ostensibly had more to gain than telephonists from the union’s claim for 33 hours, only the former could have improved their

25 Federal Executive Minutes, 27 January 1919. 26 Minutes of the 3rd CTOA National Conference, 22 September 1919. 27 Federal Executive Minutes, 21 April 1920. 28 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 570. Held with Federal records, CEPU, Melbourne. 29 Federal Executive Minutes, 27 May 1920. 30 Federal Executive Minutes, 11 November 1920. The existence of the communication to the NSW State Manager was confirmed by him in evidence at the 1923 plaint hearing. See 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 572. 31 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 570.

144 situation by management agreeing to a counterclaim for 34 hours. A dispute with the union’s federal leadership may have been sufficient cause to push them into this course of action. Were the supervisors therefore behind the sabotage? An alternative explanation is that Sydney Central telephonists were convinced the union’s plaint had a low chance of success and would serve only to antagonise management who had the power to revert to the Award provision of 37 hours. This is supported by Butler’s claim that it was the telephonists who advised they were “satisfied” with 34 hours. It may also have been the case that both these factors were operating to unite Sydney Central staff in opposition to the federal leadership. What is certain is that the classification divide did play a role. When the Federal Executive suspended the New South Wales office bearers and appointed an interim executive in April, they demonstrated acute sensitivity to the issue, resolving that each grade be represented on the new committee.32 At the National Conference in October, the schism was all too evident. Miss Slatter from New South Wales moved that supervisors be debarred from membership of the Association but failed to obtain a seconder. A motion that a sub-section for supervisors in New South Wales be formed was withdrawn because such as body was already provided for in the rules.33

Overlaying this aspect of the conflict was a deep organisational grievance with the federal structure. Although the records are not explicit, the fact the tension between New South Wales and the Federal Executive erupted again in the context of preparing evidence and witnesses for a plaint, the most significant centralised activity pursued by the union in that period, suggests Branch dissatisfaction with the extent of power and control over union affairs exercised by the Melbourne-based federal body was another underlying reason for the dispute.34

32 Federal Executive Minutes, 21 April 1920. 33 Minutes of the 4th CTOA National Conference, 3-11 October 1920. 34 Several pieces of evidence support this contention. In January 1920 New South Wales Secretary Mr Porter resigned amidst complaints that Federal Executive was ignoring his communications and were pursuing the 1919 conference decision to affiliate to the Grand Council of public service associations. It would appear New South Wales either did not support the affiliation in principle or believed the Federal Executive was relying on the Grand Council to the point of compromising the union’s control over its own affairs both at national and state levels. To New South Wales, it seemed that yet another centralising body had emerged to siphon power away from the periphery. In response to the 1920 crisis, Federal Executive was willing to concede the point, resolving “that a conference be called as soon as the arbitration case is concluded, to revise the constitution with a view to having all states represented on the Federal Executive.” Federal Executive Minutes, 27 January 1920, 27 July 1920.

145 In August the Federal Executive despatched Messrs Pearson and McCarthy to Sydney to conduct fresh elections for the New South Wales’ Branch.35 They also investigated litigation but discovered, ironically, they had limited legal power to sue the Branch for payment of its arrears of affiliation fees and arbitration levies.36 Repeated threats to expel the Branch from the union also came to nothing. The Executive went so far as to instruct Pearson to interview the New South Wales Industrial Registrar about disaffiliating the Branch but then drew back from this precipice, realising they could not afford financially or politically to cut New South Wales adrift.37 Eventually, they were left no other option than a negotiated settlement in which most of the arrears were written off at the national conference held in October 1921. The gravity of the situation was evident in the decision to move the conference itself from Tasmania to Sydney.38

The conference salvaged some semblance of unity but the underlying tension between the centre and the largest peripheral grouping would remain, surfacing again from time to time within the federal structure. The schism also continued working its way into the leadership ranks of the New South Wales Branch itself, exacerbating tensions across the classification divide and polarising views on questions such as the relationship between branches and the federal body, and between the CTOA and the broader union movement in the public service and beyond. The truce between New South Wales and the Federal Executive lasted some three years but when it fractured again, in late 1924, it led to the formation of a second branch in Sydney, known as New South Wales Number Two, which enjoyed federal endorsement while Number One Branch had its bank account frozen and its leaders suspended.39 National Conference, meeting in Melbourne in December 1926, again shouldered the task of thrashing out a resolution.40 Number One Branch survived the conference and continued to function for over twelve months until finally relenting to a series of 1928 Conference resolutions to amalgamate the two branches.41

35 Federal Executive Minutes, 12 August 1920. 36 Federal Executive Minutes, 23 May 1921. 37 Federal Executive Minutes, 28 February 1921. 38 Minutes of the 4th CTOA National Conference, 3-11 October 1921 39 Victorian Branch Minutes, 12 January 1925, 9 November 1925. All Victorian Branch records are held by CEPU (Communications – T&S), Victorian Branch, Melbourne, unless otherwise indicated. 40 Minutes of the 6th CTOA National Conference, 7-17 December 1926. 41 Minutes of the 7th CTOA National Conference, 8-15 February 1928.

146 The 1920 Award

Amidst the internal upheaval, the 1920 plaint was finalised and heard by Arbitration Court Deputy President Mr Justice Starke who had taken over Public Service plaints after Powers’ departure on 30 April. Starke’s ruling on the case was one of the early indications of a pattern that soon led unions to conclude he was even less favourable to their side than Powers had been.42 His Award fell well short of meeting the CTOA’s claim on hours, providing instead for a weekly maximum of 37 hours for main exchanges (other than Perth and Hobart), 39 for Perth, Hobart, suburban and ten provincial exchanges, 44 for all other provincial exchanges and 46.5 for all exchanges where the work did not justify the appointment of a permanent telephonist. For at least one exchange, Geelong, the decision meant an increase from 39 to 44 hours per week. The union fared better with its claim for more frequent breaks, Starke agreeing to allow a ten-minute rest or a meal break in Central City Exchanges after three hours, half an hour less than under the old Award.43

On wages, Starke also took his lead from his predecessor. Under the gendered wage fixing principles laid down by Powers in his 1917 Award, the union had pursued cost of living adjustments in separate claims for men and women, prior to the formulation of their second plaint. The claim for the men, which was not opposed by the Commissioner or the Department, was based on the ‘war bonuses’ recently awarded by Powers to other unions. The quanta of the bonuses were determined by a sliding scale of “reasonable” needs assessed according to age, workplace dress requirements, marital status and numbers of dependents.44

The women’s claim, based ostensibly on the same criteria, was opposed by management representatives and only partially accepted by Powers. The union claimed a bonus of ₤16 for adult single women receiving from ₤110 to ₤126 per annum and a bonus of ₤12 for those receiving more than ₤126. In outlining his decision, Powers stated he had no doubt from the witnesses’ testimony that they did not live on ₤126 and relied on family

42 See Gerald E. Caiden, Career Service: An Introduction to the History of Personnel Administration in the Commonwealth Public Service of Australia 1901-1961 (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ Press, 1965), p. 132. 43 Commonwealth Arbitration Reports (hereafter CAR), Vol 14, 1920, pp. 734-35. 44 CAR, Vol 12, 1918, pp.650-51.

147 support. But he was not convinced they could not live comfortably on this amount. He pointed out that one of the six witnesses insisted on “batching by herself” some distance from her workplace at Windsor, another insisted on living at St Kilda where board was expensive, and all were in the habit of buying expensive clothes.45 His assessment of “reasonable comfort” revealed the breadth of juridical skill required to rule on women workers’ livelihoods. “The most expensive dresses,” he proclaimed, “are not generally the most attractive. The witness whose clothes cost the least was dressed quite as attractively as any of the witnesses, and her nineteen and six penny hat looked as well if not better than the ₤1 10s. hat of another witness.”46 He decided though that inflationary pressures since his 1917 determination justified a ₤6 ‘bonus’ for the lower paid group.47 Those earning more than ₤126, however, received nothing apart from the consoling thought that he had not awarded the better paid men a bonus either.48

Starke set base wage rates in the new Award along similar lines. A schedule of salaries was set which applied equally to adult men and women, ranging from ₤120 to ₤132 for telephonists, ₤150 to ₤180 for monitors and ₤186 to ₤216 for supervisors.49 Junior rates, also replicating Powers’ original schema, were differentiated by gender. Twenty year- old males, for instance, would be paid ₤120 and their female counterparts would receive ₤108.50

A second schedule, modelled on the war bonus scheme, awarded additional allowances to meet cost-of-living increases, the quanta determined by gendered categories of need. Married adult men and widowers were granted ₤50 per annum, unmarried adult men ₤30 and adult women ₤15. Juniors also received allowances but theirs were based on age and gender, the assumption being they did not have dependents.51

The union did not welcome the gender inequities of the new Award but it was not surprised by them. Starke’s predecessor had abandoned any commitment to equal pay by constructing a system based on the twin pillars of need and work value. In the 1917

45 ibid., pp. 717-19. 46 ibid., p. 719. 47 ibid., p. 723. 48 ibid., pp. 23-24. 49 CAR, Vol 14, 1920, p. 733. 50 ibid., p. 732. 51 ibid., p. 733.

148 case this system had proved its bias against women both in its gender-stereotyped categories of need and its deference to management’s propositions on value. In the 1919 Clothing Trades Case, Justice Higgins had continued in the same vein, justifying his decision against awarding equal pay with the argument that “it is not for me to find a scientific basis for the distinctions in the wages paid to the various skilled employees as between themselves and the unskilled, and one another.”52 His ruling in the case affirmed a basic wage for women set at 54 per cent of the male rate, a level that remained the standard for the following three decades.53 In 1920 Starke also preferred simply to generalise about what constituted reasonable needs for men and women, and avoided any ruling that took account of work value. The CTOA of course was particularly disadvantaged by such an approach because of the assumption that single women had no dependents and were at least partly dependent themselves.

Between the base level adult telephonist’s wage of ₤120 awarded by Starke and the ₤132 claimed by the union lay an enormous gulf that could be bridged only by waging a campaign that would fundamentally challenge the discriminatory assumptions underpinning the wage fixing system. For many unionists the Court’s undermining of the principle of equal pay simply fuelled their dissatisfaction in this period with the outcomes of arbitration. When Starke rejected the application for registration by the Government Service Women’s Federation, formed around the question of equal pay, the ferment grew.54

Arbitration Under Attack

Management was unhappy with the arbitration court too. Partly this was a simple complaint about the court’s “liberal” decisions on wage claims. Expenditure on Postal Institutes could be justified as an investment in sound labour management. But to a Department struggling to generate surpluses, even the most modest arbitration court concession to unions was an outright impost and, even worse, a dangerous

52 Quoted in Zelda D’Aprano, Kath Williams: The Unions and the Fight for Equal Pay (Melbourne: Spinfex Press, 2001) p. 77. 53 Gillian Whitehouse, ‘Justice and Equity: Women and Indigenous Workers’ in Joe Isaac & Stuart Macintyre (eds), The New Province for Law and Order: 100 Years of Australian Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 2004), p. 221. 54 Caiden, Career Service, p. 131.

149 encouragement to further claims. In 1918 Webster bemoaned that “awards granted during the four years of war have increased by at least one and a quarter million pounds the salary account of the Department.”55 In 1921 the Annual Report sheeted home the blame for a diminished telephone branch profit to “the increased payments to officers on account of Arbitration Court awards, basic wage and child endowment.”56 Subsequent reports regularly drew attention to wage increases as a major extra cost burden on the Department.57

There was also a deeper disquiet. Radical accounts of the arbitration system then and since have justifiably emphasised its cooptive effects on the Australian labour movement. One of the era’s most recalcitrant rebels, Ernie Lane, complained of the trade union movement’s “corroding alliances with the Arbitration Courts and the Australian Labour Party.”58 After a century of arbitration, Bill Harley confirmed Lane’s worst fears: “during the life of the system industrial conflict has never posed a threat to the economic or political stability of the nation.”59 Individual employers, however, were not always quick to see these long-term benefits. Those of them influenced in the interwar years by the concepts of American welfarism were often quite ambivalent about ‘the system’. Many felt that any form of ‘outside’ regulation of the employment relationship that was not subject to a management veto was potentially damaging.60 Some senior public service figures openly declared the Court was a travesty of managerial prerogative. In his Royal Commission report on the administration of the Public Service, former Public Service Commissioner Duncan McLachlan argued that the Public Service Commission and the departments ought to determine the conditions of employment. He recommended handing arbitration functions back to the Public Service Commission.

55 PMG Annual Report, 1917-18, p. 34. 56 PMG Annual Report, 1920-21, p. 23. 57 PMG Annual Report, 1923-24, p. 18; PMG Annual Report , 1924-25, pp. 5 & 21. 58 E.H. Lane, Dawn to Dusk: Reminiscences of a Rebel (Brisbane: Shape, 1993), p. 236. First published 1939. The Industrial Workers of the World of course led the radical opposition to arbitration in the 1910s and early 20s. For their story see Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism. For a New Left critique of state regulation of class relations in Australian history, see R.W. Connell & T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1980), pp. 215-16. 59 Bill Harley, ‘Managing Industrial Conflict’ in Joe Isaac & Stuart Macintyre (eds), The New Province for Law and Order, p. 350. 60 Pragnell’s research shows, for example, the retail giant David Jones was opposed to arbitrated industrial Awards because they interfered with the firm’s individual merit-based salary system. Pragnell, Selling Consent, pp. 193-94.

150 The report sparked a vigourous debate between the Hughes government, re-elected on 9 December 1919, and the Labor opposition over the economic and personnel management of the public service, and result of which was a new Commonwealth Public Service Act and the Arbitration (Public Service) Act 1920. The latter removed the public service from the domain of the arbitration court and created the office of Public Service Arbitrator with powers to decide all claims by public service unions. Most unions were initially wary, fearing that Hughes was manoeuvring to deny them the right to arbitration enjoyed by all other workers. Their concern was not allayed by the appointment of Atlee Hunt, Secretary of the Home and Territories Department, as the first Arbitrator. Hunt’s early rulings quickly alienated unionists and seemed to confirm their suspicion he was a government stooge. On 6 October 1921, a mere eight months after his appointment, the CTOA National Conference resolved “that in view of the present attitude of the Commonwealth Arbitrator we deem it unwise to file any plaint to go before him.”61

The conference motion was designed to intensify the mounting political pressure on the Government to replace Hunt. In November the Opposition and even Prime Minister Hughes attacked Hunt in Parliament and on 7 December the Labor member for Bourke, Frank Anstey, moved for an adjournment of Parliament to debate “the unfairness and incapacity of Mr Atlee Hunt, acting as Arbitrator in connection with the Public Service of the Commonwealth.”62 But by late 1922 it was apparent that Hunt had weathered the storm and was settling in for a long reign. With its members clamouring for relief from their exhausting workplace conditions and low pay, the CTOA was forced to reassess its self-imposed exile from arbitration. A new plaint was formulated and in October 1923 a national conference was called primarily to “give an opportunity to all branches to place their position regarding arbitration matters before [their] advocate Mr J.C. Maher.”63

61 Minutes of the 4th CTOA National Conference, 3-11 October 1921. 62 Quoted in Caiden, Career Service, p. 161. 63 Minutes of the 5th CTOA National Conference, 22 October 1923.

151 The Award

The case that eventually proceeded was one of the most significant in the union’s long history and culminated in an Award which delivered telephonists (or at least some of them) their famous 34-hour week, an achievement that no male, blue-collar union in Australia has ever matched. This alone would warrant devoting substantial space to the case. But the transcript of the hearing also gives us invaluable insights into the way that political economy, gendered thinking and workplace ideology intermeshed to define the history of this workforce and its unions. It was one of the first (possibly the first) arbitration cases in Australia to hear a union systematically challenge the discriminatory nature of the living wage concept laid down in the 1907 Harvester decision.64 In hindsight, the case also marked the high point and revealed the limitations of the anti- sweating ideology on which Australian telephone exchange unionism had been founded.

Many of the plaint items, such as improved compensation for Sunday work, were long- standing grievances that had been raised without any success in 1917 and 1920. The central claims, though, covered hours and wages, where the previous Awards had delivered some improvement since the union’s formation. Only one item, the claim for a formal reduction of the hourly call rate, or loading, imposed on telephonists, was completely new.

The centrepiece of the wages claim was a demand for equal pay.65 Maher employed a range of tactics to support the case. He debunked arguments advanced by

64 Edna Ryan & Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1989), p. 91. 65 The 1923 conference decided equal pay was a crucial objective. (Minutes of the 5th CTOA National Conference, 22 October 1923.) Three specific developments in the industry contributed to this decision. Since the 1917 Award there had been a proportional and absolute growth in the employment of junior telephonists, who were the group most obviously affected by the gender differentiated pay scales laid down by Powers and Starke. In Sydney, female telephonists aged 21 and under comprised 5.08% of the whole staff in 1917 but by 1923 this group accounted for 44.88% of the workforce. In Melbourne the proportion of juniors had grown from 9.01% to 43.77% over the same period. (CPS Arbitration Reports, Vol.4, 1924, p. 33.) Second, the price of telephonists’ labour was continuing to decline relative to that of other occupations such as letter carriers, messengers, typists and assistants to whom telephonists were originally equated. Maher argued the principle of equal pay for work of equal value was essential to restoring the telephonist “to the position which she occupied in a relative sense with all other sections of the service.” (1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 798.) Third, in 1921 the Department formally blocked women from gaining permanent positions as Supervisor Grade II and Traffic Officer, except in Queensland. (1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 134.) This change was of course an issue in itself but by denying promotion as an individual strategy for improvement it also helped focus collective attention on the conditions and pay of the lower levels and exposed the management’s use of gender as a strategy to construct telephone exchanges as low wage ghettos.

152 Commonwealth Public Service Board advocate G.E. Willson, who relied extensively on comments by Sir George Murray, Secretary of the British Post Office, that women should not receive the same pay as men because they took more leave, served for a shorter period and did not work night duty.66 On the last point, the union’s national conference in October had anticipated this objection by resolving to arrange a plebiscite of members on their willingness to undertake night-duty as a condition of equal pay.67 This enabled Maher to argue the Department itself was the obstacle to night work for women. To prove there was no legitimate reason for the ban, he simply referred to the Adelaide exchange where women staffed the switchboard around the clock.68

The union’s main argument was based on work-value and the injustice of paying women less than men for performing the same work or work of equal or greater value. Maher attacked the notion that classifying a branch or function within the division of labour as “women’s work” on the grounds that it employed more women than men was a justifiable reason for paying workers lower wages:

I submit that the only way to approach it is to look at the work. Is the male capable of doing it? Is the female capable of doing it? If they are both capable of doing it I submit it then becomes an occupation, profession, trade or calling as the case may be, and the people who work in that profession, trade or calling should not be considered from the point of view of whether they are males or females.69

Maher’s approach linked the issues of technical skill and the capacity to work efficiently at high intensity for a prolonged period into a sophisticated labour theory of value which spoke to both the anti-sweating and producerist traditions in labour workplace culture. The ₤15 million expended on the infrastructure of telephony, he argued:

…can be, practically speaking, destroyed from the point of view of its eventual result by what is termed by the other side a simple, mechanical, ordinary

66 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, pp. 678-80. 67 Minutes of the 5th CTOA National Conference, 22 October 1923. 68 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 680. 69 ibid., p. 685.

153 manipulative piece of work on the part of the operator. I say that this explains very briefly the responsibility of the telephone operator in her relation to this huge undertaking.70

Returning to the theme later, he stressed the role of switchboard labour in generating profit. “That girl’s capacity to earn for the department a certain amount of money in order that the department can satisfactorily finance this huge undertaking with its fifteen millions of money sunk, is the all important thing to the Government…”71

Sometimes Maher used ‘value’ in the sense of a valuable contribution for which workers should be adequately rewarded, other times it became a question of fair compensation for fatigue suffered. Both forms alluded to a central proposition that the measurement of labour value was consequent upon calculating the total output of the labour process at the site of production. This was a lacuna in his argument. Under capitalist relations of production, the socially assigned value of labour power is not determined by the value of what it produces but by the cost of its own production and reproduction. It is this distinction, in fact, that enables employers to extend the working day beyond the time socially necessary to reproduce the expended labour power, and thus to appropriate a surplus value which is then realised as profit once the products of the labour process are sold.72

By conflating expended labour-power with the cost of producing it, Maher did not conceptualise exploitation as inherent to the wage labour-capital relationship but as a consequence of an unjust distribution of the profit to which both labour and capital contributed in a potentially equitable partnership. An equitable share of the profit – a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work – was all that was demanded for putting the Department’s ₤15 million to work.

Although Maher’s conception of a labour theory of value did not challenge the wage system per se, it certainly represented a step forward for women workers who as a group were actually paid less than their value because under the basic wage system it

70 ibid., p. 672. 71 ibid., p. 689. 72 The analysis here employs a Marxist labour theory of value. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), p. 188.

154 was assumed the family household would meet some of the cost of reproducing their labour-power. Maher categorically rejected the notion that wages should be determined by an ideologically-shaped and therefore arbitrary set of needs constructed around gender divisions. “The question of whether there is a wife and family to be kept should not enter into the argument,” he told the hearing.73 On the other hand, his arguments for what constituted a fair wage did not ignore needs but rather reconstructed them as deriving from workers’ contribution in the productive process. Particular attention was paid to medical and recuperative needs arising from the work.74

Whether wages were considered as compensation for physical and mental debilitation or as reward for skills provided, the union’s approach entailed a key shift away from a focus on the role of women in the family household to their role in the workforce. The particular combination of muscles, nerves and brainpower that comprised switchboard work, the conditions under which this activity occurred and its intensity and duration provided the key to determining what telephonists should be paid. As Maher saw it, his opponents had to disprove the contention “that this work does require special skill, and is work which imposes a special strain upon the operator.” 75

It was not surprising, then, that most of the conflict at the hearing revolved around differing interpretation of technical skills and the effects of particular forms of physical and mental exertion. The Department contended that a telephonist was fully efficient in all branches of the work in six months, the union again insisted that two years were required.76 In their quest for automatic efficiency, of course, the Department conceptualised switchboard labour simply as a series of disembodied motions devoid of conscious human skill. As Maher put it:

She is the only employee, I submit, whose movements are measured by seconds and fractions of seconds and she is obliged in all circumstances to work under

73 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 802. 74 The arguments developed by the union to justify its wage claim were groundbreaking. The 1926 Clothing Trades Union case, which D’Aprano has argued “represented a departure from the policy of differential rates hitherto adopted, and reflects the modern viewpoint on the value of women’s labour and social rights,” was still a full three years away when Maher outlined the CTOA’s case for a non- discriminatory wage rate for women. D’Aprano, Kath Williams, p. 77. 75 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 700. 76 Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports (hereafter CPSAR), Vol.4, 1924, p.23.

155 this particular system as an automaton, so to speak; she has to work like a machine.77

Maher delved beneath this appearance of android behaviour to discover a wide range of skills:

The operator on the switchboard has not only to answer the subscriber, but she has to deal with the subscriber. She has to be able to know in a flash what is required to satisfy that subscriber; she has to know what particular apparatus is to be used and how that apparatus is to be used; she has to go through a dozen and one operations and all those operations are flashing through her mind at once.78

He argued too that the machine-like physical behaviour itself required skills of concentration and stamina. Witness testimony and cited authorities were used to develop an argument that only certain people, irrespective of gender, possessed these skills. And even those who did could not exercise them for a prolonged period without adversely affecting their mental and physical health. Beatric Little, telephonist of 11 years, described the effects of different exchanges: “I have found that the City used to tire me more physically. My arms and back used to be very tired, but at Manly exchange the constant struggle to get your traffic over absolutely congested order wires is fearfully tiring.”79 Bridget Burke, telephonist of 12 ½ years and aged only 31, listed “neuritis in the arm and hip, laryngitis and sinavitus” as diagnosed ailments she endured as a result of her work.80

77 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 676. 78 ibid., p. 705. 79 ibid., p. 174. 80 ibid., p. 204.

156

“She is the only employee….whose movements are measured by seconds and fractions of seconds and she is obliged in all circumstances to work under this particular system as an automaton.” Telephonist at work, Tweed Heads Post Office, 1928 (NAA: Image J2879, QTH43)

Against such testimony the advocates for the Department and the Public Service Board asserted that intense and prolonged work at the switchboard had insignificant and short term effects on health or none at all. A Department doctor, Arthur Moseley, attributed the frequency of injury and illness to overdiagnosis by private practitioners and the poor lifestyles of female telephonists.81 As to the overt incidents of mental strain, he believed this was an unavoidable manifestation of the workers’ gender:

Q. With regard to the hysterical attacks which telephonists get; are they frequent in Sydney?

A. Two or three girls had hysterics last Saturday morning. But my experience is that if one girl gets hysterics others will get them. I have seen seven girls in hysterics at one time in the big exchanges. That was a field day.82

In general, though, Dr Moseley was confident that switchboard staff enjoyed good health; he had reached this finding, he told the court, after observing some of them laughing in the retiring room when they were off duty.83

81 ibid., pp. 221, 223 & 227. 82 ibid., p. 227. 83 ibid., p. 222.

157 Skewes asked one witness if the health breakdowns which did occur could be attributable to telephonists’ penchant for overindulging in dancing “week after week.” Incensed by the sexist slur, one “Peeved Female” who had worked eight years in a telephone exchange and suffered a “few small breakdowns” herself, wrote to the Federal Public Service Journal:

In point of fact 80 per cent of telephone girls work at a hateful occupation in order to keep themselves decently and to retain that self-respect which independence alone can give. Mr Skewes should realise that there are many other avocations in life than that of being a telephone attendant which are open to girls who only want to work for the sake of extra pocket money to pay their way to dances and to provide other means of amusement. Probably a large number of telephone girls dance, possibly some few dance to excess, but the work they perform is not that which a girl who considers dancing the chief end of life would choose. If Mr Skewes could only have a vision of the lives of many telephone attendants, if he only knew how few of the decent pleasures of life fall to their lot, he would refrain from asking such a question…84

As strong as the case was for equal wages and an increase based on comparative worth, and as weak as the management witnesses may have been, Skewes’ flippant sexism highlights what the union was up against. Its case required a conservative judge to rule against the weight of society’s gendered thinking and overturn the fundamental basic wage paradigm. In his summing up, Maher himself conceded the radical challenge the claim represented to prevailing wage-fixing principles:

I have never, right throughout the whole of my case, contended that we were claiming for any basic wage, and I do not even now say that we are claiming for a basic wage. I say that we are claiming a wage which is appropriate to the particular class of work being done by these officers.85

Hunt’s ruling was just as succinct in its rejection of this basic tenet of the case. He had dealt with the issue of equal pay if the Federated Assistants’ case, he pointed out, and

84 Federal Public Service Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, 28 February 1923, p. cover III. 85 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 800.

158 “showed the fallacy underlying this demand.”86 The foundation of his judgement in that case was that “in the lower grounds of service it is the needs of the worker and not the value of the work that is the determining factor in fixing rates of pay” and he saw no reason to change that opinion for the telephonists’ benefit.87 Differential wage rates for women and men were to remain.

That left the union’s case for compensation relying primarily on the claims for shorter hours and reduced workload intensity. “Where an officer must work at this machine like rapidity year in and year out, there should be some compensation and that compensation should be either in the direction of shorter hours or some special compensation for this work in the way of additional remuneration,” Maher told the court.88 Although the demand for a 33 hour week seemed radical, it did not challenge the underlying gendered principles of the basic wage in the way the equal pay claim did. Despite their different starting points, the basic wage and the notion of shorter working hours both addressed the question of what constituted reasonable compensation from the perspective of workers’ needs. Without necessarily agreeing to the quantum claimed, the court could accept the principle that a compensatory shortening of hours was a way of attenuating the needs of telephonists by reducing the medical and recuperative costs arising from long hours on the job.

The one rider was that it had to be shown the telephonists were unique in needing this form of compensation. Maher was at great pains to stress that telephonists were unlike any other category of workers. “The more the matter is investigated the more it is apparent that the telephone employee is a person who should be singled out for special treatment, having regard to the special conditions under which she is required to work,” he contended.89 Furthermore, the argument was bolstered by the Department own concessions on shorter hours in different eras. In 1908 the Department had set a weekly maximum of 33 hours for Sydney Central Exchange and Beatric Little recalled working only 35 hours a week in the suburbs.90 While a substantial prolongation had occurred

86 CPSAR, Vol.4, 1924, p. 24. 87 ibid. p. 25. 88 1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 677. 89 ibid., p. 718. 90 ibid., p. 187.

159 over the years, in 1920 management reverted to a 34 hour week in Central, three hours less than provided for by the Award.91

Hunt accepted the union’s proposition that telephonists’ conditions were exceptional. More importantly, he backed his finding with an appropriate determination. He granted a reduction to 34 hours in the central exchanges in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. He awarded staff in Perth and Hobart main exchanges, suburban exchanges and a number of designated provincial exchanges a 36 hour week, and a 44 hour week to workers in other provincial exchanges.92

In contrast, Hunt rejected any concession on workload intensity. The union had claimed a reduction on the hourly loading on each worker from 225 to 180 units, and had presented a strong argument that intensity was as physically and mentally debilitating as the duration of the work performed by telephonists. Hunt, however, stated he did not consider a case had been made out to warrant him inserting the desired clause in the Award.93 It was an interesting ruling given that most of the evidence to support the claim was similar in nature to the evidence in support of reduced working hours, which he had accepted. He was also uncharacteristically testy on the topic.

Now I am asked to upset the settled practice of the Department and establish a new basis on the evidence of a limited number of operators whose opinion is that the existing load is excessive, and so to act against the advice of experienced and, I believe, humane officials who, in asserting that the present load is not excessive, are not animated by slave-driving ideas, but solely by honest views as to the best interests of all concerned.94

Perhaps the hostility conceals his realisation of the risk the demand posed to profitability. It is clear the Department’s calculations of its revenue were based on the loading rather than the length of the working day. In other words, intensity of labour rather than the prolongation of the working day was the critical mechanism for extracting surplus value. The Department claimed that to implement a rating of 180

91 ibid., p. 570. 92 CPSAR, Vol.4, 1924, p. 49. 93 ibid., p. 45. 94 ibid., p. 44.

160 units per hour would cost them ₤97 000 per annum.95 They also challenged the court’s jurisdiction to rule on the matter, contending it was the employer’s business alone to determine the labour intensity.96 While Hunt dismissed the objection, he obviously was not comfortable with meddling in the very heart of the exploitative process and would not countenance any ruling that conceded to workers a right to influence such a critical aspect of the labour process as the pace of work. He was prepared only to recommend that the Department review the valuations on which the loading was based.97

This outright rejection of a cap on work intensity sheds a different light on Hunt’s willingness to concede shorter hours. A reduced working day gave some relief to the workers but potentially to their own detriment. Echoing Marx’s point that “the more the working day is shortened, the more can the intensity of labour increase,”98 Hunt argued that shorter hours would assist the well-being of the operators and also “add to the efficiency of the service.”99 In this respect the ruling was part of a wider trend. Chris Nyland points out that “in the four years 1918-1922 standard working times within virtually all the major industrialised nations fell by approximately 20 per cent…” Nyland believes that, at least in the Australian case, this was not simply a manifestation of working class pressure. Amongst sections of the employing class and the arbitration bureaucracy, he argues, there was a “growing awareness of the relationship between work times and industrial efficiency.”100 The court’s concession to the CTOA, therefore, may have been a double-edged sword.

Considered in isolation, however, the 34 hour week was rightly interpreted as a major victory and cause for pride in the union. At the time, the standard working week across most industries was still 48 hours. Men in Australia actually worked an average of 46.66 hours a week and women 46.02 hours.101 Little wonder that even into the 1980s former ATPOA members lauded the shorter working week as one of the union’s most significant gains. But it was one of the few to come out of the 1924 determination. The

95 ibid., p. 43. 96 ibid. 97 ibid., p. 45. 98 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, p. 530. 99 CPSAR, Vol.4, 1924, p. 42. 100 Chris Nyland, ‘Scientific Management and the 44-Hour Week’, Labour History, No. 53 (Nov 1987), p. 20. 101 Vamplew, Australians: Historical Statistics, pp. 158-59.

161 union had failed to secure a breakthrough on equal pay and a cap on work intensity, and most of the other components of the plaint were also rejected.

The Search for Suitable Allies

Apart from hourly loading, the unsuccessful claims in the 1924 plaint tended to reflect issues relevant to the public service as a whole, such as holiday pay, Sunday penalties and of course equal pay. The Award’s omissions thus strengthened the hand of those who argued for organising with workers employed in the public service beyond the telephone exchanges. In this way, the union’s internal assessments of its own performance became a vehicle through which the broader labour movement’s debate on craft versus industrial unionism, most dramatically articulated in the IWW’s call for One Big Union, would permeate the agendas of the CTOA, an Association seemingly far removed from the Wobblies’ radicalism.

Generally the union had always had a good relationship with other public service Associations, notwithstanding some skirmishes over rules of coverage. The President of the Federated Assistants’ Association was a guest at the union’s inaugural 1916 conference.102 In 1918 the union welcomed the formation of a united front of public service unions to pressure the Government for an improvement in the basic wage, and contributed financially to the campaign.103 When the united front became the permanent Grand Council of Associations in 1919, the CTOA was one of its first affiliates.104

The union continued to work closely with other unions throughout the 1920s by actively supporting a range of Grand Council campaigns, from the 1921 fight to force the Government to implement the recommendations of the Basic Wage Commission, to various initiatives to win equal pay.105 Some of these campaigns helped the CTOA to

102 Minutes of the 1st CTOA National Conference, 2 June 1916. 103 Federal Executive Minutes, 27 May 1918, 26 August 1918. 104 Federal Executive Minutes, 25 March 1919. The decision was endorsed by the National Conference on 22 September 1919. Minutes of the 3rd CTOA National Conference, 22 September 1919. 105 For Basic Wage campaign see Federal Executive Minutes, 28 February 1921. For equal pay campaigns see Victorian Branch Minutes, 11 October 1926 & Minutes of the 7th CTOA National Conference, 8-15 February 1928.

162 achieve improvements that had been sought in earlier plaints, such as better compensation for Sunday work which was won finally in 1927.106 Other campaigns, most notably the long struggle for equal pay, made no headway in this period.

The impulse to organise across occupational divisions was evident also in moves to amalgamate. Although pushed along mostly by the postal unions who organised joint meetings and published pro-amalgamation literature under slogans such as “Less unions and more unionism”, elements in the CTOA were evidently open to the arguments. When the Postal Sorters’ Union convened a joint conference in Melbourne from 14-19 January 1920, the CTOA sent Miss Slatter as its delegate.107 In July 1921 the Federal Executive deferred a decision on affiliating to the Australian Labor Party “until the amalgamation of the public service is accomplished.”108 They took one step closer to this goal at the October conference by debating various models for amalgamation and choosing the “general division scheme” which they resolved to submit to a plebiscite of members.109

But despite continuing interest among some CTOA leaders and regular overtures from the postal unions, the union was not part of the fusion in 1925 that created the Amalgamated Postal Linemen’s, Sorters’ and Letter Carriers’ Union of Australia, later thankfully renamed the Amalgamated Postal Workers Union (APWU).110 It was, however, represented at an amalgamation conference late in 1925 and at a second conference in 1926, and in 1928 the national conference instructed the General President and Secretary to meet with the APWU “for the purpose of a preliminary discussion re amalgamation…”111 But one big PMG union did not eventuate. Opposition to amalgamation from within the CTOA and the deteriorating economic and industrial environment ensured the union would tackle the looming Depression as an autonomous association. When in May 1928 the Victorian Branch formally decided to oppose amalgamation with the APWU, the 1920s impetus within the CTOA towards less unions and more unionism came to an end.112

106 CPSAR, Vol.7, 1927, pp. 89-92. 107 Frank Waters, Postal Unions and Politics: a History of the Amalgamated Postal Workers’ Union of Australia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978), p. 11. 108 Federal Executive Minutes, 29 July 1921. 109 Minutes of the 4th CTOA National Conference, 3-11 October 1921. 110 Waters, Postal Unions and Politics, p. 19. 111 Minutes of the 7th CTOA National Conference, 8-15 February 1928. 112 Victorian Branch Minutes, 14 May 1928.

163 The reasons amalgamation failed to eventuate are complex. Sectionalism played a part. In the end many of the union’s leaders formed the view that what the APWU had to offer seemed of less value than what the CTOA stood to lose. Autonomy allowed the union the flexibility to pursue its own arbitration claims while working through the High Council on other, more generic issues. This was an important factor for a union covering workers with such unique conditions of employment and where gender played such a crucial role. Having confronted divisions in their own union, the CTOA leaders possessed too healthy a sensitivity to the problem of accommodating sectional interests to believe they would easily be heard within the APWU, a union dominated by men whose activities were principally aimed at representing the needs of male workers in the postal branch.

There were also concerns about the type of unionism represented by the APWU. By rejecting overtures from the postal workers while simultaneously moving closer to the High Council (as the Grand Council became), the dominant factions within the CTOA leadership were aligning the union with the more conservative currents in the public service labour movement. At one level this was an ideological orientation with respect to the campaign for the One Big Union. Although the APWU was not the stronghold of radicalism it was often portrayed, it was influenced by OBU propaganda. According to Frank Waters, “it was partly for this reason that the APWU did not see itself as having a role in the HCCPSO [High Council].”113 The APWU would later play a leading role in the Australian Federation of Postal Unions, which eventually collapsed after the Australian Postal Engineers’ Union, alarmed by what Bruce Juddery describes as “Left- wing militancy”, defected to the High Council.114

The High Council was dominated by the Commonwealth Public Service Clerical Association (CPSCA), or more precisely by A.V. Langker, who doubled as Secretary of both organisations from 1921. In Juddery’s account, Langker appears as a conservative leader, doggedly committed to arbitration and the association model of public service

113 Waters, Postal Unions and Politics, p. 31. 114 Bruce Juddery, White Collar Power: A History of the ACOA (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p.102.

164 unionism.115 Against the more rough and tumble industrial politics of the APWU, Langker’s mode of operating won the support of the CTOA leadership.116

The ideological affinity with the High Council does not reveal a new departure. The union’s leaders had always preferred arbitration and decorous negotiation. But the extent of the union’s willingness to rely on Langker and the Council’s good offices shows the CTOA leaders moving even further away from the organising impulse and energy of the workplace that had played such an instrumental role in founding the CTOA and its predecessors. The rank and file’s focus on conditions on the job did not disappear, nor did their willingness to raise their concerns within the union. In 1926 we find staff of the Windsor Exchange in Victoria campaigning over inadequate junction capacity for their switchboard, staff shortages on Sundays, the need for a 34-hour week in their workplace, insufficient rostered relief staff, and poor rest room amenities.117 But as the 1920s drew on, these voices from the workplace were marginalised by the internecine disputes between the union’s own leadership bodies and their ponderous dealings with High Council.

Towards a Career Service Union

The growing schism between the union as a body of members and as a set of structures controlled by a small, dedicated and often-warring band of part-time officials was part of a broader historical pattern. By the early 1920s the wave of working class revolt was receding.118 Although rank and file cultures and ideologies never disappeared from the workplace, they became less likely to function as bases for class resistance as the decade progressed, and their capacity to energise unions declined. Consequently the centre of political gravity shifted from the workplace to the union meeting room, where

115 ibid., pp. 80 & 102. 116 As General Secretary Shortis reported to the 1928 National Conference: “Much valuable work has been performed during the year by the [High] Council. Delegates from the Commonwealth Telephone Officers’ Association attended every meeting and gained considerable knowledge on many matters of interest to our members. The Secretary, Mr Langker, has been of great assistance by giving legal advice and appearing before the Arbitrator for our Association in addition to appearing for the usual claims of all organizations affiliated with the High Council.” Report to the 7th CTOA National Conference, 8-15 February 1928. 117 Victorian Branch Minutes, 11 October 1926. 118 From a high of 4.6893 million strike days lost nationally in 1917, industrial disputation declined to 3.5873 million strike days in 1920, 1.2862 million in 1921 and 858 700 in 1922. Vamplew, Australians: Historical Statistics, p. 165.

165 the socio-political character of union leaderships assumed greater significance in determining union policy and practice.

For the CTOA the decisive factor here was the domination of the leadership structures by relatively senior exchange staff whose experiences of and expectations about employment in telephony were different from those of most members. A statistical snapshot of the workforce covered by the CTOA in 1924 reveals a striking diversity in age and length of service. The largest branch of the Department, New South Wales, employed 903 telephonists, 56 monitors and 32 supervisors in its telephone exchanges. The figures show that feminisation had intensified over ten years although mainly at the lower levels. Most monitors and supervisors were still men, and in percentile terms they had lost ground only slightly in ten years, down from 61 per cent in 1914 to 59 per cent in 1924. 119 On the other hand, women now comprised 85 per cent of the operator ranks, up from 77 per cent in 1914.

Secondly, there is a widening gap between the experiences of junior and senior officers. In Sydney, female telephonists aged 21 and under comprised 5.08% of the entire staff in 1917 but by 1923 this group accounted for 44.88% of the workforce. In Melbourne the proportion of juniors had grown from 9.01% to 43.77% over the same period.120 At the other end of the scale, many supervisors, monitors and even telephonists were industry veterans by the 1920s. For the female employees the ratio of average length of service in years between telephonists, monitors and supervisors was 7 : 15 : 19. The average age of the women across the three classification levels was 24 : 35 : 37.6

Virtually no junior or inexperienced staff held official leadership positions in the union, as the following profile of the Victorian Branch Executive reveals. The analysis here assumes the overall profile of the Victorian telephone exchange workforce in Victoria in 1927 was substantially similar to that of the New South Wales workforce in 1924 as represented in the table above. If this assumption holds true - and there is no reason to believe it would not - the Victorian CTOA office holders in 1927 were on average older

119 Data tabulated by author from Commonwealth Public Service Seniority Lists for 1914. Lists for this and other years are held as unclassified reference sources in the reading room of the National Archives, Brisbane. 120 CPS Arbitration Reports, Vol.4, 1924, p. 33.

166 and more experienced than the rank and file of their Branch. Proportionately more of them were monitors or supervisors (see table 3A).

Table 3A: Profile of Victorian CTOA Branch Executive for 1927-28 as at 30 June 1927.121 Name Union Position Job Age Service Classification (years) (years) Catherine Cooney President Monitor 44 23 Mary McIntyre Vice-President Telephonist 24 8 Gladys Oppie Vice-President Telephonist 29 13 Clare Rochell Secretary Telephonist 23 6 Norah Keane Treasurer Telephonist 40 14 Lorna Incledon Committee Member Telephonist 33 12 Helen Kelly Committee Member Telephonist 27 9 Mary Kelly Committee Member Telephonist 23 4 Elizabeth Rawlings Committee Member Telephonist 31 13 Cora Barry Committee Member Telephonist 27 9 Una Broben Committee Member Telephonist 23 7

Mary Maloney Committee Member Supervisor (Grade1) 48 24 Ellen Ward Committee Member Monitor 35 16

Teresa Flanagan Committee Member Supervisor (Grade1) 45 27 Average 32.3 13.2

In the federal structures, the pattern is even more pronounced. Table 3B lists the credentialled representatives at the National Conference in February 1928, excluding the two Tasmanian delegates whose details are not known.

121 Data tabulated by author from Victorian Branch Minutes, 1927, and ‘List of Permanent Officers on 30 June 1927’, Commonwealth Government Gazette, No. 128, 18 November 1927.

167 Table 3B: Profile of 1928 Conference Delegates as at 30 June 1927.122 Name Union Position Job Age Service Classification (years) (years)

Jane Roddy General President Supervisor (Grade1) 39 19 Brigid Shortis General Secretary Monitor 47 22 Mary Edwards General Treasurer Monitor 41 19

Teresa Flanagan Vic Delegate Supervisor (Grade1) 45 27 Lorna Incledon Vic Delegate Telephonist 33 12 (Mr) L.H. Jones NSW Delegate Monitor 34 20

Florence Tate Qld Delegate Supervisor (Grade2) 48 25 Myrtle Hayman SA Delegate Monitor 39 15 Mary Persse SA Delegate Monitor 33 15 Marg. Fitzgerald WA Delegate Monitor 42 26

Average 40.1 20

Control of the union by experienced and often higher ranking workers is not difficult to understand. In an organisation that placed great store on negotiation, senior workers’ knowledge of the industry and depth of experience gave them a decided advantage in running for union office. As career employees, their stake in the Department also gave them greater motivation to become involved in so far as unionism could advance their interests without harming their individual prospects of promotion or transfer. Once in union positions, the relationships they established with managers and their knowledge of the work of the union encouraged long terms in office.

Leadership by seniority, of course, was not a new phenomenon. Excluding the Tasmanians the details of whom are not known, seven of the ten representatives at the union's 1917 national conference were monitors or supervisors, while the three remaining delegates were telephonists with 14 years of experience between them.123

122 Data tabulated by the author from Minutes of the 7th CTOA National Conference, 8-15 February 1928, and ‘List of Permanent Officers of the Commonwealth Service on the 30 June 1927’, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No. 128, 18 November 1927. 123 ‘List of Permanent Officers of the Commonwealth Public Service on the 30 June 1917’, Commonwealth Government Gazette, No. 148, 6 September 1917.

168 Although this marked the CTOA immediately as a different kind of organisation to the earlier WTTA, what the difference meant in practice began to emerge only in the 1920s. As shopfloor union activity waned, the dominance of the CTOA’s structures by relatively senior staff began to play a more decisive role in defining the politico- industrial character of the union. In the extreme it threatened to fragment the union along sectional lines. Indeed in some quarters there was talk of forming a new union exclusively for supervisors, a threat taken so seriously by delegates to the 1926 National Conference that they began preparing the union against such a move.124 In 1927 the Victorian Branch leadership issued a call for a separate organisation for supervisors in the telephone branch, although they seem to have intended a separate body within the union rather than a breakaway.125

Most of the CTOA’s leaders rejected splitting the union, believing their strength lay in retaining a sense of common purpose. What they did, however, was begin to redefine the nature of this common purpose. While the younger and less experienced switchboard staff were too important to the union for their specific grievances to be ignored, as time wore on the union devoted less attention to what can be called the regime of production; the processes and relationships in which operators laboured under the watchful eye of monitors and supervisors. In this respect the 1924 34-hour week victory was the highwater mark of the earlier anti-sweating tradition. From an emphasis on oppressive surveillance and labour process intensity, attention was shifting to, among other things, higher duties allowance, reclassification and the need for equal opportunity across the telephone branch, in other words the mechanisms of career development. In General Secretary Shortis’s three-page report to the 1928 National Conference, the maximum workload carried by telephonists and the system for evaluating calls, still obviously important issues, were given only three lines.126

When the CTOA’s leaders did engage with the specific needs of the operator masses, they typically adopted an attitude that can best be described as welfarist, a kind of

124 Minutes of the 6th CTOA National Conference, 7-17 December 1926. 125 Victorian Branch Minutes, 14 November 1927. 126 General Secretary’s Report to 7th CTOA National Conference, 8-15 February 1928.

169 industrial version of the matriarchal attitude found on the job amongst some female supervisors.127 Eva Ammen, a Commonwealth public servant but not an exchange worker herself, has provided us with one of the fullest accounts of the welfarist approach to unionism. Writing to the Federal Public Service Journal in 1930, she argued there were four reasons that should impel women to join a union: self-interest, a love of one’s fellows, self-respect, and the effect on others. The second reason, she contended, stems from “the will to lift a burden from the shoulders of another – to hold out a helping hand to one’s brother.” There is self-satisfaction in that gesture, she admitted, but this pales beside the uplifting consequences for the beneficiary:

Think…of some fellow toiler, bent beneath too great a load in bringing up his family upon an adequate salary – of some woman whom you know, struggling to care for a disabled father or mother; to educate or help younger brothers or sisters. We have all seen them, these weary and discouraged human beings, whom we can aid with so little discomfort to ourselves, and incidentally turn a trick for the Commonwealth at the same time, for the discouraged can render but discouraged service. I beg you to stop a moment and ponder these considerations; but if they have no weight with you, at least be no longer blind to your own interests. You need your union…128

It requires no radical leap of the imagination to see how such a view, predicated on a distinction between an active saviour and a passive victim, sat neatly with the senior hands who ran the CTOA in the interests of their own ranks and the much put-upon junior operators. It found its perfect complement in the top-down strategies of arbitration and advocacy. Its concern with turning tricks for the employer also placed its adherents firmly within that class of organisations which did not, as Webster put it, "interfere with the discipline and administration of the Department."129 As a notionally independent body, its survival tied at some level to addressing the class needs of its mass constituency, the CTOA could never serve management in the way the Postal Institutes did. All the same, it was rapidly becoming a conduit for ideas on intra-

127 Even the formidable and legendary Mrs Dick, Brisbane’s exchange’s first female supervisor, was, according to telephonist Bertha Cleminson, “not actually the martinet whose role she assumed for newcomers.” Bertha Cleminson, Reminiscences of Service in the Commonwealth, typescript, 1971. 128 Federal Public Service Journal, 30 June 1930, p. 17. 129 PMG Annual Report, 1917-18, p. 34.

170 corporate cooperation and career development that would not have been out of place in PI forums. Predictably, there was no place for challenging managerial prerogative, the very heart of the alienation experienced by most switchboard operators.

By late 1928, however, even career service unionism was under threat as employers and the state responded to the deteriorating economy by closing ranks against efforts to aid the weary and discouraged. Decisive victories over miners, timber workers and waterside workers were followed by government moves to undermine arbitration.130 All public service unions including the High Council and the APWU were embroiled in the struggle by 1929, culminating in the electoral defeat of the Bruce-Page Government in October. Bruce’s defeat was heralded as a victory but the ruling class offensive continued, opening up a new and difficult phase in the CTOA’s history.

In 1930 the union achieved a new Award but Atlee Hunt, still the Public Service Arbitrator, found few grounds to improve on the Award he had set in 1924, despite a substantial body of evidence provided by the union and its members. The claim for increased salary for telephonists, he determined, had not been sustained. He declined to alter the rates for juniors. He found current salaries for monitors and supervisors “adequate.”131 And “on the whole” he was “not persuaded that the telephonists’ work is such that it involve[d] any special hazards to health.”132 The union’s claim for reduced hours was rejected. “Generally speaking,” Hunt declared, “improved apparatus has lightened rather than increased the load of the operator.”133 What a difference six years had made. With the Australian working class now on the defensive, the arbitrator of the groundbreaking 34-hour week now felt under little pressure to make further concessions. His 1930 Award set the tone for the CTOA in the Depression years ahead. Indeed it was to remain in force until 1975.

130 For details of the offensive against unionism, see Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement (Melbourne: Rawson’s Bookshop, 1940), pp. 153-63. 131 Determination No. 13 of 1930, CPSAR, Vol. 10, 1930, pp. 69-70. 132 CPSAR, Vol. 10, 1930, p. 69. 133 ibid., p. 67.

171 Into the Depression: Defending Jobs, Defending Careers

Unemployment in Australia rose dramatically in 1930, peaking in 1932 at around 28 per cent of all trade unionists.134 When estimates of the unrecorded jobless are included, the figure is closer to 38 per cent.135 In general women suffered lower rates of unemployment. In Queensland, according to the 1933 census figures, 20.57 per cent of men in the workforce were unemployed and 16.30 per cent of women.136 For Victoria the figures were 22 per cent and 12.5 per cent respectively.137 As Joanne Scott points out, the primary cause of the difference in the rates was the gender segregation of the workforce, with highly masculinised industries and occupations more affected by the economic downturn.138 Unemployed women may have also been more likely to be hidden by the official figures. Scott notes “a tendency for some women who had lost their jobs to withdraw into the home and thus no longer appear in unemployment statistics.”139

Accepting the official figures at face value, it was a catastrophe all the same. 21,032 Victorian women, for instance, were out of work140, and their plight was made all the worse by government neglect.141 From 1930 to mid 1932, most support for unemployed women in Victoria was organised within the working class itself, through organisations such as the Unemployed Girls’ Relief Movement (UGRM) led by working class feminist Muriel Heagney. After the election of the Argyle Nationalist Government in Victoria in 1932, these organisations withered through lack of government cooperation, leaving many jobless women with little institutional assistance. Heagney predicted dire consequences for women:

As Secretary [of the Relief Movement], I listened daily to stories of girls who for the first time in their lives had been without money earned by themselves,

134 Wendy Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour: An Oral Record of the 1930s Depression in Australia (Newham: Scribe Publications, 1989), p. 39. 135 Economic News, 9 June 1932, cited by ibid., p. 40. 136 Cited by Joanne Scott, ‘Generic Resemblances’?: Women and Work in Queensland, 1919-1939, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1995, p. 232. 137 Cited by Muriel Heagney, Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs (Melbourne: Hilton & Veitch, 1935), p. 111. 138 Scott, ‘Generic Resemblances’?, p. 233. 139 ibid., p. 270. 140Heagney, Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs, p. 111. 141 ibid., pp. 112-13.

172 and whom circumstances had forced over what to them was the border line of decency and convention….Now I dread to think of girls who are still facing the same difficulties, and who, when at the cross-roads, have no place to go…142

She had strong grounds for her fear. While there were five unemployed Victorian men for every unemployed woman in 1933, the ratio of men to women receiving government sustenance was 50:1.143 In Queensland, government relief to women was more generous but here too women faced discrimination, as Scott explains:

In order to be eligible for rations and relief work, men and women had to declare that they were distitute when they applied for assistance at labour exchanges or police stations. Given the strength of assumptions that a woman should be dependant on a male breadwinner, even if he was unemployed, rather than herself being unemployed, it seems that some women were subjected to especially searching interviews.144

For women still in the workforce, the lower rate of female unemployment brought its own pressures. With the increase of labour market competition between workers and the retreat of collectivist responses, the ideology of the male breadwinner and female homemaker was given a new lease of life as a potent formula for blaming women workers for the unemployment crisis. Heagney was instrumental in forming an Equal Status Committee in Melbourne in July 1935 precisely to combat this “flood of sentimental propaganda about women and the home [that] is let loose to obscure the real issues and divide the workers.”145

In fact, as unemployment ate into the male workforce, more women found themselves providing the main source of family income. In 1933, 24.15 per cent of all Australian breadwinners were female, compared to 17.38 per cent at the time of the 1921 census.146

142 ibid., p. 113. 143 ibid., p. 111. 144 Scott, ‘Generic Resemblances’?, p. 259. 145 Heagney, Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs, p. 11. 146 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1921. Volume Two: Detailed Tables and Statistician’s Report, p.190; Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1933. Volume Three: Tables and Statistician’s Report, p. 216.

173 Even if a young woman’s income was not the mainstay of her family, her job was often the only insurance against the disastrous possibility of the household’s main wage earner succumbing to unemployment. Fewer women married, preferring to hold a job than risk dependence on a man’s wage when at least one in four men were likely to find themselves out of work.147

A Job in Hard Times: Telephonists in a Country Exchange, ca 1930s (NAA: Image J2879, QTH158)

Within the public service jobs fell victim both to the collapse of economic activity and the implementation of conservative economic remedies contained in the ‘Premiers’ Plan’. The plan’s central plank called for governments to balance their budgets by slashing expenditure. Between 1929 and 1933, 5088 Commonwealth employees, mostly in temporary and exempt positions, lost their jobs, a reduction of at least 14 per cent, according to Gerald Caiden.148 Unions claimed that approximately 20 per cent of the total public service had been dismissed by June 1934.149 Many were PMG Department workers, their jobs eliminated “to ensure the economical operation of the various services.”150 The exact number of telephone exchange jobs lost is difficult to establish but the impact is evident in the drop in CTOA membership. Even at a time when union preference had been reintroduced, the Victorian Branch recorded a membership of 747

147 Ray Broomhill, Unemployed Workers: A Social History of the Great Depression in Adelaide (St Lucia: Univ of Queensland Press, 1978), p. 154. 148 Caiden, Career Service, p. 239. 149 Federal Public Service Journal, 30 June 1934, p. 2. 150 PMG Annual Report, 1930-31.

174 in June 1931, a total “greatly depleted” on the previous year “through the falling off of telephone traffic throughout the State on account of the financial depression.”151 A year later the number had dropped to 694.152 Victorian CTOA Secretary Mary Moloney reported in 1931 that it was their temporary members who were being dispensed with.153 In most cases these were young women who had been employed without permanency as a strategy to expedite the redundancies caused by automation.154

For the monitors and supervisors, on the other hand, displacement rather than redundancy was the issue. Responding to political pressure over rising male unemployment, Department Secretary Sir Harry Brown wanted more supervisory jobs filled by men. In November 1932 his office wrote to Victorian management:

Having regard to the large number of adult males for whom appropriate work is not likely to be available for some years, it might be desirable to exclude females for the time being from promotions to positions which can be filled satisfactorily by males.155

The Victorian Deputy Director was quick to reply “that if female officers were excluded from attending this examination grave discontent would arise amongst this class of officer.”156 Sure enough, within a year of the warning, the Department earned the ire of the CTOA when a male CTOA member, Mr R. Stewart, came forward with claims he had failed a supervisors’ examination despite being promised a pass. Whether he was a victim of a botched attempt at pro-male discrimination or low-level corruption may never be known. In any case, his revelation riled the CTOA Federal Executive Council which twice wrote to the Public Service Board demanding a full enquiry, sought advice

151 Victorian 17th Annual Report, 1930-31, with Victorian Branch Minutes. 152 Victorian 18th Annual Report, 1931-32, with Victorian Branch Minutes. 153 Victorian 17th Annual Report, 1930-31, with Victorian Branch Minutes. The claim is supported by official internal accounts of the crisis. A memo sent by Brown on 15th September 1930 directed State managers to defer appointing additional temporary officers or filling temporary vacancies. He also suggested, however, that “recruitment of new permanent staff should be suspended except in exceptional circumstances.” Other cost saving measures included keeping staff in junior positions after they reached adult age, encouraging staff to forgo furlough, and substituting time off for Sunday rates of pay. 6 page typescript, ‘The Depression – Departmental Effects’ NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9/box 21, HX 2/3. 154 Victorian 17th Annual Report, 1930-31, with Victorian Branch Minutes 155 Memo from Sir Harry Brown to PMG Dept, Victoria, 30 Nov 1932, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP 216/1 1933/5944. 156 Memo from Victorian Deputy Director PMG Dept to Sir Harry Brown, 22 Dec 1932, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP 216/1 1933/5944.

175 from a King’s Council, and finally secured a resolution from High Council that it would raise the matter with the Board with a recommendation that an independent board of examiners be appointed to conduct future examinations for promotion.157

Thus the employment crisis of the Depression years was experienced differently depending on one’s position in the hierarchy. At the lower levels of the operating staff jobs disappeared, at the supervisory levels jobs became the object of a fresh round of gendered competition. In complex ways these divergent experiences reinforced earlier trends. The greater job security of senior telephone exchange staff consolidated their hold over the union.158 More importantly, the union's responses to the employment crisis reflected and deepened the career service thinking in union affairs. . In 1935, after years of job losses at the lower levels, the union demanded permanency for temporaries but only for those who had delivered at least ten years of unbroken service.159 This rather belated and desultory policy stood in contrast to the leadership’s resolute focus on protecting the career integrity of better paying, higher level positions. It was not that the leadership wilfully neglected the operator ranks. In part, they believed the union was powerless to do more. As the mood of crisis and defeat spread across organised labour, many unionists succumbed to a deep pessimism about the efficacy of collective self-defence.160 The CTOA leaders were not alone in believing that jobs simply could not be protected against the onslaught; preserving certain rights of preference over whatever jobs remained appeared to be the best that could be achieved. In the telephone industry, this attitude had the unfortunate effect of cutting the

157 Federal Executive Minutes, 14 August 1933, 23 October 1933, 27 November 1933, 22 January 1934, 5 March 1934. 158 By 30 June 1937, five of the thirteen members of the Victorian Branch Executive for whom details are known were above telephonist level, while the eight who were telephonists had served for an average of 12 ½ years each. These veterans were truly in for the long haul. Of those amongst the thirteen who were below retirement age nine years later, eight were still working in telephone exchanges. ‘List of Permanent Officers of the Commonwealth Service on 30 June 1937’, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No. 1, 4 January 1938; ‘List of Permanent Officers of the Commonwealth Service on 30 June 1946’, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No. 1, 2 January 1948. 159 Minutes of 8th CTOA National Conference, 17-26 October 1935. 160 See Lowenstein, Weevils in the Flour, pp. 64-88. Some workers did buck the trend, however. Joanne Scott’s research unearthed a strike by seven junior nurses at Goondiwindi hospital in Queensland, over the sacking of one of their colleagues for insubordination. Scott, ‘Generic Resemblances’?, p. 315. Janey Stone also records the involvement of women in Depression-era struggles, most notably a strike by about 500 women clothing workers in Victoria against the ten per cent wage cut in 1932. Janey Stone, ‘Brazen Hussies and God’s Police: Fighting Back in the Depression Years’ in Sandra Bloodworth & Tom O’Lincoln (eds), Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History (Melbourne: Interventions, 1998), p. 50. As Scott points out, however, “the ability of female, and also, male, workers to pursue their interests through trade unionism was limited during the 1930s by the circumstances of the Depression.”

176 operators adrift while the union concentrated on quite spirited campaigns to defend the incumbency of more senior staff.

It was easy too for CTOA leaders, looking at the employment crisis from the perspective of their own positions slightly up the promotional ladder, to conflate job security with issues of career. At the time, Muriel Heagney wrote of a “new psychology” arising over the previous fifty years as the social and economic status of women was transformed, but she also pointed out that “the main urge behind women’s entry into gainful occupation is not, however, simply the satisfaction of her desire for an outlet of her energy and ability, but the driving force of stern economic necessity.”161 In fact each dimension fed off the other. The need for women to secure independent means of income was a pressing issue but it was also a fundamental, longer-term question of the right to employment played out against the propaganda of those who wished to deny them any place in the workforce. These perspectives helped define the CTOA’s attitude to the employment crisis. If the union could not prevent the Government axing the jobs held by its women members, at least it could campaign to construct a framework for long-term female careers. Thus the spotlight shifted from the collective right to employment under the best possible conditions to the individualist right to a decent career. The union took up demands for the right of women to retire at 55 and for appropriate superannuation arrangements to facilitate this option.162 They demanded three months furlough after ten years’ service.163 They responded enthusiastically to Heagney’s invitation to participate in the Equal Status Committee, organised under the auspices of the Victorian Open Door Council.164 Above all, they set about protecting their most secure jobs against unfettered and potentially corrupt competition from male workers in the internal and external labour markets.

Like craft unionists, the CTOA leaders were attempting in effect to police the gateway to the better jobs. But unlike craft workers whose pre-capitalist origins left them with some residual control over the labour process, CTOA activists never exercised any sway over the formal qualifications required on the job. The most they could do was insist on

161 Heagney, Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs?, p. 12. 162 Federal Executive Minutes, 23 January 1936, 23 June 1936, 20 July 1936. 163 Minutes of 8th CTOA National Conference, 17-26 October 1935. 164 Federal Executive Minutes, 24 June 1935,26 August 1935; Minutes of 8th CTOA National Conference, 17-26 October 1935.

177 regulating entry to the supervisory levels by ensuring transparent processes and equitable principles of selection. Indeed their lack of control over qualifications was the basis for promoting seniority as a more important principle.

The process necessarily involved enforcing a strict demarcation between the classification levels. This was not simply a matter of marking out the steps in the vertical career path. Differentiation was also a precondition for enabling supervisory staff to fulfil their function as supervisors. It was not enough for monitors and supervisors’ to invoke a lawful right of control over their subordinates. They needed informal authority, a form of social recognition from below that bestowed on them the legitimacy to perform the supervisory role. Paradoxically such authority was strongest when the supervisor’s qualifications were acquired on the job, when the person had “come up through the ranks” and was considered to have “earnt their stripes.” It was this that placed them in a separate category to the outsider or indeed to the less experienced telephone exchange worker. Having achieved this status, however, the conferred authority was upheld only if supervisor ceased to be “one of the girls.” A certain emotional and social distance was required, augmented by formal differences in pay and conditions. The concept of seniority captures the paradox perfectly. Someone who is ‘senior’ ideally shares a common work background with ‘the juniors’ but holds a quite distinct and superior status, marked by certain trappings such as higher levels of salary and the like. Adelaide CTOA member Miss Hayman drew together these different threads in her defence of seniority, written in late 1934 in the aftermath of the Stewart case and a similar breakdown of due process in Adelaide. In a letter to the Department discussed at length by the Federal Executive Council, she argued:

If seniority counted for nothing and can be overridden by qualification for, as well as appointment to, a higher position, one of the fundamentals of the service falls to pieces. Chaotic conditions is (sic) created if a Senior Monitor becomes subordinate to telephonists; as she now becomes junior in all but salary to the most junior who qualify at examination…for the position of supervisor.165

Seniority here is invoked as the only concept that will deliver supervisors the authority they need to control the workforce. It derives from knowing intimately the work of the

165 Federal Executive Minutes, 19 November 1934.

178 telephonists but knowing it to a level of expertise that ensures the Senior Monitor’s authority over her charges. Seniority is thus a notion of simultaneous sameness and difference. Unlike the junior who passes an examination, the senior is both from the ranks and above the ranks. In the eyes of Miss Hayman and her colleagues, this was the basis for protecting not only the careers of telephone exchange women against interlopers but the very functional integrity of the monitors and supervisors’ jobs. As a touchstone of CTOA policy in the Depression years, however, it variably magnified a similar paradox of sameness and difference between the union’s operator and supervisory members. The differences, in particular, helped further fray the threads that bound the operator ranks to the union they were instrumental in creating. When the operators most desperately needed a collective defence of their jobs, the CTOA merely offered to defend the opportunity to escape to more secure, higher-level positions, a strategy which by definition could benefit only a small minority.

Ultimately, then, the Depression experience facilitated a further subtle shift in the union’s ideology from the concept of collective improvement that had characterised Lillias McLeod’s generation, to the notion of individual advancement. Whereas the welfarism evident in the 1920s was still pervasive, it now stood as a kind of ideological bridge between the two positions, marking a transition of the union from an organisation of class defence to an advocate of equal opportunity and purveyor of the values of a ‘career service’.

Ironically, one of the union’s few successes of the decade harked back to the earlier tradition. In 1937 the union managed to convince the Public Service Arbitrator to reduce the working hours of country telephonists and Sydney phonogram operators and overseers, and to extend the application of rest breaks to the period 6pm to10pm. Telephonists in 31 exchanges on a 42-hour week and 261 exchanges on a 44-hour week found their working week reduced to 39 hours.166 Although not the reduction the CTOA had sought, it stood out amidst the gloom of Depression era setbacks. It stood out too as evidence of a rank and file voice that continued to exist irrespective of the direction and shortcomings of the union. Eighteen telephonists, eight phonogram attendants and two

166 Transcript of Proceedings before Common. Public Service Arbitrator, July 1937, in the matter of the CTOA and the PMG and Public Service Board, held by CEPU, Melbourne; Determination No.18 of 1937, CPSAR, Vol. 17, 1937, pp. 257-72.

179 monitors testified to the strain of long hours in country exchanges where traffic demands had grown without relief. For many of them, working the country exchanges was more arduous than their current city jobs.167 Inspired perhaps by the desire “to lift a burden from the shoulders of another”, their evidence drew directly on their own experience as the Other, and kept alive the notion of unionism built on the collective labour culture of the workplace.

The War on Wages

From the time of Federation the expansion program for telephone services devised by PMG Department engineers and driven by political expectation and consumer demand had persistently outstripped the resources available to the Department, motivating management to pursue more intensive and extensive exploitation of its labour.168 With the economic crisis of the late1920s an entirely different pattern emerged but with similar consequences for workers. For the first time, cancellations of telephone subscriptions exceeded new connections, resulting in a net loss of 19 569 lines and 22 114 telephones over the 1930-31 financial year.169 As demand declined and public expenditure was slashed, management curtailed capital investment, including their program of automating the switching process. But this was insufficient to reverse the series of losses sustained by the telephone branch since 1924-25, which management blamed in part on rising wages.170 Although largely captive to government responses to the economic downturn, which necessarily focussed on national economic and political imperatives, the Department hierarchy never lost sight of its own specific agenda. The economic crisis was a setback to their program of capital investment but it was also an opportunity to restore profitability by using unemployment to discipline the workforce.

Public service unions were initially assured by Prime Minister Scullin that he had no intention of lowering service salaries. On this basis he pressured them to forgo cost of

167 Transcript of Proceedings. 168 Extensive exploitation involves increasing the volume of productive output without increasing productivity or wage costs. Lengthening the working day while holding down wages is the classic method. Intensive exploitation entails increasing the productivity of labour per unit time, either by compelling or inducing workers to work “harder” or by introducing new technology. 169 PMG Annual Report, 1930-31. 170 PMG Annual Report, 1924-25, 1925-26.

180 living increases. By October 1930, however, the Government was moving to cut wages outright. In March 1931 the Public Service Arbitrator applied to lower the cost of living adjustment and after a conciliation conference a determination was made reducing the wages of adult male public servants by ₤18 from 16 April.171 But worse was to come with the passage of the Financial Emergency Act 1931 which slashed salaries of up to ₤250 by 18 per cent and salaries between ₤250 and ₤1000 by 20 per cent.172 Scullin again promised unions on 15 June 1931 that no further reductions were contemplated,173 but few believed they had turned the corner.

By the time Labor lost office to Lyons’ United Australia Party in December 1931, unions were resigned to another round of attacks. Despite a budget surplus for the 1931- 32 financial year, a further cut of ₤8 for men, ₤5 for women and ₤4 for juniors was imposed in late 1932.174 The Federal Public Service Journal complained that “many Commonwealth officers have suffered reductions in real wages to an extent not even contemplated by any wage-fixing tribunal in Australia.”175 It is likely that without the more militant agitation by the Sydney-based postal unions, especially the APWU, the public service wage cuts would have been even deeper and lasted longer. As it was, the ACOA and allied unions were forced to concede in September 1933 that despite “the widespread activities of the Service organisations and the tremendous amount of work involved in those activities, extending over a long period, the result is very disappointing.”176

Why, then, did the CTOA leaders not consider more militant options? The most obvious reason is that they were ideologically disinclined to break with the patterns of the past, especially when such a break was commonly constructed as a sign of Leftist sympathies. Changing course, moreover, was not simply a matter of a policy decision. A more militant approach could be built only through an active and engaged rank and file with traditions of resistance. No such body of unionists existed by the early 1930s.

171 6 page typescript, ‘The Depression – Departmental Effects’, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9/Box 21, HX 2/3. 172 Caiden, Career Service, pp. 230-31. 173 Queensland Branch Minutes, 10 July 1931. All Queensland Branch records are held by CEPU (Communications – T&S), Queensland Branch, Brisbane, unless otherwise indicated. 174 Victorian 19th Annual Report, 1932-33, held with Victorian Branch Minutes; Federal Public Service Journal, 30 Sept 1933, p. 4. 175 Federal Public Service Journal, 30 Sept 1932, p. 1. 176 Federal Public Service Journal, 30 Sept 1933, p. 4.

181 By definition the service model of unionism precluded the very conditions required for the union to embark on a new course at short notice. In other words, even if the CTOA had wished to fight in a different way, it simply did not have the organisational readiness for the battle. Mass unemployment and poverty, moreover, provided the least favourable circumstances for employed workers to initiate a fightback themselves. The perceived risk of conflictual action was simply too high. Not surprisingly, most CTOA leaders and members did not consider mass militancy a ‘realistic’ option and the union looked instead to its natural allies in the High Council. In so doing it extended even further the bureaucratic distance between leaders and members.

Through the High Council, the CTOA was willing to join united and even overtly political campaigns first to oppose the cuts to wages and conditions and then to agitate for their restoration. At a joint conference in May 1932, the unions even agreed for the first time to co-operate with non-service trade unions in a campaign to reduce working hours in Government departments and private industries.177 Direct approaches to the CTOA by the ACTU, however, continued to be met with cautious indifference. When ACTU Secretary Crofts wrote to the union in May 1934 soliciting support for an All Australian Trade Union Congress, the Federal Executive decided that “as our organization is not affiliated with the Trades Hall the letter be simply received.”178

The economic recovery over the next four years allowed the Government to respond more favourably to the persistent joint campaigning by the public service unions. A series of partial restorations of public service living standards were implemented until “full” restoration was achieved in 1936.179

By 1935, however, the years of lower labour costs and workplace pressure had allowed the PMG Department to achieve its most pressing goals. The Postmaster General could report that by June “the whole of the ground lost as a result of the depression was fully recovered and the previous highest total of 520,180 telephones, which was reached in 1930, was substantially exceeded.”180 More importantly, in 1933-34 for the first time in

177 Caiden, Career Service, p. 234. 178 Federal Executive Minutes, 25 May 1934. 179 Victorian Annual Report, 1933-34, with Victorian Branch Minutes. 180 PMG Annual Report 1934-35.

182 ten years the telephone branch turned a profit.181 Unfortunately for CTOA members there was an inverse correlation between this result and their wages. As the New South Wales Branch pointed out in February 1937, salaries of telephone exchange employees were lower then than when the union had approached the Arbitrator in 1924.182

As with the wider working class revolt that shook Australia from 1916, the rank and file resistance in the telephone exchanges that created and shaped telephone unionism in the 1900s and 1910s, declined in the 1920s. This was partly a result of its own successes in moderating the regime of pressure on the job, particularly the first Awards culminating in the 34-hour week in 1924. It was partly the result of management’s ideological offensive to win the hearts and minds of employees through initiatives such as the Postal Institutes.

Without the energy of an active working class at the point of production, the union’s centre of gravity shifted from the culture of the workplace towards the culture of the leadership. Here the decisive factor was the hegemony of more senior staff, veterans of the industry who looked to telephony not just for a job but a career in service. Those of them who already were monitors and supervisors brought to their union roles a certain haughty benevolence towards the mass membership borne out of their position as simultaneously of the ranks and above the ranks. They, along with the career telephonists who filled the remaining leadership positions, adopted a welfarist approach to members’ needs while forging a union culture that upheld the virtues of hierarchy and loyal public service. This of course dovetailed neatly with management's corporatist approach to containing and dissipating labour resistance.

The Depression and the associated government-led offensive against labour exacerbated these trends by further undermining rank and file confidence while driving an even larger wedge between the operators and supervisors. By the close of the 1930s the union had tightened its ties to the conservative High Council and abandoned any pretence that it could collectively defend the jobs of its most vulnerable members. Having failed in practice,

181 PMG Annual Report, 1933-34. 182 Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University (hereafter NBAC, ANU). Australian Telephone and Phonogram Officers’ Association (hereafter ATPOA), Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 8 February 1937.

183 welfarism continued in CTOA affairs merely as an ideology, or at worst an echo of the Department's own corporatist platitudes. By the eve of the war the CTOA was in danger of subordinating its class character completely to the values of career service, leaving its operator membership to fend for themselves against the sanctioned tyranny of life in a telephone exchange. Eva Baird describes what this meant for a young worker starting out in 1938:

It was so frightening, and everybody was so strict, and everybody was between 18 and 65, you see, and some of them were older than your parents. And they were so strict, they knew nothing else except roussing on kids like us. You daren’t be a minute late or you daren’t talk to somebody beside you or you daren’t be doing something when there was a call waiting. Everything was so very, very strict. But mostly, if you worked…they were very, very fair.183

In this atmosphere of fear and favouritism, the CTOA’s presence on the job had grown perilously weak. According to Jean Bowden, no-one in the various exchanges where she worked prior to the war even talked about unionism.184 As war approached, it was evident that the stirring slogan of pioneer unionist Lillias McLeod - ‘in union is strength’ – was in desperate need of rejuvenation.

183 Interview with Eva Baird, conducted by the author on 12 September 2001. Baird started as a telephonist in Brisbane Central Exchange straight from school in 1938. She retired in 1978 after 40 unbroken years of service which saw her perform every job in the exchange except Observations 184 Interview with Jean Bowden, conducted by author on 20-21 October 2000. Bowden began work as a telephonist in Gympie exchange in Queensland in 1937 at the age of sixteen. Through cross transfers she worked in regional and main trunk exchanges across the country before finally settling in Brisbane where she became active in the Queensland branch of the union in 1942 or 1943.

184 Chapter Five War, Challenge & Containment, 1939 -1949

When telephone exchange unionism in Australia was on the verge of disappearing in the 1910s, war and postwar reconstruction helped produce the circumstances for its revival. Although the CTOA was not directly a product of the 1914-18 war, the sweatshop conditions perpetuated by wartime government policies were a catalyst for the union establishing a permanent, national presence and securing the first ever telephonists’ Award. World War Two and its aftermath were to have a similar enlivening effect, again driven by rank and file anger at the inequities of the regime of sacrifice imposed on the job. Whereas the 1914-1919 period consolidated worker resistance in an institutional form, the 1940s held out the possibility of reinvigorating the institution as a base for worker resistance.

Three of the main industrial issues confronting telephonists during the war years were the introduction of night shifts for women, the ongoing inability to win fair and equitable wages, and the increased workload pressures engendered by wartime communication demands and labour shortages. This chapter will examine each of these issues in turn, and will argue that for telephonists the war years represented neither an aberration nor a watershed in relation to what had gone before. Far from advancing the position of this particular group of women workers, the exigencies of war led in fact to a deterioration in their working conditions as PMG managers and state regulatory authorities manipulated the ideology of essential service and patriotic sacrifice to impose longer hours, bigger workloads and a wage scale which languished well below the rates paid to males.

Faced with similar problems, other groups of women workers engaged in war production took militant action. For the CTOA too it would be a decade of new possibilities, played out against the wider political and ideological struggles between labour and capital. Rank and file anger over managerial indifference to their predicament was compounded by CTOA ineffectiveness and complicity, creating the conditions for a new challenge to the prevailing industrial order in telephone exchanges. New South Wales again created the alternative, this time in the form of a group of

185 radical workers who assumed formal leadership positions in the Branch. The group, led by phonogram operator Alice McLean, campaigned energetically for equal pay, wage increases, uniform hours, more staff and better amenities, and argued strongly for union amalgamation as the most effective means for winning improvements. McLean was publicly identified with various militant campaigns led by other PMG unions in Sydney.

Despite some important achievements, her group’s ascendancy was relatively shortlived, however, undermined by the limitations of their own top-down approach to leadership and a combination of political and ideological factors which ultimately deterred the rank and file from following the lead they offered. McLean would disappear from the union, the industry and even radical labour historiography itself, unknown or forgotten, it seems, by most PMG militants and Leftists still alive today. Her decade would end with industrial conservatism ascendant yet again as gender ideology, Cold War politics and public service corporatism combined to delegitimise the militant alternatives and re-establish the hegemony of career service unionism, despite the latter’s failings.

Telephonists and War

On 19 February 1942 a Japanese military air raid on Darwin destroyed the post office, killing most of the staff, including four telephonists: Freda Stasinowsky, Emily Young, and the sisters Eileen and Jean Mullen. The targetting was precise. The post office bomb fell in the second phase of the raid which also knocked out the building housing the overland telegraph connection with Adelaide.1 No event more graphically or tragically illustrated how essential telecommunications had become to the social and economic life of a nation-state and to the fighting of wars.

In the war economy constructed after the attack and the Japanese victory in Singapore, the militarisation of telephony and telegraphy effected by Japanese bombs in Darwin was extended by Government fiat to the communications systems nationally. The telephone service was declared a Protected Undertaking in 1942 under National

1 Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1984), p.157.

186 Security Regulations, and the PMG Department as a whole became virtually an adjunct to the Australian and US armed forces.2 The distinction made by Ann Moyal between the military and civilian functions of the Department was little in evidence as the Department directed all of its operational activities towards the singular purpose of furthering the “war effort”.3 As well as providing military communications, the Department helped facilitate the organisation of the war economy, boosted morale by offering discounted telegram and trunk line services to members of the armed forces, and along the way generated handsome profits which bolstered the government’s war coffers.

The Department’s workforce became essential civilian personnel. Indeed some were moved into overtly military roles precisely because of the usefulness of their skills to the waging of war. Engineers and other technical staff were trained to maintain telecommunications in the event of an invasion by Japanese armed forces.4 Telegraphists were seconded into military roles. For most PMG Department staff, however, the specificity of their skills meant they had little chance of moving to different areas of civilian work. The mechanics were declared a reserved occupation, although, as Moyal points out, large numbers of departmental engineers did join the Second AIF Signal Corps. By the time the Japanese government surrendered, around 7,500 PMG Department workers had enlisted, more than a third of the Department’s total permanent workforce.5

This massive departure of male labour was facilitated by, as the Public Service Board wrote, “utilising to the utmost extent the services of females…”6 But while many jobs left by men were filled by women, telephonists and phonogram operators in the main were stuck where they were, trapped ironically by the very skills which the Department had always refused to recognise. They were discouraged and from 1943 prevented by the Manpower Committee from pursuing opportunities for women in designated male occupations. Not that this necessarily meant their work was less critical to war operations or less dangerous. Telephonists from around the country maintained a strict

2 PMG Annual Report, 1941-42. 3 Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 172. 4 ibid., p.173. 5 ibid., p.154. 6 Letter from Commonwealth Public Service Board to Director, Posts & Telegraphs, 22 April 1942, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP404, CW 1243.

187 code of secrecy to protect the sensitive military information to which they were privy on a daily basis.7 Many were in the forefront of the defence effort. Carmel MacDonald (nee Ganly), for instance, was one of scores of Northern telephonists who worked in constant fear of a Darwin-style attack. She recalls operating in sweltering temperatures in the Mareeba exchange with sandbags packed to above window level. With gas mask and tin helmet in hand, she worked volunteer shifts when Japanese aircraft were sighted in the area, maintaining crucial communications links and alerting all the police stations in the district to sound their air-raid sirens. 8

Scholarship on the impact of employment policies on gender relations during World War Two has tended to fall into two camps; there are those, like Lynn Beaton, who take a ‘watershed’ view emphasising the transformative effects of the war experience, and those who focus on postwar reconstruction of the old gender order.9 The latter group argue, apropos Anne Summers, that after the war “most women obediently went back home and started having a baby.”10 Or, like McMurchy, Oliver and Thornley, they acknowledge that women continued in paid employment but conclude that “the sexual division of work into ‘men’s’ jobs and ‘women’s’ jobs re-asserted itself.”11 Sitting somewhere between these two positions, Saunders and Bolton have claimed that “the ideology of women’s central vocation in the private arena, with more limited engagement in the public sphere, was not challenged and reformulated – just modified.”12 What is at issue in all these accounts is the extent and duration of the wartime change. In other words, they all share an emphasis on the differences between war and prewar experiences. The telephonists’ story shifts the terms of this discussion somewhat by drawing attention to a group of women whose work experiences during the war were as significant for their similarities as for their differences to the prewar years.

7 Interview with Eva Baird, conducted by the author on 12 September 2001. 8 Carmel MacDonald (nee Ganly), ‘War Time Memories – Experiences in a War Zone’, typescript provided to author by Moya Walker. 9 Lynn Beaton, ‘The Importance of Women’s Paid Labour: Women at Work in World War II’ in M. Bevege, M. James & C. Shute (eds), Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982), p. 85. 10Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, 2nd revised edn (Camberwell: Penguin Books Australia, 2002), p. 466. 11 Megan McMurchy et al, For Love or Money: A Pictorial History of Women and Work in Australia (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1983), p. 113. 12 Kay Saunders & Geoffrey Bolton, ‘Girdled for War: Women’s Mobilisations in World War Two’ in Kay Saunders & Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 395.

188 As Beaton has noted, publications such as the Australian Women’s Weekly responded to the labour shortage created by the male exodus by promoting the patriotic virtues of women in industry.13 But the experience of women in telephone exchanges does not bear out Beaton’s claim that the overall increase in female participation in the paid workforce led to enhanced social significance and visibility for all working women.14 Neither did it result in improvements in telephone exchange workers’ pay and conditions. In fact, their on-the-job position deteriorated significantly during the war years. Their story thus draws attention to the heterogeneous character of women’s wartime experiences and highlights the fact that paid female labour was not promoted as a general good but as a specific contribution to the war campaign. Policies designed to increase female workforce participation were aimed in particular at meeting labour needs in those industries hardest hit by the loss of men into the armed forces. Consequently the Women’s Weekly constructed a glamorous image of ‘Winnie the War- Winner’, Australia’s equivalent of ‘Rosie the Riveter’, but passed over those areas of employment in which women had been strongly represented for many years.15 A similar strategy is evident in the Government’s creation of the Women’s Employment Board (WEB). Its aim was “to encourage and regulate the employment of women in work usually performed by men, for the purpose of aiding the prosecution of the war.”16 The WEB was empowered, among other things, to set rates of pay for women entering men’s jobs at levels no less than 60 per cent and no more than 100 per cent of the adult male rate. This was designed to overcome the disincentive of the Arbitration Court’s living wage principles under which women were paid only 54 per cent of the male basic rate.

The women falling under the WEB’s jurisdiction, however, were a minority. Of the 855,000 women in wartime civilian employment, only about 70,000 were subject to the Board’s regulations.17 The rest continued to fill women’s jobs and endure prewar female rates of pay. As Larmour notes, the wages of workers in hospitals and asylums, woollen and cotton textile industries, and food processing and preserving industries remained

13 Beaton, ‘The Importance of Women’s Paid Labour: Women at Work in World War II’, p. 85. 14 ibid. 15 Janey Stone, ‘Class Struggle on the Home Front: Women, Unions and Militancy in the Second World War’ in Sandra Bloodworth & Tom O’Lincoln (eds), Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History (Melbourne: Interventions, 1998), p. 62. 16 Constance Larmour, ‘Women’s Wages and the WEB’, in A. Curthoys, S. Eade & P. Spearritt (eds), Women at Work (Sydney: Aust Society for the Study of Labour History, 1975), p. 48. 17 Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, p. 464.

189 pegged at 54%, leading to labour shortages in these sectors which even industrial conscription was not able to overcome.18 Female telephone exchange workers, though earning more than 54 per cent of the male wage, were in a similar predicament.

What is striking, then, about the telephonists and phonogram operators in the war years are the continuities with, rather than the divergences from, prewar patterns. For the hello girls the war was neither a watershed nor an aberration. While their role in an essential wartime industry dramatically transformed the circumstances of their work, the conditions of their work, their relations with management and their responses can best be seen as part of a continuum. Four of the key issues confronted by the CTOA during the war years – staff shortages and overwork, the increasing use of temporaries, nightwork and equal pay - were all reprises on familiar earlier themes. The union’s basic approach to these questions, furthermore, remained consistent with the patterns established since the late 1920s despite the examples of militancy provided by women in other sectors of the war economy.19

Nightwork

In June 1940 the Queensland Assistant Superintendent of Telephones approached the union with a proposal to allow women exchange workers to work shifts between 6am and 11pm, and to work all-night duties one week in twenty. The change, according to the Department, was intended to “relieve male officers for compulsory war-service training.”20 At a Special Meeting of the Queensland Branch on 27 June, members unanimously viewed the suggestion with the “utmost disfavour”. The meeting pointed out that the male telephonists were all below the age for compulsory training, and that as workers in an emergency service they should be exempt from the training anyway. They conceded, however, that “should an emergency arise…Queensland female telephonists could be counted on to respond to the full.”21

18 Larmour, ‘Women’s Wages and the WEB’, p. 54. 19 Stone in particular has punctured the myth that women in industry in World War Two were so motivated by war patriotism they knuckled down willingly to whatever pay and conditions were imposed on them. For her account of women workers’ militancy in the war years, see Stone, ‘Class Struggle on the Home Front’. 20 Queensland Branch Minutes, 27 June 1940. 21 ibid.

190

The Queenslanders then notified the Federal Executive Council which raised the matter with the Chief Inspector of Telephones, Mr L.B. Fanning. He advised that a misunderstanding had occurred and assured the union that if nightwork for women was considered necessary as a wartime measure, Central Office would consult the Federal Executive. Pointedly he did not rule it out.22

In June 1941 PMG management in Western Australia approached the state Branch about nightwork. Fanning again assured the Executive Council that appropriate consultations would occur through the federal channels if such a move were to be made. The Perth managers, he said, were merely ascertaining the attitudes of telephonists on the issue.23 On 2 February1942 the New South Wales Branch also reported a rumour that all night duty was immanent. By the time the Executive Council had had an opportunity to discuss the latest development, at their meeting on 23 February, they had received news of the fall of Singapore on 15th and possibly of the bombing of Darwin on the 19th. “Realising the seriousness of the war position the members of the Federal Executive felt they should be prepared to discuss the question [of night duty for women] with Central Administration.”24

They resolved that if nightwork had to be adopted, they would seek conditions:

1. As a wartime measure only and to cease with the war or six months after. 2. Equal pay 3. All unessential services to be dispensed with. 4. Male officers released must be on military duty. 5. Staff rosters to be set out to suit transport of officers.25

The branches were contacted for their views. Before all had responded a formal proposal was received from Fanning for women to work night shifts. Referring to the grave consequences should the Department fail to meet its defence and security obligations, Fanning observed that “women are playing an ever-increasing part in affairs

22 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 15 July 1940. 23 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 21 July 1941. 24 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 February 1942. 25 ibid.

191 of national importance” and he expressed confidence “that members of [the CTOA] are also anxious to co-operate in assisting the telephone service to meet its obligations…”26

After receiving opinions from the New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australian executives, on 26 March Roddy and Edwards held discussions with management during which they verbally agreed to nightwork. In a subsequent letter to the union Fanning outlined the conditions agreed upon. No concessions had been made to the union on providing transport or on the critical question of equal pay, Fanning pointing out that telephony was categorised as women’s work and “the withdrawal…of all or some of the males from these occupations can scarcely be regarded as involving the employment of females in male occupations.”27

The Federal Executive’s acceptance of the proposal without making any ground on the equal pay issue sparked strong reaction from Queensland and New South Wales. At a special meeting called in Brisbane on 22 April, the Queensland Executive challenged the Federal Executive’s interpretation of the responses from several branches. The Queenslanders pointed out that New South Wales had strenuously opposed the introduction of nightwork for women and had agreed to accept it only on certain conditions, equal pay being a key point.28 Similarly, Perth agreed only if the five conditions originally outlined by the Federal Executive were secured. And at the time of Roddy and Edwards’ meeting with management, Victoria had not completed a plebiscite of its members on the question. Yet the Federal Executive chose to interpret the correspondence of all three branches as approval of nightwork. The Queensland meeting instructed Secretary Miss G. Leach to inform the Federal body “that [this] Branch considers summing up of States’ decisions gross miscalculation, and to suspend introduction of all night work pending re-submission of acceptance under Departmental conditions.”29

Two days later New South Wales also convened a special meeting at which it resolved that the conditions agreed to by the Federal Executive were “wholly unacceptable”.

26 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 March 1942. 27 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 14 April 1942. 28 Indeed, a Special General Meeting of the NSW Branch stipulated stringent conditions for agreeing to nightwork for women, including an unequivocal demand for equal pay. NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 22 March 1942. 29 Queensland Branch Minutes, 22 April 1942.

192 Sydney called for the question to be resubmitted to the branches and for a delegation to approach the Postmaster General, Senator Ashley, seeking a commitment to equal pay for telephone exchange workers.30 On the motion of the Queensland proxy Miss McCormack, seconded by the New South Wales proxy Kathleen Hester, the two demands were placed before the Federal Executive on 11 May. Only Queensland and New South Wales voted in favour. Their sense of betrayal was then compounded by a resolution rebuking Queensland for referring to the Federal Executive’s acceptance of nightwork as a “dishonourable surrender.”31

By June women across the country were performing shifts throughout the night. There is no doubt that the imperative of releasing male labour for war service played a genuine role in this development.32 But it is also true that night work had long been part of PMG ‘s program to organise telephone switching as a feminised ghetto.33 It is revealing that the Department’s wartime endeavours to employ women on the night shifts began before there was a wartime necessity for it. It is even more revealing that despite the more compelling case for nightwork that developed after the events in Singapore and Darwin, management did not consider the emergency so dire that they saw a need to drop their opposition to equal pay as a gesture to smooth the way for women to occupy male telephonists’ jobs. By contrast, they agreed to pay female Morse telegraphists 100 per cent of the male rate without the telegraphists’ union even applying to the WEB.34

Conflict over nightwork persisted well after its introduction. Queensland Branch continued to agitate locally for the provision of transport after nightfall, a more serious issue for women in Brisbane than in other capitals because of Brisbane’s reputation as a garrison town and the city’s poorer public transport infastructure. The CTOA in Brisbane developed a campaign which even drew support from the Trades and Labour

30 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 11 May 1942. 31 ibid. 32 According to official figures, the introduction of all-night duty for females released 337 males for other duties. Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol. 29, 1944, p. 21. 33 As recently as 1936, W. Fanning, Chief Inspector of Telephones, proposed to the CTOA that women replace men on the nightshifts at Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane central exchanges. Prior to putting the matter to the branches the Executive responded with a set of conditions including a demand that all women rostered on night duty receive an additional £50 per annum. Management would not consent and in the face of strong opposition from the branches, the matter lapsed. Federal Executive Minutes, 9 March 1936, 10 March 1936, 16 March 1936. 34 Memo from L.B. Fanning, Director of Posts & Telegraphs, Melbourne, to L. Ramsay, Secretary of Commonwealth Public Service Board, 22 March 1944, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, MP404/1, PB44/1652.

193 Council.35 Lack of amenities for women, particularly in country exchanges, was another ongoing source of complaint.36 The equal pay issue, in contrast, broadened into a general campaign waged by the union, with acceptance of nightwork just one of the justifications for their claim.

Wages

Following the evolution of gendered pay schedules in the Commonwealth Public Service after World War One, a reclassification of Public Service positions in 1926 had established a custom of paying Public Service women £50 per annum less than men performing “similar” duties. In 1941 the margin was pushed out to £62 when the men’s rate was increased by £12. This was not so much a pay rise as a reconfiguration of family income. It was the sum, adjusted over time, by which men’s wages had been reduced to fund the Commonwealth Public Service child endowment scheme. After the introduction of national child endowment, the Public Service scheme was discontinued, leaving the way open for a £12 adjustment to the male wage.37

The CTOA and the Federated Public Service Assistants’ Association quickly responded with their own claim of £12 for adult women. The hearing on the 8 and 9 January 1942 left the unions confident of a satisfactory result but after careful consideration, the Public Service Arbitrator, Justice Boniwell, rejected the claim, stating he did not “feel justified in ordering an increase in pay for females and juniors upon the restoration effected in the salaries of adult males.”38 For the CTOA it was the beginning of a string of defeats on wages that stretched beyond the war years.

In June 1942, after the nightwork negotiations had failed to deliver equal pay, the union turned to the WEB, seeking at least 90 per cent of the male rate. Judge Foster first had to decide if telephony fell within the purview of the Board which could set female rates higher than the Arbitration Court’s 54 per cent rule only for women filling men’s jobs and where a rate was not already established. On this basic point he agreed with the

35 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 August 1942. 36 Queensland Branch Minutes, 18 December 1942. 37 Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol. 22, 1942, pp. 11-13. 38 ibid., p. 15. Federal Executive Council Minutes, 12 January 1942 & 23 February 1942.

194 telephone bosses. Nightwork, he ruled, did not alter the fact that operating switchboards had long been women’s work. Indeed since South Australian women had performed night shifts since 1917, it was not even a new condition of the work. The WEB could not intervene, regardless of how essential telephony was to the war effort and how far its wages declined.39

The union then mounted an equal pay case with the Public Service Arbitrator which was heard on 14 and 15 December 1943. Some of the points forwarded by branches for the advocate’s consideration reflected exchange workers’ growing frustration at the decline in their wages and conditions relative to women covered by the WEB and to their own prewar standards. Queensland supplied a substantial list of complaints:

1. Remuneration for all-night work insufficient. 2. War has brought extra duties, and no commensurate rise in salaries. 3. Temporary employees receiving much greater salaries under the auspices of the Women’s Employment Board. 4. A definite hardship has been placed on permanent female officers by virtue of their employment, insomuch as they are not permitted to go into other branches where females are receiving the same remuneration as males. 5. Hours have been altered out of all proportion, as represented in any previous Arbitration Court determination. 6. Equal Pay would ensure the Telephone Branch left open as field of employment for men in post-war reconstruction scheme.40

The last point reveals the lingering suspicion that women’s lower rate of pay would prove too strong an incentive for management to end nightwork for women at war’s end.

The strength of the arguments failed however to convince Arbitrator Boniwell. Even the Public Service Board’s mealy-mouthed praise for “the manner in which the staff is meeting the calls made upon it under present circumstances” was dismissed as irrelevant. Such eulogising, Boniwell wrote, held no sway in his tribunal: “Loyalty and

39 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 31 August 1942. 40 Queensland Branch Minutes, 9 December 1943.

195 efficiency on the part of employees are assumed in these proceedings…Such qualities cannot be taken as factors which should affect the decisions to be given.”41 His attitude as much as his decision prompted the CTOA’s advocate, Mr Sheehan, to complain that the union was a victim of wage-pegging under the National Security Act.42

He had good reason of course for the allegation. But wartime wage-pegging must be seen in the longer sweep of history. By the end of the 1940s, the minimum adult wage for female telephonists stood at £210 per annum, slightly less than 79 per cent of the wage received by the male Postal Officers performing the same duties.43 Based on 1947 census figures showing a PMG workforce of 7401 female and only 199 male telephonists, the difference in pay rates between males and females across the range of age-groups and classifications in the telephone exchanges amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds per annum.44 Feminisation on these terms was delivering handsome economic rewards to the Department. Wartime wage outcomes, then, rather than an aberration, were simply a continuation of a prewar pattern of gendered exploitation.

Staffing Levels, Work Pressure and the Proliferation of Temps

For its wartime victims, however, wage discrimination helped exacerbate particularly acute labour market pressures. As early as January 1940, CTOA branches were fielding complaints by members that “the strain of having to work consistently at peak point would prove detrimental to the health and general welfare of the operators.”45 Monitors claimed their long hours of duty placed them at risk of “ultimate collapse.”46 Part of the problem was the speed with which the new military demands were placed on the service. Staff in the exchange at the Brisbane bayside suburb of Sandgate, for example, demanded additional outgoing junctions because the new military camp established nearby was causing continuous line congestion.47 But not all of the new demand had

41 Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol. 24, 1944, p. 24. 42 General Secretary’s Report to 9th CTOA National Conference, 17-28 April 1944. 43 Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol. 29, 1949, p. 182. 44 1947 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, Vol. II, p. 1426. 45 Queensland Branch Minutes, 1 February 1940. 46 Queensland Branch Minutes, 10 December 1940. 47 Queensland Branch Minutes, 25 September 1941.

196 external causes. The massive increase in non-military line use was partly the result of the influx of US service personnel, but it was also stimulated by offering discounted calls and telegrams. As the pressure on telephonists and phonogram operators grew, CTOA members in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia began campaigning for the abolition of half-rate Sunday calls.48 At the National Conference in April 1944, the South Australian delegates successfully moved a resolution demanding the intermediate rate be replaced with the full rate between 7am and 7pm and for improvements in the trunk line system.49 Pointedly, the Department rejected the proposal because it “would probably involve a loss to the Department in the neighbourhood of £80,000 per annum.”50

If demand for telephonists’ services was growing, the supply of telephonists was not. In Victoria, the numbers of staff resigning from the Department rose each year from 1939 to 1942, dropped in 1943 as the Manpower restrictions took effect, and skyrocketed in 1945 when they were lifted (See Table 4A).

Table 4A. Numbers of telephonists retiring from PMG Dept in Victoria as at 30 June 194551 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 71 130 167 310 207 286 496

Of those who resigned in the twelve months to 30 June 1945, 101 left to be married while 115 stated they left on account of ill-health.52 CTOA branches persistently identified low wages, overwork and the imposition of night duty as causes of the labour shortage. In Queensland the Branch Secretary, Eleanor Christsen, reported in November 1945 that many women left the service during the war because of evening shifts.53 Once the WEB began awarding higher rates for women in men’s jobs but left telephonists’ rates untouched, the pressure mounted. When women could train as telegraphists at 100 per cent of the male rate or work in exchanges as technicians at 90 per cent of the male rate, there was little incentive to volunteer for telephonists’ jobs. By 1944 some 6000

48 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 28 September 1942, 30 October 1942, 24 November 1942. 49 Minutes of 9th CTOA National Conference, 17-28 April 1944. 50 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 4 July 1944. 51 Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol.26, 1946, p. 21. 52 ibid. 53 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 66, Transcript of 1945 Wage Case, p. 179.

197 women had been recruited into men’s jobs in the Department.54 Telephonists, on the other hand, were floundering under the weight of increasing demands on their services.

The Department itself recognised the problem was serious, although not so serious as to require a reconsideration of its opposition to equal pay. In June 1940 it was announced that as a wartime measure only, women who married enlisted men could continue their employment in a temporary capacity.55 This and other similar strategies proved enormously successful at boosting the proportion of temporary staff, but less effective at alleviating the strain on staff overall. By February 1945 the Department could boast that temporaries accounted for a minimum of 50 per cent of the total operating workforce.56 Yet by its own formula, the numbers of staff on duty throughout 1945 still consistently fell short of the minimum required to handle the volume of calls received.57 The impact of this shortfall on workloads was compounded by inexperience. By 1945 34 per cent of the telephonists at the Melbourne main and trunk exchanges had less than six months’ experience and a further 15.5 per cent less than twelve months’.58 In Queensland Eleanor Christsen reported that over the five years to November 1945 the training supervisors in Brisbane had trained 180 new telephonists, amounting to a complete change-over in the staff.59

This left the CTOA facing not only a staffing crisis but also a potentially debilitating growth in vulnerable non-permanent forms of employment. Realising the danger the CTOA adopted a strategy of recruiting temporary employees and campaigning for their right to access to such conditions as sick leave. At the 1944 Conference the union launched a new bid to secure an opportunity for unmarried temporaries to qualify for permanency.60 A delegation took the proposal to management which rejected it on the grounds that it constituted “a clear departure from the principle of open competitive examinations…”61 It was not lost on the union that the decision to relax the ban on married women was also a departure from principle. Or that a departmental decision could be taken voluntarily to award telegraphists equal pay while a high-minded

54 Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 172. 55 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 15 July 1940. 56 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 26 February 1945. 57 Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol. 26, 1946, p. 20. 58 ibid, p. 22. 59 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 66, Transcript of 1945 Wage Case, p. 179. 60 Minutes of 9th CTOA National Conference, 17-28 April 1944. 61 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 November 1944.

198 opposition to a similar arrangement for telephonists was maintained year after year. The selective relaxation of some rules and the rigid enforcement of others rankled and would not be forgotten after VP day.

Operators at Work, Phonogram Room, Brisbane, 1944 (NAA: Image J2364, 691/5)

Forward to the Past

As the Japanese military threat receded, CTOA members along with the wider Australian populace began to imagine and plan the shape of their postwar world. Telephone exchange workers with long-term job aspirations wanted what the war economy had provided some women but denied them – access to a wider field of work, promotional opportunities, greater recognition of skills, and appropriate compensation for labour in the form of decent amenities, superannuation, allowances and, above all, equal pay. To this end, they saw the present labour market arrangements as an opportunity to push for longstanding aims. But they also rationally took the view that as many of their immediate grievances were caused by wartime exigencies, a restoration of prewar arrangements in certain matters was a necessary step forward. By looking to the past, they demonstrated that returning to prewar gender divisions of labour was not

199 simply a male-driven agenda, as has sometimes been suggested.62 CTOA women were only too keen to abolish female nightwork and re-establish the marriage bar, insisting they were emergency wartime measures only.

Both trends in thinking were evident in the CTOA’s National Conference in April 1944 and throughout its Executive and branch meetings in 1944 and 1945. At one extreme Conference embraced the broad shift in Australian government policy towards Keynesian full-employment policies and away from Imperial Preference in international economic relations.63 Yet Conference also resolved “that as a post-war policy we ask that the services of married female officers be dispensed with in order to ensure employment for our present temporary officers and service women.” On the general question of the marriage bar, Conference upheld the Department policy that “female officers be automatically retired on marriage…”64

This mixing of the progressive and the regressive seems strange in hindsight. But it made sense to most CTOA members. A general right to employment could logically co- exist with the marriage bar as union policy if one accepted an interpretation of full employment predicated on the social division between the public sphere of paid employment and the private sphere of unpaid labour in the home. This interpretation rested on two symbiotic assumptions. First, that there were not enough jobs for all who were able to participate in paid employment; second, that within the context of a labour force organised around the family household it was rational to exclude married women from the workforce because they were, in ideology if not reality, supported by the family wage of their husbands. In other words, full employment meant the right of breadwinners to a fulltime, secure job.65 Thus the CTOA’s conference motions, while paradoxical, are linked by a single, consistent strand of thought – the need to protect the job security of the union’s core constituency, unmarried women who economically supported themselves, breadwinners in their own right.66

62 See McMurchy et al, For Love or Money, pp. 113-14; Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, pp. 465-66. 63 Minutes of 9th CTOA National Conference, 17-28 April 1944. 64 ibid. 65 Breadwinner here is used in the broad sense of a person who is economically self-supporting and who may or may not have other people economically dependent on them. 66 It was not until after the Government abolished the marriage bar in 1966 that the CTOA broke from this position. As will be argued later, this break occurred once the dual assumptions themselves broke down. With an expanding economy in the late 1960s, married women demonstrably did not threaten unmarried

200

For all that, the union’s decision to uphold the marriage bar was not taken lightly. It followed an open discussion across two sessions of the National Conference during which some delegates argued the ban “discriminated unfairly against female officers in that they are compulsorily retired upon marriage.”67 The decision to support the ban was, in the end, a strategic, class response to their predicament as unmarried women reliant for their economic independence upon the sale of their own labour power in a relatively limited market place.

The same logic was evident in the call from Western Australian delegates to restrict all supervisory positions in the exchanges to women. From 1943 the union lobbied to allow women access to the Third Division from which they had been excluded, ostensibly because of their essential war role in the exchanges and, in the words of the Public Service Board, “in view of the need to make provision for Commonwealth employees and other males serving with the Forces.”68 When the campaign failed, the Western Australian Branch Secretary asked the Federal Executive: “...as we can get no advancement beyond Supervisor for female officers, why not endeavour to restrict Monitors and Supervisors positions to females?”69 Here, the notion of career parallels the conventional craft union focus on craft or trade. Just as craft unions sought to protect their members by monopolising and protecting the skills of the craft or trade, the CTOA’s career unionism was directed at protecting workers by limiting occupational entry to a certain group and promotional opportunities to that group’s most senior members. Craft and career unionism shared a preoccupation with differentiating and ranking labour – the skilled from the non-skilled, the single from the married woman, the senior from the junior. In both forms the integrity of the hierarchy was a central object of policy and practice, with the lower levels tending to be valued only insofar as they functioned as a rite of passage to higher duties. The unmarried, long-serving female senior served the role of craft unionism’s most celebrated subject, the master craftsmen, the embodiment of what can be achieved and what should be protected. Career unionism thus complemented the management ideology of career service.

women’s jobs once the bar was removed, while the growing participation rate of women in the workforce and the associated rise in Second Wave feminism undermined the sexism of the breadwinner ideology. 67 Minutes of 9th CTOA National Conference, 17-28 April 1944. 68 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 15 January 1946. 69 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 November 1944.

201 Workers were encouraged by their own union to accept responsibility for maintaining a hierarchical division of labour which bound them to the status-quo.

Other gender-based proposals put forward by the 1944 Conference included the call for a female welfare officer in each state administration of the Department, whose brief would be to “deal exclusively with female problems” and to watch for “the provision of facilities for female staff at new post offices in post-war expansion.”70 Conference also established a committee to consider postwar expansion of the Department, concerned especially with recruitment, training, amenities and modernisation.71

War Weariness to Postwar Unrest

Dream and plan as they may, as the war drew to a close, CTOA members could find little evidence of a bright postwar future as compensation for their years of patriotic toil. The union won them the right to be paid higher duties allowance after twelve rather than the previous twenty-six days acting at the higher level in any calendar year.72 But it was small consolation for a working life dominated by wage pegging, poor amenities and extremely demanding workloads. Despite assurances from late 1944 that the Department was endeavouring to phase out female nightwork, it too continued to blight their lives. As late as October 1948 there were still 30 exchanges employing women on night shifts and it was not until 1951 that the Department could advise that nightwork for women had been completely abolished.73

70 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 November 1944. 71 ibid. Technological modernisation of telephone switching lost some of its momentum during the war but remained the most serious long term threat to the jobs of telephonists. The Department’s policy was clear. In response to union inquiries about vacant supervisors’ jobs at Adelaide Central Exchange, management indicated that these positions and others would be left vacant or filled by temporaries to minimise the number of excess staff as exchanges were automated around the country. (Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 October 1944) Just as the union hoped to use wartime opportunities to advance the cause of gender equity for exchange workers, telephone bosses sought to use the vast wartime increase in temporary staff as a tool to manage the ‘downsizing’ of the permanent workforce, a strategy they had been deploying since the 1910s. There is also evidence that technology changes were being used as part of a Taylorist strategy to refine the division of labour and break down skill. In opposition to plans to reclassify certain positions, the union asserted “that advancement of the telephonist is to be achieved by versatility rather than specialisation.” Minutes of the 9th CTOA National Conference, 17-28 April 1949. 72 Victorian Branch Secretary’s Annual Report, 1944-45. 73 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 November 1944. Letter from N. Strange, Chief Inspector (Telephones) to CTOA, 6 October 1948, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B2900/3, P121/1/3; General Secretary’s Report to 12th CTOA National Conference, 17 September - 2 October 1951.

202 In 1945 absenteeism began to rise. Management responded with allegations of shirking. For the union, the issue became yet another defining moment in how the leaders saw their role. Without an adequate pool of relief staff, absenteeism invariably increased the pressure on operators working the boards, creating the potential for workers to turn against each other. It also widened the division between operators and supervisors whose managerial functions encouraged them to look with disfavour at all forms of shirking or insubordination. On the other hand, the issue had the potential to unite all members around the need for a campaign over staffing levels, workloads and workplace conditions and in defence of the right to take leave without harassment.

The union chose to side with management, the Victorian Branch calling on the Federal Executive to urge the Postmaster General “to take drastic action against those who are absent from duty without a reasonable excuse…” The full Executive, after soliciting feedback from all branches, duly consented at its meeting on 30 August.74 This could only exacerbate internal discontent. While operators might grumble about their tolerance and goodwill being abused by individuals taking large amounts of sick leave, few would have welcomed a management crackdown which affected everyone’s entitlements. And in the circumstances the CTOA’s pro-management position was particularly provocative. Its inability to improve the wages, conditions and job security of its rank and file when other women workers were making significant albeit temporary gains, was beginning to galvanise opposition. In August 1945 phonogram operators staged a revolt over the discrepancy between their rate of pay and the male rate received by female operators in the telegraph branch. Phonogram members in Adelaide threatened to defect en masse to the welcoming Telegraphists’ Union.75 Although nothing appears to have come of the threats, it was indicative of a wider dissatisfaction within CTOA ranks.

In December 1945 155 CTOA members of the Melbourne Trunk Exchange signed a letter to Charles Pearson, Secretary of the Victorian Branch. It represented a potent summary of worker discontent at that juncture in the union’s history and is worth quoting in some detail:

74 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 26 February 1945 & 27-31 August 1945. 75 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27-31 August 1945.

203 Dear Sir, Telephonists of the Melbourne Trunk-line Exchange are far from satisfied with conditions of work prevailing in the Department now that the war is over. During the war years telephonists worked under a great strain and handled an enormously increased volume of traffic – which shows little or no decline even now – worked abnormal shifts, and suffered inconvenience due to lack of amenities provided in other Government establishments, uncomplainingly. When other branches of the Public Service and workers generally are enjoying a return to peace time hours and improved working conditions, telephonists feel that they have been more than patient and desire some measure of relief from the heavy burden they are now carrying. Since V.P. Day there has not been one variation of the conditions under which telephonists have worked for the past five years.76

The letter then listed ten demands: abolition of night shifts for women, no rostering of workers for two consecutive Sundays, permanency for long-serving temporary staff, guaranteed observance of ten minute relief breaks, improved canteen services, reversion to the pre-war system of crediting public holidays worked, equitable payment of all telephonists under 21 years of age, provision of adequate cloak rooms and sick-bay accommodation, minimum three weeks notice of holiday rosters, and, most pointedly, an end to the practice of punishing telephonists for legitimate absences from duty.

Telephone exchange workers were obviously in no mood for a continuation of wartime conditions, particularly when the Department had emerged from the war stronger than ever. The petitioners warned Pearson that if there were any undue delay in taking their demands to the Public Service Commissioner, they would approach their parliamentary representatives. They were determined, they wrote, “to achieve a decent standard of working conditions for themselves and the telephonists of the Commonwealth, and [would] use every constitutional method to attain their just rights.”77

76 Letter to Charles Pearson, Victorian CTOA Secretary, 5 December 1945, filed with Federal Executive Minutes. 77 ibid.

204 The anger was typical of the discontent that permeated working class Australia in the postwar 1940s. Instead of the just and equitable peace promised by state and employer, the families of the working class found their lives constrained by wage pegging and material shortages, harkening back to the dark memories of Depression. Yet unlike the 1930s, the postwar economy was far from moribund, and the threshold of workers’ toleration was low. All institutions that had been complicit in the wartime propaganda and promises, including unions that had urged their members to accept ‘equity of sacrifice’, were now on notice. Many unions responded by reverting to traditions of militancy and political radicalism.78 For unions like the CTOA with weak fighting traditions, in many ways the challenge was more difficult. In general, the CTOA’s leaders, particularly the powerful Victorian and Melbourne-based federal leaderships, attempted to manage rather than mobilise the discontent. In New South Wales, however, a new group of leaders with Leftist credentials emerged to offer the rank and file an alternative to the Association model with its careerist orientation.

The Challenge from New South Wales

On 16 April 1934 eighteen year old Alice McLean commenced work as a telephonist in the North Sydney exchange. In 1941, after working for about two years in the Main Trunk Exchange, she transferred to the phonogram branch.79 On the 4 August 1941 she was elected to the New South Wales Branch Committee of the CTOA, and on 7 February 1944 she became Branch Secretary.80 She was the most radical leader the union would produce anywhere in Australia before the 1970s.

Along the way to becoming Secretary of the largest branch of the union, McLean apparently joined or became associated with the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).81 Among the Branch leaders who emerged with her, she was evidently not a lone voice

78 In 1945 over 2.1 million working days were lost through industrial disputes. This was by far the highest level of disputation since 1929 and it set the pattern for the postwar period. The level of industrial disputation did not wane significantly until after 1950. Wray Vamplew (ed), Australians: Historical Statistics (Broadway (NSW): Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987), p. 165. 79 Commonwealth Gazette, No.1, 2 January 1948, p. 300; NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 66, Transcript of 1945 Wages Case, p. 15. 80 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 4 August 1941 & 7 February 1944. 81 No written record and none of the CPA activists and PMG militants of the era approached in the course of researching this thesis has been able to clarify McLean’s exact relationship with the CPA.

205 from the Left. At a Branch general meeting in October 1942, she moved to accept an invitation from the state’s Aid to Russia Committee to send delegates to a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union. The resolution was passed and McLean and six other delegates were elected: Misses J. Eastoe, A. Pike, A. Mullery, H. Doherty, L. Bouffler and Mrs McLaughlin.82 Although admiration and sympathy for Australia’s beleaguered wartime ally was widespread at the time, the extent of the Branch Committee’s enthusiasm for Soviet history suggests the possibility of a deeper affinity. According to Doherty’s account of the celebration, five of the CTOA’s seven delegates even participated in a procession to mark the occasion.83

In February the following year, standing orders were suspended at the monthly general meeting to enable the Secretary of the Eureka Youth League (EYL), Mrs Lewis, to address the assembly “in accordance with the wishes of members expressed at previous meetings.” Like Aid to Russia, the EYL was a CPA inspired and led organisation. Lewis’s pitch, though, was broad and the politics muted. At the conclusion of her speech and ensuing questions, the meeting unanimously decided to elect its own union youth committee to cater for the social needs of young CTOA members.84 Within a month the committee had organised its first social event, a dance held at the Youth Centre run by the EYL.85 For the first time since the union’s founding decade, a working class alternative to the Department’s Postal Institutes was on offer.

If there were any doubts as to McLean’s Leftism, it was dispelled after the war when Branch unanimity with respect to ‘Red’ causes or organisations went the way of the Australia-Soviet alliance itself. By the 1946 Branch elections, McLean’s ticket, featuring Jean Morgan, Caroline Cook, Aileen Mullery and Edith Cherry, was opposed by a team running on the slogan, “keep our Association free from all Communistic influence whatsoever.”86 McLean and her colleagues pointedly made no attempt to rebut the insinuation.87 By the end of 1949, the union had banned communists from membership.88 By 1951 McLean had left the Department.

82 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 12 October 1942. 83 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 7 December 1942. 84 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 8 February 1943. 85 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 1 March 1943. 86 Election letter to NSW CTOA members, 8 July 1946, filed with Federal Executive Minutes. 87 NSW Branch election leaflet, 1946, filed with Federal Executive Minutes. 88 Minutes of the 11th CTOA National Conference, 22 August – 1 September 1949.

206 McLean’s legacy as Branch Secretary stands as a counterpoint to the conservative direction of the union federally and in other states. A different approach is evident on issue after issue, and nowhere more obviously than on the contentious question of absenteeism. Whereas other sections of the union aligned themselves with management, the New South Wales Branch promoted a class perspective. It sought to minimise friction between members by opposing the Department’s policy of sending monitors to telephonists’ homes to verify the validity of their sick leave.89 It condemned a particularly offensive visit that resulted in an Investigative Officer entering the bedroom of a sick and sleeping telephonist, Clare Nolan.90 In response to the Victorian Branch’s pro-management line, the New South Wales Branch, on a motion moved by McLean herself, placed the responsibility for absenteeism squarely on the Department:

Although [absenteeism] exists in this State, we as an Association are trying to better conditions to make the work more attractive. In this way we think we will overcome the problem. We are of the opinion that when the Department realises the importance of our work and we are suitably recompensed for services performed, only then will the complete elimination of absenteeism be accomplished.91

The motion was typical of a new, class perspective on the Branch Committee. At the very meeting McLean was elected Secretary, a resolution was tabled to thank the Transport Department for its assistance in overcoming difficulties caused by a recent transport workers’ strike. Although moved and seconded, the motion was defeated after Aileen Mullery and others spoke out strongly “on the principle involved in giving assistance to the strikers.”92

The power of mutual union assistance would become a hallmark of McLean’s leadership. She was prepared to meet management and negotiate but she recognised the value of mass industrial and political pressure. To this end, she sought alliances with the Left postal and telegraphists’ unions and eschewed the CTOA’s customary orientation to the High Council. In September 1942 the state Branch of the Third Division

89 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 8 May 1944. 90 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 8 January 1945. 91 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 16 April 1945. 92 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 7 February 1944.

207 Telegraphists’ and Postal Clerks’ Union (TDTPCU) convened a conference which established a New South Wales Council of Public Service Organisations. The CTOA Branch agreed to affiliate.93 It was the first step in a move towards closer unity, ultimately with a view to amalgamation. When the Telegraphists wrote to the CTOA in April 1943 canvassing the prospects of “unity in action” and “possible fusion”, McLean persuaded the Branch Committee to advise the TDTPCU that the Branch was always prepared to meet to discuss common ground and that fusion “had long been for the Association a desirable objective.”94 The next move came from the APWU which called an amalgamation conference at Trades Hall for 20 July. McLean, Henry, Doherty and O’Connor represented the CTOA. The conference resolved to create a committee “to further the aims and objects of closer unity and amalgamation of the organisations concerned.”95

McLean and other Branch Committee members threw themselves into amalgamation work. They set about convincing their own members with amalgamation propaganda.96 McLean wrote to other branch secretaries soliciting their support.97 She even participated in a series of broadcasts promoting amalgamation on Sydney radio 2KY. Other participants were N.W. Burke, Secretary of the state APWU, John Baker, Secretary of the TDTPCU, and Max Lovelock of the Fourth Division Postmasters, Postal Clerks and Telegraphists’ Union. In the radio discussion on 29 September McLean informed her listeners that the New South Wales Branch of the CTOA had endorsed amalgamation “because it is the opinion of members that one union for all employees in the Department would be a better form of organisation than the one we have at present.”98 In the third of the broadcasts, on 13 October, she summarised what she believed were the advantages of single industrial body for all PMG workers:

…the talks have shown me that the rights of women will not be overlooked. They have also shown that women in the Post Office need not be employed on

93 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 7 September 1942. 94 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 5 April 1943. 95 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, Amalgamation Committee file, notes of amalgamation conference convened by the APWU, Trades Hall, 20 July 1943. 96 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, Amalgamation Committee file, minutes of Amalgamation Committee Meeting, Trades Hall, 23 June 1944. 97 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, Amalgamation Committee file, letter to State Branches. 98 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, Amalgamation Committee file, transcript of 2KY Radio broadcast, 29 Sept 1944.

208 lower rates, with those rates being used as an excuse to lower men’s conditions. I cannot see men and women in the Post Office winning the big fight for equal pay in the post-war period unless we are all together in one big postal union.99

But some key CTOA figures were beginning to express doubts. In 1944 and into 1945 Rita Demas attended Amalgamation Committee meetings.100 Like McLean, Demas had emerged from the phonogram operator ranks into union activism. She was not in the Left group but initially showed no particular aversion to collaborating with McLean and her comrades. After a combined unions mass meeting on amalgamation on 13 April 1945, Demas and the Branch Acting President Rose Gallagher took issue with the way the meeting had been conducted. The details of their complaint are not clear but it appears they were displeased that opponents of amalgamation had been muzzled by the chairperson. There is no evidence that Demas herself had sought to speak or was even opposed to amalgamation at that stage. In light of subsequent events, it is possible Gallagher may have been one of those silenced. What is known for certain is that the meeting was chaired by McLean.101

It was a small but ultimately telling moment in McLean’s leadership. It was the first recorded occasion that the formidable Demas had criticised her. More ominously, it marked the emergence of an alliance between Demas and Gallagher that would culminate in the anti-communist ticket just over a year later. At the same CTOA meeting Demas raised her complaint she was elected Branch Vice President. In July Gallagher was elected unopposed to the Presidency.102 The platform for the subsequent cold war hostilities was set.

In June 1946 the Federal Executive rejected a New South Wales proposal to support the APWU amalgamation conference. Within the New South Wales Branch, the conservatives were forging unity of their own. Demas and Gallagher teamed up with Elizabeth Teulan, Flora Israel, Heather Brydon, M. Clement, Dorothy Cobden,

99 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, Amalgamation Committee file, transcript of 2KY Radio broadcast, 13 Oct 1944. 100 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, Amalgamation Committee file, minutes of Amalgamation Committee Meeting, Trades Hall, 23 June 1944 & 13 Feb 1945. 101 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, Amalgamation Committee file, letter from Amalgamation Committee to Alice McLean, 7 April 1945; NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 16 April 1945. 102 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 23 July 1945.

209 Margaret Hume and Catherine McGuire to contest the Branch elections on a platform of keeping the union in rank and file hands and free from communist influence.103 Gallagher declined to challenge McLean for the Secretary’s job, opting to re-contest the Presidency. Gallagher also contested one of the Vice-Presidents positions and Demas the other, Teulan stood for Treasurer, and the rest of the ticket sought election to the Committee.104

For the first time CTOA members faced an internal election with clear political factions. The McLean ticket included Morgan for President, Cook and Mullery for the two Vice- President’s positions, and Cherry for Treasurer. McLean was elected unopposed but leant her name to her comrades’ propaganda. A leaflet outlining their platform was sent to all members of the Branch. It began by referring to the postwar difficulties of making “ends meet” on salaries which remained at prewar levels. Drawing upon producerist notions of labour value, it pointed out that “members of our Association play a vital role in the life and development of our country.” While “recognising the telephone subscribers right to service,” it called upon the community to fulfil its “responsibility to those who provide that service.” The leaflet then spelled out the program: a ₤1 per week basic wage increase, equal pay for equal work, a living wage for juniors, a uniform 34 hour week for all telephonists, improved rosters and amenities, one month’s annual holiday leave, and prompt attention to all requests by members.105

Members would have found little in the leaflet to disagree with, but such a comprehensive election manifesto was unprecedented and left many members unsure of what to make of it. The opposition’s response urged them to see it as evidence of a Red conspiracy. With encouragement from Victorian Secretary Miss Gorman, the Federal Executive even weighed in by challenging the group’s right to send the leaflet, ostensibly on the grounds that a copy had found its way to a Victorian member who suffered confusion as a result. The substantive reason was more political. Federal Executive members, the minutes recorded, “consider this pamphlet conveys a very wrong impression to members generally.”106

103 NSW Branch election material, 1946, filed with Federal Executive Minutes. 104 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 11 June 1946. 105 NSW Branch election material, 1946, filed with Federal Executive Minutes. 106 Federal Executive Minutes, 22 July 1946.

210 On 30 July the New South Wales Branch held its Annual General Meeting at which the Returning Office, Miss E. Edwards reported on the election. Edwards declared Morgan elected President with 344 votes to Gallagher’s 333. She announced Cook (359 votes) and Mullery (337 votes) had defeated Demas (311 votes) and Gallagher (313) for the two Vice Presidents’ spots. Teulan beat Cherry for the Treasurer’s job. The meeting was then adjourned before counting of the votes for Committee positions was completed.107

On the 5 August Gallagher, claiming to act as President, called an unscheduled Committee meeting which challenged the conduct of the ballot and requested the Federal Executive to investigate. None of the McLean-Morgan ticket attended.108 When the Annual General Meeting reassembled on 12 August, Edwards declared Bruce, Brydon, Demas, Gallagher, Clement, Cobden, Hume, Young and Moncrieff elected to the Committee. Flora Israel, another conservative, was elected to one of the three CTOA positions on the Federal and State Essential Services Council. This gave the Gallagher- Demas faction eight Committee positions to the opposition’s four. Bruce, Young and Moncrieff made up the balance. The consequences were immediately obvious. At the end of the AGM, a motion endorsing the actions of Gallagher’s 5 August meeting was passed.109 McLean and her comrades had lost control of the Branch.

Over coming months the conservatives maintained the pressure over allegations the ballot for President and Vice-Presidents was flawed. In October they moved to stymie the Branch’s involvement in the latest “unity in action” initiative, a basic wage campaign launched by the fourth division telegraphists’ union under the auspices of the Combined Public Service Organisations. On a resolution from Demas, a majority at the monthly general meeting forbade the Branch taking any part in the campaign. Citing the High Council’s decision not to be involved, the resolution declared “we do not desire to be associated with threats of stop work meetings and direct action.”110

McLean pushed on. On 3 December she helped organise a combined unions mass meeting in the telephonists’ lunch room at the Sydney GPO, later defending herself on

107 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 30 July 1946. 108 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 5 August 1946. 109 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 12 August 1946. 110 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 21 October 1946.

211 the grounds she was acting in an individual capacity.111 The next day she spoke at a mass meeting of some 2000 public servants at the Sydney Town Hall. Although the CPA press’s report referred to her as Secretary of the Telephone Officers’ Association, she again claimed at the union’s December general meeting that her town hall speech was made in a private capacity.112 At the same December meeting her supporters failed in an attempt to rescind the ban on CTOA involvement in the wage campaign. To make matters worse a leaflet circulated by Grace Bardsley critical of Demas and Gallagher prompted the assembled members to pass a vote of confidence in the two conservative leaders.113

By 1947 the ascendant conservatives were organising a final push. Mullery resigned her position, and on 13 January Demas was elected unopposed to the vacancy while Gallagher gave notice of a motion to suspend McLean.114 The showdown came on 10 February. McLean, Morgan and Mullery led a spirited opposition to the suspension, ensuring the conservatives’ victory was never certain before the vote. In the end the outcome swung on a mere three voters, the motion succeeding by 32 votes to 28. A defeated McLean left the meeting and Flora Israel was elected unopposed as Acting Secretary.115

McLean’s suspension prompted a flood of protest from members in regional and country areas; 39 telegrams and 15 letters in all, according to Branch minutes. Demas and Israel accused John Baker of the TDTPCU of orchestrating the campaign. They were probably correct. Baker was certainly a close ally of McLean and after her suspension urged telephonists to support the basic wage campaign in defiance of their own union officials.116 But Demas and Israel surely overstated Baker’s influence. He may have encouraged the write-in but he could not have conjured the support for McLean from nowhere. If Charles Pearson and his colleagues in the Victorian leadership had earned the ire of many members by war’s end, McLean had earned wide respect, especially in the country, for her efforts on behalf of members.

111 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 9 December 1946. 112 Tribune, 10 December 1946, p. 7; NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 9 December 1946. 113 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 9 December 1946 114 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 13 January 1947. 115 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 10 February 1947. 116 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 18 February 1947; Z320 Carton 6 NM 66, Telegrams from CTPOA members to Jean Morgan, President NSW CTPOA, February 1947.

212

Now she was fighting for her own political survival. She intervened in the March Executive meeting with written legal advice and later launched legal action with the support of other unions.117 But the defeat would not be reversed. In the forthcoming Branch elections Morgan declined to accept a nomination for the Presidency, and Gallagher took the job. Israel was elected unopposed as Secretary.118 In September the National Conference endorsed McLean’s suspension.119 The Reds soon disappeared from the forums of the CTOA. According to John Baker, many of them “moved into studies where [they] graduated in law and arts and either resigned or secured promotion in other departments.”120

The Challenge Contained. The Tenth National CTOA Conference convenes in Perth on 22 September 1947. (NAA: Image K1131, W1078/B)

Conformity and Containment

In one sense the CTOA’s New South Wales leftists were an historical aberration, a curiosity amidst a tale of conservative, conciliatory unionism. But because they emerged out of the ranks of the phonogram operators and telephonists as every other

117 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 3 March 1947; 21 July 1947; 28 July 1947; Z320 Box 50, Arbitration & Award Variations, Application of Alice McLean to Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, 11 March 1947. 118 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 9 June 1947, 21 July 1947. 119 Minutes of the 10th CTOA National Conference, 22 September -2 October 1947. 120 John S. Baker, Communicators and their First Trade Unions (Sydney: Union of Postal Clerks & Telegraphists, 1980), p. 230.

213 CTOA leader had, their very aberrance highlights the complexity of workplace politics and warns against explanations of unionism that reduce worker behaviour to a mere product of industry circumstances. It shows that the path taken by telephone exchange unionism was not inevitable. Certain factors pushed the union in certain directions but other directions were conceivable. By the 1940s, telephonists in the United States, similar in work experiences, social backgrounds and gender and racial profiles to their Australian counterparts, could reflect on a remarkable record of strikes, pickets and even violent confrontations over the first twenty years of the century. In November 1944, 500 operators in Dayton, Ohio, rediscovered this tradition when they struck over unfair wage treatment. Eight days later the strike spread to more than 10,000 workers across all the major Ohio cities, Washington DC and Detroit, shattering the company or ‘yellow’ unions established to contain workers in the 1920s.121 The question raised by the rise and defeat of the Sydney Reds is why similar militancy and radicalism was not more prevalent amongst the telephonists and phonogram operators in 1940s Australia.

At one level it is a question requiring a sober assessment of the McLean faction’s credentials as a genuine alternative. While it is true that the Reds persistently sought opportunities for “unity in action” and measurably advanced the interests of the union’s members, in practice none of this actually involved breaking from the top-down aspects of conventional public service unionism. At the 1946 AGM McLean reported on the Branch’s achievements for the year. As impressive as these were, they included no initiatives to facilitate rank and file activism. “Over the past year,” she asserted, “we have done as much as we could for members.”122 Little thought seems to have been given to members doing things for themselves. In the fight against wage pegging, McLean encouraged and organised members to attend mass meetings but these were intermittent and controlled tightly by the campaign committee. Unity in action, in short, was confined to joint campaigns organised with like-minded union leaders. Nevertheless, at the level of ideology McLean’s faction represented a clear alternative to the obsequious and collaborationist forms of trade unionism associated with the High Council. It is inconceivable that any other CTOA leaders of the era would have addressed a mass rally of some 2000 PMG Department employees and lent their support

121 Venus Green, Race on the Line : Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System,1880-1980 (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2001), p. 177. 122 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 30 July 1946, NSW Secretary’s Annual Report.

214 to a campaign giving the Government a deadline to increase public service salaries by an interim ₤75.123 None would have even contemplated going on radio to advocate amalgamation with the leftwing postal unions. McLean was seen by her members as militant and leftwing, prepared to challenge a postwar order which rewarded employers at the expense of those who had borne the sacrifices of the war. Yet the rearguard mobilisation of her rank and file supporters was not enough to overturn her suspension and prevent the union returning to its familiar groove. The mass of the membership remained indifferent or even hostile to McLean’s class perspective despite their grievances with management and the Government.

The explanation for this conundrum lies in a combination of factors that allowed employers, the state and other conservative forces to rebuild a high threshold to militancy and radicalism. Young female telephonists and phonogram operators were encouraged to see their future as housewives and mothers.124 The social rewards that marriage was seen as offering after years of workplace stress, and the financial rewards available in other jobs, hardly encouraged disgruntled workers to stay and fight. McLean claimed 650 telephonists in New South Wales alone left the industry in the twelve months to December 1946.125. For those who stayed and those who were recruited as replacements, there were substantial risks in engaging in conflict with the employer. Many were not permanent employees and therefore more vulnerable to a real or imagined threat of dismissal.

Whatever their employment status, moreover, an array of ideological forces militated against direct action being accepted as a legitimate option. The notion of the public servant, for one, encouraged state employees to draw their social standing and self- worth from a belief in their work as a higher calling in the service of the Australian people. Cooperation at all levels of the enterprise was constructed as a hallmark of the value of public service in the eyes of the community. In contrast, conflict was unseemly and a dereliction of duty. Postwar PMG propaganda returned to the earlier theme of the public service as a ‘family’ pulling together for the good of the nation. When Director- General Giles Chippindall launched the A.P.O. Magazine in June 1954, he expressed

123 Tribune, 10 December 1946, p. 7. 124 This ideological push was orchestrated in the public sphere through popular culture and government policy. See Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, p. 465. 125 Tribune, 10 December 1946, p. 7.

215 confidence that it “will assist greatly in welding the staff more closely into one great family, will develop pride in the vital National service with which they are associated and will keep them informed of the outstanding achievements of colleagues in various sections of Post Office activity.”126

The ideology of service promulgated here not only functioned to discredit militant means to address grievances, it de-legitimised the grievances themselves. Writing for A.P.O. Magazine in December 1954, Cadet Inspector of Postal Services, Stuart Jay, rapturously explained why his pride in being a public servant took precedence over his meagre pay packet:

Remember Darwin during the air raids? Remember the people who stayed on the job until a bomb wrote the last “G.N.” in the line journal and timed off the last trunk docket in the pad? And those lasses who still came up with “Number, please” when the flood waters reached their knees? Then there was the public servant who got the telephone lines up again after swimming a flooded river.127

For Jay, working for a mere “twenty-five shillings a week, no less!” was a trifling concern in light of these stories. His was a self-worth derived from more intangible factors, like working in the same enterprise as the “engineer surveying the back country for future development of the Australian telephone service” and the “blue-eyed, freckle- faced kid pushing the familiar red bicycle over there in Broome.” If anyone asked Jay what his job was, he had no need to be ashamed of his lowly place in the hierarchy. After all, like all the others, he could answer, “I’m a public servant – and proud of it.”128

Jay’s contribution to the A.P.O. Magazine was simply one of the more strident examples of public service ideology on display. The magazine’s impact should not be discounted but its very lack of subtlety was something of a disadvantage. For ideological efficacy, it was no match for the more subtle and more comprehensive strategies of the Postal Institute. In 1945 the state-based Institutes were federated into a single body, the Australian Postal Institute (API). The masterstroke again was to hand

126 A.P.O. Magazine, June-July 1954, p. 2. 127 A.P.O. Magazine, June-July 1954, p. 2. 128 A.P.O. Magazine, Dec 1954-Jan 1955, p. 23.

216 operational control of the API to the members themselves while the Department provided the resources and the Postmaster General retained a veto right over all API decisions. By providing a semblance of control to the members, the planners aimed to foster “in the staff an enthusiasm for working for their fellow officers.”129 They thus tapped the same wellspring from which independent unionism grew. Through the API they gave workers an outlet for their talents and energies that the wage labour regime thwarted, at the same time channelling the collective workplace culture of solidarity and mutual support into activities that complemented the Department’s interests. The API’s programs helped dissipate inter-class tensions into safe forms of collegiality away from the point of production; forums were created in which supervisors and supervised, middle managers and cadet operators, came together as equals. Stripped of the accoutrements of power, bosses could appear “just like us”. Class fractiousness was sublimated into healthy sporting competition. It is perhaps not surprising that for the Department, sporting carnivals, “with their large assemblies of Post Office men and women from all parts of the Commonwealth, provide[d] the most spectacular evidence of the value of the Institute.”130

If the ideology of service to the public through loyalty to the enterprise – the Public Service as one big family with a single noble mission - was PMG’s preeminent corporate strategy for de-legitimating class conflict in the postwar era, anti-communism played a similar role on the broader terrain of industrial politics. The Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s was not simply a device to silence radical political opponents or construct a scapegoat for capitalism’s own failings. It was integral to the postwar ruling class offensive against organised labour as a whole. Employers, governments and religious-inspired anti-communist forces systematically linked industrial action of any kind with communist manipulation. Communism in turn was constructed as an ideology alien to the Australian labour movement and subservient to the interests of the Soviet Union.131

The offensive succeeded in forcing militants and radicals on the defensive and paving the way for rightwing control of many trade unions. As Tom O’Lincoln wrote, “the

129 A.P.O. Magazine, June-July 1954, p. 8. 130 ibid., p. 10. 131 See L.J. Louis, Menzies’ Cold War: A Reinterpretation (Carlton North: Red Rag Publications, 2001).

217 anti-Communist campaign soon expanded into an anti-militant campaign, with anyone who tried to be a good trade unionist as fair game.”132 Within the CTOA, the tone of the era was set by the union’s response to threatened strike action by the APWU in their 1948 wages campaign. General Secretary Kathleen Hester formally notified the Postmaster General that the CTOA had played no part in the campaign and reassured him “at no time would we be a party to a pressure campaign.”133 Charles Pearson, elected General President in 1947, was only too happy to agree. In thanking Labor Senator Rankin for opening the 1949 National Conference, he reiterated that his Association “always stood for Conciliation and Arbitration, and not direct action.” On a vote of ten delegates to two, the conference went on to ban Communists from the union.134 In this political climate, members who dared take a militant path risked being labelled a Red, a smear of some consequence to workers who had little or no experience of the hurly burly of industrial politics and who were often still dependent on the financial support of their families.

While McLean and her comrades were held in high esteem as ‘good unionists’ by many members, the leap to militantly supporting her or the campaigns she promoted was too great for most. Anxiety about victimisation, the hold of a conservative public servant identity, and the fear of being branded Red proved too strong. Even those who maintained a class perspective and upheld the legitimacy of workplace grievances became less willing to act. As the 1940s drew on, the material and social risks of mass militancy seemed to outweigh the potential gains. In the eyes of committed trade unionists, the crushing defeat of the miners’ union in 1949 only confirmed this assessment.

A higher level of quiescence, however, was not an indicator of contentment or consent. The problems for telephonists and phonogram operators did not disappear. Indeed, they were reproduced and even magnified as the exigencies of wartime telecommunication gave way to the demands of a postwar society seeking solace and escape in higher standards of living and more leisure opportunities. The painful irony was eloquently

132 Tom O’Lincoln, Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism (Sydney: Stained Wattle Press, 1985), p. 74. 133 Federal Executive Minutes, 19 August 1948. 134 Minutes of 11th CTOA National Conference, 22 August – 1 September 1949.

218 captured in telephonist Nina Costello’s account of a Saturday shift at Windsor Exchange in Melbourne in 1948:

Saturday is a very busy day there. You get all the morning [telephone] traffic when you are on all day, and then the afternoon races, and if you work a long late after the races you get picture people ringing up for seats, and then the trotting. You are really exhausted. It is an awful strain on your general health on Saturday particularly. You feel like something that has been squeezed. You have no more energy. You feel like crying.135

Costello was no overawed newcomer; she had worked at the Windsor Exchange for more than nineteen years.

Another veteran, Annie Edwards, used her twenty three years of experience at Hawthorn Exchange to shepherd her younger comrades through the pressure. Confronted with traffic overload caused by aging and overwhelmed equipment, they would turn to her for reassurance:

As a senior girl I will say this, “You do your best and try to explain things [to subscribers].” But it is very hard to explain. You hear girls who have not been there very long come in and say, “Is it always like this?” You will say, “No, it has not always been like this.”136

From Lithgow and Bathurst, petitions signed by exchange staff arrived on the New South Wales’s Secretary’s desk in Sydney, pleading for action to end the tyranny of war-era night shifts, almost three years after the war had ended.137

Like the operators of telephony’s infancy, these workers of postwar Australia desperately needed a strong union to stand by them and empower them to make a stand. In the late 1940s the one they had was still able to deliver some gains through lobbying and arbitration, although ironically not with respect to the crucial demand for a uniform

135 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 56, Transcript of 1948 Hours Case, p. 249. 136 ibid., p. 254. 137 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 50, All Night Work File, petitions from Bathurst and Lithgow CTOA members to NSW Branch Secretary, 1948.

219 34-hour week, the object of Costello’s and Edward’s testimony. The union was, most notably, a party to the arbitration cases in 1947 and 1948 which won penalty rates for weekend and nightwork for all public service unionists performing shiftwork, a genuine win for CTOA members.138 In 1949, lobbying from the CTOA and other unions convinced Chifley to allow women in the Fourth (previously General) Division of the Public Service to sit the examination for entry to the Third (or Clerical) Division, a right denied them since the first decade of the century.139 In 1949 the CTOA and other unions also pressured the Department into establishing Amenities Advisory Committees in every state to address the legacy of poor amenities left by Departmental neglect and wartime and postwar material shortages.140

During the 1950s the Department would improve the amenities but only to the extent of providing workers with a minimum level of comfort, and even then only after continual lobbying. In other areas of concern to CTOA members, the coming decade would prove more difficult. The small stream of gains marking the landscape of the late 1940s soon dried up. Industrial activity across the board diminished and an overtly anti-worker government settled into power. The radical challenge from within the CTOA engendered by war and reconstruction subsided, its transformative power falling victim to its own limitations and the countervailing power of economic vulnerability, combined with various subtle forms of social and ideological pressure. The latest challenge from the workplace had been contained.

138 Determination 66 of 1947, Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol. 27, 1947, p. 273; Determination 25 of 1948, Commonwealth Public Service Arbitration Reports, Vol 28, 1948, p. 91. 139 Letter from Prime Minister Ben Chifley to CTOA, 9 May 1949, in Federal Executive Minutes, 23 May 1949. 140 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 September 1949, 12 October 1949, 10 January 1950; General Secretary’s Report to 11th CTOA National Conference, 22 August – 1 September 1949.

220 Chapter Six Crisis, 1950-1968

The CTOA in the two decades from 1950 was a union in poor health, its pulse dangerously weak. With a shrinking membership and a largely silent rank and file, it survived on a shaky system of life support provided by a handful of honorary officials whose dedication to the task was matched only by their narrow vision of what that task entailed. This prolonged crisis is the subject of this chapter. It will be argued that a number of factors conspired to create and sustain the union’s predicament. The combination of a growing demand for female labour across industry and an increasing rate of marriage helped ensure the switchboard workforce remained young, inexperienced and relatively disengaged from the occupation’s ongoing problems. At the same time, under the leadership of the longer-term, more senior staff, the CTOA’s career unionism reached its apotheosis in a set of policies and practices framed by Cold War anti-communism and the Department’s own representation of itself as one large, dutiful family. The ensuing corporate unionism left the CTOA more reliant than ever on advocacy and arbitration at a time when inflation, government hostility, and Departmental parsimony provided the least favourable environment for a conciliatory approach.

Corporatism also reached into the workplaces and influenced the thinking of the rank and file. Grievances that in other circumstances might have prompted collective resistance came to be seen as illegitimate reactions to immutable or inconsequential problems. The Australian Postal Institute and other PMG-sponsored initiatives played a key role here by providing workers with an outlet for their creative energies, a source of out-of-hours recuperation and a forum for individual self-improvement, all the while reinforcing the image of the Department as a disciplined but ultimately caring family. The union’s own support for such initiatives narrowed even further the space for oppositional or alternative ideologies to flourish. In all respects it was a period of managerial hegemony. Even so, ideological incorporation was never total. The chapter will reveal that workers did manage to maintain their own culture of workplace solidarity and mutual support, and they did engage in individual acts of resistance. They remained hostile in particular to the regime of close supervision.

221 As powerful as the strategies of ideological control were, in management’s eyes they were not immutable either. The chapter will show how, as the 1960s approached, the rising costs of using manual systems to meet the demand for telephony prompted Department strategists to begin re-thinking the labour process problem, especially as the cost-effectiveness of automatic systems improved. We see planners beginning to realise that the welfarist approach to industrial relations which had served the Department admirably since the 1920s was no longer adequate. From their point of view, the service had reached a stage where it could expand to meet demand at an economically sustainable rate only if labour was replaced altogether. Consequently, the push to automate telephony quickened, though the absolute growth in telephone traffic ensured the full effects of automation would not be felt until the 1970s.

Even without mass redundancy, by the mid 1960s the CTOA found itself struggling for relevance. Most of its leaders clung to policies that reinforced rather than ameliorated the draconian regime of workplace control, and they delivered wage outcomes which favoured the more senior officers. In 1966, the repeal of the marriage bar delivered a fatal blow to the union’s identity as an institution dedicated to the advancement of single women within the existing gender segmented hierarchy. By 1968 it was clear the union could not continue the way it was; it would either be swept away or transformed by the economic, political and social forces around it.

Segmented Workforce, Sectional Union: The Foundations of a Crisis

Postwar economic growth and full employment in Australia created an unprecedented demand for domestic and commercial telephone services. As Peter Young has written of British telephone use in this era, “what had been primarily an instrument for business and the well-to-do was becoming a consumer durable for Mr and Mrs Everyman, who were perhaps keeping up with the Joneses.”1 As the Fifties progressed the telephone also became more than a status symbol of the increasingly affluent middle and upper working classes. Housewives tapped into its social communication potential in an effort

1 Peter Young, Person to Person: The International Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge: Granta, 1991), p. 202.

222 to cope with the frustrations and isolation of life in the suburban home. This “intermingling of the ideal of domesticity, and discontent with its limitations”, as John Murphy has called it, drove much of the growth in domestic telephone consumption.2 In 1946-47 the Department reported a record number of 49,100 telephones added to the network. Apart from the recessionary 1951-52 this record would be broken every year for the next decade. A total of 905,017 telephones were in service in 1947, rising to 1.8 million or 18.82 per capita by 1957. The volume of telephone traffic showed a similar startling growth.3

The absolute expansion of the telephone network obscured the underlying trend towards occupational decline. In 1961 management could boast that over the preceding five years “the growth in Post Office business of nearly 26% has necessitated an increase in staff of 9%, resulting in an increase of about 15% in Post Office staff productivity.”4 Put another way, although output per worker grew, it continued to lag behind the growth in traffic, and therefore more workers rather than less were needed to operate the system. Automation would not begin to reverse the outcome of this equation until the 1960s and 1970s. In the meantime workers and their union could choose to ignore the creeping problem of redundancy. Indeed during the late 1940s and most of the 1950s the union spent more time grappling with the effects of labour shortages than with pending job losses.5

Arbitrary staff ceilings imposed as an anti-inflationary measure by the Menzies Government was part of the problem.6 But a more fundamental issue lay with labour supply. The reduced birthrate of the 1930s, the increase in the postwar marriage rate, and the growing demand for female labour in manufacturing and services combined to

2 John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000), p. 19. 3 PMG Annual Reports, 1946/47 – 1956/57. 4 PMG Annual Report, 1960/61. 5 In NSW, for instance, staff shortages were a major source of discontent in 1953 and 1954. NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 2, NSW Branch Minutes, 7 December 1953, 8 March 1954, 25 March 1954, 12 April 1954, 21 June 1954. 6 Prime Minister Menzies also used public service cost-cutting to further his conservative social agenda. In 1952, he directed that married women working as temporary employees in the Public Service were to be discharged. He later modified this to allow married women with dependants to stay but gave the Public Service Inspector the power to determine which married woman met the criteria for continuing employment. NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 51, Order of Discharge – Temporary and Exempt Employees – Married Women, issued by E. Henderson, Director Posts & Telegraphs, 8 August 1952.

223 diminish the pool of young single women willing to endure working life on the boards.7 Management battled to keep up the supply of recruits while they waited for the rollout of automatic exchanges and then Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) to deliver the big leap forward. In 1948 the Commonwealth Public Service Board agreed to PMG requests to modify the entrance examination for junior postal officers, telephonists and phonogram operators as a measure to meet the shortfall.8 But although the revised exam recruited 600 telephonists, it did not solve the problem. High turnover and even greater demand led to further changes in procedures. In 1950 the competitive exam was dropped altogether in most large centres in favour of a practical operating test, while the maximum age limit for recruits was increased from 25 to 51 years.9 At the other end of the scale, switchboard jobs were opened up to girls as young as fourteen.10 Despite lobbying from the CTPOA (as the union became in 1950) the minimum age was not increased until 1958 and then only to fifteen.11 In 1950-51 the Department even resorted to advertising in the press and on radio to fill vacancies created by telephonists quitting their jobs.12

The measures adopted to solve the labour shortage helped keep telephony a youthful occupation. In 1934 the average age of the 634 permanent telephonists in New South Wales was 25.5 years; by 1951 it had dropped to 23 despite a doubling of the workforce. More startling is the reduction in average length of service. Over half (55.6%) of the 1294 telephonists in New South Wales at the end of June 1951 had been permanent officers for less than two years, compared to only around one quarter in

7 In 1947 there were 717,200 women in the paid workforce, by 1961 there were 1,059,200, a rate of increase exceeding the increase in male employment. Married women accounted for the largest proportion of the growth. In fact, in 1954 there were less single or separated women in the workforce than in 1947, leaving industries which maintained a marriage bar cut off from the main sources of available female labour. Stella Lees & June Senyard, The 1950s:How Australia Became a Modern Society, and Everyone got a House and Car (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1987), pp. 74-75. 8 PMG Annual Report, 1947/48. 9 PMG Annual Report, 1949/50. 10 Minutes of 15th CTPOA National Conference, 28 October –1 November 1957. In fact, decreasing the age and educational standard of entry probably exacerbated the high turnover by giving young women an easy entry point into the workforce while they waited for a better job. In this regard it is significant that one of the few occasions the Department encountered a decline in turnover rates amongst telephonists was during the recession of 1951 when the labour market contracted sharply. PMG Annual Report, 1951/52. 11 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 28 April 1958. CTPOA was an acronym for Commonwealth Telephone and Phonogram Officers’ Association. Although phonogram operators recruited from the Telephone Branch had been covered by the union since 1928, male Postal Officers fully employed on phonogram duties were not covered by the union until 1949. The change in the union’s name reflected the union’s successful application to the Industrial Registrar to cover all phonogram staff. 12 PMG Annual Report, 1950/51.

224 1934. Even taking into account the large conversion of temporary staff to permanent positions in 1950, the figures reveal a level of inexperience unprecedented since telephony’s formative years. Only 15.8 per cent of the state’s telephonists had worked for the public service as permanent officers for more than five years. In 1934 workers with that level of experience accounted for 55.3 per cent of the staff operating the boards.13

These trends had important effects on the union. Unless caught up in the fervour of radical times, newcomers to a workplace usually do not throw themselves into union activism. Even workers predisposed to pursue an active union life will familiarise themselves with the job and its culture first. The intrepid Alice McLean, for example, spent seven years with the Department before immersing herself in CTOA affairs. Newcomers who are preoccupied with securing a job elsewhere are less likely to become involved. It is not surprising, then, that when a workforce is gripped by a constant cycle of renewal, union activism suffers. Where a union has no full-time office-bearers, a de facto bureaucracy can emerge out of the small cohort of long- serving personnel who assume official positions. This was the CTOA’s experience in the 1950s and 1960s. High staff turnover ensured the differentiation between leaders and members, long a feature of the CTOA’s internal life, would mark union affairs even more sharply after 1948.

The union’s leaders naturally brought their own worldview and preoccupations to their union work. Many CTOA leaders were monitors and supervisors for whom access to the Third Division, the classification of the supervisory structure and salary margins were matters of particular if not exclusive concern. On the whole, they shared senior management’s conception of the importance of an efficient and disciplined workforce, perhaps even to a greater extent if the union’s attention to educational standards can be taken as evidence of a supervisory rather than an operator’s perspective. Their view of their PMG jobs as milestones on a career path made them more open to co-optive strategies that sought to integrate them into a partnership with senior management in solving departmental problems, especially problems of control over labour.

13 Statistics for 1934 and 1951 collated by the author from Commonwealth Public Service Lists of Officers as of 30 June 1934 and 30 June 1951.

225 These factors pushed the union’s leaders in a conservative direction which found its industrial expression in an unwavering belief in the efficacy and ethics of advocacy and arbitration. Occasionally the path took an even more obsequious turn. The union’s forty year history from the 1930s to the 1970s is littered with messages of congratulations to managers newly promoted by the Department or honoured by the Queen, with Christmas greetings to the hierarchy, with farewell dinners for retiring directors, with assurances of the union’s unwavering commitment to non-threatening industrial behaviour.

Once these forms of practice became entrenched they played a normative role with respect to new union activists. A certain pattern of conservatism came to define the union’s very identity and modus operandi and even the kind of person a union leader was expected to be. A milieu favouring ideological conservatives naturally attracted them, whether or not they came from the supervisory or operator ranks. As the Fifties and Sixties progressed a leap of imagination was required just to perceive that the union could be something else, a movement of people, perhaps, organising to empower themselves with a clear vision of their own needs and wants.

Welfarism and the CTPOA

The Department was an able ally in the union’s degeneration into a tool of conformity. It afforded legitimacy and a semblance of respect to union leaders who stayed within the narrow grooves of “constitutional” practice. Particularly obsequious behaviour could even elicit recognition from the Director-General himself. In his 1950 Christmas greeting to the CTPOA, Sir Giles Chippindall praised the contribution of public service organisations to the Department’s progress over the previous twelve months, and singled out the CTPOA for achieving a “greater understanding” in the “field of industrial relationships”:

Never before has the understanding between Unions, Associations and the Department been better, and I should like to thank you and your Executive for your personal endeavours in promoting the understanding. I should be glad, also, if you would convey to your Executive and to your members my appreciation

226 for the very practical help extended at all times in resolving problems of mutual interest.14

In Chippindall’s view, mutual interest was a function of sharing a noble mission:

…we work for a service touching intimately the lives and livelihood of all members of the community. Our progress reflects the progress of the community; the character of our work may accelerate or retard that progress, and this in turn bears closely on our own lives and welfare.15

The bond he espoused went deeper than simple dedication to a shared goal. Drawing again on familial sentiment, Chippindall opined that “we Post Office people develop something in addition to loyalty; we develop an affection for the Department, an affection which I believe unifies and gives character to our work…”16

Chippindall had some reason for his confidence in the staff’s level of affection and loyalty. His rejuvenated Postal Institute, designed expressly to deepen the sense of ‘mutual interest’, was attracting mass support. In the year ending June 1954 alone it conducted 128 educational classes attended by 5536 members, and auspiced 92 sporting and social clubs.17 By 1955, it boasted 40 011 members or 52.2 per cent of the total staff employed by the Department, the highest proportion since the first Institute was established in 1918.18

Telephonists and their union leaders threw themselves into social, sporting and charitable activities convened by the API and the Department. The union came to share the PMG’s representation of itself as analogous to that most culturally revered of 1950s social institutions, the family, replete with demarcated gender roles and gendered celebrations of PMG activities. For the Department’s dutiful daughters on the switchboards, there was the Popular Telephonist Quest. In 1955 sixteen entrants vied to raise the most money for the Prince Henry Hospital. Backed by “unselfish support from

14 Letter from Director General Chippindall to CTPOA, 21 December 1950, in Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 January 1951. 15 ibid. 16 ibid. 17 APO Magazine, June-July 1954, p. 10. 18 APO Magazine, October-November 1955, p. 10.

227 staff, families and friends”, they raised a total of ₤4754 and at the gala ball held as the finale, the Department’s Victorian Director, N.W. Strange, and his wife announced Monica Haddock from the Windsor Exchange had accumulated the award-winning sum of ₤727. The Secretary of the Quest Committee was none other than CTPOA General Secretary Kathleen Hester.19

Marching to PMG’s Tune?: Australian Postal Institute Marching Girls, 1961. (NAA: Image J2634, 3117/2)

The Department’s co-optive initiatives also extended to competitions that directly benefited the drive for efficiency and service. In 1953 it organised the first national Telephone Quiz, a team contest based on answering questions about trunk line operating procedures. In its inaugural year 137 teams participated, and the Department was pleased to report that the competition had “done much to stimulate the interest of operators in their work, to promote a friendly spirit of rivalry, to encourage efficiency, and to inform the public of the service telephonists are required to render.”20 It also did

19 ibid., p.11. 20 PMG Annual Report, 1953-54, p. 24.

228 its bit to advance gender stereotypes. Publicity shots show young Southport telephonists posing in swimming costumes on the beach, procedure manuals in hand.21 The winning team from Warwick is shown examining a Sunbeam mixmaster, that iconic 195os symbol of the suburban housewife and her supposedly appliance-rich lifestyle.22 Read together the images serve to map out some key boundaries of women’s participation in the workforce of the time. They remind us that no female worker of this era could be celebrated just for her skills in the workplace. The relegation of biological and social reproduction to the privatised realm of the family ensured that women’s waged contribution to society was invariably subsumed into a much narrower destiny defined by marriage, child rearing and homemaking.23

As with the Popular Telephonist Quest, senior CTPOA leaders initially proved incapable of maintaining a critical distance from the event. Management encouraged the union to endorse the contest, even inviting the General President to open it. At its 1953 national conference the union went so far as to donate ₤10/10/- annually as prize money for the runner up team.24 In 1956 the Annual General Meeting of the New South Wales

21 Photograph of ‘Quiz telephonists 1957, Southport Winners’, NAA (Bris, Syd): PMG Dept, J2364, 2579/22. 22 Photograph of ‘Warwick, Telephonists’ Quiz winning team’, NAA (Bris, Syd): PMG Dept, J2364, 2255/1. For accounts of the marketing of ‘home-making’ commodities and associated gender roles in the 1950s, see Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, pp. 42-54, and Lees & Senyard, The 1950s, pp. 53-73. 23 For as long as privatised reproduction remained unchallenged as capitalism’s preferred option and women remained principally responsible for reproductive labour, the postwar increase in the rate of married women in the workforce ensured, paradoxically, that women’s role as homemakers and mothers would continue to be emphasised by the systems of ideological control. For married women in the paying labour market, this situation entailed carrying the double burden of working in two sites of production, the workplace and the home. The discussion here draws upon Brenner and Ramas’ theoretical work on the sexual division of labour under twentieth century capitalism. They argue that “while the capitalist development of the forces of production tends to undermine the family-household system by pulling women into wage labour, capitalist class relations set up a counter-tendency reinforcing the sexual division of labour. This is not, as [Michele] Barrett argues, because gender divisions are ‘embedded’ in capitalist relations of production. It is because one consistent tendency of the capitalist system is to reduce working-class living standards and to force working people to accomplish the labour necessary for their reproduction in their ‘own’ time.” According to Brenner and Ramas, in working class families this unpaid work historically fell to women because men’s freedom from the biological constraints of pregnancy and childbirth meant they were in a stronger bargaining position in the capitalist labour market. For working class households, it made economic sense for the man to maintain an unbroken record in the workforce while the woman took primary responsibility for childcare. Johanna Brenner & Maria Ramas, ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression’, New Left Review, No. 144 (1984), pp. 60-62. A later version of the article appears in Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp.1-49. Barrett’s position was elaborated in Women’s Oppression Today: the Marxist/Feminist Encounter (London: Verso, 1988). In the Australian literature, Ann Curthoys presents an analysis sympathetic to Brenner and Ramas’ position with her argument that the “sexual division in the labour market arises from an interaction between bio-cultural tradition and practices on the one hand, and the specific institutions of capitalist production on the other.” Ann Curthoys, For and Against Feminism: A Personal Journey into Feminist Theory and History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 127-28. 24 Minutes of 13th CTPOA National Conference, 20-28 October 1953.

229 Branch sent a letter of congratulations to the Bathurst team for their success in that year’s competition.25

Then a curious event occurred. At the 1957 conference, Queensland delegate Gordon Stone led a spirited attack on the quiz, arguing the teams were coerced into entering and exchanges were left short-staffed by the absence of quiz competitors. The conference called upon the Department to discontinue the event and use the funds towards better amenities for staff.26 Stone was no radical. He merely sensed the union was approaching a crisis. He saw the membership shrinking (below the 1947 level by 1958) and the finances deteriorating.27 He recognised that the union’s own interests were not served by the leadership metamorphosing completely into a cheer squad for management’s agenda.

He was not alone. When General President Miss J. Thomas informed the Federal Executive in July 1958 she had again accepted an invitation to open the quiz, a heated debate ensued which resulted in Rita Demas from New South Wales successfully moving the union take no part.28 Undeterred, Thomas proceeded with opening the competition, prompting a vote of no confidence from the New South Wales Branch.29 The matter was referred to a full Executive meeting at which the July position was affirmed but a motion condemning Thomas defeated with only the two largest branches, New South Wales and Victoria, voting in favour. Queensland refrained from voting, undoubtedly to prevent an embarrassment to the General President rather than out of support for her stand. In the debate Stone agreed with Demas that the CTPOA’s participation in the quiz “while staff were working under appalling conditions and the department giving such poor service” held up the union for ridicule.30

25 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 3, NSW Branch Minutes, 30 July 1956. 26 Minutes of 15th CTPOA National Conference, 28 October – 1 November 1957. 27 CTPOA annual national membership: 3963 member in 1944, 6735 in 1947, 8579 in 1948, 7871 in 1952, 6998 in 1954, 7053 in 1957 and 6640 in 1958. Data collated from General Secretary’s Report to 10th CTOA National Conference, 22 September – 2 October 1947 and Federal Executive Council Minutes, 25 October 1948, 25 February 1952, 24 March 1952, 27 September 1954, 17-18 November 1958. 28 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 21 July 1958. 29 Ironically, the no confidence motion was moved by Beris Forrester, who had also initiated the motion to congratulate the Bathurst quiz team in 1956. NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 3, NSW Branch Minutes, 11 August 1958. 30 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 18 November 1958.

230

Southport’s Winning Telephone Quiz Team, 1957 (NAA: Image J2364, 2579/22)

But while Stone realised the union could ill-afford the scorn of its own members, he was not prepared to jeopardise his relationship with management either. He stood for unionism that laid no claims on managerial prerogatives and did not countenance militancy. In this he was at one with Hester, Thomas and Forrester. The broader context for this of course was anti-communism. For most of the CTPOA leaders the onset of the Cold War engendered a mindset that irrevocably fused expressions of militancy with communist influence. There was certainly more than a grain of truth in this presupposition with regard sections of the APWU but it was no means the whole truth.31 The effect, though, was to sharpen the distinction between the two leading political forces in public service unionism, the ACOA-dominated High Council on the one hand, and the APWU on the other. Whereas the CTPOA had gravitated towards the former since the 1920s, now it felt compelled to publicly choose and in choosing repudiate the methods of the alternative. By throwing in its lot with the obsequious High Council, the CTPOA was left with few options when genteel negotiations and arbitration failed. Not just industrial militancy but even basic organisational unity with the trade union movement was ruled out in fear of political contamination. Whereas Hester proclaimed “this association is not political”32, Stone took Cold War paranoia to its isolationist

31 Frank Waters, Postal Unions and Politics: A History of the APWU (St Lucia: Univ of Qld Press, 1978), pp. 96-98. 32 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 28 January 1953.

231 extreme, arguing for a ban on affiliation to political groups, trades and labour councils and the ACTU. Only after vigorous opposition from Demas did he amend the proposal to allow industrial affiliations.33

Conflicts and Crises from Within: the CTPOA’s Internal Decline

New South Wales Branch under Demas and Israel consistently provided the only opposition to the hegemonic alliance of the Victorian-based federal officials and Queensland’s Gordon Stone. Yet as Demas and Israel’s own rise to power in the 1946 branch elections made clear, their opposition should certainly not be construed as leftist even though they espoused causes such as equal pay. Demas rejected the isolationist, association model of unionism as it took shape in the 1950s, but her motivation could not have been further from Alice McLean’s agenda of creating a unified, militant industrial force in the Post Office. Demas was an anti-communist and she wanted her union to contribute more effectively to the cause of anti-communism within the broader labour movement. As she explained to the 1951 National Conference:

…we feel in N.S.W. that in the Trade Union Movement we should take our part and share the expenses of all the cases taken by the A.C.T.U., who in the past have had difficulty in keeping control from the Left Wing Unions.34

Having defeated the Leftists in her own union, Demas directed most of her animosity at Hester. Hester’s supporters chose to interpret this as personal animosity but its real significance lies in the fact that Hester more than any other official embodied a non- industrial style of conservative public service unionism.35 Demas’s conservatism was of an altogether different type: active, engaged and political.

33 Minutes of 15th CTPOA National Conference, 28 October –1 November 1957. 34 Minutes of 12th CTPOA National Conference, 17 September – 2 October 1951. The Branch activists still held the same view ten years later, a general meeting in 1961 concluding that “a preponderance of moderate membership would obtain moderate control of the ACTU.” NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 3, NSW Branch Minutes, 11 September 1961. 35 Kathleen Hester remained in office for 23 years, retiring in 1965. Her final report poignantly enunciated her own conception of the union. In thanking past and present industrial advocates and members of the Executive, she singled out the founding office bearers and the five General Presidents who had served during her term of office. These early leaders were, she stated, a “wonderful group of people” who “founded an Association to work for the betterment of conditions for their fellow workers.” The rank and file, on the other hand, are mentioned only insofar as they are admonished to be “forever grateful” to the Association’s pioneers. Whatever her failings, Hester, along with other dedicated leaders

232 Relations between Demas and the federal body began to deteriorate in early 1951 after ‘the feds’ intervened in a conflict within the New South Wales Branch between Demas and Israel, on the one hand, and a group around their former ally and Federal Executive Councillor, Rose Gallagher. A series of increasingly acrimonious exchanges culminated in the federal body laying charges of “conduct inimical to the interests of the association” against President Demas, Secretary Israel, Treasurer Lamont and three other members of the New South Wales Branch committee. After hearing evidence in Sydney over four days from 22 May, a committee comprising the full Executive council suspended Demas, Israel and Lamont from holding office until 31 December 1952 and the others until 30 September 1952. Gordon Stone was authorised to take charge of the Branch until elections produced a new Branch committee.36

Although the suspensions were affirmed by the national conference in September, legal challenges ultimately prevented the decision ever taking effect. Demas and Israel remained in power and their critical fire against the Federal Executive in general and General Secretary Hester in particular showed no sign of abating until 1955, much to the increasing chagrin of all other sections of the union.37 At the 1953 national conference amidst yet another skirmish, Hester was rewarded with a vote of confidence after lashing out that the “usual part played by N.S.W. Branch was pinpricking and obstruction” which, she claimed, had debilitating and potentially catastrophic consequences for the union.38

There was evidence that Hester had a point. New South Wales was the largest branch and its instability did effect the union generally. It was Sydney’s lack of cooperation in 1952 that posed the biggest threat to the success of the union’s national claim for improved amenities. Even more damaging, Demas’s fixation with the Federal Executive

of her generation, must be credited with keeping the union alive. As ATPOA leader and life member Jean Bowden observed, “they did play a very important role because they maintained our union throughout that long period…they did what was expected of them.” Federal Executive Council Minutes, 10 May 1965; Interview with Jean Bowden in Trades & Labor Council of Queensland, From Lunchroom to Boardroom: Records of Oral History Project, Women in the Labor Movement, 1930-1970. Held in the Fryer Library of The University of Queensland, UQFL300, accessible online via www.library.uq.edu.au 36 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 2, NSW Branch Minutes, 12 February 1951, 26 February 1951, 28 March 1951, 2 April 1951, 14 May 1951, 13 June 1951, 29 June 1951; Federal Executive Council Minutes, 2 April 1951, 10 April 1951; Proceedings in connection with charges laid against members of the NSW Branch, 22-26 May 1951, held with Federal Executive Council Minutes. 37 Minutes of 12th CTPOA National Conference, 17 September – 2 October 1951. 38 Minutes of 13th CTPOA National Conference, 20-28 October 1953.

233 appeared to come at the cost of declining membership within her own branch. Union membership was falling across the nation but the most dramatic shrinkage was in New South Wales. By 1958 there were 1402 less members than in 1951 and the Branch’s contribution to total membership had slipped from 37 per cent in 1952 to 26 per cent in 1958 (see Table 6A).

Table 6A: CTPOA Membership Figures for NSW, Vic and Qld and as Proportion of National Membership39 N.S.W. Victoria Queensland Sub- National Total Total 1951 3149 3050 - - - members % of total - - - - -

1952 2930 2470 1188 6588 7871 members % of total 37% 31% 15% 83% 100%

1958 1747 2315 1407 5469 6640 members % of total 26% 35% 21% 82% 100%

When the union density state by state is compared it is even more evident that factors endogenous to the union were largely to blame for the disproportional collapse in New South Wales’ coverage. According to figures recorded by the Federal Executive in 1958, Demas’s branch had a potential membership almost equal to that of Victoria and Queensland combined. However only around 43 per cent of the New South Wales telephone exchange workforce was unionised, compared to over 80 per cent in the other two states (see Table 6B).

39 Data collated by author from Federal Executive Council Minutes, 6 March 1951, 25 February 1952, 24 March 1952, 17-18 November 1958.

234 Table 6B: CTPOA Branch Membership and Density.40

State No.of Members Possible No. of Percentage Members New South Wales 1747 4068 42.94 Victoria 2315 2821 82.06 Queensland 1407 1752 80.31 South Australia 777 1063 73.09 Western Australia 233 615 37.89 Tasmania 170 484 35.12

If these figures are accurate, Hester had some cause to assert that New South Wales needed to attend to its own shortcomings before ridiculing other areas of the union. Sectional leadership interests, Cold War politics and in many cases petty squabbles were being placed ahead of basic organising and effective representation. Demas herself asserted that organising was the key to building a stronger union.41 Without full-time officials, of course, organising thousands of workers scattered across a state the size of New South Wales was never going to be easy. But apart from the occasional country visit, little organising seems to have been attempted. It was this failure, according to the APWU, that prompted many telephonists to look elsewhere for industrial coverage. The APWU wrote to Flora Israel in 1959:

…we have received dozens and dozens of requests from female telephonists to join this union and they have been refused in spite of the fact that they have advised our organisers that they are not interested in joining your Association because they claim they never see a full time official.42

By 1960/61, New South Wales membership had dropped to 1465.43

The Federal Executive cannot avoid some of the blame for the crisis. Disdainful of mass activity, distanced from all outside labour movement forces apart from the High

40 Data based on figures cited in Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17-18 November 1958. 41 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 3, NSW Branch Minutes, 7 October 1959. 42 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 56, Letter from NSW APWU to Flora Israel, NSW CTPOA, 5 March 1959. 43 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 41, NSW Branch Secretary’s Report, 1960-61.

235 Council, and committed to arbitration, the federal leadership along with the branch committees had created a union which stood or fell on the effectiveness of a small band of leaders to deliver outcomes. Alternative models of unionism were never considered. When Muriel Heagney published Arbitration at the Crossroads, the title alone may have given the Federal Executive pause for thought.44 Instead they chose to rule out purchasing a copy.45 Even a modest proposal from the Federal Executive to stimulate members’ participation by allowing them to form sub-branches was rejected by the 1953 conference, Stone arguing “the expense would not be warranted.”46 Dissatisfaction among the ranks had few channels to follow and most workers simply drifted into the ever-widening pool of disengaged, unfinancial and non members. Left with a choice between Demas’ whinging and Hester’s wheedling, workers shrugged and went about their lives, disgruntled with their lot perhaps but not sufficiently so to contemplate revolt. Their creativity and talents and longing for community found alternative outlets, most notably in the API and other Department-sanctioned initiatives, where their sense of their own collective energy was stripped of any class meaning and reconstructed as corporate collegiality.

The union was left completely ill-equipped to fulfil its most basic functions. It relied for salary increases on basic wage cases but these lagged behind inflation, especially after the Full Bench of the Arbitration Court abolished automatic cost-of-living adjustments in 1953.47 In July 1949 the union lodged a claim for increased rates for its juniors with evidence from twelve junior telephonists and three junior phonogram operators. This eventually led to an agreement with the Public Service Board that every junior would be paid the adult rate after two years of service if she or he had proved their efficiency, a deal similar to the arrangement already in place for typists.48 In 1953, a mere two years later, the Board withdrew from the agreement.49 Despite protests from sections of the union led by the Victorian Branch, the union as a body offered only token opposition to the move.50

44 Muriel A. Heagney, Arbitration at the Crossroads: Digest of Opinion on Legal Wage Fixation (Melbourne: National Press, 1954). 45 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 22 March 1954. 46 Minutes of 13th CTPOA National Conference, 20-28 October 1953. 47 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 30 November 1953. 48 General Secretary’s Report to 12th CTPOA National Conference, 17 September – 2 October 1951. 49 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 February 1953, 27 April 1953. 50 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 April 1953, 25 May 1953.

236 The union devoted considerably more attention to winning higher margins for senior employees. But here too the gains were meagre. In 1952 the union submitted a claim for bigger margins for monitors and supervisors, arguing that “the margin above the telephonist or phonogram operator is not sufficiently large to compensate for the responsibility required of supervisory employees.”51 The Arbitrator awarded a ₤12 increase to supervisors, nothing to monitors. Not everyone would be satisfied with the result, Hester conceded, but “it was an achievement to disturb the margin which had been in existence for so many years.”52

The occasional marginal disturbance aside, there were few wage achievements to boast of in the 1950s. In other areas of the Department wage pressure was a catalyst to militant action. On 14 September 1956 the Post Office experienced its first recorded strike as APWU members walked off the job over a pay claim.53 The strike ultimately failed to achieve the desired increase but, according to APWU leader Frank Waters, its overall effect was positive because the members “now appreciated that they could ‘stick’, and that neither the ground nor big snakes swallowed those who stood up for their industrial rights.”54 The lesson left the CTPOA unmoved. It followed up a flow-on basic wage increase of 10/- per week with support for a High Council claim for an increase of ₤26 per annum for adult males and “consequential increases” for females and juniors. On 2 November 1956 the Public Service Arbitrator refused the application.55 No industrial response was considered. Another claim submitted by the CTPOA and based on comparative work value was rejected out of hand in 1957, the Arbitrator reportedly commenting that “he was not interested in what outside firms were paying.”56 Again, industrial persuasion was never contemplated. Instead, delegates to the 1957 National Conference voted to pursue wage increases through a strategy of reclassification simply because “it seemed impossible now to gain increases in salary through arbitration.”57 This too came to nothing.

51 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 21 January 1952. 52 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 28 January 1953. 53 Waters, Postal Unions and Politics, p. 118. 54 ibid., p. 124. 55 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 November 1956. 56 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 May 1957. 57 Minutes of 15th CTPOA National Conference, 28 October – 1 November 1957.

237 Welfarism to Automation: Towards a New Era of Class Relations in Telephony

The parsimonious attitude of the Board and the Public Service Arbitrator in the 1950s was not only a response to the political and economic conservatism at large. It marked an acute sensitivity to the systemic problems confronting the business of telephony. Given the size of the PMG’s workforce, even the smallest increase in pay rates represented a significant loss of revenue unless output per worker improved or customer charges were increased to compensate. The CTPOA had reached the limit of the Department’s capacity to concede any increased labour costs without a fight. For management, tamecat unionism was no longer enough, for even tamecat unionism was an obstacle to reducing absolute labour costs. The conundrum could be solved only by removing labour from the equation altogether.

The pace of automation had begun to quicken in the 1950s. Perth became the first capital to boast a fully automated system in 1953. By 1961 virtually all capital city subscribers were connected to automatic exchanges for local calls, while the overall connection rate was 77.4 per cent, compared to only 59.5 per cent in 1947.58 Telephonists were increasingly concentrated in the trunk line network, but here too living labour power would begin to lose ground after STD services were introduced in 1956. The following year the Department created the Automatic Network and Switching Objectives (ANSO) Committee to formulate a national plan to fully automate the trunk line network. In Ann Moyal’s words, “ANSO’s long-term aim was…to take the operator out of the telephone call.”59

In 1959, in a major strategic article on the automation strategy, PMG Deputy Director- General, F.P. O’Grady, contended that the use of two or more telephonists to handle trunk line traffic was once justifiable because the cost of operators’ labour was

58 PMG Annual Reports, 1946/47, 1960/61. 59 Ann Moyall, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1984), p. 224. The automation of the switching function in telephony eventually led to a change in workplace terminology. Telephone exchanges gave way to Manual Assistance Centres (MACs). As the PMG Annual Report explained in 1969: “Post Office policy for the development of a completely automatic telephone service provides also for the provision of a number of manual assistance centres throughout Australia. These…will assist customers who have encountered difficulty in the setting up of a call, supply telephone number information to customers, establish trunk calls for customers who for various reasons will not use the STD facility or who require some special service.” PMG Annual Report, 1968/69.

238 “relatively low” and the cost of trunk line channels was relatively high. But, he observed, “two fundamental changes” had occurred in recent years:

(a) The cost of operators’ labour, especially by the imposition of penalty rates for shift work, etc, and of much more extensive provision of amenities, has increased very considerably. (b) The cost of trunk line channels has been reduced very considerably.60

To retain manual parent exchanges, he went on, “would mean continuing a method which shows every indication of steadily rising costs even where labour is freely available.”61 On the other hand, the invention of new carrier systems which deliver a large number of telephone channels from a single pair of conductors “has made it possible to reduce the cost per channel mile substantially.”62 In short, the point had been reached “at which it becomes economic to consider semi-automatic or automatic methods rather than continue the use of manual methods…”63

This complex algorithm of technology and political economy would dominate the thinking of PMG planners throughout the coming decade. Following the formulation of the Community Telephone Plan in 1958-1960, the Department produced an implementation plan in 1963 which mapped out a strategy to automate the national trunk line network using crossbar switching as the new standard. As Mr I.H. Maggs, a senior Department engineer, put it, the STD objective was “to contain the number of trunk calls handled under manual conditions, to prevent any marked increase in the total number of operators, and to prevent any overall expansion of the manual trunk system.”64 It was expected the new network would save “several million dollars” each year.65

60 F.P. O’Grady, ‘Developments Leading to Subscriber Trunk Dialling in Australia’, The Telecommunications Journal of Australia, Oct 1959, Vol 12, No.2, p. 65. 61 ibid. 62 ibid. 63 ibid. 64 I.H. Maggs, ‘The New National Automatic Trunk Network’, The Telecommunications Journal of Australia, Vol. 18, No. 1, Feb 1968, p. 3. 65 ibid.

239 In 1965 the Department connected Australia’s two millionth telephone service. What was astonishing about this milestone was the fact the second million took only twelve years to add.66 Pushed on by population growth and rising living standards, new subscriptions grew exponentially in the city and the bush. By June 1968 there were 1,456,475 metropolitan connections and 902,658 in the rural areas, each figure representing an expansion of around 44 per cent since 1961.67 This growth reflected nothing less than a communications revolution. As Young has written:

The phone, which took almost a century to become a medium of the masses, offered a dialogue, with the potential to become a conference. It helped create new communities of interest, bringing together people of like mind. If you were not on the phone, you were poor or a recluse.68

New uses for telephony also emerged. Anticipating the digital revolution of the 1980s and 90s, the Department reported in 1963 that:

The increasing use of commercial and Government organisations of automatic methods of processing large volumes of data has led to a rising demand for communication links for the transmission of data from remote locations.69

A year later the Department revealed the key customers for this service were the Defence Forces and the Melbourne Stock Exchange.70

For R.T. O’Donnell, Superintending Engineer for Planning in New South Wales, new technology was the solution to these new demands but only once it was cost effective:

The Post Office has striven continuously to improve service offered to subscribers who naturally are only amenable to new services if the charges are not increased. As a result it is the economic pressures within the Post Office which set the timing for the introduction of new facilities or techniques. Within

66 PMG Annual Report, 1964/65. 67 PMG Annual Report, 1960/61, 1967/68.

68 Young, Person to Person, p. 217. 69 PMG Annual Report, 1962/63. 70 PMG Annual Report, 1963/64.

240 the trunk network, single operator dialling reduced Post Office costs and provided subscribers with a speedier service, the introduction of ELSA converted to local calls and subsequently to automatic operation short haul trunk traffic which was proving too expensive to handle manually, and the same kind of pressures are now forcing the expansion of STD.71

O’Donnell’s formulation suggests that PMG was not simply responding to widening community demand for known services but was seeking to create markets for new services. Ian Reinecke documented in the 1980s how this supply driven approach to telecommunications became especially prevalent with the advent of computerisation, mainly as a result of the profit drive of the suppliers of computerised equipment.72 His arguments will be dealt with in some detail in the next chapter. The significant point here is that by the 1960s neither the forces of supply nor demand could deliver outcomes acceptable to the major protagonists unless labour costs in telephony were driven down. For this reason, O’Donnell’s thinking and that of O’Grady before him signalled a shift in management’s approach to class relations in the telephone exchanges. In 1912 Electrical Engineer John Hesketh had emphasised both labour costs and labour control in his investigation of the benefits of automation. O’Donnell’s deliberations reveal that by the 1960s managers regarded labour costs as a much higher order issue than labour control. The new push for automation was driven fundamentally by the need to provide services at an unprecedented scale for a price which the old labour-intensive systems could not deliver. It was these “economic pressures” that inspired the Department to drive living labour out of the telephone exchanges. Ideological incorporation of workers and their unions was giving way to mass redundancy.

Similar shifts were occurring elsewhere. In Britain, writes Peter Young, “when wage costs were rising, a labour-intensive service was giving away to a capital-intensive one, becoming increasingly automatic and do-it-yourself.”73 In the United States, argues

71 R.T. O’Donnell, ‘Subscriber Trunk Dialling in Australia’, The Telecommunications Journal of Australia, Feb 1967, Vol 17, No.1, p. 6. 72 Ian Reinecke, Connecting You: Bridging the Communications Gap (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1985), pp. 14-15. Reinecke also develops the thesis that computer companies and their corporate clients were key players behind the political pressure around the world in the 1970s and 80s to privatise telephone utilities. 73 Young, Person to Person, p. 194.

241 Venus Green, the availability of electronic switching and relaying equipment led to a new managerial perspective on operators which heralded the demise of the white lady identity: “operators were no longer needed as they had been in the nineteenth century to sell the service, nor were they essential to deliver it.” This allowed management to withdraw the ‘privileges’ used to appease white workers and begin recruiting cheaper workers from the inner-city African-American communities. Over time they too were expendable.74

In Australia the Courier-Mail in Brisbane announced the new era in April 1960 with the headline, ‘big cut in hello girls is forecast.’75 In August the same year the CTPOA Federal Executive advised branches to be on the alert to assist members whose positions “may be abolished due to cutovers [to automatic exchanges].”76 Redundancy had entered the union’s vocabulary for the first time. Even so, job loss continued to be treated by the CTPOA as a peripheral concern. Partly this was due to the union’s poor organisation of country exchange staff who bore the brunt of the cutovers in these years. In 1961 New South Wales Branch drew attention to the impact of automation on country staff and won support from the federal body for the union to request the Department to “assist officers and employees in selecting suitable positions where necessary, when a country exchange is cut over to automatic.”77 In the main, however, their plight did not register on a radar more attuned to the clash and clamour of work in the big city exchanges where, as in the 1950s, the underlying decline of labour’s role was disguised by a shortage of applicants for the available positions. Overall the number of operators remained substantially constant throughout most of the decade, even though trunk traffic increased by at least ten per cent each year.78

74 Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2001), p. 220. 75 The Courier-Mail, 14 April 1960, p. 3. Quoting a Post Office spokesman, the report stated that “big reductions would be made in the numbers of Australia’s trunk line telephone operators over the next 15 years.” A subsequent internal PMG memo from the Public Relations Officer who was the source of the story informed his superiors he had been shown the journalist’s copy before it went to press. He noted that although the paragraphs containing the quote “were not as I would have liked them, I could not justify asking him to re-write them. The 15 years relates to the estimated time it would take to completely bring the new policy into effect.” Memo from PMG Public Relations Officer to the Director, 14 April 1960, NAA (Bris): PMG Dept, J3088, QPT21. 76 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 22 August 1960. 77 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 1 May 1961. 78 L.M. Wright, ‘Manual Trunk Switching Developments in Australia’, The Telecommunications Journal of Australia, June 1967, Vol 17, No 2, p. 90.

242

Maryborough telephonists, 1958. While the absolute number of operators remained constant in the 1950s and 60s, an underlying decline had begun. (NAA: Image J2879, QTH680)

The underlying trend was also hidden by the historically transient nature of the operator workforce. The Victorian Branch complained in 1964 of the difficulty in keeping the membership roll up to date because over the preceding few years “the staff in most Exchanges have been continually changing, particularly in the Main Trunk Exchange, with new trainees, transfers from one Exchange to another, the resignations.” 650 new members in that year alone had been offset by approximately 600 resignations.79

Indicative of this constant flux was the fact that most telephone exchange staff were under 21 years of age (see Table 6C).

Table 6C: Juniors as a Proportion of Total CTPOA Membership, 1965.80 Branch Qld WA Tas SA NSW Vic Members < 21 50 55 60 55 55 60 %

With few workers remaining for long periods in the exchanges, job loss had less of an obvious effect on individuals and was managed through what would later come to be

79 Victorian Branch Secretary’s Annual Report, 1963/64. 80 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 22 November 1965.

243 known as natural attrition. Internal PMG Department reports reveal that over the three years from 1969/70 to 1971/72, the department anticipated automation would ‘save’ them 1092 telephonists’ jobs and 96 monitors, overseers and supervisors. Yet it was the relatively few supervisory staff who management identified as the main problem in managing the transition to automation:

The supervisors (female) have been stationed at their present localities for many years and have not a great period of service prior to retirement. Likewise overseers and many monitors have had many years of service at their present locations and would be loath to move if it can at all be avoided.81

There is little doubt the leadership of the union would have concurred with this assessment. Job cuts were perceived as a problem principally for those committed to a career service.

A third reason for the union’s comparative silence on the issue of technological displacement of labour was the absence of an ideological framework enabling the leaders to see job loss as a social issue which they had a right to oppose. It was seen instead as inevitable or a matter of managerial prerogative. Except where it involved members who “would be loath to move” it was interpreted as beyond the legitimate realm of association activity. In the main it was a union issue only to the extent it impacted on the union organisation itself. As the Victorian Secretary, Mary Gorman, put it, “automation is going to have a great effect on our membership, probably reducing the numbers considerably…” Her implied solution was not to oppose redundancies but to step up the recruitment of remaining non-members: “…we must have the support of every one on your staff. If we lose our strength by losing our members, there will be no-one to look after your interests.”82

Recruitment was indeed given a higher priority. Yet it failed to stem the decline. In the eight years from 1958 to 1966, membership dropped from 6649 to 5395, then rose slightly to 5474 in 1967.83 Redundancy certainly contributed to the decline but so too

81 PMG internal memo on ‘closure of manual telephone exchanges in planned automatic areas – placement of staff’, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B2900/4, 155/2/133. 82 Victorian Branch Secretary’s Annual Report, 1963/64. 83 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17-18 November 1958, 21 August 1967.

244 did the union leadership’s relationship to the workforce. Gorman’s plea was not all that convincing to workers accustomed to their union not relying on membership strength.

Work Value and Wages in the 1960s: The CTPOA Crisis in Practice

As in the previous decade, wage outcomes in the 1960s were one indicator of the union’s state of health. In 1960, the High Council opened negotiations with the Public Service Board specifically on junior wages because of the difficulty in flowing on the new margins set in the Metal Trades case. The Board eventually agreed to a ₤15 rise.84 Given the importance of junior wages to a union with over half its membership under the age of 21, the issue constantly occupied the attention of Federal Executive and branches. One strategy was to devise schemes to allow juniors to rise rapidly to adult rates. Under the arrangements prevailing in the 1950s, juniors could be recruited as young as fifteen and could not reach the adult rate of pay until they turned 21. The 1959 Conference resolved that years of service rather than an age limit should determine the threshold into the adult pay scale.85 But this sat un-actioned until March 1961 when Rita Demas successfully proposed to the Federal Executive that representation be made to the Public Service Board to permit juniors to progress to the adult minimum rate in three years.86 After further stalling and opposition ensured the matter was not raised with the Board, Demas, with support from Nance Lougheed from Victoria, brought the matter to a head at a full Executive meeting in October 1962. Both cited cases of juniors being unable to meet their financial obligations because of their poor pay. Demas again moved:

That the salary range for juniors be either by age or by years of service so as to enable adult rates to be reached in 3 years, and then the maximum in 2 years. If approved to contact the Public service Board.

The motion was lost when President Coridas refrained from using her casting vote to break a deadlock.87

84 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 26 September 1960. 85 Minutes of 16th CTPOA National Conference, 12-16 October 1959. 86 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 6 March 1961. 87 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 22 October 1962.

245 A further eleven months elapsed before another attempt to resolve the problem was attempted, this time by a formula submitted by Gordon Stone that allowed juniors to reach adult rates by the age of nineteen.88 Branch consideration of the proposal, however, was overtaken by the decision of the Public Service Board to award higher increases to junior typists than to junior telephonists and phonogram operators on the basis of an assessment of market rates outside the public service. The union informed the Board that it disagreed with the methodology, and resolved to include juniors in its next general salary claim, the first since 1957.89

At the 1966 conference Stone conveyed the “dissatisfaction amongst the juniors when seniors receive an increase in salary and the juniors have to wait six months or more before their salaries are reviewed, which means a big loss in pay…” On his suggestion, conference adopted a new formula for annual incremental increases for staff below the age of 21.90 After negotiations with the Board in 1967, the union eventually accepted an offer that provided for junior rates ranging from 58% for those under seventeen to 91% for twenty year olds.91 The basic problem of a five-year wait to gain adult rates remained unresolved.

If the wage scale for juniors continued to vex the CTPOA, their general wage claims at least held out hope that some measure of wage justice could be achieved through overall increases. Utilising the concept of work value, which the Industrial Relations Commission had revived in 1961, Stone formulated a new salary scale for all classifications covered by the union. The Executive won approval of the 1964 conference to approach the Public Service Board for an immediate increase based on Stone’s schedule. If that failed, the union was directed to file a claim.92

The union’s arguments centred on changes in the work since the last claim in 1957 and a comparison with typists. Both aspects were disputed by the Board at the conference held on 20 August, but they agreed to give the claim further consideration. Discussions finally recommenced on 27 May 1965, nine months after the original conference. Public

88 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 25 November 1963. 89 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 February 1964. 90 Minutes of 19th CTPOA National Conference, 10-13 January 1966. 91 CPS Arbitration Reports, Vol 47, Part 2, 1967, p.1021; Vol 48, Part 1, 1968, p. 457. 92 Minutes of 18th CTPOA National Conference, 27 April – 1 May 1964.

246 Service Commissioner Nordeck stated the claim would be dealt with under two categories, change in circumstances and comparative wage justice. He explicitly rule out any consideration of junior rates as these would be addressed on a service-wide basis.93

On the changes in the job, the Board conceded that skill levels had not declined but would not agree that contemporary operators required a higher order of skills than their predecessors. In some instances, the Board acknowledged, the duties could be regarded as “more technical” and requiring “more thinking” than the telephonists of earlier eras whose duties “were more of a manual nature.” Nordeck offered an all-round annual increase of ₤56, calculated by establishing the half-way mark between the margins in State and airline awards in New South Wales and Victoria. After the union’s objections were heard, this was increased to ₤70 which the union accepted, even though the Board refused to back date the new rate to June 1964.94

In 1967 the union formulated a fresh claim for higher wages, again based on changes to the duties of operating and supervisory staff, and increases won by other groups, most notably the Clerical Assistants.95 The negotiation of this claim, however, marked a final break with the salary relativity that had held between telephonists and typist grade 1 up until 1964. The union conceded management’s argument that “the operation of a keyboard is a qualification which automatically places an advantage above the position of telephonist.” The Board appeared to win the point by highlighting the discrepancy in training between the two jobs - typists received twenty-one weeks training, telephonists only three – while hinting the skills needed to perform the new non-manual tasks in the Manual Assistance Centres would be addressed by reclassifications at a later date.96

It was a critical concession by the CTPOA for it eroded the position of operating staff without compromising the conditions of overseers and supervisors, leaving the union open once more to the charge it was favouring the upper echelons of the membership. Negotiators, Cousins and Stone, did nothing to allay this perception when they accepted the Board’s offer on operators’ salaries but continued to push for a better deal for

93 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 August 1965. 94 ibid.& CPS Arbitration Reports, Vol 45, Part 1, 1965, p. 221. 95 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 April 1967, 21 August 1967. 96 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 May 1968.

247 supervisory staff on the grounds of “increasing responsibility.”97 The negotiated outcome gave them significant increases but left the juniors and operator staff with far less to celebrate (see Table 6D).

Table 6D: 1968 CTPOA Wage Case Outcome – Per Annum Base Level of Each Classification98 Female Adults Old Scale $ New Scale $ % Increase Telephonists/Phonogram 1610 1735 7.8 Operators Monitors 2038 2183 7.1 Overseer (Quarters) 2125 2270 6.8 Overseer 2270 2474 9.0 Supervisor – Grade 1 2562 2824 10.2 Supervisor – Grade 2 2736 3056 11.7

Meanwhile the equal pay movement continued to grow around the union. “By the end of 1966,” Zelda D’Aprano writes, “the combined efforts of the unions and equal pay committees has produced a number of successes, more frequently within the professions and the organised workforce.” Against this background, one striking feature of the 1965 and 1968 CTPOA wage cases is the union’s silence on the question of equal pay. The indefatigable New South Wales officials Demas and Israel were the only two figures in federal union circles pushing the cause.99 In keeping with its overall orientation, the union’s leadership majority under Hester’s guidance preferred to channel all calls for

97 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 May 1968; Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 May 1968. 98 ibid.; CPS Arbitration Reports, Vol 48, Part 1, 1968, p. 456. 99 Demas in particular was a tireless campaigner for equal pay throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s, arguing consistently that the “only answer” for the low wages endured by CTPOA members was to abolish separate rates of pay for men and women. To this end, she argued it was “useless to depend upon High Council” as it was not “vitally concerned” with the question. She felt the union should be actively campaigning for wage equity in its own right, as well as supporting the equal pay initiatives of the broader labour movement, advice she never ceased to act on herself. NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 3, NSW Branch Minutes, 13 April 1959, 8 June 1959. It is worth noting that Demas’ support for other unions’ efforts to obtain equal pay was not always reciprocated. The Women’s Sub-Committee of the Professional Officers’ Association adopted the position that they were entitled to equal pay because their efficiency as workers was not affected by issues such as weaker physical strength, menstruation, higher rates of absenteeism and inability to work overtime. These arguments, they asserted, “are largely invalid where professional women are concerned” and “could only be important among industrial workers.” This of course played straight into the hands of PMG managers who had repeatedly insisted that female telephonists should receive lower wages because they were more prone than men to absenteeism. National Library of Australia, MS 8201, Margaret Crawford Collection, Folder 1, Statement of the Women’s Sub-Committee of the Professional Officers’ Association of the Commonwealth Public Service.

248 equal pay into the increasingly moribund High Council. More direct, active campaigning was shunned. A proposal put to the 1961 conference by Israel and Forrester, “that all branches and executive take an active part in the equal pay campaign particularly by working with the equal pay committee,” won support from only the Western Australian delegates Miss R. Stace and Miss M. Watson.100 The union was prepared to circulate information and send representatives to equal pay conferences endorsed by High Council but otherwise the issue was marginalised. Queensland Branch recorded that “due to other engagements our members cannot find the time to attend the meetings” organised for Equal Pay week in April 1961.101 Gordon Stone was then able to advise the Federal Executive three weeks later “that very little enthusiasm is shown amongst members…to take an active part in the campaign.”102 Similarly, Mr K. Peek from South Australia reported that in his state “there was very little activity regarding equal pay…”103

One reason for the reticence of CTPOA officials, many of whom did support equal pay in principle, was fear that the campaign would compromise the union’s dogged adherence to the marriage bar. Gordon Stone, who perhaps had other anxieties about equal pay and married women in the workforce, certainly seemed keen to exploit this point. He reported to the Queensland Branch in May 1961:

Two representatives of our Federal Executive attended the Equal Pay Seminar which was held in Sydney last month. Observations made included that a number of the speakers were trying to include the retention of married women in the service without loss of status. (Our Association is strongly opposed to the retention of married women in the Department, as this would prevent promotion for many of our members.)104

Many CTPOA leaders of the era never did resolve their contradictory support for wage equality with men and employment discrimination against married women, and there is no doubt this sullied their support for the resurgent equal pay movement of the period.

100 Minutes of 17th CTPOA National Conference, 20-24 November 1961. 101 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 April 1961. 102 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 1 May 1961. 103 Minutes of 17th CTPOA National Conference, 20-24 November 1961. 104 Queensland Branch Minutes, 10 May 1961.

249 At the 1964 national conference Rita Demas again raised the issue of equal pay in an effort to pressure inactive branches. Conference conceded to her request for branches to advise what action they had taken in pursuit of the goal but from Hester’s minute-taking and the comments of Stone and Peek, it was clear only lip-service was being payed. Hester’s record of the feedback from branch delegates ends with the deflating assessment that “in most cases very little satisfaction had been gained.” Stone advised “he considered that the Branch Officers already are fully occupied with their Association duties and the members generally who show interest in this matter are not concerned.” Mr Peek, meanwhile, felt that the equal pay campaign in South Australia “was just about dormant.”105

The arguments were virtually replayed at the 1966 conference, this time against the backdrop of moves to employ PMG women in a number of men’s jobs in the postal division. Demas pressed branches to take up the fight for equal pay, while Stone and Lougheed warned that equal pay might entail telephone exchange staff losing the ‘privileges’ they currently enjoyed. In the end, the conference accepted Demas’ proposal “that the Association further press for the implementation of equal pay owing to the intention of the C.P.S. Board employing females in positions previously held by males.”106

Persistent agitating from the likes of Demas eventually compelled the High Council to take equal pay seriously enough to form a joint committee with the ACTU and ACSPA to pursue equal pay for work of equal value in the Public Service.107 The committee played an important part in the 1969 Equal Pay case which finally ended the separate female and male schedules in the telephone workers’ award.108 Female telephonists were among only eighteen per cent of women in the Australian workforce directly affected by the case.109 Even so, it did not deliver them equal pay for work of equal value. In fact, the court’s decision would eventually be implemented by freezing the

105 Minutes of 18th CTPOA National Conference, 27 April – 1 May 1964. 106 Minutes of 19th CTPOA National Conference, 10-13 January 1966. 107 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 3 April 1968. 108 CPS Arbitration Reports, Vol 59, Part 1, 1970, p. 9 109 Jocelynne A. Scutt, ‘Inequality before the Law: Gender, Arbitration and Wages’ in Kay Saunders & Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 278.

250 male telephonists’ rate while the women’s ‘caught up’, leaving both groups languishing even further behind the wages of comparable occupations.

The CTPOA and Workplace Surveillance

On the whole, the relationship between the management-oriented union leadership and the operator-based mass membership of the CTPOA was distant. When the oppressiveness of managerial control over operators itself became a union issue, the leadership floundered, caught between the conflicting interests of the two groups. Tape recording of operators emerged as the most dramatic illustration of the problem. The South Australian Branch reported in early 1964 that the Department planned to introduce tape recording “for sampling purposes” in service centres in Adelaide. The issue immediately split the Federal Executive, with Miss V. Hopkins from Tasmania and Pat Manning from Victoria in favour of the development, and Demas strongly opposed.110 The matter was then brought before the national conference in late April. Manning mounted a vigorous defence of tape recorders which she admitted she was “partly responsible” for introducing. Leaving no doubt she spoke from the point of view of the Observation Officers, she considered the operator “had no reason to object to this recording…when she heard it played back to her, she would be helped considerably with any weaknesses…” Furthermore, it enabled “100% evidence” against a subscriber who was verbally abusive.

Demas led the opposition, objecting strenuously on behalf of her branch “to this kind of policing of the Operators’ duty” which she believed would add additional strain and was probably unlawful anyway. On her motion, Conference formally rejected tape recorded sampling “in practice and in principle.”111 But as with most conference resolutions not wholly supported by Hester, the post-conference follow-up was characterised by tardiness and complacency, forcing Demas with the support of Peek to raise the issue again four months later. By that time New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania had a

110 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 February 1964. In fact, the New South Wales Branch under Demas’ leadership had first raised the issue in 1956 when tape recorders were introduced to monitor the performance of phonogram operators. In 1963 the Branch again strongly rejected tape recorders after recordings of operators were made at the North Sydney Complaints Centre. NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 3, NSW Branch Minutes, 11 June 1956, 16 September 1963. 111 Minutes of 18th CTPOA National Conference, 27 April – 1 May 1964.

251 tape recorder installed, Queensland had two and South Australia had one waiting for installation. Both the General President and Secretary seemed content with assurances from Central Office that the intention was not to use the recordings for disciplinary purposes “but as a training procedure.” Lougheed on behalf of the Victorian Branch reiterated her branch’s support for the new tool. When put to the vote Demas’s motion of opposition could muster support from only two other branches, leaving a 3-3 deadlock which President Coridas refrained from resolving by exercising her casting vote.112

By March 1965 opposition had further ebbed. Only New South Wales and South Australia supported a motion rejecting the use of tape recorders.113 By the 1966 national conference, even South Australia had no objection, and Demas’ by now obligatory motion on the subject could muster support from only one other branch, Victoria, which ironically “had no objection to the present method but were doubtful about the erasing of the recording in front of Telephonists.”114 While Demas continued to register her branch’s opposition, tape recordings became a feature of observation work, much to the chagrin of operators who would raise their own voices against the practice as a new era of unionism developed in the 1970s.

The CTPOA and the End of the Marriage Bar

If CTPOA endorsement of taped surveillance of operators posed fundamental questions about what the union had become, what it stood for and whom it represented, the union’s animated defence of the marriage bar during the 1960s suggested answers which were no longer a basis for taking the union forward. As the decade progressed the ban on permanency for married women became one of the touchstones of the union’s ideological and political crisis.115

112 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 24 August 1964. 113 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 15 March 1965. 114 Minutes of 19th CTPOA National Conference, 10-13 January 1966.

115 For a useful general account of developments leading up to the repeal of the ban on married women in the CPS, see Marian Sawer (ed), Removal of the Commonwealth Marriage Bar: A Documentary History (Canberra: Centre for Research on Public Sector Management, Univ of Canberra, 1996). In Queensland Jean Bowden played an important role in the Equal Opportunity for Women Association, the primary goal of which was the abolition of the marriage bar. Once the objective was achieved, Bowden was able

252 In 1960 the union reacted with alarm to the Boyer Committee’s recommendation to abolish the marriage bar, rushing letters to the Department, the Public Service Board and the High Council reminding them “the policy of our Association is that female officers be arbitrarily retired on marriage and not retained in the service as permanent officers.116 In 1964 the national conference even voted down a proposal to allow the re- employment of married women for up to two years as a way of addressing the staff shortage. Although delegates agreed married women with experience in telephone work were “preferable to the average recruit which is offering”, they feared such a gesture would be misinterpreted as a softening of the union’s policy.117 Of course, without an industrial strategy the union had no more hope of preventing the Department proceeding with such a plan in 1964 than it had in any other era. Married women had long served as a reserve army of trained operators to be accessed on a temporary basis in periods of staff shortage and many had performed years of service in this capacity. The union’s fallback position up til 1966 was to ensure they were not used to undercut permanent staff. Agreement was reached with management and the Public Service Board that temporarily re-employed women would commence on their pre-marriage salary, although the union found itself continually policing this arrangement.118

As noted in previous chapters, the core of the union’s opposition to permanency for married women was its commitment to careers for single women. Only by protecting the few opportunities they had could ‘independent’ women hope to build a career in the public service. Rather than concentrate on fighting for wider opportunities for female paid employment, the union pragmatically accepted the limitations of the existing gender structure of the labour market and sought to make a virtue of the space that had been created for and by women in the telecommunications industry. Their ghetto became their fortress.

Yet it was a strategy that reflected the interests of only one section of the ghetto. If female operators stayed on after marriage, it blocked some opportunities for prospective base level recruits from outside the service but it did not pose a threat to existing

to resume her career as a telephonist in 1969 and become one of the CTPOA’s most important activists in the 1970s. Interview with Jean Bowden in From Lunchroom to Boardroom, Fryer Library, UQFL300. 116 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 28 November 1960. 117 Minutes of 18th CTPOA National Conference, 27 April – 1 May 1964. 118 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 10 May 1965.

253 operator staff – it simply entailed a more stable workforce. However, if they stayed on and sought promotion, competition in the internal labour market at the higher levels would increase. Thus it was not the operators per se whose positions were threatened by married women, it was those in and aspiring to the higher ranks. By insisting on mandatory retirement upon marriage, the pool of longer serving women with permanency was dramatically diminished, thereby enhancing their prospect for promotion into the limited number of higher jobs. Many years later, Eva Baird still believed that bringing the married women back was a mistake for it “didn’t give any room for the girls, young ones, coming on to go into decent jobs.”119

When it became obvious the Government was committed to repealing the marriage bar, the union’s damage control manoeuvrings made the sectional interests of its leadership even clearer. It is indicative of the hold of this line of thinking over the leaders that is was Demas, the leader most strongly committed to equal pay, who proposed to the national conference in January 1966:

that subject to the Act being passed we consider that when female officers are re-engaged after marriage they be re-employed as telephonists or phonogram officers only and should be paid the rate of salary as telephonists and phonogram operators at the time of resignation, if they are not on the maximum. (emphasis added)

Such was the confusion caused by this pending calamity, conference could not agree on how to proceed and the vote on the motion was 6-6, New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia in favour; Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania against. 120

High Council also formed a sub-committee to examine the pending change but delegates were unable to agree on a position either and referred the matter back to individual unions. At an Executive Council meeting on 18 April 1966, the CTPOA simply reaffirmed its policy. President Coridas’ summing up of the arguments mixed

119 Interview with Eva Baird, conducted by the author on 12 September 2001. 120 Minutes of 19th CTPOA National Conference, 10-13 January 1966.

254 socially conservative ideology, craft union labour market strategy and a managerialist preoccupation with efficiency and reliability:

…permanent employment of married women in the Service was not in the best interest of the Community and was morally wrong as well as stopping promotion for those who wanted to make a career in the service especially in telephone work. The introduction of married women into the telephone and phonogram sections would have serious effects to the efficient working of the service because of ‘drop out’ and special leave. 121

A letter of protest to the Public Service Board was penned but to no avail. By September the matter was before Cabinet and the union could only “watch proceedings” so that “single girls are not placed at a disadvantage.”122An amendment to the Public Service Act allowing married women permanency in the service came into force on the 18 November 1966.

PMG documents from within its New South Wales administration reveal some of the changes that ensued. By December 1967 the Department in that state employed 2751 married women. Of the 2100 of them employed on a long term, continuous basis, 555 worked in the telecommunications division. Within the telephone exchanges and MACs, a new pattern was quickly established as temporary staff were retrenched to make way for permanent married women.123 Although many women continued to resign on marriage, many stayed on (see Table 6E).

121 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 18 April 1966. 122 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 5 September 1966. 123 The union in fact fought a rear guard action to defend temporaries, many of whom had given long years of service but were too old or medically unfit to sit the exam. Federal Executive Council Minutes, 20 November 1967.

255 Table 6E: Married Women Continuing Employment in NSW PMG, November 1966 – December 1967.124 Designation Resigned on Continued Resigned Still on Duty Marriage After After December Marriage Marriage 1967 Telephonists 81 165 28 137 Phonogram 2 7 2 5 Operators Monitors 5 17 3 14 Overseers 2 7 0 7 Total 90 196 33 163

In addition to women retaining their positions after marriage, over the same twelve month period 565 married women passed the examination for entry into the Department as telephonists or phonogram operators (see Table 6F).

Table 6F: Married Women Contesting Examinations, NSW, November 1966 – December 1967.125 Designation Applied Sat Passed Telephonist 1322 778 450 Phono Operator 357 216 115 Mail Officer 760 410 324 (Coding) Total 2439 1404 889

New South Wales Director of Posts and Telegraphs, T.H. Skelton, concluded the new arrangements facilitated the retention of trained staff while posing “no serious disadvantages.”126 It was left to the CTPOA to adjust to the new workforce that would emerge, on average older and more inclined to look to the Department for longer term employment.

124 Survey of Married Women Remaining in Employment, 23 April 1968, compiled by T.H. Skelton, Director, Posts and Telegraphs, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B2900/3, 96/1/16. 125 ibid. 126 ibid.

256

A union out of touch? CTPOA Christmas lunch, Criterion Hotel, 1967 (NAA: Image J2364, 4171/7)

The View from Below: The Foundations of a CTPOA Recovery

The demographic changes in the operator workforce precipitated by the 1966 legislation influenced telephonists’ outlook on their work and relationships with management. Issues that could be tolerated as merely inconvenient by transient employees became for longer term workers problems that had to be addressed. Conditions born out of an occupation’s secondary labour market status were less tolerable to women who entered the labour market wanting and needing permanent employment. The idea that PMG women worked for pin money was always a myth but it lost credibility completely once increasing numbers of them took advantage of the end of marriage restrictions to accumulate extensive employment records in the Department.127

It should not be assumed, though, that this meant PMG women saw their employment as an upwardly mobile ‘career’. A survey of telephonists conducted in 1966 before the marriage bar was abolished revealed a “strong[ly] unfavourable attitude” towards

127 For Louise Thornthwaite, the abolition of the ban on permanency for married women was the decisive factor in the transformation of the industrial behaviour of telephonists that would occur in the 1970s. In this author’s view, Thornthwaite places too much emphasis on this one change. Abolishing the marriage bar did make a difference but it was one factor in a multi-dimensional process which created a new psychology in the telephone exchanges. Her argument will be examined in more detail in the next chapter. Louise Thornthwaite, ‘Union Growth, Recruitment Strategy and Women Workers: Queensland Telephonists in the 1970s’, Labour and Industry, Vol. 7, No. 1 (June 1996), p. 98.

257 promotion to the position of monitor. According to the survey’s author, the respondents’ hostile reaction was due to “some ill-feeling towards monitors or perhaps because they [felt] they would lose the respect and friendship of their fellow telephonists if they were promoted…” And although they were committed to ongoing employment, the notion of the Department as a career service clearly left them cold. A majority of the 32 respondents indicated they preferred to work elsewhere.128

There were huge dilemmas here for the CTPOA. The removal of the marriage bar destroyed its modus operandi as an advocate for the sectional interests of the “single girls”, while in general its career unionism mentality obviously failed to speak to the concerns of many, probably a majority, of rank and file operators. Fifty per cent of the survey’s respondents were not happy with their wages, and many regarded their amenities as unsatisfactory. Resentment towards the tyranny of close supervision was particularly strong. The majority felt the “supervisors” were overbearing, a result the survey’s author believed would have been even more unfavourable if the question had referred specifically to monitors. Many telephonists amended the questions to read ‘monitors’ and added remarks expressing their dissatisfaction with that layer of the supervisory staff. These were disturbing results for a union so closely identified with the hierarchy and its regime of control. But it should have come as no surprise. Eva Baird, herself a monitor and supervisor for many years, describes aspects of normal supervisory procedure in those times as “standover tactics”.129 Moya Walker recalls that the tenacity to cope with monitors and supervisors was one of the essential skills of the job. “You had to be able to be chastised or picked on or just take it, have a report made out…you couldn’t just pick up your headset and say you were leaving. You could, but you didn’t.”130

Some individuals did resist, though. The Queensland PMG’s ‘Irregularity Book’ recorded employee breaches of rules and regulations and the punishment imposed on

128 A Survey and Report on the Attitude of Telephonists to their General Work Environment, conducted by public service employee number 58/35525, March 1966, NAA (Melb): PMG Dept, B6286/9 Box 68. It is worth noting that while most respondents wanted to work somewhere else, presumably because of the poor wages and amenities and their mistreatment at the hands of monitors and supervisors, the majority believed the Department provided a good service, 80 per cent found their jobs interesting and overwhelmingly they held positive attitudes towards the subscribers. This suggests telephonists were committed to the kind of state-administered community service they were engaged in, even seeing it as a source of pride and honour. 129 Interview with Eva Baird, 12 September 2001. 130 Interview with Irene (Moya) Walker, conducted by the author on 19 September 2001.

258 them. Its pages bear witness to the petty discipline in the exchanges, and the reactions of some of the victims. The following examples span the 1950s but they are typical of the entire period covered by this chapter, an era, it should be remembered, defined in popular imagination more by its social conformity and acquiescence than its conflict.131 But conflict there was. Maryborough telephonist D.J.H. was fined 2/6 for “unsatisfactory behaviour when corrected by a Supervisor.” Telephonist S.F.H. was reprimanded for impertinence towards a monitor. J.F.M. was found guilty of unauthorised absenteeism, withdrawing switchboard plugs by the cord, and directing an “insolent and insubordinate remark” towards the monitor, to wit, “if you can do any better you can damn well do it yourself. I’m sick of you all picking on me.” Mt Morgan telephonist M.F. was in a similar mood of belligerence after being charged with a minor discrepancy over a trunk line docket. She wrote to the Acting District Telephone Officer in Rockhampton:

The fact that you are very surprised and disappointed at my attitude towards recent inquiry re multi-coin deficiency does not impress nor interest me. Nor does the fact that you will not tolerate my conduct. You can have my resignation today if you want it.

Most recalcitrants did not direct their anger at so senior a figure. A.B. at Cunnamulla was fined 5/- for failing to carry out instructions from a monitor and adopting “a cheeky and insubordinate attitude.” P.F.T. told the monitor in Goondiwindi to shut up and go to hell. Y.M.K. at Redcliffe was warned about her unsatisfactory tone to a caller and her “subsequent unsatisfactory attitude to [the] monitor.” When J.E.D. was handed a memo criticising her remarks to a private switchboard operator, she proceeded to tear the

131 An absence of social conflict is a feature of both nostalgic and critical appraisals of the era. John Murphy claims that in the 1990s John Howard and Paul Keating produced opposing images of the 50s yet his depiction of these images as “either a golden age of prosperity and stability….or a dark age of statis and bland complacency” succinctly captures the antagonists’ shared emphasis on the period’s lack of overt contestation. Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, p. 3. For Lees and Senyard too, conformity is the key theme of the decade. Dorothy Hewett’s novel Bobbin Up, set amongst women in a Sydney textile factory, was, they argue, “ahead of its time in its emphasis on a woman who seeks equality in the home as well as at work.” In was an era when “old ideas of male dominance were re-stated: the Australian was male and master of the physical world. This figure was so frequently encountered that it was proffered as the truth.” Lees & Senyard, The 1950s, pp. 93-94. Those who did resist were, as Tom O’Lincoln writes, battling “against the stream.” Tom O’Lincoln, ‘Against the Stream: Women and the Left, 1945-1968’ in Sandra Bloodworth & Tom O’Lincoln (eds), Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History (Melbourne: Interventions, 1998), p. 87; Dorothy Hewett, Bobbin Up, 40th anniversary ed (Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 1999).

259 report into small pieces and verbally dispute the allegation, again in “an impertinent and insubordinate manner.” D.A.N.A., meanwhile, was found guilty of assaulting an acting monitor in Brisbane’s Main Exchange. Mild acts of subversion against the general tone of restraint and deference were also not unheard of. Phonogram operator C.P. fell foul of the authorities when she “caused excessive noise by bursting a bag and indulging in skylarking and talking with officers adjacent to her position.” For this outbreak of “irregular conduct” she was fined 10/-.132

This pattern of workplace oppression and inchoate individual resistance still prevailed in the late 1960s. Much would need to change before the spirit of workers’ intolerance revealed in these scattered individual incidents could become a collective movement for respect and recognition. The union as it stood was incapable of facilitating the change. At the time, all that the mass of CTPOA members had as a base for collective resistance was their own long traditions of workplace camaraderie, their culture of mutual support and recognition. When asked if they got on with other telephonists, the respondents to the 1966 survey reacted more favourably than to any other question. When Jean Bowden returned to the industry in 1969 after 17 years away, the camaraderie stuck in her mind. There was, she said, “great mateship, almost like a family.” She felt it was inspired by the common experiences of the labour process: “We were sharing the job….In Brisbane we had 80 trunk positions when I went back.” But workplace camaraderie was not the same as industrial solidarity. As Bowden acknowledged, “it was a different step altogether. We had to take that other step.” 133 Few at that stage could believe the step was possible, let alone foresee how it might occur. Yet out of the new workforce emerging in the exchanges, the new economic imperatives being stamped on telephony and the new wind of mass defiance blowing through Australian society, the conditions were already crystallising for just such a leap. An era of transformation was underway.

132 PMG Department. Irregularities Book – Queensland. The registers are held in the private collection of historian and former PMG employee, David Brownsey, Brisbane. Copies of relevant sections are held by the author. To maintain anonymity, the names of the telephonists cited have been abbreviated to initials. 133 Interview with Jean Bowden, conducted by the author on 20-21 October 2000.

260 Chapter Seven Transformation, 1969-1975

In 1968 the world was engulfed by a wave of mass intolerance: intolerance of the war in Vietnam and imperialism generally, intolerance of racial, gender and sexual oppression, of working life under technocratic capitalism, of the very nature of the ‘system’ itself as capitalism was often then called. It was, to coin Jurgen Habermas’ term, a legitimation crisis of the most thoroughgoing kind, the resolution of which would inevitably entail a break from the past.1 For radical youth, the break needed to be as dramatic as the revolt that precipitated it. “Nineteen sixty-eight was an attempt to create a new world, a new starting point for politics, for culture, for personal relations,” writes Tariq Ali. “The world had to be rebuilt anew so that it served the interests of the majority.”2

In many respects 1968 both symbolised and foreshadowed the CTPOA’s own metamorphosis. It symbolised it by defining the new period as one of upheaval and mass struggle. It foreshadowed it by illustrating in the compressed space of one year the overall pattern of change that would take five to ten years to unfold in the case of the CTPOA. Like 1968, the transformation of the telephone operator workforce and its union was multi-faceted. It involved the creation of Telecom, in effect a restructuring of the industry to free it from certain state constraints in order to align it with the needs of a modernising economy. It consequently involved the partial dismantling of the public service ethos and an end to the social contract which the ethos had nourished for decades. Under the new organisation the industry would experience a legitimation crisis of its own.

From the workers’ side it involved the institutional overhaul of the union. More fundamentally it entailed the revitalisation of labour culture in the workplace as new and old workers alike brought the spirit of 1968 onto the job or created their own out of the combustible mix of accumulated grievances, organic traditions of resistance and the new managerial belligerence. Through the union, workers revived producerist ideas to claim moral ownership over an industry they felt governments and managers were

1 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 74-5. 2 Tariq Ali & Susan Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets (New York: Free Press, 1998), pp. 7-8.

261 betraying to commercial agendas. New activists emerged, new leaders came to the fore, and they in turn built upon the transformative power of the moment. Like 1968, a dialectical interplay between all the constituent processes was at work, leading eventually to a clear break from what had come before. Like 1968, the ‘new’ was defined most strikingly by the attitude of the mass participants: independent, assertive and lacking deference to the old standards and figures of authority.

This chapter will explore this multi-faceted transformation, starting with the prosaic details of the union’s institutional reform, then moving to the revival of a resistant culture in the workforce and ending with a discussion of the creation of Telecom and the significance of this for class relations in telephony.

Transforming the Machinery of Unionism

The CTPOA as an institution was under considerable pressure by the end of the 1960s. It had always kept its membership dues low and managed as a body of part-timers by offloading some of its key functions to the High Council or professional arbitration court advocates employed on a case by case basis. But freelance court advocates were becoming rarer and more expensive while the critics of the High Council were becoming more vociferous as the decade progressed. The reorganisation of the Council in 1967 provided a fresh opportunity for criticism. In discussions held at the Executive Council meeting in August 1967 Nance Lougheed referred to the limited amount of assistance given by High Council in the past. Rita Demas honed in on the increased affiliation fees proposed for the revamped organisation. It was a characteristically astute approach. General President Coridas and most other executive councillors supported reaffiliation but on the basis of the union’s current subscription rate, they calculated they could afford an affiliation fee of ten cents per member but not the nineteen proposed.3

After a special High Council meeting on 24 March 1968 Coridas reported back that the union’s proposal would not be adequate to meet the new cost of affiliation, set at $23 200 for the first year. The only alternative was to increase subscription rates. Gordon

3 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 21 August 1967.

262 Stone was in favour as he considered it was necessary for the union to remain affiliated with High Council, and Miss Hopkins from Tasmania indicated her branch supported an increase of $1.00 in the annual subscription rate to meet the cost. But others were not convinced the value of affiliation outweighed the problems of a hike in members’ dues. Lougheed opposed any increase, arguing that “shortage of members, difficulties in collecting money and a general reluctance to support the Association were indicative of a disinclination to increase subscriptions.” On the 26 May 1967 the union voted four branches to two “that the CTPOA does not affiliate with High Council under the present proposal.”4 The relationship between the two bodies formally ended eleven months later on 18 April 1969.5 Stone drily noted, “it will be interesting to see what solution can be found to replace our affiliation and how we will be represented at future Arbitration claims.”6

With old alliances severed and no new strategies in place, the union appeared aimless. After a slight increase in members from 1967 to 1969, during 1969 membership plummeted from 6118 to a postwar low of 4848.7 Sensing another opportunity, the APWU launched a new push for coverage of CTPOA members. In early 1969 APWU petitions and propaganda were distributed to workers covered by the CTPOA Award in South Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland, and an application by the APWU for coverage lodged.8 A hearing of the case was listed for October 1970, then postponed until 1971 and eventually adjourned indefinitely.9 The APWU concentrated its efforts in the workplaces, doggedly campaigning to woo CTPOA members throughout 1969 and 1970. Propaganda continued to circulate during 1971 in South Australian country exchanges, and into 1972 in exchanges in New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania.10 When reports were received that night staff in New South Wales and Tasmania had been targetted by a fresh wave of APWU propaganda, Gordon Stone, who took over from Demas as General President in January 1971, made an extraordinary attack on members who might consider swapping unions because of the

4 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 27 May 1968. 5 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 April 1969. 6 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 June 1968. 7 Minutes of the 20th CTPOA National Conference, 24-26 February 1969; Federal Executive Council Minutes, 16 February 1970. 8 Minutes of the 20th CTPOA National Conference, 24-26 February 1969. 9 Federal Executives Minutes, 28 September 1970; 18 January 1971; 23 August 1971. 10 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 29 November 1971; 17 April 1972; 4 September 1972.

263 CTPOA’s poor performance.11 “If any of these members are dissatisfied with the present rates of pay they should try to obtain employment in other areas by exercising individual effort and ambition,” he fulminated.12 The ideology of careerism was never more eloquently stated.

With the Postal Workers’ Union cast as the neighbourhood bully, CTPOA leaders continued to cast around for a body that could fill the High Council’s traditional role of protective big brother. In early 1971, on the initiative of Queensland’s Pat Rolph, the Federal Executive even sought details of affiliation to the ACTU, a little over one year after Demas’ customary conference resolution on ACTU affiliation had garnered no support beyond her own state.13 Support for Rolph’s initiative seemed to stem from a deluded hope that the ACTU might be a substitute for the High Council. When the matter was discussed at the August Federal Executive meeting, Rolph asked if the ACTU fought salary cases (as the High Council had done). When informed it only fought national wage cases, the delusion seemed to evaporate and the old fear of industrial unionism resurfaced, encouraged by Gordon Stone’s reference to an ACTU meeting convened to discuss possible support for a British Post Office strike. By the end of the discussion, “delegates agreed that Association policy of non-strike action must always be upheld.” The union opted instead for the safer alternative of rejoining the restructured High Council, now named the Council of Commonwealth Public Service Organisations (CCPSO).14

Most of the leaders appeared to recognise, however, that the CCPSO was at best only part of the solution to their problems. The CTPOA itself needed to be overhauled or even amalgamated. Ironically the most far-reaching proposals in this regard originated from Gordon Stone’s own branch, Queensland. A branch meeting in July 1969 decided:

…unless we as an Association retrieve out former image as a progressive Association and not to be lagging behind all other Associations and Unions as

11 Demas reluctantly became General President after Corridas resigned in 1969. Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 November 1969. 12 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 4 September 1972. 13 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 18 January 1971. 14 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 August 1971. For details of the transformation of the High Council into the CCPSO see Bruce Juddery, White Collar Power: A History of the ACOA, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980, p. 214.

264 regards Salaries, etc, Federal Executive [ought to] discuss the suggestion of amalgamation with other Association having similar conditions as our members…A full-time General Secretary, and full-time Branch Secretaries were needed, circulation of information to members by the Federal Executive so as all members would receive the same information, restoring of comparative salaries with Typists etc…15

It was a drastic proposal, tempered only by ruling out the APWU as an amalgamation partner. Some at the meeting suggested the Federated Assistants’ or the Telegraphists’ Union.16 By September this had firmed into a proposal to invite a representative of the Commonwealth Public Service Association (Fourth Division Officers) (CPSA) to the next branch meeting to discuss the advantages of amalgamation. In October the branch decided the Federal Executive should initiate similar discussions in other branches and “perhaps” also obtain members’ views on a federal amalgamation.17 Meanwhile Western Australia had also arranged talks with the telegraphists but had chosen not to pursue the matter any further.

In November it emerged Mr McMullen, Federal Secretary of the CPSA, had contacted General Secretary Cousins after being approached by the Queenslanders. From the frank discussion that followed, clearly no other branch favoured amalgamation. Victoria was appalled at such an initiative being taken by the states, and Acting General President Miss E.A. Lovell declared that no invitations were to be extended to representatives of other organisations to address CTPOA meetings without Federal Executive approval. The meeting instructed the General Secretary to turn down McMullen’s offer to attend a future Executive meeting.18

The Queensland branch returned to the amalgamation idea in 1972 in the even more radical form of a proposal to consider amalgamating with the CPSA, the Telegraphists or the APWU. “Why the aggression against affiliation with the APWU?” they asked. “Is

15 Queensland Branch Minutes, 24 July 1969. 16 ibid. Demas favoured the Telegraphists. NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch minutes, 20 October 1969. 17 Queensland Branch Minutes, 11 September 1969; 8 October 1969. 18 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 November 1969.

265 it because of regulation strikes? The only section of that union that strikes is the mail room, and the wages and conditions of their members in comparable positions are in front of the other organisations’ members.” The branch requested Federal Executive invite officials of the three unions to address conference and the branches.19 Around the same time Western Australia urged the union to approach the CPSA.20

If in the intervening years Queensland had reassessed its hostility to the APWU and industrial unionism generally, at the federal level a less hostile response to the Queensland proposition is also evident. The proposal was not taken up but neither was there a stinging denunciation. Rather, “the necessity for retaining Association identity” was noted and a more assured assessment of the union’s current situation was presented. Beris Forrester referred to positive outcomes at branch level, and outlined the necessity for the General Secretary to take a day off each month for Association work, including preparation of the newsletter.21

In fits and starts, the leadership was groping towards a new model for the union. A majority position, if not a consensus, was emerging that the CTPOA could not survive unless it became a much stronger industrial entity, affiliated to a peak body, but capable of acting independently with authority to tackle the challenges. While some of the ideas had been around since 1969, a coherent view began to take shape in 1972, and in 1973 the national conference delivered the breakthrough. Under the direction of retiring General President Gordon Stone, the Executive proposed a sub-committee to investigate and make recommendations on reorganising the union for the purpose of, as Stone put it, bringing “the Association up to present day standards of industrial functioning.” His arguments proved convincing. After lengthy discussion, the following package was put to conference as a motion moved by Miss M. Massey from New South Wales and seconded by Mr H. Duncan from Western Australia:

This Conference being of the opinion that our Association is in need of updating and the provision of an improved service to members, directs the following:-

19 Queensland Branch Minutes, 8 March 1972. 20 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 April 1972. 21 ibid.

266 (a) A sub-committee consisting of the following members – General President, General Secretary with Miss B. Forrester. Miss N. Lougheed and Mr G. Stone (Chairman); a majority decision to decide. (b) To obtain a qualified applicant for engagement as Executive Officer, full- time, at an appropriate salary, to organise the running of the Association under the control of Federal Executive and/or Conference. Salary to be negotiated. (c) Provision of suitable accommodation, equipment and staff to enable the Executive Officer to carry out his duties (d) Arrangement for publication of an Association journal and the distribution to various officers. (e) When Executive Officer installed, the honorariums of our Federal Executive Officers to be reviewed due to the provision of full-time staff.

A separate resolution increased the annual member subscription rate to $10.40 per annum as from 1 July 1973. 22

By August the Executive had established a permanent federal office and appointed Larry Glover as Executive Officer. Glover had been General Secretary of the Postal and Telecommunications Technicians’ Association (forerunner of the Australian Telecommunications Employees’ Association - ATEA) and Assistant Secretary of the High Council before studying industrial relations at Oxford under a Churchill Fellowship in 1967 and working as an Immigration Department official in London and Rome.23 Apparently he was recommended for the job by Stone who knew him from his High Council days. Stone would in fact not live to see Glover take up his duties. He died on 27 June 1973. He had been awarded life membership of the union at the national conference only three months earlier.24

Glover himself resigned in late 1974.25 His tenure, while short, was groundbreaking for it succeeded in convincing most members interested in CTPOA affairs that a full-time

22 Minutes of the 21st CTPOA National Conference, 19-23 March 1973. 23 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 22 August 1973. 24 Queensland Branch Minutes, 11 July 1973; Minutes of the 21st CTPOA National Conference, 19-23 March 1973. 25 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 5 December 1974.

267 bureaucracy was acceptable and necessary, and it led directly to the appointment or election of full-time officials at state and federal level.26 Along with the first issue of the union journal Telephone Echo in October 1974, the emergence of full-timers marked the culmination of a five year process of institutional reform. The ATPOA, as it was renamed in November 1973, now looked like a modern trade union.27 Of course, rejigging the machinery of unionism was one thing, leaving behind decades of conservative culture and practice quite another. Ultimately the more fundamental measure of change would be found in the realm of campaign activity; in the issues taken up by the union and, more importantly, the way these were pursued and the attitude the union adopted to management.

Transforming ATPOA Culture and Politics

Most CTPOA campaigns in the early 1970s followed very familiar patterns: flow-ons of conditions won elsewhere, negotiated incremental improvements conceded by management anxious to keep the peace in profitable times. Many were gains of some consequence. The five day week, 17½ per cent leave loading and the extension of four weeks annual leave to all telephone exchange workers, nine years after its introduction for those working at least ten Sundays per year, were all won in this period.

The classification structure of the supervisory staff continued to preoccupy the union. The 1969 conference called for the designation of monitor and overseer to be renamed and thereby upgraded to supervisor grade one and two respectively, and for telephone exchange traffic officers to be reclassified as fourth division supervisors to enable more of these positions to be created.28 An additional demand to amalgamate the existing positions of grades one and two supervisor arose in the course of negotiations over the union’s 1969 pay claim but no resolution was forthcoming.29 The union’s best chance for change came with the PMG’s decision in 1972 to review the entire supervisory structure. Some of the union’s input is evident in the outcome which abolished the

26 Marilyn Brown recalls Glover himself insisted when he resigned that the time had come for the union to establish full-time secretaries rather than appoint another executive officer in his place. Interview with Marilyn Brown, conducted by author on 18 November 2003. 27 ATPOA was the acronym for Australian Telephone and Phonogram Officers’ Association 28 Minutes of the 20th CTPOA National Conference, 24-26 February 1969. 29 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 16 February 1970.

268 monitor and overseer designations and created a structure encompassing seven grades of supervisor.30

On wages, the CTPOA’s ‘successes’ were limited to increases flowing on from wider victories. Consistent with her entire history as a union activist, Rita Demas remained the union’s staunchest campaigner for equal pay towards the end of the 1960s, regularly attending equal pay meetings and promoting the cause within her own union.31 She retired with life membership in late 1970, 25 years after being elected New South Wales Branch Vice-President.32 If the 1969 and 1972 equal pay cases appeared to offer her a high note on which to end a lifetime’s campaigning for wage justice for women, they proved only moderately so. The cases formally ended the PMG’s seventy year old fiction of telephony as women’s work. But as Verity Burgmann points out, in reality the very existence of the dual labour market ensured groups like telephonists were relatively quarantined from any direct benefits flowing from ‘equal pay for work of equal value’.33

In fact, the most significant outcome for telephonists was a ‘rate for the job’ which froze male telephonists’ wages until the female rate caught up. At a meeting between a CTPOA delegation comprising Cousins, Demas, Stone and Leech, and the Assistant Commissioner of the Board’s Arbitration Division, Mr K.J. Brennan, on 19 December 1969, the union accepted an offer to increase the female rate by three per cent of the male rate, effective from 1 January 1970. Brennan indicated that women would probably be on the male rate by 1972. For their part, the union officials made no claim for equal pay, arguing later in their defence that they were deceived into thinking the male rate would become the rate for the job in 1972 whereas the Board’s offer in effect entailed accepting the female rate as the rate for the job.34 In any event the bungle caused understandable unrest among male CTPOA members who faced the prospect of at least a two year pay freeze until women ‘caught up’, and even a pay cut in the case of male employees commencing after February 1970. In New South Wales CTPOA men even managed to win support for a motion threatening industrial action.35

30 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 4 September 1972, 23 January 1973, 30 November 1973. Telephone Echo, Oct 1974, p.3; Aug 1975, p. 4. 31 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 18 November 1968; 12 January 1970. 32 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 30 November 1970. 33 Verity Burgmann, Power and Protest: Movements for Change in Australian Society (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 99-100. 34 CPS Arbitration Reports, Vol 50, Part 1, 1970, p.9. Federal Executive Council Minutes, 18/5/70. 35 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 19 October 1970.

269

When the union found their next pay claim, lodged in 1971, facing interminable delays in reaching a hearing, some of the frustrations burst to the surface. In June 1972 the Queensland branch sent a letter to the federal body indicating that members were very discontented about the delays. For the second time in as many years, union minutes record a willingness to consider industrial action. Queensland councillor Mr B.J. Dwyer reported his branch “felt positive action in the form of a go-slow and work to regulation campaign was required.” By September, however, the claim was settled and the Federal Executive’s discussion of the Queenslanders’ letter simply became an opportunity to pontificate on the dangers of militancy. Cousins and Stone expressed opposition and other delegates offered the opinion that go-slow tactics would have made the situation worse by causing unfavourable public reaction.36

While the new wage arrangements settled on a common rate for the job applying from 13 July, it did not resolve problem of comparative value. It was decided to lodge a further claim which would include equal pay.37 By the time of the Federal Executive meeting in January 1973, buoyed by the election of the Whitlam Labor government on 2 December 1972 and the national wage case decision on 15 December, the Executive was confident of a breakthrough.38 By the end of the year it had one, and so did PMG. The Board agreed to wage increases in exchange for the union lifting its ban on night work for women and also allowing part time work. Neither measure was received magnanimously by the branches. The union attempted to quarantine the impact by insisting on a no compulsion clause in the provision for female night shifts and a cap on the use and hours of part-timers. But night shifts on a voluntary only basis proved unworkable and was formally abandoned in June 1974, while policing the part-time work agreement simply added to the union’s growing workload.39

In all, the campaigns waged in these years by the ATPOA were not without some successes but they did not dramatically improve the telephonists’ lot nor did they revitalise the union’s culture.40 Marilyn Brown, a telephonist in Sydney International

36 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 June 1972. Federal Executive Council Minutes, 4 September 1972. 37 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 4 September 1972. 38 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 23 January 1973. 39 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 30 November 1973; 10 June 1974. 40 At a fundamental level, the wage campaigns of these years missed an opportunity by focussing on enhanced skill levels arising from new technology, rather than on the improving productivity. Even if the

270 Exchange from February 1974 and later the first full-time Secretary of the New South Wales branch, remembers the union in these years as “a very benign sort of club” run by and largely for supervisors.41 Sylvia Hall, Branch Secretary in South Australia from March 1972, described it even more disparagingly as a knitting circle.42

All the same, a cultural transformation was underway. It was a transformation in two parts. The first derived from the multiplicity of changes occurring in the membership base itself, a transformation which most of the union’s established leaders intuitively considered threatening and resisted in the vain hope of preserving the world of work they had known. A second and related element was associated with the arrival of a new group of leaders who did not identify with the old ethos or its antiquated politics of production. Both changes were consequences of the period 1969 to 1975 yet at the time their causal relationship with each other and their longer-term influence on telephone exchange unionism was by no means obvious.

What was evident even then was a growing tension between the lower ranking union members and their supervisory colleagues who dominated union leadership positions. While the gap between the two groups had long influenced union culture and practice, the supervisor-leaders had seldom believed they had cause to feel threatened by their subordinates. The late 1960s and early 1970s, however, saw the emergence of acute anxieties about what the new generations of workers meant for the established employees and the world of career service they are built their lives around.

In 1969 PMG introduced a new entrance examination for telephonists which the union claimed allowed entry to candidates who had failed under the old system.43

union’s claims of increasing skill levels were valid, it was a weak base from which to substantially lift labour’s share of the wealth because the cost of skill formation was exponentially smaller than the value that workers were producing by virtue of the technology they deployed. As PMG reported in 1973: “In the past 10 years, domestic telephone traffic has doubled, international telephone traffic has increased five-fold and telex traffic 15-fold. During the same time staff has increased by less than a quarter.” (PMG Annual Report, 1973/73, p.13.) In the absence of a concerted wage hike forced on PMG by union militancy, this massive increase in productivity implied an equally massive increase in surplus value going to the department. Until unions changed tack and focussed on labour output rather than skill, in other words began to directly challenge the share of wealth going to the department, wages could improve in real terms while actually continuing to fall relative to profits. 41 Interview with Marilyn Brown, 18 November 2003. 42 Interview with Sylvia Hall, 1 November 2001. 43 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 18 August 1969, 16 February 1970.

271 Further alarm was expressed when it was reported that at Dalley Exchange in Sydney university students were being brought in on a temporary basis after a two week crash course. Not only was this in breach of union policy stipulating a minimum of four weeks training, the students were used in what the union regarded as specialist positions within the interstate and international traffic areas.44 There is no evidence, however, that the Department was swayed by the union’s representations. Delegates continued to complain during 1972 and 1973 about the lowering of standards but to no avail.45

It is tempting to read these anxieties about skill levels as an echo of craft style unionism. The case for this is strongest where the union took up the question of entry levels into the higher positions. The officials clearly sought to limit the competition for the supervisory positions by lobbying for qualifying periods and entry examinations.46 But precisely because of the union’s history as a supervisors’ advocate, it is important to differentiate the potentially divergent motives of CTPOA leaders when they railed against falling standards amongst the rank and file. They may not always have spoken unequivocally as unionists. Or more accurately, they did not necessarily draw any distinction themselves between their supervisory and Association personas. At times the union records resonate with managerialist values and mores reflecting the specific interests of those whose function it was to control the operator workforce on a day to day basis. From this perspective policing the educational standards was part of a broader tendency to police the operators.

Dress standards were a case in point. In one instance in1970 the Queensland branch successfully lobbied the Department for permission for women to wear slacks on week- end duty but then felt responsible for the transgressive behaviour that ensued. “It appears the privilege is being abused as some staff are wearing see-through slacks, bare mid-riffs and tattered jeans,” reported an alarmed Gordon Stone. The Branch promptly urged management to intervene with a memo stipulating the scope of their concession. In the Branch committee’s censorious view, “tailored slacks and slack suits” were in, tattered jeans were out.47

44 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 18 January 1971. 45 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 April 1972, 4 September 1972, 22 August 1973. Minutes of the 21st CTPOA National Conference, 19-23 March 1973. 46 Minutes of the 20th CTPOA National Conference, 24-26 February 1969; Federal Executive Council Minutes, 16 February 1970. 47 Queensland Branch Minutes, 11 March 1970.

272

At the same federal meeting in April 1972 at which “all delegates reported unanimous opinion that the standard had been lowered considerably by the new type of [telephonists’] selection test,” the delegates again took umbrage at what they considered were poor dress standards and then added a new complaint about staff, the ‘abuse’ of health breaks. The minutes bristle with managerial high-mindedness:

General discussion indicated that while the Department permits longer breaks where there is not ready access between operating and amenities areas, there is a necessity to check the time taken by each operator recording the commencement of break and return to duty. It was suggested that the use of daily break cards be enforced.48

But indiscipline proved difficult to eradicate. A year later clothes were still a talking point in union circles. A meeting of the New South Wales Branch felt moved after much discussion of the issue to write to the Superintendent with a proposal to improve the standards. In the meeting’s considered opinion pant suits were acceptable, as were long frocks “if presentable.” Frocks had to be a reasonable length and stockings and shoes were mandatory. “See through gear” was ruled out completely. Men, they advised the Superintendent, should wear trousers and shirts, and night staff should present themselves for duty suitably attired.49 The reasons for singling out the night shift employees for special mention are not recorded and can only be imagined. The Acting Superintendent, Mr James, opted to duck the issue. Much to the Branch leadership’s frustration, James replied that the Department would continue to rely on the staff’s own “good dress sense and pride in self.”50

The next year the Branch and the Federal body were still battling to rid telephony of mini-skirts, tattered jeans and see-through gear, indignant that they alone at managerial level were taking a stand:

48 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 17 April 1972. 49 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 15 May 1973. 50 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 24 July 1973.

273 Miss Massey gave detailed account of situation in Sydney where Traffic Officers agree but fail to support Association bid to secure staff to report for duty in a neat and tidy appearance.

After hearing reports of similar problems in other centres, the General Secretary was instructed to refer the matter to a higher level.51

Such anxieties were in fact a reaction to a fundamental shift in the psychology of the telephone workforce. Jeans and other casual attire were symbols of a new generation of workers who were both more anti-authoritarian and less attracted to the codes of respectability which the earlier generations had helped nurture as part of their struggle to maintain a positive self-identity on the job. For many younger workers the quest for dignity would take a different direction, less centred on loyal public service and the accoutrements of ‘status’, more on personal freedom and equality in relationships. They were not inclined to demurely accept the stifling atmosphere of the public service with its hierarchical power arrangements and ritualised modes of deference and consent.

New technology and new fashions on display. Maryborough Exchange, 1972. (NAA: Image J2879, QTH674) A buoyant labour market and expanding opportunities for women underpinned the independent demeanour of the jeans wearers. From 1961 to 1971 female participation in the Australian labour force as a percentage of total female population jumped from 20.4

51 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 15 August 1974.

274 to 26.7 per cent, and then to 32.4 per cent in 1976.52 Progress in the conservative PMG Department was considerably slower yet even there female participation grew. In 1973 women constituted 19 per cent of the full-time staff, up from 16 per cent in 1963. Although many of the growth areas for women’s employment in the public service – data processing, particularly – were themselves new low paid female ghettoes, they did offer an alternative to telephony and typing and they were not the only areas beginning to open up. From 1963 to 1973 the proportion of women in the Clerical and Administrative Group of the Department increased from 9 to 24 per cent, mainly as a result of the abolition of the marriage bar in 1966.53

Louise Thornthwaite has argued that lifting the marriage ban was a pivotal element in the resurgence of the CTPOA because it introduced “a new breed of telephonist: married women with an expectation of permanent employment.”54 There is no doubt that married women would play a very active and important role in the union as the decade progressed, both at rank and file and official level. Thornthwaite’s argument, however, rests on the mythology that prior to 1966 workers in telephone exchanges were all young, single and short-term and consequently more accepting of poor employment conditions.55 As earlier chapters have outlined, the reality was more complex. Alongside workers with this profile were married women employed on a temporary and exempt basis, many for long periods, as well as unmarried women who made careers in telephony. The young, single women, moreover, were not necessarily disengaged from union activism simply because they did not aspire to PMG careers. This was one factor among many that increased their threshold of toleration.

Conversely, the expectation of employment permanency that grew out of the 1966 victory, the equal pay cases and the wider feminist movement was not the only nor even the most important determinant of industrial behaviour that emerged from these events. Broader changes were occurring. The spectre of 1968 haunted the land. As Burgmann has pointed out, to the extent this spectre took the form of social movements de-linked from the class power of organised labour, it proved relatively harmless compared to its

52 Glenn Withers et al, Australian Historical Statistics: Source Paper No.7, Part 2 (Canberra: Australian National Univ, 1985), p. 117. 53 PMG Annual Report, 1972-73, p. 49. 54 Louise Thornthwaite, ‘Union Growth, Recruitment Strategy and Women Workers: Queensland Telephonists in the 1970s’, Labour and Industry, Vol. 7, No. 1 (June 1996), p. 98. 55 ibid.

275 nineteenth century communist equivalent.56 Nevertheless its impact was not limited to the direct gains it was able to wring from the system. The general shift to the left in Australian society partly generated by the movements against war and sexism flowed into the workplaces and helped revive labour cultures of resistance. Gains by and for women, especially those clearly linked to the efforts of women in the labour movement, helped to energise the rank and file of unions with large female memberships. Inspired by the women’s liberation movement, women clerks in Sydney, for instance, established a caucus in 1973 to agitate within their own unions. “The only way we can force (and we will have to force) unions to take up the issues of abortion, equal pay, child care facilities, for union democracy,” they wrote, “is by building strong and active rank and file groups.”57 Along with the other social movements of the era, in various subtle ways the women’s movement added to (and drew from) the resurgence of trade union struggle that followed the unions’ victory in the Penal Powers strike of 1969.58 The personal transformation of emerging ATPOA leader Joyce Williams is testament to these hidden connections:

I had been sort of brought up to be tolerant, you know, you don’t rock the boat too much. You’ve got to learn to be tolerant, to be passive and all that, you know. And then from the women’s movement 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…59

While Williams’ motivation for a life in workplace politics was never specifically feminist, it was influenced by issues beyond the realm of industrial relations:

I had a son who was going to be called up and I objected very strongly to the Vietnam war – I didn’t believe in it at all – and I’d just joined the Labor Party and I finished up as secretary of the Labor Party [in Sandgate]. I did my Third Division at that time too. I went back and did English and Maths and History

56 Burgmann, Power and Protest, p. 263. 57 Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, September 1973, p. 3. 58 For details of the strike and its impact, see Tom O’Lincoln, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era (Melbourne: Bookmarks Australia, 1993), p. 15. 59 Interview with Joyce Williams, conducted by author on 10 August 2001.

276 and Economics and that sort of thing. And I suppose it all gave me a bit of confidence.60

On the job, it was the regime of discipline that most inspired her to make a stand: “the total injustice of it….We were treated like little children.”61

In many respects Williams’personal journey exemplifies the broader transformation underway. There was indeed a new breed of telephonist emerging and not just among the recent influx of married women. Workers generally were less tolerant of poor conditions, tedious jobs, low pay, employment insecurity and management bullying because they were beginning to realise they had the collective power to fight for something better. Younger workers simply took this for granted. As Mary-Anne O’Neill (nee Morris) recalls of her early years in the Civic Exchange in Canberra:

I don’t think I was aware [of the union’s transformation] because for me it was operating like a union should. I thought that was what unions did. They took up issues and they took action…I wasn’t there long enough under Beris [Forrester] to know the difference.62

Expectations were high, confidence was high, tolerance barely existed.

The new mood swept through the Australian Post Office (APO), as the Department came to be known. In 1973-74 it was hit by 65 separate work stoppages accounting for 2.81 staff hours lost per employee. Although well below the average hours lost for industry as a whole, it was a sharp rise on preceding years (see table 7A) and its impact was magnified by the central role of communications in civil and economic life. As the annual report noted, “Any industrial action in the Department comes under public notice very quickly.”63

Table 7A: Man Hours Lost Per Employee64

60 ibid. 61 ibid. 62 Interview with Mary-Anne O’Neill (nee Morris), conducted by author on 2 September 2004. 63 APO Annual Report, 1973-74. 64 ibid.

277 Year Australian Post All of Industry Office 1970 3.36 4.38 1971 1.28 5.49 1972 0.60 3.71 1973 0.47 4.51 1974 2.81 10.41

The postal side of the operation accounted for most of these disputes but the unrest permeated the ranks of telephony too. Membership of the ATPOA reached 9659 by 1974, a doubling in size in less than five years.65 There is no doubt that the Whitlam Government’s introduction of automatic union fee deduction contributed to the growth. But as Thornthwaite points out, where a union is inactive or compliant, favourable government policies alone are not sufficient to entice workers to join en masse. Deeper changes were underway in the psychology of the workforce and the attitudes of their union leaders. 66 As already noted, New South Wales and Queensland members considered the prospect of industrial action and Queensland leaders began questioning the conventional view that the APWU’s militant reputation was an obstacle to amalgamation. In 1973 the branch went so far as to threaten to withhold members from the renovated Brisbane phonogram room until their issues were addressed.67

Even the Federal Executive was showing signs of a new combativeness by 1974. Frustrated by management’s failure to address their concerns over supervisors’ staffing ratios and workloads under the new structure, the Executive resolved that if further negotiations did “not result in meaningful anticipation of the negotiated agreements…then we withdraw our agreement to working night shift and part-time duties.”68 On 20 February 1975 the Executive resolved to place a ban on the two arrangements from 1 March, the union’s first ever federally sanctioned industrial action. Although lifted on the basis of mere promises from management, the significance of the bans was not lost on Pat Manning, a staunch ATPOA leader from the old school:

65 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 15 August 1974. 66 Thornthwaite, ‘Union Growth, Recruitment Strategy and Women Workers’, p. 107. 67 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 September 1973. 68 Federal Executive Council Minutes, 15 August 1974.

278 This Association is proud of its record of industrial relations with its employer, we are also proud of the service we have given and will continue to give…This pride in our work is deep, so deep we chose by a unanimous decision of all States to blemish our long-standing record for what we believed to be a just and reasonable cause, and will do so again should the challenge be made.69

The definition of what constituted a just and reasonable cause was itself in flux as leaders old and new began displaying a new sensitivity to issues confronting rank and file operators, most notably the question of job loss. In July 1974 Forrester and Glover met with Central Office and the Public Service Board over the issue of redundancy. It was the first formal discussion ever to raise management’s responsibility to those left jobless and it ended with possibly Australia’s first ever redundancy agreements for white collar workers.70 Of course, forcing management to abide by it proved far more difficult. Three months later the first issue of Telephone Echo confirmed that “redundancies of telephonists [had] emerged as a crucial issue.” It informed members that submissions on the matter had been made “to all appropriate levels, including to Cabinet Ministers.”71

Forrester, Manning, Lougheed and other remaining members of the union’s old guard understood their milieu was passing and they made occasional gestures towards the new. For all their dedication and experience, however, they were ideologically and culturally ill-equipped to lead the re-juvernating union. The task of transforming the culture and politics of the organisation at leadership level would fall to the new crop of trade union officials who came to power in the early to mid 1970s. Three in particular would have a profound impact on the union’s history: Sylvia Hall, Marilyn Brown and Joyce Williams. Hall had worked as a zookeeper and switchboard operator in England before migrating to Adelaide where she joined the Department as a telephonist.72 In March 1972 she took over as Branch Secretary in South Australia, a position which became full-time from January 1976. She was elected Federal Secretary in November 1978. Marilyn Brown was a university-trained teacher who had decided not to pursue a teaching career. After a year of unemployment, in February 1974 she gained a position

69 Telephone Echo, April 1975, p. 3. 70 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 1, NSW Branch Minutes, 9 July 1974. 71 Telephone Echo, Oct 1974, p. 4. 72 Interview with Sylvia Hall, 1 November 2001.

279 as a telephonist at the International Exchange in Sydney, hoping to move into the clerical division. She was appointed the New South Wales Branch’s first full-time Secretary in August 1975, and would later become Federal President.73 Joyce Williams, in contrast, was a Department veteran, having commenced her career as an operator in the Sandgate exchange in 1949. In late 1974 the Queensland Branch appointed her to act as Branch Secretary/ Treasurer until the 1975 Branch AGM. Within a year she too was fulfilling the role in a full-time capacity.74

Despite their differences in age and backgrounds, these new officials shared an approach to unionism that set them apart from most of their predecessors. They engaged with the membership directly and inclusively, and encouraged rank and file activity through delegates’ structures backed by training from the new Trade Union Training Authority. They also set about rebuilding the union as an institution workers could trust. Marilyn Brown recalls that in her early years as Branch Secretary members were extremely reluctant to leave their names when they rang the union with a complaint because in the past the union officials had habitually taken individual grievances straight to the complainant’s immediate supervisor. Much to the consternation of certain supervisors, Brown adopted the practice of taking matters to a higher level, an approach which raised the status of complaints and minimised the risk of local management reprisals. For Brown this basic protocol was part of a broader agenda of separating the union from managerial influence. In her words, “we became independent of management.”75

It was this growing independence that was the true measure of the union’s transformation. From an association that relied on its good offices in the corridors of administrative power, it was becoming an organisation that could rely on the strength of its own members’ in that other site of power, the workplace. To their credit the older, conservative leaders had held the union together through one of its darkest patches and had created the new internal machinery to take the union forward. The union’s history thereafter would never again be as narrowly determined by the actions of the leadership,

73 Interview with Marilyn Brown, 18 November 2003. 74 Interview with Joyce Williams, 10 August 2001. 75 Interview with Marilyn Brown, 18 November 2003.

280 a group to whom the members were obliged to be beholden. The centre of the story was shifting at least somewhat onto the myriad sites of mass rank and file activity.

The site of telephony’s corporate power, meanwhile, was also shifting. From a department of state, the instrumentality controlling Australia’s telephone services was about to become a state-owned statutory corporation, the Australian Telecommunications Commission, trading as Telecom Australia. A new phase of class relations in the workplace was in the making on the employer’s side as well.

The Birth of Telecom and Telephony’s Crisis of Legitimacy

On 30 January 1973 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam announced a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Australian Post Office as part of the Labor Government’s agenda of modernising public institutions. The Government set broad terms of reference. The Commission’s overall task was to “inquire into and report upon what changes, if any, should be made in the organisation, administration and operations of Australian postal and telecommunications services…” CSR Ltd General Manager Sir James Vernon was appointed chairman. On 19 April 1974 the Commission submitted its report and five days later Whitlam announced the Government had accepted its recommendations.76

The Commission’s essential brief had been to provide a formula that would free the services from some of the constraints of governmental control. It approached the task by comparing what it described as the two differing views of the role of the APO in the community:

One is that the APO is essentially the supplier of a social service to the Australian public and, as such, should not be oriented to making a profit on its services…The second view is that the APO is a business enterprise and as such should provide services based on commercial criteria and with the minimum objective of matching revenue with expenditure.77

76 Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government 1972 – 1975 (Ringwood (Vic): Penguin, 1985), pp. 697-98; PMG Dept Annual Report, 1973-74, p. 6. 77 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Australian Post Office. Commission Report, April 1974 (hereafter 1975 Royal Commission Report), p. 53.

281

The Commissioners came down on the side of the latter. Although they were at pains to acknowledge that the APO responded to both social and commercial imperatives, by carefully deploying the language of commerce and favourably comparing the APO to large private corporations, they disingenuously presented the social dimension largely in market terms. In any large organisations that supplied goods or services, they contended:

some services may be marginal in operation, or manufacturing resources may give greater profits if utilised elsewhere in the enterprise, but it is not uncommon that organisations continue to supply the services or continue the manufacture of the goods to keep faith with customers, to retain custom, and to attract further custom. The Commission sees no reason why the APO should be regarded differently.78

This formulation squeezed the concept of service of any sense of social obligation, and reduced the notion of value to a mere market calculation. It discounted public welfare as a legitimate basis for supplying a telephone service at a financial loss to certain disadvantaged groups in the community, recasting the practice as a crude market ploy aimed at building a relationship with people as ‘customers’. In keeping with this marketisation logic, moreover, the strategy of servicing disadvantaged sectors through state subsidies from consolidated revenue or by “cross-subsidisation” from profitable areas was interpreted as a form of market distortion which, although admirable in social policy terms, should be kept in check. The Commissioners adopted the principle that “the tariff structure should not reflect a gross distortion in favour of some categories or classes of users of a service at the expense of the majority of customers of the APO.”79 Ideally, they argued, “tariffs for different services should be such that each service produces a comparable financial result measured say in terms of return on capital or profit margin on sales.”80

78 ibid. 79 ibid., p. 58. 80 ibid., p. 189.

282 To facilitate a vision of telephony as an industry profitably delivering a commodity to a market, managers had to be given a free hand to manage according to commercial imperatives and the enterprise needed to be driven by its own revenue generating capabilities, with less reliance on the political vagaries of government largesse. In particular, the Commissioners noted, “a solution has to be found to the present difficulties of amending tariffs if these services are to be managed as businesses.”81 The solution they offered, indeed “the only course of action” they felt they could support, was the establishment of separate statutory corporations for post and telecommunications.82

If the abolition of Australia’s largest trading enterprise after 74 years carried more than a hint of millennialism and Whitlamite dramatics, it was in fact a change long in the making. Efforts to liberate telephony from the constraints of the state dated back to the 1910 Royal Commission, a mere twenty years after the last of the privately owned telephone exchanges had passed into state hands. The Commissioners at that time had argued that the Department should be conducted on business lines and ought to be self- supporting. Their view found support within Parliament, although not within the Fisher ministry. Member for Parkes Bruce Smith used the occasion of a parliamentary debate over the plight of telephonists to call for the telephone service to be managed by a Commission. The service was, he asserted, “essentially a commercial concern,” and its failings were due to a lack of commercial expertise. “We need at the head of the Postmaster-General’s Department business men who know the necessity for promptitude, expedition, and good management in the conduct of its business,” he advised the House.83

Less than three years later Sir Robert Anderson, reporting on his commissioned inquiry into the business management of the Department, recommended the Department should match expenses with revenue and be controlled by a general manager with full control over staffing matters.84 In 1921, a Royal Commission on Economies criticised

81 ibid., p. 202. 82 ibid., p. 205; The essential feature of the statutory corporation is that its legal status, powers, duties and responsibilities derive from an Act of Parliament. Unlike a department of state, its general manager, chief executive office or board is not directly answerable to a Government Minister and its commercial and industrial relations arrangements are usually severed from any institutional ties with the public service, giving management a much freer hand over all administrative and commercial decisions. 83 Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates, Vol. LXIX, 1912, p. 7420. 84 1975 Royal Commission Report, p. 55.

283 governments for failing to act on the earlier inquiry recommendations. Its own advice was to place the administration of the Department in the hands of “a competent Board of three Commissioners” vested with the powers to direct its business activities.85 This recommendation too would lie un-actioned until the 1973-74 Vernon Commission resurrected it to support its own proposal for a new corporate structure.86

The postwar economic boom encouraged governments to examine the role and status of their major trading entity yet again. In 1954 the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Public Accounts proposed that the Department’s accounts be prepared on a commercial basis. In 1959 an Ad Hoc Committee of Inquiry was established after disagreements over the findings of the previous investigation. Among a range of measures, the 1959 Committee majority proposed the “annual contribution by the Post Office to Consolidated Revenue should be by way of an interest charge and that the interest rate should be at the average long-term bond rate…”87 In accepting the recommendation, the Menzies Government took telephony another step down the path of commercialisation. It advanced even further in 1968 with new legislation which required all Post Office revenue to be paid into a trust account against which operating and capital expenditure would be drawn. As management saw it, “the arrangements will give greater flexibility in providing services according to the needs of the public and will encourage and sustain improvements in Post Office efficiency and economy.”88

Bit by bit governments were conceding power to managers by accommodating their long-held desire to run post and telecommunications as a business. Managers eagerly seized every opportunity. Commenting on the 1968 changes, Director-General Trevor Housley wrote of the need to justify the faith of the enterprise’s “twelve million shareholders” by rising to the challenge of the new arrangements. The Department’s staff had to raise their sights, he intoned, adding:

85 Report of the Royal Commission on Economies, Common. Parliamentary Papers, 1920-21, Vol. IV, p. 8. 86 1975 Royal Commission Report, p. 55. 87 Quoted in ibid., p. 26. 88 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1967-68, p. 3.

284 We are a business, and we mean to stay in business. We must aim not just at being Australia’s biggest business – this Australian Post Office can be, should be, and, with your help, will be Australia’s best business.”89

The launch of Telecom on 1 July 1975 was the most dramatic step to that date towards breaking the business shackles. Freedom from government control was to be matched with limits on government funding. On the advice of the Commission’s consultants, Price Waterhouse, the Commission recommended each corporation should be required to provide a minimum of 50 per cent of the cost of new capital investment from internal sources. In the case of telecommunications with its enormous capital investment program, this would require the new entity to generate large annual surpluses, either by using its monopoly position to pass on every rise in input costs, or by improving productivity through new technology, invariably at the expense of labour. Political and economic pressure kept the former strategy in check, leaving managers to rely primarily on new technology to maintain profits.

While PMG workers often complained they were ruled by engineer-managers making decisions on purely engineering grounds, management liked to present their technological modernisation programs as purely service driven. In one sense the managers were correct. Whatever the corporate arrangements the enterprise had to satisfy their customers, or ‘meet the market’. Yet as Ian Reinecke has observed, the expectations of the market with respect to facilities and service standards were largely the creation of the industry itself deciding to introduce this or that technology ahead of any public knowledge as to its capabilities. He traces this supply-driven approach to the influence of multinational computer manufacturers, the profits of which partly derived from convincing telecommunications utilities around the globe to buy their products.90 Reinecke’s expose is persuasive as far as it goes, but as an analysis of PMG/Telecom’s corporate behaviour it does not give due weight to the corporation’s own agenda. Beyond meeting rudimentary levels of customer service, their decisions too were driven

89 APO Magazine, Aug-Sept, 1968, p. 11. 90 Ian Reinecke, Connecting You: Bridging the Communications Gap (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1985), pp. 14-15.

285 above all else by questions of revenue maximisation, operational efficiency and cost containment.

Looking back in 1978, Ken Power, Branch Head of Engineering Planning, claimed one of the main reasons for adopting crossbar switching technology was the need to introduce nationwide STD “to contain spiralling costs of the manual connection of trunk calls.”91 Cost minimisation was no less a factor in the transition to computerised switching, first with the trunk network and then with local switching. The Department declared in 1975 that the new generation of local exchanges could provide “economically, a wide range of improved customer facilities.” It was the economic qualifier in this statement that most occupied their attention. Despite rising labour and material costs, the telecommunications division made a $95.1 million profit that year only by increasing telephone tariffs.92 The new exchange technology offered more politically palatable strategies for maintaining profit levels. In the Department’s words, the new equipment would “help to improve productivity, reduce operating costs and would require less building space” than the present electro-magnetic systems.93 The results of this kind of thinking over fifteen years was astounding. From 1960 to 1975 trunk line traffic in Australia increased by over 250 per cent and local call traffic by over 240 per cent.94 The number of telephonists over the same period remained virtually static: 8382 in 1960, 8878 in 1975.95

Reinecke in fact concedes that cost-minimisation was paramount in the Department’s decision-making but argues that the reasons for it differ from the pure profit-motive of private companies. He and Julianne Schultz contend that in Australia unlike the US there has been a government commitment to “a universal, low-cost telephone service” since before Federation.96 The claim is somewhat misleading. Government commitments to funding the PMG ’s telephone network was never so strong as to obviate the political pressure on the network to pay its own way. As with private corporations, a large proportion of funding for capital investment always had to be

91 K. W. Power, ‘History of Local Telephone Switching in Australia and Background to the AXE Decision’, The Telecommunications Journal of Australia, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1978, pp. 208-9. 92 PMG Annual Report, 1974-75, pp. 20, 39. 93 ibid., 1974-75, p. 19. 94 PMG Annual Report, 1974-75, p. 71. 95 ibid., p. 86. 96 Ian Reinecke & Julianne Schultz, The Phone Book: The Future of Australia’s Communications on the Line (Ringwood (Vic): Penguin, 1983), p. 2.

286 generated internally. The revenue surplus was channelled to Treasury and returned in the form of budgetary allocations. In this respect, a policy of universal low-cost service was not a straightforward case of state-sponsored wealth redistribution. Lower tariffs for disadvantaged sectors of the community were subsidised from higher tariffs imposed elsewhere. But beneath this lay a more fundamental form of subsidisation. All tariffs were minimised as a direct result of the regime of production imposed on telephony’s own workforce. Feminisation, skill devaluation, ideological inducement, speed-ups and new technology were all ways in which managers ensured that the industry’s own workers, and not Treasury, were chiefly responsible for delivering a low-cost service.

In wishing to defend state ownership of telecommunications Reinecke and Schultz’s interpretation of the facts is also problematic. Telecom as a state-owned enterprise, they argue, “embodie[d] the very antithesis of the values which the international corporate states seek to implant.”97 Here again, we are presented with the proposition that the state stands as a benign force against the rapaciousness of private capital. Here again, the argument is untenable. To the extent the state was committed to a universal, low cost telecommunications service for the mass of the Australian population, this commitment cannot be understood in isolation from the state’s relationship with the broader economy. It is true that the universal accessibility of telephone services was progressive and best defended as a state responsibility but it should not be overlooked that in Australia even the progressive was bounded in practice by the exigencies of an evolving industrial capitalism. Because of telephony’s status as a universally useful (and ultimately essential) service, the state for many years accepted it had a special responsibility to administer it on behalf of capitalist society as a whole. It was a component of national infrastructure vital to the cohesiveness and growth of Australian capital as a bloc, even if it was not always profitable in its own right.98 It also became

97 ibid., p. 59. 98 John Urry argues that each capitalist state “is located within a structure in which it attempts to provide for profitable capital accumulation.” To this end, he later observes, states sometimes directly intervene in the sphere of production because a particular enterprise is strategically important. John Urry, The Anatomy of Capitalist Societies: The Economy, Civil Society and the State (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 101, 135. Urry cautions, however, that these factors alone are not sufficient to induce state ownership, as the example of the private monopoly of telecommunications in the United States demonstrates. He concludes that “nationalisation will only be possible where capital is in general neutralised – two circumstances which facilitate this being opposition and conflict between the different fractions of capital, and the existence of an extremely strong and vigorous working-class and popular movement.” p. 137. The former was more the case in Australia. Early statist traditions in the colonies flourished as a direct result of the local bourgeoisie’s rivalries, weaknesses and disorganisation. See R.W.

287 an integral part of the social wage delivered to the Australian working class in response to the upheavals of the 1890s and inter-war years, and would help cement the rise of the post-war industrial consumerism centred on the burgeoning outer suburbs of Australia’s cities.99 State-administered mass telephony thus helped sustain mass markets and mass social cohesiveness, two of the fundamental requisites of capitalist growth.

These priorities meant that governments and administrators were prepared to allow parts of the telephone service to function at less than maximum profitability. State ownership meant the extent of this strategic benevolence was more open to electoral and other forms of political pressure than would have been the case under private control. But the fact remains that telecommunications policy was always formulated around the concept of ‘the national interest’, which in a capitalist economy is invariably defined in accordance with the overall strategic needs of capitalism’s dominant economic players.

From an employee’s perspective, few of the hallmarks of a capitalist regime of production were missing. The enterprise was not encumbered by competition with rival firms. Nor did it administer telephony purely to accumulate capital, subordinating the usefulness of the service to the quest for ever-expanding value.100 But it was squeezed by the contradictory imperatives of raising surpluses for network growth while simultaneously delivering low cost services to private sector customers as part of its strategic commitment to the needs of the capitalist economy.101 Like their counterparts in private industry, therefore, managers and planners of state instrumentalities always endeavoured to maximise the surpluses generated from their own employees by minimising the overall labour bill and lifting productivity.

The Australian government’s decision to create Telecom was entirely consistent with this approach. For Whitlam the key strategic question was how telecommunications could best serve a national interest proscribed by the needs of Australian capitalism. The

Connell & T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narrative and Argument (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1980), pp. 111-12. 99 For an important exploration of these themes, see Connell & Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, pp. 298-300. 100 For an explanation of the subordination of use value to the value realised in commodity production and exchange, see Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), p. 151. 101 State-provided telephone services would fall into the category Habermas calls collective commodities. “The rise of the public sector is among other things,” he writes, “an indication that the state looks after the production of collective commodities, which it makes available at a saving for private use in the form of the material and immaterial infrastructure.” Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 55.

288 old answers were beginning to come under scrutiny. Whereas full state control had long been the orthodox position, the spectacular end of the long postwar economic boom had begun to undermine the Keynesian consensus. “By the end of the 1970s,” writes Robert Brenner of the global situation at this time, “the manufacturing sector on an international scale was at an impasse, as was the Keynesian programme of demand management that had been implemented to revitalise the world economy. Even greater government stimulus had been unable to prevent the further fall of manufacturing profitability system-wide.”102 Reagan and Thatcher would respond with “supply-side economics”, a program built on slashing public expenditure and overseeing a massive transfer of wealth from labour to capital. The deregulation and privatisation of state- owned utilities was a feature of the period as even Labour and Social Democratic governments soon embraced the neo-liberal agenda. Telecommunications were at the forefront of the program as the old system of national regulation came under attack from large corporations seeking to exploit the transnational potential of new telecommunications technology. In building the new era of "digital capitalism," writes Dan Schiller, the corporations launched campaigns “for customized service offerings and, more broadly, for a more permissive global telecommunications regime.”103 The divestiture of AT&T of its monopoly status in the early 1980s and the privatisation of British Telecom in 1984 set the pattern for telecommunication policy that has prevailed ever since.

In the mid-1970s, however, this “politics of neoliberal telecommuncations reform” was in its infancy.104 In Australia, neither Whitlam’s Labor nor Malcolm Fraser’s Opposition were advocates of privatisation, but a change was underway. As Rob Watts writes, “the ALP’s conception of the relationship between state and economy increasingly privileged market-forces over state interventions through the 1970s.”105 Whitlam saw himself as an economic moderniser, committed to creating a model for telecommunications that would make it more responsive to changing communications needs. As the economy continued to stagnate, he was also under pressure to reduce

102 Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy (London: Verso, 2002), p. 34. 103 Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge (Mas): MIT Press, 1999), p. 41. 104 ibid., p. 44. 105 Rob Watts, ‘Laborism and the State: Confronting Modernity’ in Paul James (ed), The State in Question: Transformations of the Australian State (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. 57.

289 public expenditure. Greater autonomy and financial self-sufficiency in the telephone service suited him on both counts.

The same priorities that had guided PMG’s path all along would continue to apply under the organisation Vernon proposed, the main difference being that Telecom’s managers would have fewer subsidy lifelines. With more freedom came more responsibility to make their own way. In this brave old world, the most pressing problem was how to generate adequate investment capital from within the organisation. Telecom managers naturally looked at their labour costs. Wages and salaries and the associated costs of superannuation and long service leave accounted for 46.8 per cent of the total expenses of PMG’s telecommunications division in 1973.106 Mid-seventies inflation looked set to make the situation worse. With major capital expansion programs to fund, at least 50 per cent internally, Telecom’s managers took little convincing that workers were the problem and technology the solution. Capital’s epoch-old assessment of labour as a cost to be minimised or eliminated was given new impetus. The Inquiry did its best to assist management by ensuring each new statutory corporation had the freest possible hand over industrial relations issues. The Government, on the Commissioners’ recommendation, vested Telecom and Australia Post with responsibility for their own staffing arrangements and pay and employee conditions, free of interference from the Public Service Board. Ironically, trade union discontent over the APO’s inability to negotiate directly with them on pay and conditions served as one justification for the reform.107

The corporatisation of telephony simply reinforced the mood of intolerance growing within the ranks of the service’s workforce. Control, manipulation and exploitation of switchboard labour-power were as much a feature of the Public Service as of Telecom. But the new arrangements were bound to intensify the pressure on workers and, more importantly, do so on the basis of a more clearly discernable orientation to profits over service. In the process Telecom would strip away the public service ethos, leaving the contending forces facing each other not only over job security and terms of employment but the very nature of the service itself.

106 1975 Royal Commission Report, p. 33. 107 1975 Royal Commission Report, p. 204.

290 As Telecom’s agenda became clearer, ATPOA members started to link bread and butter unionism to a defence of Australian telecommunications as a service operating for the common good. As the ATPOA journal later explained:

Through the unions, employees are now far more prepared to question the basic values and priorities behind a decision than simply the amount that will be paid out. In Telecom all unions and their members have expressed concern about staffing, ergonomics, health and safety, profits, management’s ability to manage, design of equipment, supervisory and career structures, workplace ethics, ownership and control of telecommunications, new technology, training, superannuation and so on.108

The old model of public service unionism as an implicit social contract which conceded the state’s right, as the legitimate custodian of the common good, to appropriate workers’ socially useful labour, was broken down as the commodification of services deepened. ATPOA members began to conceive of themselves as custodians of the common-wealth in opposition to the state’s betrayal of its citizens to the market. As Mary-Anne O’Neill explains, “There was a lot of ownership about the whole thing and you all felt…people just felt it was wrong.”109 As the Telephone Echo would put it:

Based on the notion of people, rather than profit, as the top priority, the Telecom unions including the ATPOA, have each in their own way, been conducting skirmishes and staging ambushes against the priorities and values of the Corporate Plan since its inception.110

By placing workers’ labour at the centre of an alternative conception of telecommunications, encapsulated in one union article in the notion of workers as architects (creators and providers) rather than bees (followers and servants of the state), the union revived producerist strands of labour thinking and self-identity as the basis

108 Telephone Echo, Jan/Feb 1981, p. 15. 109 Interview with Mary-Anne O’Neill, 2 September 2004. 110 Telephone Echo, Jan/Feb 1981, p. 15.

291 for workers’ sense of their own worth.111 This in turn sharpened the mood of resistance and gave a new ethical dimension to the struggles that would emerge. In short, the more polite industrial relations traditions of PMG were clearly in decline by the time Telecom was launched but its own actions succeeded in hastening their demise. Workers and Telecom together ushered in an unprecedented era of class struggle in telecommunications.

111 ibid. The architect-bee metaphors were taken directly from a book by union shop steward, Mike Cooley, about workers’ efforts at Lucas Aerospace in Britain to challenge management’s control over production decisions. See M. Cooley, Architect or Bee? (Sydney: TransNational Coop, nd).

292 Chapter Eight Resurgence, 1976-1984

By 1975 the managers of Australia’s telephone service were accustomed to its employees tolerating their regime of class pressure and their manipulative use of gender to organise telephone exchange work as a secondary and inferior segment of the workforce. Even during the industrial turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was the Department’s postal workers who accounted for most of the disputes.1 Apart from the telegraphists, whose numbers were in terminal decline by the 1970s, the Telecom unions had seldom mounted any serious challenge to the industrial relations order. The masters of the new corporation had reason to feel confident that they had inherited a far less demanding ‘labour problem’ than had their counterparts in Australia Post.

Such confidence was misplaced. The phase of class relations in telephony beginning with the creation of Telecom and continuing until the mid 1980s would be dominated by militant, bitter and often prolonged confrontations with management and the government. The ATPOA and its members would be at the forefront of this wave of conflict. As Jack Fitzgerald, a retired Telecom Industrial Officer, would later confide to Queensland ATPOA militant, Jean Bowden, her union was considered harder to deal with than any other.2 It is easy of course to dismiss his comments as the polite flattery of an old foe grown conciliatory in the comfort of retirement. Except there is the small matter of the history itself. Even taking into account an element of exaggeration, the tenor of his remarks ring true with the events of these years. The ATPOA did in fact force Telecom to take its members’ views and demands seriously and it did win important concessions.

1 See Frank Waters, Postal Unions and Politics: A History of the Amalgamated Postal Workers’ Union of Australia (St Lucia: Univ of Queensland Press, 1978). 2 Interview with Jean Bowden, conducted by author on 20-21 October 2000. Bowden began work as a telephonist in Gympie exchange in Queensland in 1937 at the age of 16. She became active in the Queensland branch of the union after moving to Brisbane in 1942 or 1943. Following her marriage in 1952 she was compulsorily retired. She returned to telephony in 1969 and over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s became a leading figure in the Queensland ATPOA’s resurgence, both as a rank and file activist and as Branch President. She was awarded life membership of the ATPOA upon retirement in 1983.

293 Chapter four argued that the decline of rank and file activity and the associated eclipse of rank and file workplace culture as a source of union energy in the 1920s and 30s cannot be explained adequately simply by invoking the metaphor of a pendulum swinging metronomically between industrial militancy and conservatism. While such a cycle does occur in the life of unions, the pattern is typically so disjointed and a- rhythmic that it offers a level of analysis that is incapable of doing justice to the complexities of workers as resisting and acquiescent subjects. As chapters four and five revealed, telephony’s workforce remained inured for many decades to forces that could reasonably be expected to set the pendulum on its return swing. The workers resiliently pursued non-conflictual modes of resistance, and most of them barely resisted in any systematic way at all. The cause of this pattern, it has been argued throughout the thesis, was not a labour process free of oppression and alienation. On the contrary, probably no other segment of the public service endured poorer conditions and more debilitating work pressure. Explanations for the absence of conflict, this thesis has contended, lie with the factors that cumulatively created a high level of toleration amongst employees. The transitory character of the telephone exchange labour market was one enduring factor that diminished the probability of workers making a stand against their treatment. Gender socialisation and proscriptive gender roles was another. Limited opportunities for alternative female employment also played a part.

Over time, another significant determinant of telephonists’ industrial behaviour has been their attraction to the ideology of public service with its status rewards and emphasis on loyal service to the community. Oppositional work ideologies have been too formless and diffuse to offer a counterpoint, while on the few occasions that radical critiques have been given a voice, they have been quickly marginalised by wider ideological forces operating in defence of conservatism. One element of public service ideology which proved particularly alluring was the notion of career service. Careerism’s cooptive power ironically drew strength from the fact it was an aspect of public service employment only partially available to women in the telephone exchanges because of the marriage bar and the dual labour market. It therefore entered ATPOA members’ consciousness as a denied entitlement, an aspect of their lived sense of disadvantage which those with long term employment aspirations felt most acutely. Under the leadership of the more senior staff, the union embraced careerism in the form of a demand for promotion by seniority in all divisions of the service. Whilst the

294 demand was obviously just, it had the effect of focussing union attention on individual upward mobility, and cut across an orientation to demands which sought collective improvement for the vast majority who would remain in the lower ranks. It encouraged employees moreover to see themselves first and foremost as public servants and to set aside their daily experiences of work as a lesser consideration.

In effect, the ideology operated as a form of social contract. Conditions on the job may have left a lot to be desired but a public servant at least enjoyed a certain status deriving from her acknowledged contribution to the common good (or common-wealth), and she at least had the prospect of a relatively secure job if she remained single. Respect, in other words, was a function of the social worth of the enterprise rather than the treatment on the job or the job’s material rewards, providing certain basic standards were met. Workers thus tolerated a certain (albeit variable) level of disrespectful treatment on the implicit condition that the state accepted responsibility for providing an equitable and worthy telephone service which would reflect credit on the service’s employees.

If the overall thesis holds true, one would expect that once these various factors operating to engender toleration were removed or neutralised, workers would be more willing to pursue conflictual modes of behaviour in response to wrongs inflicted on them, unless of course the various ideological and structural mechanisms of control were replaced by outright repression. This chapter argues that this indeed was the case in the period from 1976 to 1984. The transformation of the enterprise, the workforce, the union and the general political culture of the period allowed workers to see their employment relationships and their very future in a new light. Whereas exploitative and disrespectful treatment of telephone exchange workers had always been a necessary condition for resistance, around 1976 it became sufficient to spark resistance of a quite militant kind.

The campaigns through which this militancy became manifest provide the empirical core of the chapter. It is a chapter immersed in narrative detail, delving into the minutiae of the events and the complexity of the moment. In one sense this is an act of recovery. As Tom O’Lincoln has written, these were “years of rage” in which workers across the country battled the Fraser Government’s attacks on Medibank, its spending cuts and its

295 wage control measures, while protestors in Queensland confronted the corrupt and repressive practices of Premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, and social movements everywhere continued to mobilise against racial, gender and sexual oppression, environmental degradation, uranium mining and the new global arms race.3 Out of this maelstrom, only certain struggles have managed to claim a prominent place in the historical record. The ATPOA’s battles have not been among them, despite their significance and connection to these other events. There is, though, another reason for the empirical density of what follows. It is in the narrative detail that we can best see the shifts in attitudes and the emergence of new forms of thought and practice. It is at the micro level that we can disclose the contingent quality of the moment and unlock the door into a world where agency and structure are at their most immediate. This does not imply that the broader historical contexts ceased to be important. Rather, what follows will disclose the broader social patterns as an historical reality lived and shaped by a particular group of workers in the context of their own specific struggles with the employer.

Militancy and the Bush

Regional and rural ATPOA members were at the forefront of the first militant stirrings. In 1976 telephonists in the small western Queensland town of Quilpie threatened industrial action over the implementation of a new roster which would cost them one job. The branch backed their stand by unanimously endorsing any industrial action they decided on and Branch Secretary Joyce Williams then took the issue to the Federal Executive. On a motion of Marilyn Brown, the General President was directed to renegotiate the Quilpie roster. When no progress was made over the next three weeks the Queensland branch passed a motion of no confidence in the federal body “for its

3 Tom O’Lincoln, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era (Melbourne: Bookmarks Australia, 1993). Also see Verity Burgmann, Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003). For historical accounts of particular social movements of this period, see: Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999), pp. 231-52; Drew Hutton & Libby Connors, A History of the Australian Environmental Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1999), pp. 125-44; Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000), pp. 131-47.

296 failure to continue to support the branch in its efforts to have staff retained at Quilpie and an acceptable roster introduced.”4

The rise of discontent in regional centres was no mystery. Country telephonists were bearing the brunt of the job losses with limited alternative employment options, and they now had state leaders committed to organising them and supporting their struggles. From 1974 branch officials from South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland regularly made tours of regional areas to meet and recruit members and take up specific grievances. In New South Wales the change in approach was evident in the way these tours were conducted. In June 1975 President Beris Forrester visited several exchanges in the Bathurst district. Her itinerary was arranged by a Travelling Supervisor, Miss M.S. Guthrie, who also served as the driver on the trip. Travelling Supervisors were usually seen as management representatives and on the whole were regarded with trepidation by country telephonists. The sight of Forrester, herself a city supervisor, arriving with Guthrie in tow would hardly have inspired workers with confidence that their union was a body independent of the Department. Yet some issues must have been raised. As a result of her trip, Forrester prepared a report for management on certain “items” needing attention.5

Under the leadership of Marilyn Brown, country trips took on a different complexion entirely. Not only were they organised and conducted without any input or perception of input from management, attention was given to organising as well as representing the rank and file. Members in the larger centres were encouraged to establish sub-branches, while every workplace was urged to elect at least one delegate who would be trained and resourced to act as the union’s local representative.6

In Queensland, Joyce Williams toured the North and the Central Highlands. Branch President Jean Bowden visited all the exchanges west of Toowoomba in her own time and her own car, driven by her retired husband Warren. Some centres in Bowden’s itinerary were particularly memorable. “I had a wonderful meeting at Cunnamulla,” she

4 Queensland Branch Minutes, 10 March 1976, 14 April 1976. 5 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 10 June 1975. 6 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Secretary’s Annual Report, 1976-77; Interview with Marilyn Brown, conducted by author on 18 November 2003.

297 recalled. “They stopped work, the staff and the supervisor. They brought cakes and we had [the meeting] in the exchange building” while Warren waited patiently and cakeless in the park across the road.7

Queensland regional workers were encouraged to initiate their own campaigns. Quilpie was merely one of the first. In late 1975, a petition with about 500 signatures of Queensland country members was presented to Williams calling for action on a uniform 34 hour week.8 In one month alone in1979, Nambour stopwork action prevented the introduction of a new roster and the loss of a job, a Clermont ban on nightshift won the payment of a penalty rate, and Townsville members’ refusal to apply the surcharge for manual assistance calls gained them three extra staff.9

The highest profile country struggle stemmed from a proposal by New South Wales branch to campaign against rural exchange closures.10 In February 1978 the Federal Council supported the idea.11 In May, Queensland branch took up the fight with a warning that in future “each proposed closure will be considered with regard to standard of accommodation and amenities at the centralised exchange, and [the] cost both to our members and to the local community.”12 New South Wales kicked off their campaign in August after the ATEA’s technology dispute with Telecom drew media attention to the plight of telephonists.13 Queensland entered the fray around the same time by opposing the closure of the exchange at Gympie, a former gold-mining town less than two hours drive to the north of Brisbane.

Gympie became the showcase for what were essentially community-based campaigns. Local staff resolved to oppose the closure of their exchange and then set about mobilising local support. They stopped work for a day, letterboxed the town extensively

7 Interview with Jean Bowden, 20-21 October 2000. 8 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 January 1976. 9 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 November 1979; Telephone Echo, December 1979, p. 2. 10 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 6 December 1977. 11 Federal Council Minutes, 20 February 1978. 12 Queensland Branch Minutes, 10 May 1978. 13 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 22 August 1978; For detailed accounts of the technicians’ struggles with Telecom over the impact of new technology, see Claire Williams, Blue, White and Pink Collar Workers in Australia: Technicians, Bank Employees and Flight Attendants (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 32-53; Ian Reinecke & Julianne Schultz, The Phone Book: The Future of Australia’s Communications on the Line (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1983), pp.156- 78.; Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommuncations (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1984), pp. 315-35.

298 and leafletted every business in Gympie’s long main street. Two union members took the campaign onto local radio.14 A ballot of the townsfolk showing overwhelming support was published in a large advertisement in the Gympie Times, accompanied by a message of appreciation from the telephonists. Enthused by the result, other rural exchanges joined in. The union sent exchange closure campaign kits containing leaflets and petitions to eager members in Proston, Kingaroy, Charleville, Barcaldine, Longreach, Collinsville, Morven, Mitchell, Dalby, Marwick and Tara.15

None of these exchanges survived the final onslaught by Telecom’s planners, leaving Joyce Williams to wonder later if the union had simply given rural members false hope.16 At the time, though, even Williams could not have predicted the outcome. The absolute preservation of jobs, moreover, was not the only yardstick of the campaigns’ success. In a most dramatic way, the Gympie-style campaigns brought to the public’s attention some serious questions about Telecom’s commitment to rural services and community needs generally, a debate that continues to dog its half-privatised successor. As Marilyn Brown explains:

Instead of…Telstra [ie Telecom] just going along and busily automating everything in sight and leading dead bodies everywhere, they had to come up with a program, they had to advise the people about the program and there had to be discussion about that program and there had to be a better consideration of what they were going to do with the people who were there. And Telstra for the first time…had to go out and justify it to the townspeople.17

One practical and immediate consequence was that Telecom was forced to delay the closure of many exchanges, thus buying members some extra time to find alternative employment. The union also managed to improve redundancy arrangements. Perhaps most important of all, as Brown argues, the campaigns helped create amongst the public and ATPOA members themselves a new awareness of the social value of the telephonist

14 Queensland Branch Minutes, 13 September 1978; Jean Bowden interview, 20-21 October 2000. 15 Queensland Branch Minutes, 11 October 1978. 16 Interview with Joyce Williams, conducted by author on 10 August 2001. 17 Interview with Marilyn Brown, conducted by author on 18 November 2003.

299 and a greater recognition of the skills they offered.18 This new way of thinking contributed to the energy the rank and file invested in other, more successful campaigns.

Militancy and the City

If country campaigns harmed Telecom politically, city-based campaigns had the most potential to harm it economically for it was in the city operations that most profits were generated. Here too the union’s leaders set about revamping the organisation to encourage greater rank and file participation. Different times for monthly general meetings were tried in an effort to include women with family responsibilities. Meeting procedure was relaxed to facilitate involvement from workers unaccustomed to formal standing orders. City delegates were encouraged to organise their work areas and raise the level of awareness of union business.19

Union business itself began to be directly shaped from below. In 1976 branches around the country complained when Telecom directed trunk exchange telephonists to promote STD to subscribers. The issue went straight to the July National Conference which adopted a policy of total opposition to all STD and ISD promotions, to be enforced by industrial action in the form of bans if required. At the same conference Marilyn Brown won support for the inclusion of an industrial action clause in the union’s constitution. Only Victoria’s Nance Lougheed was opposed, proclaiming her branch did not support direct action in any form.20

The earliest bans of the era generally involved a refusal to perform particular, relatively inconsequential tasks, but a major escalation in the tactic occurred in the last quarter of 1976 over the rate of pay for workers rostered for duty on Christmas day. For Sylvia Hall, the issue was the “first thing I ever did as union secretary in South Australia,” and led to the branch’s first ever stop work meeting.21 It had a similar galvanising effect in Queensland. In September a special meeting of 53 Queensland members resolved not to

18 ibid. 19 Interview with Jean Bowden, TLC (Q) Oral History Project, Fryer Library, UQFL 300; Interview with Joyce Williams, 10 August 2001. 20 Minutes of the 22nd ATPOA National Conference, 12-15 July 1976. 21 Interview with Sylvia Hall, conducted by author on 1 November 2001.

300 attend for duty on Christmas day unless the public holiday rate was paid; in effect, a strike threat. A further meeting of 114 members was held on 16 November to consider Telecom’s proposal on the matter which again contained no mention of public holiday rates. By a vote of 100 to 3 the proposal was rejected and the previous threat to not report for work was carried 83 to 20.22 Around the country, only the Victorian branch was willing to accept Telecom’s offer. Other branches rejected it outright, although it would appear none was prepared to follow Queensland’s lead in threatening strike action. A counterproposal was formulated which called for exchanges to be staffed Christmas day on a voluntary overtime basis to a maximum shift of ten hours.23

Further negotiations led to another Telecom offer which allowed for work on Christmas Day to be deemed overtime, for the shifts to be short enough to enable staff to have one main meal with their family, and for a minimum of staff to be required. On 1 December up to 400 Queensland members stopped work to consider the proposal. A motion by K. O’Dwyer to reject it and reaffirm the strike threat was defeated.24

A ban of another kind had mobilised union members in Sydney. As part of Telecom’s plans for a network of 10C exchanges, it had built a new centre in Pitt Street. Brown, Manning and Forrester met with Telecom to discuss amenities in the new building and were led on several tours of inspection. The ATPOA officials were not impressed with what they saw. Apart from obvious shortcomings in the standard of the amenities, they suspected the building had been designed on the assumption the new system would need fewer staff than the old. On 5 October they reported their observations to a general meeting of the union and on a motion moved by Mr A. Naysmith, the branch resolved that “the 10C exchange at Pitt St will not be staffed by members of the ATPOA for other than training purposes until firm commitments on staffing requirements and amenities are given by State Management.”25 At a subsequent union meeting members complained that the Dalley Street Exchange was being left short-staffed because Telecom was deploying telephonists at the Pitt Street centre to perform live testing. The union promptly extended the ban to include training and live testing.26 Although the

22 Queensland Branch Minutes, 18 August 1976, 15 September 1976, 27 September 1976, 16 November 1976. 23 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, New South Wales Branch Minutes, 17 November 1976. 24 Queensland Branch Minutes, 1 December 1976. 25 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 5 October 1976. 26 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 19 November 1976.

301 ban was lifted five days later, the issues and the building ban tactic would become commonplace in the union’s national history for the next eight years.27 The Pitt Street centre itself was rarely free of problems. The building’s design, amenities and lighting, and the ergonomics of the new equipment would be an ongoing source of discontent well after the exchange came into service in June 1977.

Later in 1977, Queensland members placed a ban on the new 10C complex in Cairns, citing training, staffing, further cut-overs and supervisory numbers as the key issues in dispute.28 The branch clearly saw Cairns as a key test of the new militancy, even seeking support from the ATEA whose members agreed to ban the cutover to the Cairns MAC “until such time as the dispute between ATPOA and Telecom is settled.”29 This earned Williams a rebuke from Manning who expressed her disappointment that the Queenslanders had sought external assistance.30 In the face of Telecom’s moves to secure a resolution in the Arbitration Commission, and with no support federally, Williams eventually sought to restart negotiations to prevent Cairns members being industrially isolated. The Executive agreed to contact Telecom and after returning from the May executive meeting, Williams flew north to convene a meeting of the Cairns’ sub-branch. After passing a resolution condemning the district management’s actions as “irresponsible and a total disregard for staff and the general public,” the members voted to lift the ban. The outcome was a victory of sorts. An additional three trainees were recruited, more relief staff were added and training was restored from three to four weeks.31

The success of the new tactic of refusing to staff a new centre was soon applied on a much bigger scale against the Woolloongabba (or Gabba) complex in Brisbane. The Gabba was intended to be the main Manual Assistance Centre (MAC) in a network encompassing Nambour, Southport and Toowoomba that would handle National and International trunk traffic. In October 1978 the Queensland branch banned the selection and training of all staff for the Gabba/Toowoomba/Nambour/Southport complex until Telecom adequately addressed various concerns, including hours to be worked at the

27 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 24 November 1976. 28 Federal Executive Minutes, 31 August 1977. 29 Federal Executive Minutes, 24 May 1978. 30 ibid. 31 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 July 1978.

302 three MACs, the supervisory structure, an elevator for Nambour MAC and alterations to the fire escape at Toowoomba.32 The last two grievances were dealt with expeditiously at the local level but staffing and hours were national questions going to the heart of Telecom’s plans for reducing labour costs. Management had estimated that up to eight Grade-4 supervisors’ jobs would be lost in the Brisbane MTX alone, while night shift supervision would be downgraded to Grade 1 work.33

Recognising that the Queensland stand potentially gave the union national leverage on these and other issues, Williams took the struggle to the national arena, successfully moving two motions at the Federal Executive meeting in October 1978. In order to protect regional jobs, the executive resolved:

That [the] ATPOA oppose Telecom’s proposals on SPC exchanges. Telecom’s stated preference for 24 position 10C exchanges would mean greater centralisation rather than decentralisation as claimed in the proposal. If we must have SPC exchanges they should be of varying size and much smaller than 24 positions.34

Williams’ second motion aimed to use the position of strength the bans had given the union to increase pressure in the long-running struggle to obtain uniform working hours for operators in all exchanges.35 Heartened by this support, the Queensland members felt confident of victory. None suspected that what lay ahead was the longest and most bitter campaign in the union’s history.

Supervisors and Supervised: A United Front in the Making

A key factor in the coming struggles would be a rapprochement between operators and supervisors, built on an insistence that the petty tyranny of close supervision had to end. This in itself was a landmark struggle of the era. In April1975 Queensland members complained that telephonists were being asked to carry out aural observations on fellow

32 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 February 1979. 33 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 July 1978. 34 Federal Executive Minutes, 13 January 1978. 35 ibid.

303 workers, a practice which management abandoned after union intervention.36 Many supervisors were themselves uncomfortable with their oppressive role. Grade 3 Supervisor Val Williams wrote to Telephone Echo in August 1976 criticizing the “excessive” type of supervision directed at telephonists:

Conducting weekly observations, and noting on permanent record, all items, however trivial, on which it is considered correction or retraining is required, is unnecessary and unfair to the staff concerned. The guidance and control exercised by supervisory staff should be sufficient to maintain a good standard of service.37

Union pressure in Queensland forced local management to abandon its method of handling ‘errors and careless operating’ in the Brisbane Edison Exchange and to establish committees of supervisors and telephonists to investigate a more satisfactory procedure for quality control. Joyce Williams claimed this was the first instance in Australia of telephonists and supervisors having “a voice in determining the procedures and practices they are required to use in their work.”38

Old practices were not overturned easily, however. Aural observations, usually without the telephonist’s knowledge, continued into 1977, and members’ discontent forced the union to adopt a policy on the question. A general meeting of the Queensland branch debated the issue at some length in July. The need for observation itself was not challenged, the debate raging only on the question of secrecy. Thirteen voted against observations being made without telephonists’ knowledge and eleven voted in favour. The meeting resolved to distribute a questionnaire to members.39

In New South Wales observations had been suspended in 10C exchanges but were reintroduced in early 1978 against the branch’s wishes. When the issue came before the Federal Council in February, debate centred on the frequency and multiple kinds of observation and the appropriate staff to perform the task. New South Wales members

36 Queensland Branch Minutes, 23 April 1975, 14 May 1975. 37 Telephone Echo, August 1976, p.5. 38 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 May 1976; Telephone Echo, August 1976, p. 8. 39 Queensland Branch Minutes, 13 July 1977.

304 were particularly resentful that monitoring was conducted by service assessment personnel who were not on-the-spot observers. A motion by Victoria’s Nance Lougheed that the practice be retained lapsed without a seconder. A second motion, moved by Williams, restricting observations to training and retraining purposes, won support from all states except Victoria, reflecting the strong conventional views of some of Melbourne’s supervisors.40 Twenty-two of them from the service sampling section wrote to Telephone Echo in May taking umbrage at Pat Manning’s critical comments in the December 1977 issue about the oppressiveness of service sampling. In defending their function, however, they inadvertently revealed how their own years of dedication to high norms of public service had been manipulated for less than altruistic ends:

Whether the name-calling is by unco-operative operators who resent retraining, correction or discipline, or by members of the Executive of our Association, it will do nothing to maintain or upgrade the high-priced ($99 million profit) Telephone Service we provide.41

Within a profit-driven venture, tight managerial control of labour power could serve only to intensify exploitation, a point which Pat Manning made herself when replying to the criticisms:

Since the Commission came into being, a fresh approach has been engendered into Management at all levels to create a high level of productivity from the staff employed. This new attitude has brought about a drive in Management along the lines of private enterprise which many of you know means ‘dog eat dog’.42

One effect of this ethos was to encourage the relatively powerless to exercise ruthlessly whatever authority they happened to hold over others.

Manning’s defence won support from other supervisors who abhorred the inhuman treatment of operating staff. An unnamed Grade 2 supervisor wrote to the journal criticising the 22 Melbourne staff whose lives she claimed revolved around “their minor

40 Federal Council Minutes, 20 February 1978. 41 Telephone Echo, May 1978, p. 11. 42 ibid.

305 and/or major irregularities and disciplinary action.” The “sooner Management agree to amending (and reconstructing) telephonist observation to a more human approach, the sooner a step further with the changing times will be achieved.”43

Management were in no hurry to oblige. A review of observations was not launched until 1979. In September Queensland branch banned remote (aural) observations at Central MAC and Service Centre after one case where the legality of secretly aurally observing a telephonist was questioned.44 In October Williams presented legal opinion to the Federal Council that secret aural observation indeed was unlawful. Western Australian Secretary Jennifer Lockwood informed the meeting her legal advice supported the Queensland view. Council proceeded to place a total ban on aural observations until the results of the review were known and the legal position clarified.45 On 25 October Telecom agreed that there would be no more observations without the operator’s knowledge and a guarantee was given that supervisory positions would not be affected as a result.46 The ATPOA ban continued until an established procedure was in place. In January 1980 Council again deliberated at length on the topic and determined that it would allow observations to be performed only by Training Supervisors on trainees during their training and probation periods and only after they had been informed on the day they were to be observed. Similar conditions were to apply to staff undergoing retraining.47 When this motion was taken to National Conference in July, however, it was voted down. On the final day, the Federal Office sponsored a motion totally opposing secret aural observation as an invasion of privacy and a contravention of Telecom’s Interception Act. This was passed, marking a complete reversal of the ATPOA’s original capitulation to secret taping of telephonists fifteen years earlier.48 Telecom, however, would not relinquish their ‘right’ to secretly eaves-drop on staff, so negotiations continued into 1981. The ban itself was re-affirmed on 4 February 1981.49

43 Telephone Echo, July 1978, p. 4. 44 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 September 1979. 45 Federal Council Minutes, 4-6 October 1979. 46 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 November 1979. 47 Federal Council Minutes, 23-25 January 1980. 48 Minutes of 24th ATPOA National Conference, 21-25 July 1980. 49 Federal Council Minutes, 3-4 February 1981.

306 Supervisors’ support for the right of operators to work without secret surveillance helped bring exchange workers together after many decades. Pat Manning, in most respects part of the old guard of ATPOA leaders, deserves special mention for her in role in this campaign even though she did not see it through to the end. She resigned as General Secretary in November 1978 and was replaced by Sylvia Hall. The Queenslanders had been openly campaigning to unseat her since September 1977 and in the end she departed partly on doctor’s advice, partly on realising the extent to which the union had moved away from the forms of quiet advocacy with which she felt comfortable.50 “I have sought compromise through fair and just negotiation,” she noted, only “to be laughed at by Management and the Union movement.” “Antagonizing management,” she cautioned, “will get you nowhere…”51 Her ignominious departure has helped ensure she is remembered mainly as something of a dinosaur from the High Council period. A fair assessment, however, would acknowledge her role as a bridge to the new era.

Whereas Manning opted to leave, other members of the old guard took a more destructive path. In early 1980, a potentially damaging bid to form a breakaway supervisors’ union was launched from Sydney under the leadership of New South Wales Branch President and former General President Beris Forrester. The New South Wales Branch Council suspended Forrester from the branch presidency on 1 February for “gross misbehaviour”, and a special general meeting on 5 February confirmed the suspension by a vote of 68 to 32.52 The next day a special Federal Council telephone hookup issued an instruction for her to desist from her “disloyal activities.” Her only ally at that meeting was Nance Lougheed from Victoria, who condemned the New South Wales special meeting as a kangaroo court.

Over coming months a special newsletter was compiled for all members and two substantial articles in the national journal were devoted to attacking the Forrester dissidents.53 Telecom, meanwhile, lent Forrester support by providing a meeting venue and paid leave to allow supervisors to meet in worktime.54 Outside New South Wales,

50 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 September 1977. 51 Federal Council Minutes, 22 November 1978. 52 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 1 February 1980, 5 February 1980. 53 Federal Council Minutes, 6 February 1980; Telephone Echo, April 1980, p. 10 & July 1980, p. 10. 54 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 1 July 1980.

307 her push gained most sympathy amongst the Victorians although without activists to carry it forward to a split, the campaign eventually foundered. In 1981 the group linked up with the Telecom Technical Officers’ Association (TTOA), a tiny breakaway from the ATEA with links to the ultra-conservative National Civic Council.55

At one level the saga was a political conflict over union tactics. Only five years earlier Forrester had led a spirited discussion on amalgamation which resolved that in any negotiations with prospective amalgamation partners, the ATPOA should insist on a no- strike policy and a union name which did not include the words ‘worker’, ‘employee’ or ‘union’.56 Subsequently the ATPOA baulked at amalgamation but it did embrace many of the tactics and approaches which Forrester found abhorrent. The opposing visions were ultimately formalised in competing tickets at the 1978, 1979 and 1980 branch elections which left Forrester in a minority position on the Branch Council.

At a deeper level she and her supporters were aggrieved by the erosion of their authority over their subordinates in the workplace, and they saw the union’s new direction as symptomatic of this decline in respect. By the late 1970s operators no longer ‘knew their place’ and refused to be silenced when subjected to what they perceived as bullying and unfair discipline. According to New South Wales councillor Julayne Flannery, the supervisors who attended the special branch meeting on 5 February had only one complaint; they were tired of being constantly howled down by other members at union meetings.57

As a result of this rank and file pressure, some of the worst aspects of workplace oppression were removed or moderated. Along with the freedom to work without secret surveillance, Queensland branch fought to prevent Quarters Supervisors accessing staff lockers without the user’s permission.58 Operators in all states won the right to a toilet break without needing to gain the supervisor’s consent to leave the board.59 The New South Wales branch adopted a policy permitting all staff “to dress suitably depending on climate and general standards.”60 In a truly great victory for good taste, male

55 ATPOA Reportback, No. 12, Sept/Oct 1981, p. 2. 56 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 15 April 1975. 57 Federal Council Minutes, 6 February 1980. 58 Queensland Branch Minutes, 12 February 1975. 59 Federal Council Minutes, 23-25 January 1980. 60 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 29 November 1978.

308 telephonists went on to win the right not to wear long socks when they wore shorts.61 National Conference then followed up with a policy that Telecom had no right to impose a standard of dress at all.62 In an echo of the Sydney telephonists’ famous victory over the tyrannical Mr Monaghan in 1907, Queensland members in 1978 threatened to black ban the Food Services Manager for derogatory remarks about Brisbane exchange staff.63 In April 1979 the New South Wales branch suspended the membership of two male all-night supervisors at Dalley Street exchange for “victimisation and discriminatory practices….against fellow ATPOA members.”64

These and other similar initiatives helped to humanise the workplace. And notwithstanding the efforts of a disgruntled minority, most supervisors responded positively to the changes, in the process facilitating a new unity across the barriers between rank and function. Although the inherent tension between supervisors and subordinates was never eliminated entirely, operators and their line managers were able to forge new relationships of trust and respect. This would prove crucially important in (and be reinforced by) the big conflicts the ATPOA was about to lead them into. Joyce Williams claimed the supervisors were essential to building rank and file organisation because they had the freedom “to move around the section and talk to various people,” and “they did have a bit of influence with the staff.”65 Williams’ views are supported by Jean Bowden, herself a militant supervisor. In recounting her role, she emphasised the relative freedom that supervisors had on the job, but she also alluded to the supervisor- operator relationship itself as a crucial dimension of successful militant action.

One particular story is instructive. In the lead up to the first occasion that ATPOA members in Brisbane’s Edison Exchange were called upon by the union to stop work, Bowden devoted considerable time explaining the issues and the impending action to the operators in an effort to allay fears and build confidence. On the day, senior manager Noel Uncles appeared in the exchange room and, accompanied by Alice Brady, the supervisor in charge, began threatening the operators prior to their planned walk-off at 1pm. As they moved around the room speaking to staff, Williams arrived

61 Queensland Branch Minutes, 30 April 1980. 62 Minutes of the 24th ATPOA National Conference, 21-25 July 1980. 63 Queensland Branch Minutes, 13 September 1978. 64 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 24 April 1979. 65 Interview with Joyce Williams, 10 August 2001.

309 from the union office and began following them, urging members to disregard the intimidation. Bowden followed too, providing, she hoped, leadership by example. As the hour of the stoppage approached, Uncles, Brady and other senior managers formed a line near the door through which the members had to pass. Most supervisors stuck firmly with their fellow unionists on the boards. Bowden remembered vividly what happened as one o’clock ticked over:

I saw them standing up, oh, it was a tremendous feeling. And they walked out. They got up from their boards and walked out, and no-one sat at their boards…That was the first big action of that type.66

After that, she recalled, “we stopped quite easily.”67

It is evident here that Bowden’s freedom as a supervisor and her role as a supervisor were both important. When she and her peers actively supported union action, they indirectly stamped it with the imprimatur of the authority they exercised over the operators in the normal employment relationship. This both absolved operators from some of the responsibility for making a pro-union decision and recast the nature of the supervisor-operator relationship vis-à-vis the employer. For Mary-Anne O’Neill, it was a case of a well-drilled industrial army marching behind a new leadership. She argues the same discipline exercised over and internalised by operators was evident in the industrial campaigns, only the allegiances had changed: “I think because they were so disciplined, when they were directed to do it by the union, they did it too.” The union’s instructions simply over-rode the management’s.68 Once that shift in allegiance had been made, the customary bureaucratic authority exercised by the supervisor-delegates like Jean Bowden could be subverted and deployed in the interests of the union. The new relationship would be a feature of every mass campaign that was to come.

66 Interview with Jean Bowden, 20-21 October 2000. 67 ibid. 68 Interview with Mary-Anne O’Neill, conducted by author on 2 September 2004. O’Neill (nee Morris) joined the Department as a telephonist in Civic Exchange, Canberra, in July 1973. She soon became an ATPOA delegate and was later elected to Branch Council. She remained active in the union in Canberra until she left Telecom in 1987.

310

Central and Edison Exchanges, Brisbane, 1981. Having defied management intimidation once, Edison workers subsequently stopped work “quite easily.” (NAA: Image J2364, 6669/21)

The 1979-1980 Salaries Campaign

The first instance of mass defiance across state borders was sparked by the issue of wages. It began calmly enough. On the initiative of the Queensland branch, the 1978 national conference resolved to undertake work value cases based principally on the introduction of new equipment.69 This was prompted partly by a growing concern among unions about wage erosion under the system of wage fixation which required unions to apply for flow-ons from national wage cases, and partly from realising that as a result of huge productivity increases telephonists’ wages were declining as a proportion of the wealth they generated. In July 1979 the union resolved to submit a salary claim for a 20 per cent increase across the board. This was lodged on 2 July. At the same meeting, the union’s frustration over Telecom’s stonewalling on a range of other issues came to head. The Council resolved to recommend branches call stop work meetings in all states to consider what industrial action to take if Telecom had not started meaningful negotiations within one month.70 By late September this anger was given a specific focus when Telecom refused to consider granting any wage increases based on changes to work functions and value. The campaign that had been threatened

69 Minutes of the 23rd ARPOA National Conference, 30 October-3 November 1978. 70 Federal Council Minutes, 27-29 June 1979.

311 over various issues took shape as an industrial struggle over wages. Mass meetings were authorised for all cities and large provincial centres.71

On 4 February 1980 the union’s wage claim came before an anomalies conference and was referred to a Board of Reference. The pressure for direct action grew. In the opinion of the ATPOA’s Industrial Advocate, John Grenville, the Board of Reference was unlikely to convene quickly unless forced by industrial disruption. He argued there was no time for further procrastination. The National Wage Case increase of 4.5 per cent on 4 January had already effectively reduced the ATPOA’s claim from 20 to 15.5 per cent and this would continue to erode the longer a resolution took. Even worse, Grenville’s research revealed that telephonists’ wages were in a lot worse shape than originally believed. The imposition of the female rather than the male rate as the rate for the job under the equal pay principles had pegged telephonists’ wages near the national average. Then in 1974, the year prior to the imposition of wage indexation, telephonists’ wages had risen by 31 per cent whereas average female wages rose 44 per cent, placing telephonists well behind when indexation commenced. Thereafter their wages declined exponentially.72 By 1976 telephonists’ base wages were lower than typists, storemen and senior cycle mechanics and only slightly higher than stores’ assistants.73 By May 1980 a survey of receptionists and telephonists across all industries revealed Telecom telephonists’ wages had slipped from 14th out of a field of 56 in 1974, to 51st spot.74

After discussing the court tactics with Bill Kelty from the ACTU and Geoff McGill from the Council of Australian Government Employees’ Organisations (CAGEO), formerly CCPSO, the union decided to proceed with a new log of claims backed by the threat of industrial action if Telecom did not accede within 48 hours.75 Predictably, Telecom rejected the demand and in the week beginning Monday 24 March stopwork meetings were held in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland, resulting in members banning the recording of the operator surcharge on the charge dockets, a move which gave subscribers discounted long distance calls.76

71 Federal Council Minutes, 4-5 October 1979. 72 Federal Council Minutes, 3 March 1980. 73 Data on Telecom Australia Salaries, Telecom Australia files, NAA (Melb), Series B6286/9, Box 60. 74 Telephone Echo, July/August, 1981, p. 2. 75 ibid. 76 Telephone Echo, April-May, 1980, p.2. The idea for the ban originated in a campaign devised by Marilyn Brown and others in the New South Wales branch in 1979. The union claimed the surcharge was an attempt to price members out of their jobs. Brown won support for a ban from Federal Council in a

312 Telecom reacted with fury. Chief Industrial Relations Manager Barry O’Sullivan telexed all state managements describing the union’s actions as fraudulent. In Queensland, managers took operators off the switchboard in small groups to point our the dire consequences of their “criminal activities.” Staff were informed that dockets would be stockpiled in the exchanges and would need to be repriced when the bans were lifted. Refusal could lead to charges under the Crimes Act. For workers without any experience of industrial confrontation, these were fearful tactics indeed, and management were confident the workers would buckle. Joyce Williams reported to her Branch Council, however, that despite the barrage of intimidation and misinformation, “members remained firm in all centres” and “strongly opposed” any proposal for them to amend the dockets.77 A remarkable period of courageous resistance had begun.

Away from the exchanges, Telecom revealed they were anxious for a quick resolution, O’Sullivan even approaching CAGEO to intercede. On 28 March, after various negotiations, the President of the Industrial Relations Commission, Sir John Moore, pledged to hear the case by the end of April, and set 9 April as a date for mention. He insisted, though, that the bans be lifted first. Sylvia Hall then advised O’Sullivan that she was prepared to recommend to branches that all bans be lifted providing Telecom was prepared to allow the trunk dockets in Queensland to be removed unaltered. Telecom refused. That afternoon Hall convened a phone conference of the Federal Council where she conveyed Moore’s proposal. Joyce Williams responded that “under no circumstances” would her members agree to alter the dockets. They had supported the Association’s bans under enormous pressure, she stated, and the union in return should continue to support them. She also pointed out that since the public had already been told the surcharge was not being applied, it would be deceitful to now include the fee on the dockets. Irons and Lockwood agreed. Hall then contacted O’Sullivan again but he refused to relent. In an effort to break the impasse, Williams proposed that telephone hookup on 10 September 1979, just a little over a week after the basic surcharge was increased from 60 to 70 cents. She argued for a campaign similar to the one against rural exchange closures, with propaganda to be aired in the media and a call for the public to demand a government enquiry into Telecom’s charging policy. But she also clearly envisaged an industrial dimension to the campaign, arguing that one of the tasks was to “advise members of possible action that could be taken to avert or cancel the new charges.” It was obvious she meant bans. Before a separate campaign could be launched, however, the surcharge ban made its debut as the main industrial tactic in the salaries dispute. The union would eventually return to the issue of the ban in its own right, launching a campaign against it in the second half of 1980. Minutes of the 24th ATPOA National Conference, 21-25 July 1980; Federal Council Minutes, 22 August 1980, 8 September 1980, 22 September 1980, 28 September 1980; Queensland Branch Minutes, 28 September 1980; Telephone Echo, November/December 1980, pp. 11-12. 77 Queensland Branch Minutes, 1 April 1980.

313 managers could alter the dockets. This too was rejected. The meeting broke up without any progress and with the New South Wales stop work meetings to come after the week-end.78

On the morning of Monday 31 March the Queensland state manager directly advised Williams that if the dockets left the exchanges unchanged, they would be regarded as incorrectly priced and charges would be laid against individuals under the Crimes Act. Later in the day New South Wales members decided not to impose bans unless action was taken against members in other states. Just after 4pm the Council went into telephone conference again, beginning with a motion moved by New South Wales councillor Julayne Flannery that on the basis of having a date for mention in the Commission on 9 April and the assurance from Moore of a hearing by month’s end, all bans be lifted. The resolution went on to state that ATPOA members would not alter any of the dockets and that any action by Telecom against members for refusing to do so would result in the reimposition of the bans in the three states and their imposition in New South Wales. The meeting then heard reports from Flannery on the New South Wales mass meetings and from Williams on her discussion with Queensland management. Lougheed advised that Victorian members would also enter the fray if action was taken against members elsewhere.79 Brown put the motion which Williams was alone in opposing. The bans should stay, she argued, until Telecom withdrew its threats.80

At 9am the next day Williams contacted Telecom Industrial Relations and again sought an assurance on the processing of dockets and a response prior to the branch council’s meeting at 11am. The meeting commenced without receiving a reply. During proceedings Marilyn Brown telephoned to put the view that if Queensland persisted in trying to gain assurances from Telecom, the early hearing of the salary claim could be jeopardised. The Queensland Branch Council was unrepentant. The minutes undoubtedly reflect the arguments of Secretary Williams yet there is no doubt she had the meeting’s support. “Unless we obtain an assurance,” the minutes record, “our

78 Federal Council Minutes, 28 March 1980. 79 Federal Council Minutes, 31 March 1980. 80 ibid.

314 members could well be in a position of having to re-impose the bans in a few days time.” On William’s initiative, the meeting then resolved:

That the Queensland Branch Council cannot fully accept the recommendation of the Federal Council in that assurances should be obtained from Telecom that ATPOA members will not be required to reprice dockets handled during the dispute, prior to any recommendation being made to members to lift the bans.

The ensuing discussion on what recommendation should be made to members was interrupted by a phone call from Telecom’s Secretary of Industrial Relations. He gave an undertaking that Telecom had no plans at that stage to have ATPOA members reprice dockets and if such a situation did arise it would be discussed with the union’s State Executive prior to any action proceeding. Quite literally at the eleventh hour management had backed down. The Council proceeded to discuss the assurance and on Williams’ motion, the meeting agreed to recommend an end to the bans.

Relief at the breakthrough quickly turned to anger towards those within the union the Queenslanders believed had let them down. Belinda Molyneux moved to condemn “the lack of any real support by some of our federal officials and other states that have not participated in industrial action.” In a remarkable example of leadership restraint, Williams opposed the motion, arguing that “it would be divisive at a time when we most needed unity. Negative criticism will not help our membership and this is what we are about.” The motion was lost 2 to 7.81 The next day, at stop work meetings across the state, Queensland members voted to lift all action.82

On 4 June, Commissioner Clarkson handed down his decision on the wage claim, divided between the 1979 20 per cent claim and the 1980 anomalies dispute. He acknowledged the erosion of telephonists’ wages since 1974 but argued the constraints imposed by the indexation guidelines prevented him from adequately correcting the injustice.83 He awarded increases of between 5.7 per cent and 10 per cent, backdated to

81 Queensland Branch Minutes, 1 April 1980. 82 Qld Branch Correspondence, 2 April 1980, held with Queensland Branch Minutes. 83 Telephone Echo, July 1980, pp. 1 & 6.

315 1 December 1979. Louise Otway, telephonist at the Service Centre in Brisbane, summed up the judgement:

I thought we could have got more. Telecom offered 4% and we settled for 6.3% which isn’t much higher…We are the ‘front line girls’ for Telecom and we have to put up with quite a bit in here, so we’re entitled to more. When you look at Telecom’s profits it’s obvious that they can afford it.84

The industrial phase of the wages dispute further transformed the ATPOA. It brought fresh internal tensions into the open but more importantly it highlighted the collective power of telephone exchange labour. The fact that Queensland members had forced Telecom to withdraw their threats of retribution contrasted starkly with the mediocre outcome in the Commission. The union was energised by a surge of confidence in its own capacities

The Gabba Campaign

By 1980 the explicit issues in dispute at the Gabba had been narrowed to hours and supervisory arrangements. With both sides realising national precedents were at stake, no negotiated resolution appeared in sight. Telecom launched a bid in September to circumvent the ban by recruiting telephonists and supervisors into the International Positions at the Woolloongabba exchange without the union’s agreement. The Federal Council, on the recommendation of the Executive, re-affirmed its endorsement of the Gabba ban and called on members to reject Telecom’s overtures.85 On 6 October Commissioner Clarkson ordered the parties to confer. By the time of the Adelaide Federal Council meeting on 20 October, Telecom had provided a proposal for a five- year national MAC plan covering all staffing arrangements as the basis for resolving the Gabba dispute and, it hoped, all other MAC disputes.86

84 Telephone Echo, July 1980, p. 1. 85 Federal Council Minutes, 22 September 1980. 86 Telephone Echo, November/December 1980, p. 11.

316 The meeting rejected the salary component of the plan but only it would appear because it did not adequately compensate staff for the proposed abolition of the International Allowance. Deeper reservations were raised about staffing numbers, the size and location of exchanges, the use of part-timers, the selection procedures and job security.87

At the resumed Commission hearing, Clarkson decided there were in fact two disputes, one involving the staffing arrangements and salary structure at the Gabba, the other concerning hours of duty in other exchanges. He ordered the parties to confer again on the first dispute and report back on 10 November. Crucially, he directed the ATPOA to lifts its ban on the Gabba. Federal Council met by telephone conference on 29 October to consider developments. Williams was absent, having suffered a heart attack nine days earlier. A revised salary offer by Telecom incorporating the International Allowance was discussed. All states except Queensland agreed that the offer was reasonable and adequately addressed the concerns raised at the Adelaide meeting. Pat Rolph for Queensland reported that her Branch Council insisted on an additional $600 on the minimum rate offered for a MAC operator. The Queenslanders believed that their deployment of the new technology would deliver Telecom a massive leap in productivity and revenue in which they had a right to share. New technology, they added, meant new skills for which they ought to be rewarded.88 On other aspects, according to Brown’s summary, the meeting believed that Telecom still had progress to make in the areas of “career prospects, designations, service advisory/service assessment supervisors and selection panels.” Hall then asked the meeting to recommend to Queensland that the bans be lifted “so that we could appear to be obeying the direction of the C&A Commission.” On a motion seconded by Queensland’s Pat Rolph, the Federal Council unanimously consented.89

In Brisbane, unanimity of a contrary kind was in evidence. On Friday 31 October the Branch Executive, with Williams back on duty, requested Sylvia Hall meet with management later that day to seek clarification on thirteen specific questions pertaining

87 Federal Council Minutes, 20-21 October 1980. 88 Interview with Noel Wilson, conducted by author on 24 July 2002. Wilson began his Telecom career as a Directory Assistance operator in Brisbane Central Exchange in 1979, one of only six or so men in the exchange at the time, as he recalls. He had been a union delegate in a former job and soon became active in the ATPOA as a delegate and Branch councillor. 89 Federal Council Minutes, 29 October 1980.

317 to the MAC plan. The answers were delivered with an ultimatum that the overall MAC plan offer would stay open until Wednesday afternoon on the understanding that the union would release members immediately to apply for the Gabba positions. A request that the deadline be extended to Friday to allow members access to the full facts was refused. Later the same day Williams convened a meeting of her Branch Council which rejected the Federal Council recommendation and called on Queensland members to maintain the bans and not apply for the jobs “in view of Telecom’s refusal to extend the application period.”90 This prompted Telecom to break off negotiations.

An enfuriated Sylvia Hall summonsed the Federal Executive and councillors to a meeting in Brisbane. She had considered, she said, arranging a telephone conference but on the suggestion of Marilyn Brown, she had opted instead for a face to face meeting. The purpose was clear. As Hall stated, “our policy on industrial action allows the Federal Executive or Council to take over a dispute when a national issue is involved and this is what this meeting is all about.”91 Despite a challenge by the Queensland Branch to the constitutional validity of the special Federal Council meeting, it went ahead in Brisbane late afternoon on Monday 3 November. It was to be one of the most dramatic showdowns of the era between Williams and her federal opponents Hall and Brown. Williams was not without support. Western Australian Secretary Jennifer Lockwood spoke against the federal body interfering in branch affairs and urged support for Queensland members. “We must stick together,” she pleaded, “and make it clear to Telecom that we were supporting Queensland.” Her branch passed a resolution of solidarity with Queensland members around this time.92 But the wider solidarity Williams needed to hold out against Telecom, the Commission and the federal officials was not forthcoming. To win, the struggle had to be escalated but clearly that was not under consideration by other branches. Recognising this, Williams sought instead the least dangerous avenue for retreat and only on the handful of positions in immediate dispute.

When the meeting resumed at 9am Tuesday morning, a new proposal from Williams was hammered into a recommendation that paved the way for a partial settlement. At a

90 Federal Council Minutes, 3 November 1980. 91 General Secretary’s Report to Federal Council, 22 September 1980, held with Federal Council Minutes. 92 Federal Council Minutes, 3-4 February 1981.

318 stop work meeting on 18 November, Brisbane members voted 142 to 17 to allow selection and training of eight International positions at the Gabba “pending agreement on a staff structure for computerised MACs and a resolution of the shorter hours issue.”93 In return, Telecom’s offer was revised to include, among other things, the $600 originally sought by Queensland branch for MAC operators, another significant victory by the locals.94

If relations between the federal office and the Queensland branch had deteriorated during the salaries dispute, the Gabba struggle unleashed veritable warfare between them over coming weeks. By mid January 1981 Queensland had accused Hall of striking a deal with Telecom on the supervisory structure and salary scale over the heads of the branches and of submitting an application to vary the Award on hours without consultation. On 14 January a long-winded Queensland resolution condemning Hall as, among other things, “decidedly pro-management” ended with a vote of no-confidence in Hall and Brown “for their unsatisfactory performance in their elected offices.”95 At the next Federal Council meeting, Western Australia lined up behind Queensland, even seconding the no-confidence motion, while South Australia’s David Irons accused Queensland of waging a campaign against the two federal officers. The motion was lost amidst acrimony from both sides.96

On the second day of the meeting the hours case was discussed. What particularly aggrieved Queensland and Western Australia with the application for a variation submitted by the union had not claimed 34 hours for all-night staff, phonogram operators and other non-MAC staff in the country. Hall warned against amending the claim because “too many people would intervene in the case and cause problems.” Her strategy was to “go for what we [can] get now and pick up the others later.”97 For most branch representatives, including Williams, the key question was whether members would support industrial action for 34 hours across the board.

93 Federal Council Minutes, 3-4 February 1981. 94 Federal Council Minutes, 16 October 1981. 95 Queensland Branch Minutes, 14 January 1981. 96 Federal Council Minutes, 3-4 February 1981. 97 ibid.

319 Eventually a compromise was adopted claiming 34 hours for all MACs already designated as such and any others which incorporated 10C and other computerised technology. MACs outside this ambit apart from Broken Hill, Gawler, Kadina and Mt Isa would work a 36 hour week. These four as well as manual exchanges and phonogram centres would operate a 36 ¾ hour roster.98

The amended submission was put before Commissioner Clarkson on 10 February but he refused to proceed until all bans in relation to the dispute were lifted. Queensland by then had already lifted its ban on training International positions for the Gabba but to appease Clarkson they indicated this action implied that staff could accept Gabba positions at the completion of their training. Western Australian members, who had maintained a ban on the Perth Wellington 10C exchange since late 1979, for similar reasons to Queensland’s Gabba ban, also lifted all sanctions at this time.99 On 19 February Clarkson resumed hearing the case and on 18 March 1981 announced the award would be varied to amend the hours. Much of the ATPOA’s main claim was won, including the demand for wider application of shorter working hours.100 Fifty seven years after the union had obtained the 34 hour week as an ameliorative measure for sweated telephonists in big city exchanges, the ATPOA had finally succeeded in extending it to other areas of the workforce.

The struggle over International positions may have been resolved, albeit temporarily, but the Gabba bans were not done with yet. Staffing arrangements for the National positions at Woolloongabba became the new flashpoint. The poor selection and training processes for the Gabba International positions had led to a surplus of 37 senior International staff at Central who would have to be redeployed until 10C positions became available. This in turn placed pressure on the National staff which came to a head when Telecom called for applications for the National positions at Woolloongabba. According to Williams, Telecom had given an undertaking before four ATPOA witnesses that no calls for applications would be posted until negotiations at federal level had been completed. Edison trunk staff, ‘1100’ staff and Central

98 ibid. 99 Queensland Branch Minutes, 11 February 1981; Telephone Echo, March/April 1981, p. 10.

100 Federal Council Minutes, 20 February 1978.

320 International staff downed headsets on 2 March 1981 and after hearing a report from Williams resolved that until all matters in dispute were settled no member was to apply for the positions at Gabba National. At the conclusion of the meeting, the members rose to applaud Williams for her attendance, “just prior to her going off on leave for major surgery.”101

This new phase of the dispute soon broadened to encompass a ban on Nambour exchange after Telecom posted notices for jobs under a non-negotiated structure. A general branch meeting resolved to organise a stop work of all MACS if any action was taken against Nambour members for their stand.102 Wider discontent also continued over Telecom’s manoeuvres to implement their preferred MAC supervisory structure beyond the trial at Gabba International. At the acrimonious Council meeting on 3 and 4 February Williams raised suspicions that the wording of Telecom’s Industrial Relations Circular 19 (1980) suggested that Hall may have secretly agreed that the Gabba ‘trial’ would serve as the starting point for a continuous program of implementation. No evidence was presented in support of the allegation but most delegates did concur with Brown that the ATPOA should make it clear to Telecom that management’s actions were pre-empting any agreements. The meeting resolved to demand immediate and meaningful negotiations on the supervisory structure before it was implemented in any area other than Woolloongabba International.103

On 2 April Williams, back into the fray after surgery, reached agreement with Queensland management that allowed for the 48 positions at the Gabba to be brought under the trial. As a result of the Queensland stand, all Queensland MACs were to be multifunctional, allowing for a diversity of skills and opportunities, and there would be little displacement of existing staff at the fourteen MACs that would remain after 1985.104 Her actions were endorsed at a special Federal Council telephone conference the next day during which councillors also reaffirmed that “no further trial is to take place until the Structure is finalised to the satisfaction of ATPOA.”

101 Minutes of ATPOA stop work meeting, Brisbane, 2 March 1981, held with Queensland Branch Minutes. 102 Queensland Branch Minutes, 13 May 1981. 103 Federal Council Minutes, 3-4 February 1981. 104 Queensland Branch Secretary’s Annual Report, 1981, held with Queensland Branch Minutes.

321 By May the entire issue of MAC staffing and salary structures was before Commissioner Clarkson who insisted on a wider trial of Telcom’s proposals despite the ATPOA’s objections to many of its points. He rejected Telecom’s request for a two or three year trial and agreed with the union’s proposal for one year only, with recourse to the Commission at any stage over the twelve months. The trial was to include Ballarat, Bendigo, Nambour, Toowoomba, Southport, Murray Bridge and the various city 10C centres, and would run until 30 June 1982.105

Although Federal Council voted to accept Clarkson’s recommendation, members in New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland voted it down.106 Again, the struggle in Queensland was particularly intense. On 9 June members throughout Queensland stopped work and voted 502 to 12 that members withdraw any application already submitted for positions under the proposed structure and that training supervisors train only those designated as telephonists and supervisors. After returning from the meeting, six trainers were called in by management and asked if they intended following the union’s direction. They replied they would. The next morning they were again called in and asked if they would train eight applicants from country areas who had defied the union. Again they refused. At 11am they were called aside individually and given a direction to train the eight applicants and threatened with stand downs. They refused to comply. At 11.30 Williams met with the eight trainees but failed to persuade them to withdraw their applications. The next day the union lodged a notice of dispute in the Commission and a general meeting of the Queensland branch voted to institute charges under the union’s rule against the recalcitrant members and to impose industrial actions if any disciplinary action was taken against the training supervisors.

The revolt of members around the country against trialling a plan they regarded as a threat to their jobs and salaries provoked Telecom on 19 June to withdraw all offers on the MAC staff structure, leaving the trial limited to a small number of positions at the Gabba. The loss of money on offer prompted the ATPOA to step up its preparations for a new salary claim (lodged 29 May) involving a planned campaign “incorporating education of members leading to controlled industrial action if necessary.”107 As for the

105 Federal Council Minutes, 25 May 1981. 106 Queensland Branch Minutes, 2 June 1981, 10 June 1981. 107 Federal Council Minutes, 23 June 1981.

322 MAC staffing structure, the union demanded the continuation of the Gabba trial while resolving to “develop a more suitable and acceptable structure to meet the needs of members and MAC operations in the future.”108 Both sides then entered a phase best described as a war of manoeuvre with little open negotiations over MACs. There was no respite from disputation, however. A new national struggle over wages was about to take centre stage.109

The 1981 Salaries Campaign

The June 1980 wage rise had pushed Telecom telephonists from 51st to 29th place in the switchboard operators’ salary rankings. But in the 13 months since they had dropped back to 51st spot.110 Taking the lead of the other Telecom unions, the ATPOA lodged a claim for a $25 Industry Allowance and an 8 per cent increase across the board. On 22 June Telecom formally advised the union it would not accede to any increase “outside the principles of wage determination” adopted by the Commission. The ATPOA interpreted management’s hardline as a direct reaction to the Fraser government’s offensive against workers in general and public sector employees in particular.111

A general meeting of the New South Wales branch on 7 July called for a national general stop work meeting to discuss the implementation of work bans or other action to achieve “meaningful negotiations” over the salary claim.112 On 31 July the Government scrapped wage indexation, prompting the ATPOA to lodge a notification of dispute over the wage claim, only to find it was tenth on the hearing list. Industrial action alone would force the pace. When the federal councillors met on 4 August, however, there was a marked wariness about embarking on an industrial campaign. The New South Wales recommendation was put to the meeting by Flannery but the motion lapsed for want of a seconder. The minutes record a consensus that “there is pressure for some sections of the membership but generally members are not ready to take action just yet…”113

108 ibid. 109 Federal Council Minutes, 4-5 August 1981. 110 Telephone Echo, July/August 1981, pp. 2-3. 111 ibid. 112 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 7 July 1981. 113 Federal Council Minutes, 4-5 August 1981.

323

The meeting deferred the issue by giving Telecom a deadline of 31 August to start real negotiations. Councillors also adopted a policy that should any ATPOA members be suspended, stood down or dismissed under Fraser’s anti-strike legislation, the Commonwealth Employees Employment Provision (CEEP) Act, all ATPOA members nationally would down tools with the exception of those providing emergency services.114

The deadline passed without progress. A general meeting of the New South Wales branch resolved to hold stop work meetings on 23 September and urged federal council to endorse a national stop work.115 Rank and file feeling in the branch was running high. Sydney activist Colin Turner, claiming to hold views typical of his colleagues, wrote to Sylvia Hall on 4 September condemning the federal officials for dropping the $25 Industry Allowance claim:

…we have no air-conditioning, no canteen, no STD on our rest room phones, no carpets (except for the telex room), no microwave oven, unreliable lifts, the building we work in has at one time been condemned, and we suffer from unbelievable noise pollution from a construction site next door….I would have been prepared to overlook most of these matters had our original claim been pursued as some compensation for our lack of amenities. How many federal or state full time officials are trying to pay-off or save a deposit on a home on the adult telephonist wage?116

He concluded with a call to arms and a warning. “Let’s show some guts and determination for once and stand firm on our original claim or I can envisage a disillusioned and dwindling ATPOA membership.”117

Although reluctant to escalate the campaign, the Federal Council, meeting by telephone hook up on 11 September, agreed that New South Wales should not be left to proceed

114 ibid. 115 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 1 September 1981. 116 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, letter from Colin Turner to Ms S. Hall, copied to Ms M. Brown, 4 September 1981. 117 ibid.

324 alone. The meeting decided to call national stop work meetings on 30 September.118 It was to be the first time in the union’s history that co-ordinated stop work meetings were held in all states.

On the day, 4515 ATPOA members walked off the job around the country. The main motion gave Telecom until 1 October to accede to the demands or face a range of action designed to:

(a) disrupt the telecommunications system whilst as far as possible maintaining service to domestic customers and at all times to life and limb services; (b) withdraw goodwill and cause a significant slowing down of productivity.119

The national vote overwhelmingly favoured the action with New South Wales leading the charge.120

From midnight on 7 October New South Wales imposed various bans, including many affecting the pricing of calls, Queensland commenced a guerrilla strategy of unannounced rolling stoppages across the state, while Tasmania, Western Australia and Victoria implemented a work to rule. The actions continued unabated for one week despite threats by Minister for Communications, Ian Sinclair, to cancel payroll deduction of ATPOA dues and use the CEEP Act against ATPOA members. On 14 October federal councillors met and heard reports from around the country. New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland councillors reported their bans, work to rules and stoppages had been very effective, while Mrs W. Lang from Western Australia commented that her members thought the action being taken was not strong enough. Against the wishes of New South Wales, however, the meeting decided to suspend all action for 48 hours to allow negotiations to proceed in the Commission.121 The suspension was later extended to 20 October on the strength of Telecom’s assurances of a pending offer.

118 Federal Council Minutes, 11 September 1981. 119 Minutes of stop work meetings, Queensland, 30 September 1981, held with Queensland Branch Minutes. 120 ibid. 121 Federal Council Minutes, 14 October 1981; NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 14 October 1981.

325 Telecom opened negotiations with an offer of 6.8 per cent and ended by offering 10.2 per cent. They also demanded a twelve month freeze on further salary claims and wage- related industrial action and a dispute procedure clause to be determined by the Commission. Meeting on 22 October, the Federal Council rejected the quantum and the attached strings and decided to implement national rolling stoppages from midnight Monday 26th leading to a national stop work on Thursday 29th.122

Commissioner Clarkson pre-empted the ATPOA by calling a hearing. It had the immediate effect of weakening the resolve of some branch leaders. By Saturday 24th, only New South Wales and Queensland were still supporting a stop work meeting.123 When the hearing convened Clarkson recommended the union accept the 10.2 per cent as an interim measure along with the twelve month no-claim clause and the disputes procedure clause. The union’s claim for an additional increase, he argued, could be heard through invoking a ‘special and unforseen circumstances’ clause he was prepared to insert. When this was put to the Federal Council on the Thursday, all states except Queensland were prepared to accept it.124 Members’ meetings across the country on 29 October considered Clarkson’s formula and on a national count voted in favour. Queensland members, true to form, voted no.125 The November issue of the journal summed up the mood, “Interim settlement of 10.2%…But justice yet to prevail.”126

Technology and Health: The Shriek and RSI Campaigns

Amidst the 1980-81 struggles over staffing structures and wages a new, deadly threat to telephonists’ health arose: ‘shriek’, or spurious noise as it was formally known. Shriek was a high pitched spike of electronic noise transmitted without warning through the network. The impact in an operator’s ear was intensified by her close-fitting, insulated headset.127

122 Federal Council Minutes, 22 October 1981. 123 Federal Council Minutes, 24 October 1981. 124 Federal Council Minutes, 28 October 1981; NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 28 October 1981. 125 Minutes of Queensland stop work meetings, 29 October 1981, held with Queensland Branch Minutes. 126 Telephone Echo, November/December 1981, p.2.

127 Ear problems of course were not new to telephonists. Beatric Little told the 1924 Award hearing that she and her colleagues had suffered “ear trouble” along with other ailments that doctors had attributed to switchboard work. (1923 Plaint Hearing Transcript, p. 185) Indeed it is no exaggeration to assert that the

326

The ear problems caused by shriek could include intense pain at the time of impact, ongoing headaches, vertigo, subsequent noises in the ear, psychological trauma, destruction of tooth nerves and permanent and sometimes total hearing loss. At least one South Australian telephonist is known to have sustained permanent 100 per cent hearing loss in one ear.128 The first reported incident in the computerised era occurred in the Adelaide Local Service Centre on 12 August 1980 when a telephonist taking a 1100 call received a loud noise through her headset. She ultimately underwent surgery which confirmed the noise had caused damage to the structures of her inner ear. Over the next eighteen months Adelaide operators were the victims of over 800 reported incidents, with 285 workers requiring medical attention. The problem spread to Victoria in April 1981, New South Wales in May and to Queensland and Western Australia in July/August. Up to February 1982, 1200 incidents had been reported in New South Wales alone.129

New South Wales members led the union’s reaction. On 13 May, members at the Pitt Street International 10C Exchange refused to continue working in their positions while the shrieks continued, voting unanimously to return to the old International Manual Exchange at the GPO. Telecom had no option than to close Pitt Street until the problem was rectified to the satisfaction of the union.130 As the epidemic spread around the country two sets of demands were made. The union insisted that Telecom devote resources to determining the causes of and solutions to the problem. It also demanded greater medical and counselling support for victims.

At a meeting on 15 May Telecom managers and engineers briefed the ATPOA on initiatives being taken to investigate and overcome the problem. Their main response had been to install volume limiters in Local Service Centre positions in December 1980 history of telephonists’ subjugation to the machine can be told as a tale of physical and mental harm. One of the earliest recorded mobilisations of switchboard operators was in fact sparked by the damage caused by the introduction of headsets. In 1898 telephonists in Victoria organised a deputation to the Government which succeeded in provoking a parliamentary debate over the new contraption, likened in one colourful exchange to “the machines used in the dark old times as a means of punishment for committing grave offences.” (Victorian Parliamentary Debates, Vol. LXXXVII, 1898, p. 1072.) 128 R.T. Gun, Report on Exposure to ‘Shrieks’ by Telephonists, Telecom Australia, 1 October 1981, p.10. Held with Federal Council Minutes. 129 ATPOA ‘Shriek’ Circular No.1. Held with Federal Council Minutes. 130 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 13 May 1981; Telephone Echo, May/June, 1981, p. 3.

327 and then to replace them in May 1981 with a newer model. The union was not satisfied. Limiters, they argued, were a welcome measure but they attenuated the severity rather than prevented the incidents of shriek. They also introduced their own problems, with many telephonists complaining that limiters diminished reception quality.131 Determined not to allow Telecom to abrogate its responsibility to protect workers’ health, the South Australian branch of the union commissioned Dr Ritchie Gunn, Medical Officer with the South Australian Health Commission, to conduct an independent study. Released on 1 October, his report concluded that on the evidence available, Telecom had not categorically established the technical causes of shriek, let alone identified adequate solutions.132 The reduction in severe incidents since the installation of limiters, he contended, may have led Telecom to the belief that further analysis of the problem was largely academic. Such a belief, he warned, would be unwarranted.133

His recommendations included a call for better medical support within Telecom, better systems to monitor and report on incidents and a more co-ordinated and systematic effort to research and rectify the causes.134 It was, he wrote, a matter of repaying a debt:

Nine women have undergone surgery following exposure to shrieks, one woman has a total and permanent hearing loss in the affected ear, and in all 99 incidents (so far) have required absence from work of one day or more. Notwithstanding this the telephonists have ensured that the services to the public have been uninterrupted throughout this harrowing period. For this both Telecom and its customers owe the telephonists a considerable debt – a debt which should be repaid by ensuring that every possible avenue is explored to overcome the problem, by full compensation of all those affected physically or psychologically, and by acknowledgement of the conscientiousness of the telephonists…135

131 Victorian Branch Minutes, 19 April 1982; Queensland Branch Minutes, 17 March 1982. 132 Gun, Report on Exposure to ‘Shrieks’ by Telephonists, Telecom Australia, p. 24. 133 ibid., p. 26. 134 ibid., pp. 28-29. 135 ibid., p. 1.

328 At the union’s November Federal Council meeting, councillors endorsed Gunn’s recommendations. They also requested Telecom ensure technical staff were made available to provide prompt action whenever shriek was reported, and they demanded that the wearing of headsets be optional. To give impetus to the issue, they resolved to ban any position where shriek had been reported until a report had been supplied to the union on the outcome of efforts to trace and rectify the problem.136

Telecom, though, was to need more pushing throughout 1982 as shrieks continued to plague telephonists around the country. The bureaucracy was particularly obfuscatory about their research into causes. In replying to ATPOA suggestions that local network modifications and installations may be implicated, management claimed it was too difficult to draw any conclusions. Yet internal Telecom documents leaked to the union concluded that “again it does appear that technical activities within the network are causing the majority of noise reports.” In particular, attention was drawn to the fact that at the time of a large increase in shrieks on 16 December 1981, significant upgrading and modification work was being conducted. A graph showed a major increase of shrieks reported by subscribers at the times when major PABX cutovers were occurring.137

On the initiative of David Irons, Federal Council passed a long-winded resolution in February castigating Telecom for “not exhibiting sufficient interest or concern over the occurrence of spurious noises in the network and the consequent serious occupational health problem with telephonist staff.”138 There were reasonable grounds for the accusation. Telecom consistently downplayed the scale of the problem, culminating in its infamous claim in the 1981/82 Annual Report that there had been 174 reported cases of acoustic trauma when the real figure was over 4000.139 And despite the corporation advocating limiters as the main protective measure against shrieks, there was no rush to install them across the country. It was not until after Cairns and Atherton telephonists were struck down by shrieks, four of them seriously, that Telecom advised that limiters would be installed in all exchanges in Queensland. Three of the Cairns victims and one from Atherton had to be granted 26 weeks compensation leave each and none of the

136 Federal Council Minutes, 11-12 November, 1981. 137 Telephone Echo, March-April 1982, p. 14. 138 Federal Council Minutes, 9-10 February, 1982. 139 Telephone Echo, Jan-Feb 1983, p. 5.

329 four regained full hearing.140 In contrast, Telecom installed limiters within three days of members walking out of its lucrative Pitt Street exchange in Sydney.141 Telecom, many workers concluded, paid its debts only when subjected to sanctions affecting its revenue. The problem was never eliminated completely although by 1984 far fewer serious incidents were reported.142

Shriek was not the only major health problem to re-emerge with the birth of electronic telephony. Telecom’s habit of introducing new technology without due consideration to the physiological or psychological effects on users, and its drive to improve productivity using various techniques, most notably its newfound ability to electronically measure telephonists’ individual work performance, invariably threatened the health of those who continued to work the boards and consoles. The union’s fight against individual productivity monitoring and for regular breaks took on a greater urgency in 1984 with the outbreak of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), also known as Overuse Injury or Repetition Injury Syndrome. RSI referred to a range of muscle and tendon injuries caused by continuous, repetitive movement of a certain part of the body. Telephonists employed in the new computerised directory assistance areas where keying was an integral part of the job were especially at risk.143

Management’s response to the problem drew deeply from that well of suspicion and sexism sunk many years before. They may not have brazenly belittled telephonists’ ailments as women’s problems or accused them of malingering, as their predecessors had done, but they did tend to react with indifference and in some cases attempted to sack victims of RSI in the process of recovering.144 Their attitude set the tone for the entire organisation. With Telecom less than equivocal in its support, many victims found themselves subjected to suspicion and innuendo from their own colleagues, leaving them isolated and psychologically vulnerable. Brisbane operator Robyn Purse recalls that when she was struck down with RSI in 1985, “it caused all sorts of

140 Queensland Branch Minutes, 17 March 1982, 21 April 1982; Telephone Echo, May-June 1982, p. 10. 141 Telephone Echo, May-June 1982, p. 10. 142 The ATPOA’s role in forcing Telecom to address the shriek problem would also serve workers of a later generation. Through the agency of the CEPU, the ATPOA’s expertise in shriek was kept alive and brought to bear in the late 1990s as workers in the burgeoning call centre industry confronted the problem of shrieks all over again. It was one of many issues that would link ATPOA members to the new manifestation of the hello girls. (Interview with David Irons, conducted by the author on 1 November 2001.) 143 Telephone Echo, May-June 1984, p. 11. 144 Federal Council Minutes, 22-23 May 1984.

330 problems, not just physical but psychological as well because we were actually treated like pariahs.”145

On 23 May 1984 Federal Council devoted an entire morning to the issue, ultimately passing five resolutions setting out the union’s basic demands. They insisted that staffing levels be maintained at a level adequate to handling traffic and providing for rest breaks, and that Telecom ensure breaks were taken. They called for ergonomically sound equipment and work environments, call control buttons on all equipment, removal of any emphasis on work speed and comparative work rates, adequate training in safe keying techniques and the mitigation of stress inducing activities. Finally they demanded greater attention to developing suitable rehabilitation procedures for victims. They also were not prepared to allow Telecom to set the timeframe for a response. “In view of Telecom’s reluctance to issue adequate guidelines on rest breaks,” the union resolved to implement its own. Members were advised “that 10 minute breaks must be taken…after a work period of 50 minutes.”146

As the problem worsened and pressure from the union mounted, Telecom was forced to respond. Dr Bruce Hocking, director of the corporation’s Occupational Health Service, commissioned occupational physician Dr Colin Mills to study and report on incidents of RSI in Perth. He found that 19.5 per cent of the operators surveyed had a diagnosed repetitive injury and a further 24 per cent displayed signs of an emerging problem.147 “Every day that they continue to work in the same environment using the same techniques,” he warned, “they risk progression of their injury.” As for the remainder, “the prevalence of RIS (sic) indicates that the risk of injury to the unaffected operators is high, and justifies immediate action to reduce that risk.”148 In November the union presented Telecom with a draft document on RSI prevention, treatment and rehabilitation, the centrepiece of which was the proposal for a federal RSI taskforce comprising senior telecom managers and ATPOA officials which would develop,

145 Interview with Robyn Purse, conducted by the author on 27 November 2002. Purse commenced work with PMG in 1973. RSI in her hand, shoulder and neck forced her off work for 18 weeks in 1985 and finished her career as an operator completely. She returned to clerical duties in Telecom, and remained an employee until accepting redundancy in 1993. She is critical of the ATPOA for not doing enough for the first wave of RSI victims. She was instrumental in organising a support group for RSI sufferers which she believes made it easier for those who came later. 146 ibid. 147 Dr Bruce Hocking, Survey: Repetition Injury Syndrome, Telecom Operators Using Screened Based Equipment, Western Australia, August 1984, preface & p. 1. Held with Federal Council Minutes. 148 ibid., p. 27.

331 implement and monitor a comprehensive prevention, treatment and rehabilitation programme.149 By 29 November Telecom had agreed.150

By February 1985 the number of reported RSI cases in ATPOA work areas had risen to around 1200, an increase of 630 per cent in an eight month period coinciding with a sharp increase in the cutover from manual to automatic exchanges operating screen- based equipment. The union committed substantial time and resources to the taskforce whose brief, on the union’s insistence, incorporated all aspects of worklife that could contribute to an increased risk of RSI. Sylvia Hall represented the union on the taskforce, along with Gary Sattler from the New South Wales branch, and together they devoted many hours to its success. With the epidemic estimated to cost Telecom about $12 million for the year, management faced substantial pressure to deal seriously with the taskforce and its recommendations.151 All the same, three months after the taskforce report was released in April 1985, the union found cause to complain that the only recommendation dealt with by Telecom were “the easy ones.” The journal criticised Telecom’s tendency to classify certain causal factors of RSI as “environmental” and thus beyond the scope of intervention.152 Management were said to be singularly unimpressed by the report’s chapter on Management Philosophy/Style which Hall had insisted being included. The chapter argued that RSI was a symptom of a wider problem that needed addressing if any other initiatives were to be effective:

This wider problem…concerns the management philosophy and resultant management style that has evolved within Telecom and appears to be primarily one which is task orientated without sufficient or appropriate regard for human factors.153

The report went on, “in the design of equipment and the way it has been introduced, the human factors have been overridden by technical and commercial considerations.” This had contributed to “low morale, high absenteeism, diminishing job commitment,

149 Agreement between ATPOA & Telecom: RSI prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Programme, p.4. Held with Federal Council Minutes. 150 Telephone Echo, Jan-Feb, 1985, p. 3. 151 ibid. 152 Telephone Echo, July-Aug, 1985, p. 2. 153 Telecom/ATPOA Taskforce Report to the Principals on RSI in Manual Assistance Areas, April 1985, p. 27.

332 feelings of alienation, low organisational esteem, etc. as well as the significant RSI problems.”154

While management were slow to change the habits built up over almost ninety years of controlling and exploiting telephonists as appendages of the machine, they did eventually implement some of the less holistic recommendations. From September 1985 telephonists working some of the screen-based equipment had the option of controlling calls manually or through the automatic system. Automatic redial on ‘1100’ services began to be phased in beginning with Western Australia and South Australia. A new group was set up to undertake task analysis studies of various kinds of automatic exchanges with a view to identifying equipment features and work practices that adversely effect operators’ health.155 Wrist rests were eventually introduced. As important as these measures were, however, their impact took effect only slowly. Twelve months after the taskforce report was released, RSI had become an even larger scourge. According to figures published by the union, over one quarter of all operators in Australia were afflicted with RSI by March 1986 (see Table 8A).

Table 8A: RSI rates amongst Telecom Operators.156 State % of Operators with RSI Western Australia 52 Tasmania 57 South Australia 28 New South Wales 17 Victoria 33 Queensland 23 National 26

The scale of the problem was matched only by its devastating impact on victims. As Robyn Purse recalls, “we were dealing with people who were really on an emotional

154 ibid., p. 28. 155 Telephone Echo, Sept-Oct 1985, pp. 2-3.

156 Telephone Echo, March-April 1986, p. 7.

333 roller coaster. There were several girls who I knew who actually committed suicide, it affected them so badly. This thing just went right across your life.”157

‘Telecom Cuts You Dead’: The Fight for Jobs

By 1982 the future for telephonists was looking bleak. On the political stage, attention had turned to the public inquiry into telecommunications services, established by the Fraser Government in 1981 to investigate the potential for private sector involvement in the industry. Chaired by J.A. Davidson, Chairman of Commonwealth Industrial Gases Ltd, the inquiry was seen by the ATPOA and other Telecom unions as a threat to the future of the corporation as a public enterprise. When its report was tabled in Parliament on 28 October 1982, the union’s fears were vindicated, and the ATPOA embarked on a media campaign with other unions to defend state-owned telecommunications.158

The more immediate threat came from Telecom itself. Manual country exchanges were disappearing rapidly and even workers in the newer MACS were under threat from Telecom’s relentless drive to maximise productivity and minimise costs through labour- saving technology. The centrepiece of Telecom’s strategy was the MAC Plan, which had been a subterranean stream beneath many of the clashes in 1981 but had rarely risen to the surface in its own right. In December 1981, without any attempt at consultation, Telecom released a new version of the plan featuring a more centralised configuration of Directory Assistance services and manual traffic handling across the state networks.159

New South Wales responded by announcing a “huge campaign”of publicity costing around $30 000.160 In March, under the slogan ‘Telecom Cuts You Dead’, the branch released radio advertisements, posters and leaflets targeting eleven towns affected by the planned closure of the sixteen MACs. Public petitions, delegations to local politicians and media interviews were used to press home the point. Letters were sent to

157 Interview with Robyn Purse, 27 November 2002. 158 Moyal, Clear Across Australia, pp. 380-83; Reinecke & Schultz, The Phone Book, pp. 199-225; Federal Council Minutes, 23 November 1982. 159 Federal Council Minutes, 9-10 February, 1982; Queensland Branch Minutes, 20 January 1982. 160 Federal Council Minutes, 9-10 February, 1982.

334 politicians from local lodges of the miners’ union and the teachers’ union, pointing out the importance of local exchanges to their industry and the community at large.161 The branch’s Industrial Officer, Graeme Thomson, outlined an alternative MAC Plan based on accepting the technology but preserving regional MACs by programming the system to return calls to the local centre. The plan, he argued, aimed “to use modern technology to provide a high local service, to save jobs, to maintain decentralized exchanges and to yield reasonable profits.”162

Western Australian ATPOA members launched a similar campaign over the closure of Northam exchange, Jennifer Lockwood reporting the ATPOA had attracted support from federal and state parliamentarians while the town and the emergency services were “totally behind the ATPOA position.”163 Meanwhile Victorian members also used the media and local events to build community and political support against the closure of Hamilton, Horsham, Swan Hill, Dromana and Frankston MACs which would cost these areas around 120 operator jobs.164 In May a federal and New South Wales delegation visited Canberra to lobby all parties and present petitions.165 As a direct consequence of these various activities, Ian Sinclair, Minister for Communications, announced in Parliament on 6 May that “the Government had asked Telecom to ensure that, before any final decisions are made about any of the centres being closed, the matters are referred back to the Government.”166

Although interpreted by the union as a moratorium on closures, it was an illusory victory. As Telephone Echo reported in July, “throughout the Commission technical conversion and building work has continued without any noticeable sign of regard for the decision of Mr Sinclair…” Telecom justified this belligerence by interpreting the ministerial edict as referring only to exchanges listed for closure during 1982/83.167 They then proceeded to treat the government review of their plan with contempt, prompting the union’s national conference in July to note that Telecom regarded the

161 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 16, letter from L. Moore, Lithgow District Secretary, Australian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation, to A.J. Mackenzie, Federal Member for Calare, and letter from David Griffiths, Secretary, Moree Branch NSW Teachers’ Federation, to D. Griffiths and NSW ATPOA. 162 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 23 February 1982; Telephone Echo, May- June 1982, p. 5. 163 Telephone Echo, March-April 1982, p. 3. 164 Telephone Echo, May-June 1982, p. 3. 165 ibid., p. 2. 166 Cited in Telephone Echo, May-June 1982, p. 7. 167 Telephone Echo, July-Aug 1982, p. 2.

335 review “as being of no consequence and that the interests of staff and the community are of little import.” Conference also resolved to submit the union’s alternative MAC plan to the new minister, Neil Brown.168 While significant as a critique of Telecom’s commercial philosophy and an enunciation of an alternative vision for telecommunications, it too amounted to little in the actual struggle. By October, Federal Council had to acknowledge the union was yet to make a dent in Telecom’s schedule.169

If the macro level struggle over the shape of the network did not go the union’s way in 1982, battles over the smaller but related issues of the supervisory structure and the introduction of computerised directory assistance services proved equally frustrating. The mid-1981members’ revolt against extending the Gabba trial had effectively quarantined the higher pay won by Gabba. On 17 February 1982 a Queensland branch general meeting decided to mount a breakout bid as Telecom prepared to cutover to the new 10C exchange installed at Edison. Members resolved “that no work be undertaken on 10C or any other computerised equipment until current ‘Gabba salaries are extended to all computerised areas in Brisbane MTX.” They further decided that “a stop work meeting be held to consider a total ban on training in any computerised area until the salaries and staff structure of computerised MACs are settled satisfactorily.”170

Whereas Western Australia’s Jennifer Lockwood had supported the Queenslanders in the 1980 showdown, this time Williams had no ally at federal level. The April 1981 resolution quarantining the structure to 48 Gabba positions was reaffirmed with the support of all other branches. In addition, Hall successfully moved a resolution which clearly allowed for another federal intervention into the Queensland branch171 Brown then made the threat explicit. Federal Council did not want to take over the dispute, she claimed, “but would have to if it is not resolved and if Telecom give notice of withdrawing from the current review.”172

On the 18 March, members at the Gabba, Edison and Central, Nambour, Toowoomba and Southport exchanges stopped work to consider the supervisory review. On

168 Minutes of the 25th ATPOA National Conference, 5-9 July, 1982; Telephone Echo, Sept-Oct 1982, pp. 2 & 5. 169 Federal Council Minutes, 14-15 October, 1982. 170 Queensland Branch Minutes, 17 February 1982. 171 ibid. 172 ibid.

336 Williams’ invitation, Brown and Hall bravely agreed to put their case in person. After all three had presented reports and fielded questions, two key motions moved by Jean Bowden were put to members. Only one person at any of the four meeting sites voted against the first motion, none voted against the second:

1. That this meeting considers the Federal Council is wrong in bowing to threats and pressure by Telecom and that it is not ultimately in the interests of any members to continue to go into new computerised areas without any firm undertakings on a specific and reasonable time-table for a supervisory/staff structure and associated salaries. However, because other states object to our proposed bans, it is resolved in the interests of union unity, to defer any proposed action until states have had the opportunity to vote on the following foreshadowed motion.

2. That this meeting calls on all states to consider the imposition of a ban on training for any new computerised area until Telecom has given a firm undertaking on a specific and reasonable time-table for supervisory/staff structure and associate salaries.173

It was, yet again, powerful evidence of the strength of the Queensland membership in the face of opposition from Telecom and sections of their own leadership.

In early August Queensland unilaterally reimposed a ban after Telecom failed to meet its own deadlines for providing a proposal on the supervisory structure and an associated salary offer. On this occasion interstate support seemed more likely. On the 6th August, New South Wales, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland Federal Council representatives voted as a majority to recommend that all states place bans on training and staffing of new computerised exchanges.174 In the end, though, only New South Wales Branch Council endorsed the federal resolution. Facing isolation once more, Queensland members opted to suspend their ban again.175 The impetus was slipping away.

173 Minutes of ATPOA stop work meeting, Trades Hall Brisbane, 18 March 1982. Held with Queensland Branch Minutes. 174 Federal Council Minutes, 6 August 1982. 175 Queensland Branch Minutes, 13 August 1982.

337

In November Telecom announced it would implement its preferred structure regardless of the objections of the supervisors and the union. With doubts growing over the ATPOA’s ability to have any effect on Telecom’s behaviour, some union leaders began talking up the Labor Party as a solution to their problems. Federal Labor’s victory in March 1983 was welcomed by a Telephone Echo banner headline “Labor Government Offers Workers a Real Future” and Sylvia Hall’s accompanying editorial offered the view that “what we hope we have gained by the March 5 result is a Government that wants Telecom to succeed and who want to co-operate with the Commission’s 88,000 employees.”176 In the event, Labor’s notion of a successful Telecom would prove to have little in common with that of Telecom’s employees, while its notion of co- operation was perhaps best illustrated by the Prices and Incomes Accord, a compact underpinned by an agenda of wage restraint, deregulation and economic restructuring.

ATPOA members at all levels soon realised that Labor’s victory meant business as usual for Telecom managers. In June the ATPOA was summonsed to a meeting at the corporation’s Melbourne headquarters. Expecting the worst, the union arranged for media representatives to accompany them. By agreement, the journalists waited outside while the union delegation rode the lifts to the boardroom to hear management’s ‘presentation’ on their new MAC plan and its impact on jobs. For the first time Telecom went someway towards revealing the full scale of the cuts they were planning. Their first salvo conceded that some 2137 full-time positions would be made redundant. When later figures revealed losses of an additional 800 directory assistance jobs and around 268 part-time positions, the total came to over 3200 jobs, a figure close to the union’s own prior estimates.

Yet even the 2137 lost positions admitted to at the 8 June meeting was a massive slice out of a workforce numbering 7952 at the end of June 1983, and a catastrophic blow to workers in a period of high unemployment. As one telephonist at the Campbelltown Exchange observed, over 50 per cent of her colleagues were breadwinners and many supported children on their own. “Nobody works here for pin money,” she told the union.177 Industrial Officer Graeme Thomson estimated that out of 3000 workers the

176 Telephone Echo, March-April 1983, p. 1. 177 ATPOA Reportback, No. 21, June/July 1983, p. 3.

338 union had calculated beforehand as at risk of retrenchment, only 1000 would not be eligible for support from Social Security, presumably because they had spouses receiving a wage. Of the remaining 2000, 1200 would be forced onto the dole and 800 were single parents who would have to rely on the sole parent’s pension.178 For these workers a job and a steady wage were not something to be given up lightly.

For others, their job was about their own independence. Returning to her old occupation in 1969 after 17 years, Jean Bowden “felt empowered just to get out of the house.” For her and other older married women like her, “that bit of money was our power, and it gave us power to feel power about other things.”179 Money was not the only dimension of this. Lorraine O’Donoghue became a telephonist in 1987 after raising a family. She recalls her motivation: “I was 47, I’d been at home for 22 years, and I was a bit sick of being imposed on.”180 When Williams asked O’Donoghue what she enjoyed most about rejoining the paid workforce, she replied: “For so many years I’ve been mum, the missus, Mrs O’Donoghue. Suddenly I’m Lorraine again.”181

All of this, however, mattered little to Telecom. On 8 June they delivered their announcement, apparently oblivious to the storm that was about to break. On hearing the ‘news’, the union representatives in the meeting managed to alert the waiting media who immediately requested an interview with management over reports of mass redundancies. The meeting broke up in a furore as managers, having just announced the decimation of over 2000 jobs, railed against the union’s lack of ethics and declared the job cuts “were not for public debate.” The story broke around the country later that day, giving the union an early propaganda advantage in the struggle that they were about to launch.182

The next day Federal Council, meeting in Melbourne, called upon Telecom and the Government for an immediate moratorium on any further job losses.183 In Sydney at

178 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Carton 1, Moratorium Dispute, telex from Graeme Thomson, NSW Branch, to Sylvia Hall, undated. 179 Interview with Jean Bowden, 20-21 October 2000. 180 Interview with Lorraine O’Donoghue, conducted by the author on 7 June 2001. O’Donoghue’s Telecom career spanned the tumultuous years from 1977 to 1987. She was active in the union for most of this period, and served as Queensland Branch President from 1984 until her retirement. She is a life member of the union. 181 Interview with Joyce Williams, 10 August 2001. 182 Interview with David Irons, 1 November 2001; Telephone Echo, July-Aug 1983, p. 4. 183 Federal Council Minutes, 9 June 1983.

339 least 700 and by some estimates more than 1000 members stopped work and rallied outside Telecom House in protest at Telecom’s revelation.184 Media coverage of the picket and an ATPOA press conference the same day ensured the story featured again on news bulletins that evening and in newspapers the next morning. By the end of the week, the ACTU had also telexed the Government with a call to support the moratorium, and messages of support from other unions were being received by the ATPOA.185

On 15 June union officials met with Telecom again and submitted a claim demanding a moratorium and a job study with a view to maximising employment opportunities and security within the enterprise. Telecom refused. The next morning Federal Council decided to call a national stop work meeting on Thursday 23 June to endorse a campaign of industrial action.186 Later in the day union representatives met with Communications Minister, Michael Duffy, who agreed to contact Telecom. Management responded with an offer to freeze MAC closures until September, which the union rejected as insignificant.187 On 23 June ATPOA members across the country walked off the job to consider a package of industrial bans in a bid to save their industry. The following sanctions were proposed as a first step:

(a) All operators to use standard phrase of “good morning/afternoon/evening, may I help you” and finish “thank you for calling” and to give maximum service at all times.

(b) 1100 operators to connect ‘coins no service’ calls without query and without metering.

(c) Phonogram operators not to collect coins from public telephones and all telegrams charged at ordinary rate but sent as requested.

(d) Telex operators to charge maximum three minutes.

184 ATPOA Reportback, No.21, June-July 1983, p. 1; Interview with Marilyn Brown, 18 November 2003. 185 Telephone Echo, July-Aug 1983, p. 6. 186 Federal Council Minutes, 16-17 June 1983. 187 Telephone Echo, July-Aug 1983, p. 7.

340 (e) Directory assistance operators to use last call button (or not be preset) and give full search but not STD code information.

(f) Local manual operators to charge maximum three minutes, not collect coins from public telephones and not charge PP or RBP fees.

(g) Non SPC MAC [ie manual exchange] operators to charge maximum three minutes with no PP or RBP charges and not to collect coins from public telephones.

(h) 10C operators to retain all calls on board till all circuits full and dissociate one at a time and not to collect coins from public telephones.

(i) Supervisors not to pass on statistics on traffic, productivity or telephone accounting to Telecom and no oversighting or observation/assessment of operators, assistance given only on request of operator and no PLMs during dispute.188 A second resolution empowered Branch Councils to escalate and extend the action if necessary.189 In a powerful display of anger, a majority of just under 90 per cent - around 3000 workers - supported both resolutions.190

ATPOA members rally outside Telecom House in Sydney on 9 June 1983 to protest Telecom’s announcement of mass redundancies. (Telephone Echo, July/August 1983)

188 Federal Council Minutes, 16-17 June 1983; Telephone Echo, July-Aug 1983, p. 9. 189 ibid. 190 Telephone Echo, July-Aug 1983, p. 9.

341 The action was imposed immediately, and gained wide media coverage. Management reacted as they had in the surcharge ban in 1980 with harassment of ATPOA members on the job for their ‘unlawful behaviour’, and negotiations at higher levels for a settlement. On Friday 1 July, just over one week into the industrial campaign, Telecom capitulated. For Sylvia Hall, it was a vindication of the efficacy of industrial action. Prior to the stop work meetings, she wrote, “we had got precious little from Telecom and even less from the Government. All the negotiating, talking, statistics, arguments, facts and figures had not moved Telecom one iota. Two weeks of lobbying and press had brought nothing…” A week of action and associated publicity, by contrast, had produced Telecom’s first definite offer acceptable to the union. The lesson? “Industrial action does pay off.”191

On 5 July members at on-duty meetings across the country voted to lift all bans, satisfied that the terms of settlement at least required Telecom to negotiate.192 In the context of three years of management stonewalling, subterfuge and sheer arrogance, this seemed a significant breakthrough. The cover of the July issue of Telephone Echo carried a photograph of one of the mass meetings beneath the banner headline “MAC Technology Dispute VICTORY!”193 And indeed it many respects it was one of the most decisive victories of the era. Telecom had agreed to a moratorium on MAC closures (apart from Wyndham and Longreach) and all job cuts until 31 January 1984 with the possibility of an extension should negotiations fail to produce agreement by that date. It committed itself to achieving a no-retrenchment solution to excess staff and to provide additional assistance to redundant manual exchange staff in finding alternative employment. Crucially it agreed to jointly convene a study of ways to maintain employment in ATPOA work areas.194

In the long history of Australian telephony, this was the only occasion that management had consented to consultation with its exchange workforce over such fundamental issues as the type and level of service provided, and one of only a few instances of such a consultative framework in any Australian industry. But there was a paradoxical quality to this milestone. On the one hand, it testified to the power of ATPOA members

191 ibid., p. 8. 192 ibid. p. 7. 193 ibid., cover. 194 ibid., p. 5.

342 to impose their collective will on an organisation whose attitude towards them had rarely risen above contemptuous disinterest or calculating paternalism. By the same token, the ATPOA’s stand marks the desperation of a workforce that felt its future could no longer be trusted to the familiar contours of public service unionism. The old social contract that had guaranteed a level of job security and status above the labour market standard in exchange for accepting managerial prerogatives had broken down under the weight of management’s increasing orientation to the market. The ATPOA realised they had to assert their rights or perish. Even in forcing Telecom to commit to the jobs study, few believed they had won more than a reprieve. As Hall bluntly put it, the settlement “guaranteed for us a breathing space, but it did not and still doesn’t guarantee us a future.” The union, she claimed, was entering the most crucial 12 months of its existence.195

The New ATPOA

By then the ATPOA was unrecognisable from the union it had been ten years before. Even a contemporary observer astute enough to recognise the transformation underway in the ATPOA from 1967 to 1975 would have been amazed by the union it had become by 1984. Although the earlier period provided the preconditions for the wave of anger and militancy that broke over Telecom after 1975, the energy and direction of the surge could not have been predicted beforehand. The unionism of the Telecom era created its own dynamic, each campaign, each issue, building on the transformative power of the one before, each nourished by the wider forces of ‘rage’ that characterised the Fraser years. With each new moment, workers became less tolerant of the forces they came to believe were conspiring against them. As Joyce Williams commented, they would no longer “cop the discipline that was being handed out in the 50s and even the 60s. They wouldn’t cop that sort of thing at all.”196 Less forcefully but no less powerfully, Eva Baird, a telephonist since 1938, explained the transformation this way: “I was always in the union from the time I started work. But I always had the idea that in the public

195 Telephone Echo, Sept-Oct 1983, p. 8. 196 Interview with Joyce Williams, 10 August 2001.

343 service you couldn’t sort of fight anything. If you were told to do it, you did it. But then we found out that you could try and have things [changed].”197

The act of standing together against Telecom’s agenda precipitated new relationships and new areas of solidarity that found expression in the union’s policies and decisions. In 1977 the union sent Jean Bowden as its delegate to the Working Women’s Charter Conference in Sydney.198 It lent its support to the struggle for civil liberties in Queensland.199 Gay men in the ATPOA, particularly in Sydney, took up issues of discrimination and won support within union forums. In 1978 the New South Wales branch sent six delegates to the Fourth National Homosexual Conference, and in1984 another milestone was achieved when a general meeting of the New South Wales branch instructed the federal office to start negotiations with Telecom and the Commonwealth Superannuation Board to attain equal rights for homosexual employees.200

New South Wales led the union in other social struggles too. A general meeting in 1982 instructed the secretary to write to the Mayor, Council and Town Clerk of Nowra “protesting their action in refusing to allow the Aboriginal flag to be flown on National Aborigine Day and in burning an effigy of it.”201 In Queensland, the union passed resolutions of support in 1982 for local railway workers, suspended from their jobs for striking for a shorter working week.202 In 1985 the union would actively back the South East Queensland Electricity Board (SEQEB) linesmen who were sacked for taking industrial action against the introduction of individual, non-union contracts. On 20 February that year ATPOA members in the Brisbane phonogram and telex area imposed bans on all telegraph and telex traffic to and from Queensland Cabinet Ministers, SEQEB and the Queensland Electricity Commission.203 The branch supported the

197 Interview with Eva Baird, conducted by author on 12 September 2001. Baird started as a telephonist in Brisbane Central Exchange straight from school in 1938. She retired in 1978 after 40 unbroken years of service which saw her perform every job in the exchange except Observations. “I hated the observations,” she told this author. “They had the observations room which I reckon was always wrong.” 198 Queensland Branch Minutes, 10 August 1977. 199 Queensland Branch Minutes, 9 November 1977; Minutes of the 23rd ATPOA National Conference, 30 October – 3 November 1978. 200 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 5, NSW Branch Minutes, 8 August 1978, 5 September 1978; NBAC, ANU. Z320 Carton 9, Report of the Fourth National Homosexual Conference, Sydney, 24-27 August 1978; NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 7, NSW Branch Minutes, 19 June 1984. 201 NBAC, ANU. ATPOA, Z320 Box 6, NSW Branch Minutes, 20 July 1982. 202 Qld Branch Minutes, 18 August 1982. 203 ATPOA Newsheet, Qld Branch, 20 February 1985. Held with Queensland Branch Minutes.

344 general mass meetings across the state on 15 March, held under the direction of the Queensland Trades and Labor Council.204 It donated $5000 to the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) to support the sacked workers.205 It invited two of the workers, Rob Elliott and Neil Burrows, to address its general meeting on 17 April and followed up by encouraging all members to levy an appropriate amount from each pay to assist the linesmen while they remained out of work.206 For its part, the Federal Council donated $1000 to the ACTU Fighting Fund for the dispute and an additional $3000 to the sacked ETU members.207

Notionally free of the shackles of public service ideology and the straitjacket of gender conventions, ATPOA members as a group had fashioned a new independent identity that redrew the boundaries between ally and enemy. It reached out, albeit tentatively, to workers outside the ATPOA, not just as industrial allies but also insofar as they too may have been victims of gender, racial or sexual oppression. In this respect the new ATPOA identity interpellated a multi-dimensional and inclusive conception of class. On the other hand, it was an oppositional identity, defined in relation to a power structure which clearly demarcated ‘the workers’ from those who would exploit and harm them, an amorphous group which at any one time could include Telecom management, the Government (federal and state), big business and unsympathetic media. Against this Other, ATPOA members created a positive sense of themselves as workers and trade unionists, drawing no particular distinction between the two.

Through the agency of the ATPOA they also tapped a subterranean stream of producerist ideology to shape this worker-trade unionist persona into a form which emphasised a sense of independent custodianship over the service they provided to the community. Union propaganda insisted that telephonists and their labour rather than the corporation or the state constituted the common-good in the provision of telephony. Its 1983-84 Community Enquiry into customer needs, for instance, linked the decimation of ATPOA jobs to an assertion that Telecom was abrogating its “social responsibility to provide adequate telecommunications services to all Australians.”208 Only the ATPOA,

204 ATPOA Newsheet, Qld Branch, date unknown. Held with Queensland Branch Minutes. 205 Queensland Branch Minutes, 17 April 1985. 206 ibid. 207 Federal Council Minutes, 7 March 1985, 26 April 1985. 208 Telephone Echo, Nov/Dec 1983, p. 3.

345 it argued, was genuinely committed to finding out and advocating what the community actually wanted from its telephone network. From a rank and file perspective, Mary- Anne O’Neill asserts that “everyone was really proud of what they did. It wasn’t really a glamorous job because they treated us like crap but people really liked the stuff they did.” Although workers reacted strongly to automation because their own jobs were under threat, O’Neill believes they were also motivated by a deep sense of outrage over the future of telephony as they knew it. “There was a lot of ownership about the whole thing and you all felt…I don’t know, people just felt it was wrong.”209 Robyn Purse suggests this pride was especially pronounced amongst longer serving telephonists who had known the old manual services.210

ATPOA members defending jobs and services, 1983. (Telephone Echo, July/August 1983)

The corporation miscalculated this mood completely. As the union’s New South Wales journal put it, Telecom had always regarded them as expendable because they were “just a bunch of sheilas.”211 To Telecom’s amazement, by the late 1970s the sheilas and their male colleagues in the telephone exchanges were no longer acting to script. As 700

209 Interview with Mary-Anne O’Neill, 2 September 2004. 210 Interview with Robyn Purse, 27 November 2002. 211 ATPOA Reportback, No.21, June/July 1983, p. 1.

346 or more walked off the job and rallied angrily and noisily outside the Sydney headquarters in 1983 after the axing of 2000 jobs was announced, senior managers locked the doors and stood around inside stunned and speechless.212 The telephonists they once knew had gone, replaced by a belligerent rank and file mass which refused to be cowered by corporate power. As Mary-Anne O’Neill remembers it, “for a while there we really thought we could make a permanent difference.”213 For the managers it was a disturbing possibility. Once they recovered their composure, the experience of the ATPOA rebellion appears to have reinforced the view that the most effective industrial relations strategy was to push ahead with replacing people with machines. Like Electrical Engineer Hesketh in 1912, they confronted the fact “that in the Commonwealth Telephone Service, the difficulty of obtaining a well-disciplined staff is increasing’; as with Hesketh, automation was the most comprehensive solution imaginable.214

212 Interview with Marilyn Brown, 18 November 2003. 213 Interview with Mary-Anne O’Neill, 2 September 2004. 214 PMG Dept Annual Report, 1912-13, p. 36.

347 Chapter Nine Eclipse, 1985-1988

If the transformation and resurgence of the ATPOA from 1969 to 1984 led many telephonists to believe they “could make a permanent difference”, the four years that followed appeared to expose a contrary reality. Notwithstanding the workers’ determined resistance over preceding years, the downward spiral of telephony as a source of employment soon picked up pace again as Telecom, driven by neo-liberal prescriptions and its own commercial imperatives, overcame the ATPOA challenge to forge ahead with replacing the network’s living labour with mainframes and electronic circuitry. By 1987, the depletion of the occupation had forced the union to turn once again to the amalgamation option. This time there would be no drawing back.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the optimism engendered by the successes of the ATPOA’s earlier mass campaigns as misplaced or irrational, simply on the basis of the eventual outcome, as if capital’s ‘ultimate’ triumph was a matter of decreed fate, the product of some iron law of history, or a manifestation of market capitalism as the end of history, in the manner proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama.1 Such nostrums are no less deterministic than the supra-historical schemas on which predictions of the ultimate triumph of the proletariat are based. They deploy, to use Daniel Bensaid’s words, a “retrospective illusion whereby a society invariably tends to conceive the past as its necessary genesis.” Using history as the arbiter of history, they invoke a ruthlessly circular and normative conception of the passage of events from moment to moment: “the unilateral relationship of the latest form to past forms eliminates an abundance of possibilities, and mutilates necessity by severing it from the relevant chance.” This circle, writes Bensaid, must be broken. The notion of a normative state must be rejected. To this end, he offers a Marxism built on the necessity and contingency of the moment. Marx, he argues, aimed “to disentangle a bundle of possibilities – not to predict the necessary course of history, but to think [through] the bifurcations emerging out of the present.”2 For Bensaid, like Marx, “every instant witnesses a confrontation between the rational and the irrational, between possibilities that attain effective history and those

1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2 Daniel Bensaid, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, translated Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2002), p. 26.

348 that are provisionally or definitively eliminated. The struggle alone decides between them.”3

Adopting Bensaid’s perspective, the reasons telephonists failed to defend their occupation successfully will not be found in axioms positing the superiority of capitalist rationality over labour utopianism or the inevitability of technological progress, but in the particularities of the struggle and its constraints. Here struggle includes not only the conflict between governments and Telecom managers, on the one hand, and the ATPOA on the other, but also the wider struggle between capital and labour. In this sphere, a number of structural, political and ideological factors operated to contain and ultimately overcome the ATPOA’s challenge to the Telecom agenda. This chapter sets out to identify these factors as they shaped the struggle of telephonists from 1984 to the ATPOA’s disappearance as a separate entity in 1988. In narrating and analysing some of the key events of the period, it approaches them with an eye to the contingency of the moment and with due attention to what could have been. It recognises that the factors extrapolated to ‘explain’ the actual development of events always resonate with a potential to effect change in other, unrealised directions, while their explanatory power often rests simply on the absence or weakness of countervailing elements. Thus the triumph of the actual over the potential course of history is not assumed in this chapter but is the principal question under investigation.

From Job Study to Green Book Agreement

Following the union’s dramatic 1983 campaign to defend the occupation against mass redundancy, attention turned to the Job Study agreed to in the terms of settlement. ATPOA representatives on the Study negotiating team were Sylvia Hall, Marilyn Brown and Joyce Williams, the three leaders who had done most to facilitate the emergence of the new ATPOA, despite their own conflicts. The ACTU was represented on the team by Jenny Acton. Each state appointed a convenor to compile reports based on the specific needs of branches and the ideas generated by members at specially convened seminars and training sessions. At a special federal conference held at Clyde Cameron College from 3 to 5 October 1983, the information from the various branch

3 ibid., p. 89.

349 reports, the concomitant community enquiry conducted by the union, and an overall report on MACs produced by the consultancy firm Logica was distilled into a MAC policy based on the overarching principle that “new technologies and the organisation of work involving those new technologies in the operator services area should result in an improvement of the services offered to subscribers and an enhancement of working conditions of members who provide those services.”

The policy formed the basis of the twelve page proposal the union would take into negotiations with Telecom. By 6 February 1984 the union and Telecom had a draft agreement which Federal Council unanimously decided would provide for the employment security of ATPOA members and the organised implementation and ongoing review of the MAC plan.4 On 28 February members nationwide attended meetings to consider an official recommendation to accept the proposals. All branches returned overwhelming votes in favour, with a total count of 2965 votes for the deal and 69 against.5

The document, soon to be referred to as the Green Book Agreement, set out in detail Telecom’s obligations and commitments with regard employment policy, manual assistance management and recruitment and redeployment.6 It enshrined much of the ATPOA’s demands, leading Sylvia Hall to claim at the time it was “unequivocally a massive victory for [ the] ATPOA.”7

There can be little doubt that as a statement of principles it was as every bit a breakthrough for the ATPOA as the ‘Technological Change’ protocols had been for the ATEA after their momentous struggle against Telecom in 1978.8 The Green Book enshrined ATPOA’s right to be consulted when significant, potentially detrimental changes were being planned or indeed in any reviews of the MAC plan. It mapped out

4 Federal Council Minutes, 6-7 February 1984. 5 Minutes of on-duty meeting, Victoria, 28 February 1984. Held with Victorian Branch Minutes. 6 Agreement between the ATPOA and Telecom Australia, 29 February 1984. Held with Federal Council Minutes. 7 Telephone Echo, March-April 1984, p.3. 8 As a result of the ATEA’s militant campaign in 1978, Telecom’s Telecommunications Consultative Council issued a document entitled ‘Considerations of the Introduction of Technological Change’ which the ATEA eventually endorsed as a framework for assessing and negotiating the introduction of new technology. Claire Williams argues that through this and other ATEA campaigns in 1979 and 1981, the union “penetrated managerial prerogatives” and “succeeded more than any other Australian unions in control demands.” Williams, Blue, White and Pink Collar Workers in Australia, p. 44. See also Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 334.

350 service standards and committed Telecom to achieving these with consideration to staffing levels, rostering practices and managerial arrangements. It laid down firm procedures for recruitment, redeployment and relocation which for many years afterwards continued to spoil management’s appetite for unfettered labour force ‘flexibility’ and ‘downsizing.’ And in the short term it provided for some of the central features of ATPOA policy. It locked Telecom into maintaining MACs at their stated locations with the types of operating positions specified in the MAC Plan until the end of the 1986/87 year. It localised handling of service assistance and emergency calls in country MACs and increased the multifunctionality of many centres.9

Ultimately, though, the agreement must be judged against the issue at the heart of the dispute - jobs. Here the evidence is far less favourable to the union’s claim of an unequivocal victory. By 1987 the numbers of telephonists in Australian Manual Assistance Centres were in freefall and the union’s very survival in question. How did this happen? How did a massive victory slide into a demoralising decline? Was there some act of betrayal? Or was the Green Book an illusory victory to begin with, a mere gesture against the tide of history? In what follows, the search for answers begins with a critique of the union’s reliance on the Agreement and then proceeds to examine some broader factors relating to workplace ideology, occupational consciousness and the limitations of trade unionism.

The Green Book Agreement in Theory and Practice

In 1983, in the lead up to the Green Book negotiations, Ian Reinecke presented the ATPOA with a commissioned report on global trends in telecommunications. The document, The Future of Operator Services, was serialised in Telephone Echo in 1984. A strong advocate of state-ownership for its unique capacity to deliver affordable and equitable access to telephone services, Reinecke criticised Telecom for falling captive to a commercial agenda dictated by the needs of big business. “The pressure to reduce the number of operators is a prelude to a much more ambitious plan to automate the services they provide,” he wrote. With striking prescience, Reinecke foresaw that the capacity to digitalise voice would allow essential voice-based services to be automated

9 Agreement between the ATPOA and Telecom Australia, 29 February 1984.

351 while the telecommunications network as a whole was opened up to data transmission. In his opinion, corporate consumers would be the main beneficiaries: “The integration of voice and data has more to do with the demands of those who wish to communicate electronically than those who do so by voice. That distinction is between business and domestic subscribers.” 10

Reneicke developed two arguments of strategic significance for the ATPOA. He contended that the process of eliminating operators’ jobs was made easier by the social invisibility and devaluing of women’s work generally. “The worth of what operators do has been underestimated, sometimes by themselves,” he observed.11 Stripped of any recognition of the social skills involved in their work, telephonists were defined by a “narrowly-based technocratic view” of their functions, leaving them vulnerable to each new advance in automation technology. To defend their jobs, therefore, operators had to recognise and communicate “the complexity and value of their work.” As Sylvia Hall put it, “the ‘hello girls’ image was the best thing Telecom ever had going for them and I believe it’s the best thing we’ve got going for us. All we’ve got to do is use it.”12

The sooner they did, Reinecke reasoned, the stronger their chance of occupational survival. For once begun, automation imposed its own technological logic on the labour process. Computerisation, like mechanical automation before it, reduced work to a series of narrow and instrumental tasks, each capable of being absorbed into the operation of the technology until few, if any, meaningful roles were left for humans beings. This was not an ad hoc process in which technological change moved casually from one autonomous task to the next, displacing workers with each advance. Rather, in an integrated system like telephony, automation of one part necessarily prefigured the automation of all. As Reinecke observes, “the assumptions designed into the electronic systems are incompatible with the way human beings would do the job.” Here, technology appears to possess an agency of its own. Not only do managers have an economic motivation for introducing new labour-saving techniques into all areas of their enterprise, the enterprise will in fact become dysfunctional if they attempt to restrict new techniques to certain areas. For workers, the consequences are profound.

10 Telephone Echo, July-August 1984, p. 12. 11 ibid., p. 11. 12 Telephone Echo, May-June 1984, p. 9.

352 Once new technology is introduced, workers must intervene early and creatively if they are to have any chance of preserving a place for their unique skills.

Reinecke’s strategic thinking is evident in the ATPOA’s 1984 proposal for a 24-hour Community Information Service providing information and referrals on everything from, as Louise Tarrant suggested, bus timetables in Melbourne’s western suburbs, child care facilities in Fremantle and Chinese painting classes in Townsville.13 As Tarrant explained, such a facility would expand on the unofficial services, or shadow work, to coin Ivan Ilich’s term, traditionally provided by telephonists:

In the past, when small manual exchanges predominated, the telephone exchange stood for much more than just a phone switching centre. It was, in fact, the focal point of the community providing de facto a communication and information centre for the district. Local knowledge and expertise made the service they provided vital to those areas. The coming of advances in technology, such as STD and regionalizing of exchanges did much to alter the nature of the telephone exchange. Much of the ‘unofficial’ role was lost but wherever possible our country telephonists used their local knowledge to give a higher grade of service than would have been the case had they just followed Telecom instructions and directories.14

The new service, she implied, recognised that machines were incapable of replicating the communicative act at the heart of the information transaction. Only humans could provide the level of responsiveness necessary for handling complex and diverse information queries, only humans could provide the social contact that enquirers desired as an outcome in its own right in the information transaction.

Under the terms of the Green Book agreement and with a $10,000 Federal Government grant authorised by Minister for Local Government and Administrative Services, Tom Uren, the ATPOA set about investigating the feasibility of its proposal. Two years later Uren officially launched the union’s scheme at a press conference on 4 February 1986. Tarrant, who had led the project, outlined the basic idea:

13 Telephone Echo, March-April 1984, p. 5. 14 Telephone Echo, March-April 1984, p. 5; Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981).

353

Using modern data-base technology the operation of the service is quite simple. Two positions at every regional MAC, operating on a publicized given level, would provide a 24 hour service. The operator would receive the call, and through the keyboard and screen, bring up the information available on the subject required…It would cost the caller the price of a standard call and so would not discriminate against the lower income groups who are the very people in need of such a service.15

Uren urged Telecom executives to support the initiative, arguing it was “a basic right of all citizens to be able to find out quickly and cheaply about the rights, benefits and services which governments provide.”16

Telecom, however, was unresponsive. It sent representatives to the launch as protocol required but subsequently showed no serious interest in the proposal. On 26 February a Special Federal Council meeting demanded the corporation respond to the scheme by the end of March.17 The deadline passed quietly with no reply from Telecom or further public pressure from the union. For all its merit, the Community Information Service was still-born. The concept of “the socially aware, helpful, local telephonist” which Tarrant and others had worked so diligently to defend through their research and proposals had left the managers of Australia’s telephone network singularly unmoved.18 In March 1987 the union reported that overall, Telecom’s response to the Green Book’s clause on new products had been “slow.” Telecom’s own New Products Section had been integrated into Operator Services and there had been “few concrete gains despite a lot of work and hope by the ATPOA.”19

With the job creation approach all but defunct, the union was forced to rely on a more conventional strategy of defending existing jobs. But here too the interventionist power of the Green Book agreement proved illusory. In the first place the agreement did not cover country manual exchange closures except to the extent of strengthening existing

15 Telephone Echo, March-April 1986, p. 4. 16 ibid. 17 Federal Council Minutes, 25-26 February 1986. 18 Telephone Echo, March-April 1986, p. 4. 19 Telephone Echo, March-April 1987, p. 13.

354 redundancy and redeployment provisions. From 1984 to 1987 manual exchanges in rural areas dropped from 622 to 237. By 1988 there were around seventeen per cent fewer telephonists than in 1983, with country closures the single largest cause of the losses. (see Table 9A).

Table 9A: Telephone Exchanges & Staff, 1983-1988, collated from Telecom Annual Reports20 Year 82/83 83/84 84/85 85/86 86/87 87/88 Exchanges Metro Auto 531 541 535 586 586 N/A Country Auto 4087 4131 4204 4216 4333 N/A Manual 735 622 488 360 237 N/A Telephonists 7518 7038 7070 7032 6315 6220

City MAC operators also found the agreement did not afford them the protection they had hoped. In fact, to the extent the terms of settlement accompanying the Green Book agreement required or at the very least encouraged the cessation of specific union resistance to job destroying measures, it weakened the union’s ability to defend city jobs. In late 1983 Telecom moved to introduce a surcharge on operator assisted international calls. When the Minister allowed the plan to proceed merely on a Telecom assurance that employment would not be adversely affected, the ATPOA implemented a ban, which at one stage the union estimated was costing Telecom $50,000 per day.21 However, even prior to a final draft of the Green Book Agreement being put to members, the Federal Council recommended that the ban be suspended “in the light of the understandings of no retrenchment…and the discussions within the Moratorium/Job Study negotiations to establish a mechanism for consultation prior to tariff changes, and the intention to pursue a public and parliamentary investigation…of OTC’s charging policies.”22 Yet in the final agreement, Telecom’s only obligation to the union with respect to tariff charges was to advise it of changes and the likely employment effects prior to implementation. The union, meanwhile, was compelled to lift all sanctions relating to the matters contained in the agreement, a requirement with considerable catch-all capability. Queensland members, for instance, were obliged to end their bans

20 Telecom Annual Reports, 1983-1988. 21 Federal Council Minutes, 18 January 1984. 22 Federal Council Minutes, 26 January 1984.

355 on training for and staffing of the computerised directory assistance services, the application of ring-back price charges, the application of the operator surcharge on leased coin telephones, and the application of the operator surcharge on calls to public telephones.23

As for the overall commitment to maintaining employment levels, enshrined in the Green Book as a specific undertaking by Telecom that “the total number of telecom staff employed at June 1987 will be at or very close to the June 1984 level”, Telecom’s own figures tell the story. While the corporation’s overall workforce increased by 3999 in this period, 723 fewer telephonists were employed.24 The MAC plan, at core a strategy for maximising productivity and minimising labour costs in telephony, continued on its seemingly inexorable path of job destruction.

The State as Saviour?: Telecom Managers and Labor Governments

Senior ATPOA figures blamed Telecom’s bad faith for the failure of the Green Book and its associated agreements and proposals. In November 1986 Sylvia Hall blasted Telecom for its “sordid history of backsliding and outright dishonesty.” With regard to the Green Book agreement, she wrote:

Telecom have flagrantly abused the use of fixed-term staff, have not introduced one new product that they themselves didn’t plan anyway, have hardly lifted a finger to help redundant members find work and, last, but not least have failed to maintain staffing ratios at a level necessary for the efficient management of MACs.25

Employees, she concluded, were treated like so much horse fodder.

Hall’s frustration was well-founded. Telecom consistently ignored the spirit and often the letter of industrial agreements that did not suit their purposes. Yet the union’s close

23 Minutes of ATPOA stop work meeting, Brisbane, 28 February 1984. Held with Queensland Branch Minutes. 24 PMG Annual Reports, 1983/84, 1986/87. 25 Telephone Echo, November-December 1986, p. 3.

356 dealings with the corporation since 1975 had given them ample reason to anticipate this sort of behaviour. Telecom’s threats to use the Crimes Act against employees during the 1980 wages dispute, its dismissive attitude towards the victims of RSI and shriek, its belated and high-handed 1983 announcement of mass job cuts at a time of high unemployment, and its refusal to negotiate over the future of operator services until rocked by costly industrial action, all pointed to a senior management group with little compunction about circumventing agreements that stood in the way of their preferred course of action. To blame Telecom for the Green Book’s shortcomings is thus somewhat disingenuous. Knowing the opponent, why did the union place so much faith in Telecom abiding by the provisions of the agreement?

Part of the reason lies in the union’s misreading of the underlying cause of Telecom’s belligerence. Here it is useful to return to Reinecke, in many respects the ATPOA’s theorist in these years. As noted in chapter seven, Reinecke developed a powerful critique of the creeping commercialisation of telephony, focusing on the influence of telephony’s corporate suppliers and consumers. Yet his analysis and the strategic thinking that flowed from it were limited by his reliance on a pluralist theory of the state. Reinecke assumed the formal separation of politics and economics characteristic of advanced capitalist society gave the state unlimited autonomy vis a vis the realm of capitalist production and exchange. Standing above the contending economic forces, the state ideally mediated between them or, more likely, fell captive to one bloc or another. In either case, the way was always open for all factions to vie for influence. In this model, parliamentary democracy tipped the scales in favour of the masses and turned the state into an instrument of popular will, a bulwark against the power of big business.

State-controlled economic activity likewise took production out of the hands of the money power and subordinated it to the needs of the people. In turn, the functionaries who ran the state-controlled enterprises were not regarded as managers in the strictly capitalist sense, even though they might be ridiculed as ‘fat cats’ for their power, affluence and lack of any ‘real’ contribution. They were still the people’s servants and their individual or collective behaviour was judged accordingly. The systemic basis for capitalist managerialism in state-run enterprises appeared weak; therefore instances of it could be explained away as personal lapses caused by individual venality, ignorance or the insidious influence of external interest groups. In this light, it was possible for the

357 Green Book agreement to assume overtones that would not have applied to an industrial settlement in the private sector. It spoke to an ideology which, in the last instance, preferred to represent all state functionaries as public servants with interests in common, despite the conflicts they might have from time to time. It thus appeared to reaffirm the old implicit social contract, only this time providing the ATPOA with a greater consultative role in the partnership. As an agreement between parties within a state-run service, moreover, it could appear as a public declaration of political accountability, binding management not only to certain commitments to its employees but also to the community at large. It could appear, in short, to possess a binding power beyond the realm of the law.

All of this was indeed mere appearance. The personnel occupying executive positions in Telecom were in fact no more functionaries of the people than they were pawns of the business elite. Rather, Telecom management embodied ruling class interests, both as an elite stratum in its own right and in its supportive relationship with capitalism at large. As chapter seven argued, the organisation’s senior managers had a long history of endeavouring to maximise their own autonomy vis a vis Treasury and government. They were also naturally committed to the capitalist status quo from which their authority and privileges ultimately derived. It is true, as Boris Frankel observes, that capitalist states are not merely “instruments for the defence and reproduction of capitalism.”26 But as Offe and Ronge explain, they do “protect and sanction…a set of rules and social relationships which are presupposed by the class rule of the capitalist class.”27 In the extreme they defend these rules and relationships with armed force. But even in producing non-commodified use-values (health, education, etc), capitalist states help sustain the economic and political conditions necessary for the production and circulation of all commodities. In return, the state enjoys access to wealth generated in the private sector.

PMG/Telecom (and the functionaries that ran it) can be understood within this matrix. Shifts in policy and organisational restructuring had their origins in the fact that the

26 Boris Frankel, ‘On the State of the State: Marxist Theories of the State after Leninism’ in Anthony Giddens & David Held (eds), Classes, Power, and Conflict: Classic and Contemporary Debates (Berkeley: Univ of Claifornia Press, 1982), p. 272. 27 Claus Offe & Volker Ronge, ‘Theses on the Theory of the State’, in Giddens & Held (eds), Classes, Power, and Conflict, p. 250.

358 symbiotic relationship between state and capitalist production does not take a fixed form. In the twentieth century the relationship found expression in Keynesian and laissez-faire models. Moreover, the intervention of struggle means there was (and is) never an ideal functional ‘fit’ between the state and the purely economic needs of capitalist society. In the interests of stability, the state makes concessions to organised labour, and mediates between competing sections of capital.

Taken together, these factors ‘explain’ the broad history of PMG/Telecom as a state entity up to the late 1970s, as well as its subsequent turn to the market. Nationalised industries and services and the social expenditure of the welfare state were simply a particular strategy for stable, demand-driven growth fashioned from the war economy and the reforms imposed on the state by earlier working class struggles, culminating in what Bob Jessop has called the “Keynesian welfare national state.”28 But in the long term the dual character of the welfare state – as a concession to labour and a mechanism for its containment - created its own problems. As elements of the social wage, public services were subjected to expansionist pressures which pushed the overall costs higher than they would have been had the services been delivered by private companies. To the extent these costs were financed from taxation siphoned from private sector surplus value, they represented a net gain to labour at capital’s expense.29 This was partly offset by the ensuing increase in workers’ consumption capacity and in the value of their labour power (through improved health and education). Nevertheless, the welfare state overall was an impost on capital, a price it paid for relative class peace. Nationalised production posed an additional problem. As Yaffe points out, state-run industry historically developed around products that were necessary but not profitable.30 Over time, however, many of these became profitable and would come to represent investment opportunities denied to the private sector. In the ideological realm, state- owned production represented an ongoing challenge to the idea that the market was a superior mechanism for mediating economic relationships.

In the circumstances of the long postwar boom little thought was given to these issues. As Richard Nixon famously declared, “We are all Keynesians now.” But underlying

28 Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 255. 29 See David S. Yaffe, ‘ The Marxian Theory of Crisis, Capital and the State’, Economy and Society, Vol. 2 (1973), p. 218. 30 ibid., p. 226.

359 economic problems were beginning to surface, and Nixon’s reading of global economics would soon prove as unreliable as his political judgement. Even as Watergate unfolded, the Keynesian consensus was collapsing. Faced with a global crisis in profitability exacerbated by the OPEC oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, governments and big business turned dramatically to market liberalism. In an effort to lower direct and indirect labour costs and restore rates of profit, capitalist states with conservative or social democratic governments began slashing social expenditure and withdrawing from the economy’s ‘commanding heights’. Telecommunications, transport, gas, water, electricity and banking, even health and education, became neo-liberal targets. In the United States where state-run production has always been relatively weak, the strategy was aimed more at breaking the legacy of the New Deal, that “sozialepolitik of high government spending, capitalist expansion, and growing real incomes for labor that underpinned a modus vivendi between big government, big business and big labor.”31 In foreign policy, it translated into a program of rolling back the “containment liberalism” that had characterised America’s approach to the Cold War.32 Through economic coercion in the form of Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, market economics were exported to the world, delivering unprecedented investment and trade opportunities for American and other First World corporations, and new depths of misery for the mass of the world’s population.33

In North and South, the economic dimensions of the program required and facilitated an ongoing political war against workers and the poor. In the United States, the offensive was launched by the Carter administration and then intensified under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, culminating in the defeat of the Air Traffic Controllers Union in 1981.34 In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher provided capital with the breakthrough it needed by defeating the British miners, paving the way for a sustained attack on living standards generally, while public assets were delivered into private hands.35 In the South, the United States and its allies helped pro-American regimes

31 Walden Bello, Dark Victory: the United States and Global Poverty (London: Pluto, 1999), p.10. 32 ibid., p. 18. 33 ibid., p. 27. 34 See Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy (London: Verso, 2002), p. 51. 35 For details of the strike and its issues, see Alex Callinicos & Mike Simons, The Great Strike: the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 and its Lessons (London: Socialist Worker, 1985), Geoffrey Goodman, The Miners’ Strike (London: Pluto, 1985), Martin Adeney & John Lloyd, The Miners’ Strike 1984-85: Loss Without Limit (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) and Huw Beynon (ed), Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners’ Strike (London: Verso, 1985).

360 crush domestic opposition to pro-market ‘reforms’, and punished governments that refused to buckle under, using military force if necessary.36 Despite substantial resistance, by the 1990s the pattern of privatisation and deregulation was entrenched across most of the North and South, and labour everywhere was in retreat.37

Telecom’s mid-1980s enthusiasm for commercialisation and deregulation, and its rejection of the ATPOA’s labour-intensive approach to community service, must be seen in this light. As it prepared its submission to the Davidson Inquiry into Australian telecommunications, it was only too aware that the Thatcher Government was busily preparing British Telecom for privatisation. Not surprisingly, the Australian corporation set about positioning itself to maximise its opportunities in a new environment of competition. In a classic piece of hedge betting, its submission to the Inquiry sought to protect managers’ commanding place in the existing state hierarchy while openly embracing the underlying neo-liberal rationale for a commodified and deregulated telecommunications sector.38 In the industrial relations sphere, as Ruth Barton observes, “Telstra management…used the opportunity provided by corporatisation, deregulation and the process of partial privatisation to secure managerial prerogatives and position.”39

36 See Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003) and William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (London: Zed Books, 2002). 37 For a lucid overview of the new global economic architecture see Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Malden ( Mas): Polity Press, 2000). Details of the specific role of the IMF and other international financial institutions can be found in Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002). The United States’ position in contemporary international economic arrangements is examined by Bello, Dark Victory (1999), while Robert Brenner has provided a more substantial analysis of the US role in The Boom and the Bubble (2002). For an account of neo-liberalism in Australia, see the collection of articles in Peter Fairbrother et al (eds), Privatisation, Globalisation and Labour: Studies from Australia (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2002). 38 The submission argued that “there is a continuing need for a strong viable national telecommunications authority” and that Telecom “as that authority should remain as a Statutory Body, but modified to recognise the existence of competition and provide appropriate management flexibility.” The desired flexibility included “the opportunity to market profitable services to offset the loss areas” and the “opportunity to compete on equivalent terms” with the private sector. Again, the key goal for Telecom was to free itself from state constraints. Most ominously for the employees, Telecom called for “the freedom to negotiate structural changes in organisation, work methods, and staffing of the organisation. (It is crucial for Telecom to be able to optimise the deployment and use of its workforce as telecommunications technology develops – this will mean changes in roles, relationships, work methods, organisation and therefore the need for industrial relations initiatives specially applicable to the field of telecommunications).” Telecom Australia, Submission to Public Inquiry into Telecommunication Services in Australia, February 1982, pp. 4, 6, 7. 39 Ruth Barton, ‘Internationalising Telecommunications: Telstra’, in Fairbrother et al (eds), Privatisation, Globalisation and Labour, p. 52.

361 The need to “wend a path through the competing tensions” of deregulation, continuing state ownership and eventually partial privatisation at times gave rise to contradictory decision-making within Telecom’s management structures.40 But it never generated a view of Telecom/Telstra as a community-focussed organisation subordinating profit to use-values. On the contrary, as Leo Panitch writes of the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan era, “governments and bureaucrats proudly enveloped themselves in an ideology that proclaimed the necessity of the state’s subordination to the requirements of capital accumulation and markets and even to the norms and opinions of capitalists themselves.”41 For Telecom’s senior administrators, any alternative vision of telephony was outside the realm of the possible, beyond even the realm of the desirable if their own rhetoric about the virtues of the market is to be believed. At best, their proposals and plans were about ‘striking a balance’ between profitable and non-profitable services. Breaching the spirit of the Green Book agreement was not then an act of betrayal for at no stage did management embrace the meaning given to the agreement by the ATPOA. Nor, in the final analysis, would they have been likely to. As for breaching the letter of the agreement, management had only to point to the agreement’s preamble for a defence:

Telecom Australia’s charter requires that it makes its services available throughout Australia so far as is reasonable practicable, that revenue must cover current expenses each year and provide not less than half of capital requirements. Services are to be kept up to date and operated efficiently and economically with charges as low as practicable.42

Even the most modest proposal for a labour-intensive community service could be made to founder on these obstacles.

If the ATPOA’s faith in a social democratic state was shaken by the ‘treachery’ of Telecom managers, it also suffered a blow at the hands of the Labor Party. In 1983 the union donated to the ALP and publicly campaigned for its election on the strength of

40 ibid., p. 51. 41 Leo Panitch, ‘The Improverishment of State Theory’, Socialism and Democracy, 13, 2 (Fall 1999), p. 21. 42 Telephone Echo, March-April 1984, p. 7.

362 Labor’s commitment to keeping Telecom under state control.43 Here too the union would later have reason to feel short-changed. In Australia, the dismantling of the welfare state and the turn to the market were implemented first by the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. For many in the social democratic Left, these were acts of betrayal far more unexpected and difficult to fathom than the market rhetoric of Telecom managers. Here it seemed was a genuine “sell-out.”44 But as Panitch points out, what the world was actually witnessing was a new period marked by refreshing political clarity:

As social democratic regimes…found their freedom of manoeuvre restrained by lower rates of capitalist growth and a renewed ideological militancy on the part of capitalists, they soon abandoned all pretense that the mixed economy had not all along been a capitalist one and that the welfare state had not always been dependent on and necessarily contained within the limits of capitalist accumulation.45

Labor did not privatise Telecom but it did oversee the organisation’s corporatisation in 1988 and open telecommunications up to competition in some areas of service, developments which would prove incalculably useful to John Howard’s Coalition government when it began the privatisation process in 1997.46

With support from the ACTU through the Prices and Incomes Accord, Labor also began the systematic deregulation of the labour market, beginning with the two-tier wage deal in 1986. To win wage rises beyond the two small flat-rate increases awarded under the first tier, unions were compelled to negotiate productivity offsets at an enterprise or industry level. For Telecom, the second tier negotiations provided an opportunity to pressure the ATPOA into trialling the concept of ‘profit centres’ in return for an extra four per cent in wages.47 The scheme required each Manual Assistance Centre to show an actual or theoretical profit based on the fees charged or a pseudo fee where services

43 Federal Council Minutes, 23 February 1983, 9 June 1983; Combined unions’ leaflet for 1983 federal election, calling for a vote for Labor. Filed with Queensland Branch Minutes. Copy in the possession of the author. 44 See, for instance, R.G. Walker & Betty Walker, Privatisation, Sell Off or Sell Out?: the Australian Experience (Sydney: ABC Books, 2003). 45 Panitch, ‘The Improverishment of State Theory’, p. 21. 46 Barton, ‘Internationalising Telecommunications: Telstra’, p. 53. 47 Telephone Echo, August 1987, p. 4.

363 were provided for free. The union, moreover, was expected to work with management to find ways and means to improve profitability.

Whatever the direct commercial merits of the program, it was a turning point for the ATPOA. By committing workers to the idea that employment security and recognition were contingent on commercial viability, Telecom undermined workers’ instinctive adherence to a conception of telephony as a use-based, public service. Workers’ worth (and therefore employability) would no longer be measured by the value of their labour to the community but by the value of their products in the market place, as revealed in the bottom line of the accounts. As Sylvia Hall acknowledged, “in the past our primary concern has been service. Now, service will have to be balanced against profit.”48 Even more damaging, insofar as the project did improve workers’ productivity, the benefits that accrued over and above the cost of the wage rise flowed directly to capital, and were realised as a reduced demand for labour. Far from enhancing employment security, workers’ active support for profit centres hastened their own demise as an occupational group.

Thus the success of the Green Book Agreement as a bulwark against job loss, or more precisely the success of the ATPOA strategy of relying on the Green Book, depended on a level of good-will by the state and the Labor Party that could by delivered only if both institutions acted contrary to the direction in economic policy preferred by the most powerful sections of the Australian ruling class. Since it was these ‘stakeholders’ rather than the consuming or working masses who set the terms under which the particular class interests of Telecom managers were constituted and the decision-making of Labor governments was framed, the likelihood of managerial or governmental compliance with the spirit of the Green Book Agreement was negligible, especially in the absence of ongoing class pressure from the workers themselves. To the extent the ATPOA leadership group chose not to organise such pressure, it can be regarded as a victim of its own flawed understanding of the administrative and parliamentary wings of the Australian capitalist state.

48 ibid.

364 The Limitations of Producerism

The ATPOA also fell victim to the lingering influence of the service mentality. Although the public service ethos was largely dismantled by 1984, traces of the ideology persisted in workers’ own producerist conception of themselves as custodians of telephony’s social value against the debasing impact of the market. Producerism spoke to telephonists’ need for recognition and respect and provided the basis for a worker-community alliance in the defence of operator-assisted services but it also carried across some of the vestiges of the master-servant relationship embodied in the old notion of the public servant. It left intact the responsibility to serve, and simply shifted the formal object of service from the enterprise (or state) to the community. It gave rise to a new identity but one still dominated by a set of restrictive social obligations. Telephonists became producers with an obligation to produce. The entire strategy of limiting industrial campaigns to actions that would disrupt revenue but not harm the community rested on this fundamental premise. More than a tactic to ‘keep the public onside’, it was an expression of the very vision of telephony on which telephonists staked their claim for survival.

This is not to say that community-worker alliances in service industries invariably served to dissuade workers from taking strike action in defence of their interests. But alliances built on notions of service certainly did. For all its positives, in the end the producerism of the ATPOA fatally restricted the workers’ options. The problem can be approached ontologically. The producer is defined as that which she is not. Historically, producerism delimited an identity against the parasitism or laziness of non-producers.49 While there were elements of this in the ATPOA’s world-view, there is a much stronger sense of the producer as the binary opposite of the customer or subscriber, personified typically as a member of the popular classes. In Louise Tarrant’s exposition on the merits of a community information service, for instance, her customers are people using public transport in Melbourne’s western suburbs and child care facilities in Fremantle, and people undertaking Chinese painting classes in Townsville. Here telephonists as producers are defined in relation to a community of ‘ordinary’ consumers, the

49 See Harry Cole and Drew Cottle, ‘Forgotten Labour Beliefs?: Producerist Ideas in Australia’, in Transforming Labour: Work, Workers, Struggle and Change, Proceedings of the Eighth National Labour History Conference, Brisbane, 3-5 October 2003, p. 81.

365 consuming masses. Yet the producer stands apart from this community even though the producer is, in other circumstances, part of it. The community becomes the object to the producer’s subject. It is the projection of the producer’s own alienated labour and appears to the producer as an alien imposition, something it must serve to gain meaning. Under the ATPOA’s producerism, the community can serve as an ally only on the proviso that the producer continues to produce. If she desists, the relationship is severed and the community turns against her. There is no scope for an appeal to longer term interests over the pain of short-term disruption.

Occupational producerism, it should be noted, was not the only basis for building community alliances. Conceptualised not as a mass of atomised consumers but as the aggregated working class in civil society, the community may well have supported strike action by telephonists despite the short-term inconvenience. In any case, faced with Telecom’s continuing belligerence, the ATPOA needed the freedom to pursue strike action notwithstanding its relationship with the community, for it is difficult to conceive any milder sanction curbing the Telecom technological juggernaut. The moral claim on the community’s support engendered by the strategy of hurting the employer and helping the customer did little to tip the balance of power the ATPOA’s way. The complete withdrawal of labour may have given it a fighting chance.

But would it have given it anything more? Having achieved significant gains with industrial pressure, it could be said the ATPOA was short-sighted for withdrawing from the field of battle once the Green Book agreement was signed. Ultimately, though, their problem may have been more than a case of mis-placed trust. If the workers and their leaders were guilty of looking too hopefully at the employer, the ALP and civil society at large, was it because they sensed their own fundamental limitations?

The Struggle for Jobs and the Strategic Limits of Trade Unionism

At one level, of course, these were questions of power. How could a union impose its will on an employer over the issue of jobs? Even as their numbers declined, operators still occupied key positions in the telecommunications network. But as more and more national and international trunk line switching positions were automated, the industrial

366 potency of the ATPOA as an autonomous force ebbed away. Even at their industrially strongest, however, there were limitations to what the ATPOA members could do organised as an occupational union. For while their own workplace culture encouraged them to see themselves as producers, trade unionism organised them as workers, sellers of labour-power bounded by an imposed division of labour, mere occupiers of a small constellation of jobs created by and in the interests of a vast alien enterprise. Their industrial power thus appeared to them not as a potential source of sovereignty over the entire process of production but in the far more attenuated form of a lever to use in the day to day struggle for improved material conditions and respect within the enterprise.

This had major implications for the campaign against redundancy. By reducing to a question of jobs the fundamental issue of how individuals’ material and subjective needs are met or not met, trade unionism relied on categories irrevocably marked by the movement of capital. The notion of a job is itself unique to the capitalist epoch. It refers to the form that productive activity is forced to assume for the mass of the population dependent on wages for the socially determined necessities of life. It expresses the commodification of labour and its complete subjugation to an ever-changing technical division of labour in the formal economy.50 To fight for jobs, therefore, is to fight to preserve a particular social relationship, a particular form of co-dependency. The need to fight, however, arises at the very moment when capital is ceasing to depend on living labour or has found alternative, cheaper sources. Labour is left with two options. It can attempt to convince the employer that their own interests are served by continuing the relationship or it can assert a right for its continued existence irrespective of capital’s interests.

The first option is simply untenable. In effect it reduces the workers’ defence of their occupation to a kind of a Ghandian moral plea. The language of the ATPOA’s case for a community information service betrays the sense of powerlessness in this position:

50 This definition leaves aside the contested issue of whether occupational specialisation would continue after the abolition of wage labour, ie under socialism. For more on this discussion, see Ali Rattansi, ‘Marx and the Abolition of the Division of Labour’ in Anthony Giddens & Gavin Mackenzie (eds), Social Class and the Division of Labour: Essays in Honour of Ilya Neustadt (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1982), pp. 12-28, & Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, trans. Michael Sonenscher (Boston: South End Press, 1982).

367 If Telecom were to agree to moving into the information area and we were allowed to provide an easily accessible, cheap, 24 hour information and referral service we will not only be providing an essential community service but we will be ensuring an ongoing demand from the public for a responsive human voice at the end of their phone – and that means a future for telephonists!”51

The future here is in Telecom’s hands, not the operators’. The workers bargain from the position of wage slavery, pleading to be ‘allowed’ to survive. Or in other moments they abandon the moral terrain for economics and make a case on the basis of the workers own exploitability; in the ATPOA’s case, to accept Telecom’s profit centre concept over the union’s own notion of community information centres. This too, as we have seen, was ultimately self-defeating, for an orientation to profit inevitably drives enterprises to divest itself of living labour.

The alternative for the ATPOA was to defend jobs regardless of the ‘logic’ of the enterprise and the interests of its rulers. This may have taken the form, for instance, of a demand to implement the community information service irrespective of the cost to Telecom, or a demand to share the remaining work in operator services by reducing the length of the working week without any reduction in weekly pay. Here also, the conception of ‘a job’ was inhibiting. From the late 1970s the ATPOA’s invocation of the ideology of producerism stressed the loss to technology of telephonists’ unique skills and contributions. With obvious parallels to craft unionism, it was an ideology that derived its power from a moral code grounded in the particular use values produced by the occupation. It was thus an ideology of differentiation. Telephonists laid claim to special talents which set them apart from other areas of specialisation and from the amorphous mass of the unskilled. They celebrated their contribution as if it were the output of an autonomous workforce. Others of course did the same. There were the ‘techs’ (technicians), there were the ‘lineys’ (linemen) and there were the hello girls, to name just three self-defining tribes of the telecommunications industry.

Unlike craft artisans, however, neither telephonists, techs nor lineys actually produced autonomously. Working in a telephone exchange or a Manual Assistance Centre was not a craft but a job, a mere position in the finely honed division of labour of a vast

51 Telephone Echo, March-April 1984, p. 5.

368 integrated enterprise. As important as the hello girls may have once been, their importance was realised only in the context of the enterprise as a whole. No one group could produce use values independently of the whole. They were all, quite simply, cogs in a machine. The machine, moreover, was controlled by forces increasingly under the sway of market logic. Irrespective of their use to the community, telephonists embodied a use to Telecom only to the extent they helped the enterprise to be self-supporting or profitable.

For both these reasons, the employment security of ATPOA workers could not be defended simply by mobilising to prevent job loss. In an age of technology-intensive mass production (of which telephony always represented an exemplar), the usefulness of living labour lies not in any one ‘job’ it performs but in the collective output of all labourers in the enterprise, the enterprise considered as one big job, the sum of which is greater than the individual parts. A defence of telephonists based on claims of a stand- alone social usefulness was simply not tenable. Their work was defensible as a community service only when conceptualised as an aspect of telephony taken as a whole. To defend telephonists as the providers of socially useful labour necessarily required defending the entire enterprise and its entire productive workforce on the same grounds. Looking at the problem from where telephonists stood as an occupational group in 1984, it was ultimately an either/or question. Jobs had to go because capital had found more profitable/cost effective alternatives, or capital had to go to guarantee jobs. Not reform or revolution but redundancy or revolution, not a sectional struggle over jobs but a thorough-going confrontation with the employing class and the state in general, the successful prosecution of which would depend on, among other things, the application of class power predicated on an uncompromising conception of class interests. 52

For the ATPOA, the starting point for such a challenge lay in the emergence of a subjectivity of producerism not grounded in the particular, concrete labour of the

52 In the act of usurping control, of course, the struggle ceases to be about jobs in the conventional (ie capitalist) sense of the term. Freed from a dependence on wage-labour, producers are no longer compelled by personal economic necessity to defend de-skilled and oppressive jobs against automation. Advances in technology appear not as a cause of impoverishment or exclusion but as a genuine tool in the liberation of society from what Gorz calls the ‘sphere of necessity’. Under workers’ control, the socially necessary tasks that remain can be rationally and equitably distributed across society at large. Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, p. 105.

369 switchboard or console but in an understanding of telephony as a single, integrated combination of associated labourers. In short, not a producerism of work but a producerism of the enterprise and its place in the wider economy, not a culture of the workplace but a culture of class. Here the ATPOA was trapped by its own past, its own long project to obtain recognition of the social and economic worth of its members’ particular contribution. The occupationally-bound producerism which had served them well in earlier struggles against the effects of ghettoisation was too narrow for the task of defending the occupation. In the past it had helped them win recognition but recognition was no longer the issue. The issue was the subordination of social needs to market relations. The issue was the rule of capital.

As workers and unionists, telephonists instinctively understood this even as they continued to harbour illusions in the class neutrality of the state. Younger workers may have understood it even more simply because they had joined the industry at a time when the material basis for occupational producerism had largely disappeared. Not having experienced a labour process in which telephonists provided a technically skilful and personalised service, they did not mourn it or fetishise it as an important source of personal dignity and respect and a basis for claiming higher wages. Telephony was merely a job, a means to a pay packet which delivered certain freedoms in the realm of consumption, away from the sphere of work. The work itself held little significance, as Eva Baird explains: “those girls [in Brisbane’s new international exchange], they had all these computers, they were so bored, they just could not stand it. So really, we had the better years of the telephone operating."53 For some, this change was felt negatively as a deterioration in standards. Robyn Purse felt the people recruited directly into the computer-based jobs at Woolloongabba were not as well trained or as attentive to customers’ needs as her generation was: “I’m not saying they weren’t still good at their job but they had a general uncaring attitude.”54 For others, the notion that the job was merely a means to a financial end paved the way for a decline in workplace camaraderie. Moya Walker recalls that as the 1980s progressed “it was a matter of getting promoted, relieving in someone’s job, doing much better for yourself, doing a

53 Interview with Eva Baird, conducted by the author on 12 September 2001. 54 Interview with Robyn Purse, conducted by the author on 27 November 2002.

370 course or learning a language. There didn’t seem to be the feeling anymore or the need to have that closeness that we had in our younger years.”55

It is possible that what Walker experienced as a decline in collectivism may well have been a process through which, paradoxically, a new, more inclusive basis for collectivism was emerging. Whereas the old was defined by a shared allegiance to an occupation structured by the values of service, the new would be defined by a common experience of work as a purely economic relationship, devoid of meaningful skills or intrinsic reward. While it is true, as Walker observed, that this relationship atomises workers and pits them against each another, it is also true that the unequal distribution of power between individual employee and employer can push workers to the realisation that their only defence is to combine. Freed from an insular concern with occupational integrity, such an aggregation potentially extends beyond the parameters of job and industry to embrace the multitude of producers who share the same alienated wage labour relationship with an employer.

There is no inevitability here. The conditional terms ‘can’ and ‘potentially’ are chosen deliberately. If ATPOA members were more likely by the 1980s to attribute their predicament to the impersonal and inherently malevolent rule of capital, the wider society, the culture of the workplace and the landscape of real, existing trade unionism provided few clues as to how the issue could be resolved in their favour. Isolated instances of trade unionists challenging the employer to the point of assuming temporary control of their workplaces are certainly not uncommon.56 But to usurp the role of the non-producers in any sustained way was and is conceivable only on a society

55 Interview with Irene (Moya) Walker, conducted by the author on 19 September 2001. 56 In Australia, worker action of this kind has usually taken the form of the sit-in, a strike tactic whereby workers occupy their workplace to prevent management and strike-breakers continuing production. See Barry Hill, Sitting In (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1991), an account of the occupation of the Altona petrochemical plant in 1979-80, the longest action of its kind in Australian history. Also see Drew Cottle’s account of the ‘work-in’ at the Harco Steel Plant in Cambelltown in 1971-72 and the ‘perch-in’of a crane at the Wyong Shopping Plaza site in May 1974: Drew Cottle, ‘Labour Transformed? Two Key Moments in Workers’ Militancy in Australia, 1969-1975’ in Transforming Labour: Work, Workers, Struggle and Change, October 2003, pp. 106-7. The Harco workers in fact extended the sit-in strategy by continuing production under their own control, thereby refusing to accept the company’s ongoing program of retrenchments. The most notable recent examples of workplace occupations come from Argentina where workers have seized and re-started factories closed down during the 2001 economic crisis. See Esteban Magnani, ‘The Work of Changing Minds: Recovered Factories in Argentina’ (www.zmag.org/argentina_watch.cfm).

371 wide scale as a revolutionary political act of millions.57 Conservative ideas masquerading as ‘common sense’ cannot countenance such a project, while the trajectory of trade unionism seldom affords workers more than a glimpse of its possibility. Not only do trade unions concede capital’s sovereignty, they organise their constituent millions according to the same segmentations and divisions that capital imposes while also replicating capitalism’s formal separation of economics and politics. Even when unionists reach out to other groups of unionists to provide and solicit support, as the ATPOA began to in the late 1970s and early 80s, they do so in the form of sectional alliances, as an expression of inter-union solidarity. In certain circumstances these linkages become the precondition for a deeper unity of the associated producers but again there is no inevitability in this development. New ways of thinking, acting and organising seldom arise without the galvanising impact of a society-wide social, economic or political crisis. Even then, unionism may well not provide the vehicle for the new to be carried forward. The revolutionary French workers of May 1968, for instance, largely bypassed the unions and created new organisations to implement their programs.58

There was no such eruptions shaping the struggles of telephonists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While these were years of rage in Australia, it was a rage that failed to generate anything comparable to May 1968 or the Italian ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969. The few radicals who were active within the union lacked a wider context of politicised class struggle to give their ideas and proposals a sense of real possibility in the minds of their workmates. They even lacked an organic ATPOA tradition of militancy and radicalism

57 It is worth noting that telephonists have sometimes found themselves centre stage in 20th century anti- capitalist revolutions. According to John Reed’s account of the 1917 Russian Revolution, telephonists in Petrograd’s Central Exchange supported the counter-revolutionary yunkers who occupied the exchange on 11 November. After Bolshevik sailors stormed the building in the afternoon, a Commissar of the Military Revolutionary Committee tried to persuade the women to remain on duty. Appealing to them as members of the working class, he promised that under soviet control, their wages would be more than doubled and their hours reduced. Most of them were not impressed: “members of the working class indeed!…Remain? Not if they were offered a thousand roubles.” Half a dozen experienced operators did stay, however, and set about training volunteers to keep the telephone network running. In Reed’s account, “the six girls scurried back and forward, instructing, helping, scolding….So, crippled, halting, but going, the wires slowly began to hum.” John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: New American Library, 1967), pp. 181-82. In Republican Barcelona in May 1937, the telephone exchange became the site of armed conflict between Communist forces in the Republic’s Popular Front government, and anarchists and radical Marxists who believed the Communists were betraying the revolution. George Orwell, who fought for the Republic with the radical Marxist group the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista), claimed the Barcelona telephonists were mainly allied with the anarchist group CNT. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 102. 58 Daniel Cohn-Bendit & Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obselete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 91-112.

372 they could look back to. As Jean Bowden observed, “there was no background experience of militancy or activity. It was a very different thing…It was a pioneering thing for me.”59

In these circumstances, the ATPOA’s efforts are all the more notable. No white collar union in Australia has ever encroached into the terrain of managerial prerogative as far as the ATPOA did in those years. For a union with a tamecat reputation as recently as the mid-1970s, the ATPOA had good reason to consider the Green Book a remarkable achievement. Ultimately the agreement failed to prevent the decline of the occupation but the actions that produced it showed that no path taken by capital was necessarily a fait accompli. Through struggle ATPOA members revealed new possibilities which, under different circumstances, may have held more promise. They compelled the employer to take new directions or at the very least a more circuitous route that invariably led to a slightly different destination than the one intended. The optimal conditions for managerial practice were interrupted. The course of history was changed.

Amalgamation

As things stood, however, the ATPOA faced the tougher decisions. By 1984 the continuing erosion of the union’s position gave rise to a fresh drive for amalgamation with the ATEA, helped along by legislative amendments allowing union amalgamations to proceed once a simple majority in favour had been attained from as low as twenty- five per cent of the members of each union, down from the fifty per cent turnout required previously.60 The union’s own recent combativeness helped too by diluting fears that amalgamation would embroil the union in unwanted militancy. Telephonists still expressed an aversion for strikes that disrupted services to the community but the use of industrial force per se no longer held the demons it once had. The erosion of occupational producerism, moreover, encouraged operators to see other groups of workers for what they had in common rather than in terms of difference.

59 Interview with Jean Bowden, conducted by the author on 20-21 October 2000. 60 Queensland Branch Minutes, 1 March 1984, 26 September 1984; Telephone Echo, May-June 1984, p. 12, July-August 1985 p. 6; Victorian Branch Minutes, 17 September 1984; Federal Council Minutes, 4 October 1984;

373 The union’s national conference in November 1985 gave the process impetus by sanctioning an amalgamation sub-committee drawn from officials of both unions. Conference gave the unions until June 1986 to present an agreed proposal for membership consideration. The threat of growing anti-union attacks, the centralisation of decision-making under the Accord arrangements, the convergence of roles due to technological change and increasing administrative costs were all cited as reasons for proceeding. 61 At heart, though, the union was struggling because its constituency was shrinking. As Sylvia Hall had admitted over eighteen months earlier:

ATPOA’s viability is undoubtedly at a crossroads. Several thousand members face an uncertain future unless we can convince Telecom of the correctness of our position. As an organization we face the difficult prospect of declining membership. For this reason we have agreed to re-commence amalgamation talks with the ATEA.62

By late 1985 the failure of the Green Book to reverse the trend had settled the ATPOA’s fate. A Deed of Amalgamation was duly presented to the Federal Council on 4 July 1986 and, with some modifications, approved at the Council meeting on 16 July.63

In the history of institutions, it is often the case that milestones and moments of transition are embodied in the personal histories of notable protagonists. The retirement of Kathleen Hester in 1965, for instance, symbolised probably better than anything else the passing of an era in ATPOA affairs. The same could be said of the resignation of Joyce Williams in 1987. Both women were dedicated and selfless unionists. But they took very different approaches to their union work. Whereas Hester stood for a tradition of constrained, conservative union practice, Williams’ history as an ATPOA official embodied the spirit of defiance and militancy that characterised the best traditions of the ATPOA from 1975. Shrewd, tough and autocratic, Williams commanded respect from friend and enemy alike. She was “totally formidable”, remembers former Queensland Branch Councillor and occasional acting Branch Secretary Michael Saunders, a quality he traces back to her upbringing:

61 Minutes of the 26th National ATPOA Conference, 25-29 November 1985. 62 Telephone Echo, January-February 1984, p. 4. 63 Federal Council Minutes, 4 July 1986, 16 July 1986.

374 She basically grew up with a no fear concept, that there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do if she set her mind to doing it...Basically, she was never prepared to sit back and just let things happen. Even if she appreciated that at the end of the day it wasn’t going to get them much further down the road, she’d still put her heart and soul into it because it was surprising what you could actually achieve.64

At the beginning of 1987 Williams retired and in March, she and Jennifer Lockwood, the former Western Australian Branch Secretary, were awarded ATPOA life membership. Williams finally succumbed to her long battle with heart disease in 2002. Fellow life member and militant, Jean Bowden, died the previous year.

Joyce Williams and Jean Bowden, 1992. Both were awarded life membership of the ATPOA for their outstanding contribution. (Photograph courtesy of Marie McFarlane)

The era was coming to an end. Once the Industrial Registrar had ratified the proposed joint rules of the amalgamated union, it was left to the members of both organisations to have the final say. In all, 3,083 ATPOA members, or forty five per cent of the total membership, cast a vote and of these, 92.6 per cent voted for amalgamation. The vote from the technicians was almost as decisive, with 81 per cent of those who voted supporting the proposal for a united union.65 On 1 April 1988 the ATPOA formally

64 Interview with Michael Saunders, conducted by the author on 27 February 2003. 65 Telephone Echo, January-February 1988, p. 3.

375 ceased to exist as a separate entity, its 6500 or so members becoming the operator division of the ATEA/ATPOA. The new organisation would later amalgamate with the APTU to form the Communications Workers’ Union which in turn became a division of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union in 1994. Operator numbers continued to decline. In 2003, exactly 100 years after male telephonists in Sydney founded the first telephonists’ union in Australia and 89 years after the first national union for telephonists was established, the operators’ section of the CEPU ceased to exist, its membership too small to justify its continuation.

A Union Eclipsed, an Occupation Reborn

This chapter began was the aim of contesting the supra-historical view of the hegemony of capital that arises when history is read backwards from the present. It sought explanations for capital’s triumph over telephony’s living labour in the actual history of the struggle, in the contingent weaknesses and strengths of the contending forces. The chapter proceeded by way of the general proposition that human agency has power and limitations, that men and women do make history but not in circumstances of their choosing.66 It has shown that the women and men of telephony were no exception. Their intolerance of Telecom’s treatment of them sparked resistance but it was a resistance constrained by received ideas and practices and the weaknesses of working class struggle at a broader level. A residual belief in the class neutrality of the capitalist state and the bureaucratic and political forces that attach to it helped disarm them at a critical juncture in their struggle. The culture of producerism, as much as it liberated telephonists from the deadening conservatism of public service ideology, continued to bind them to job rather than class, to service rather than solidarity. More fundamentally, telephonists were unable to transcend trade unionism’s limited terms of engagement and proscribed range of likely outcomes. With few radicals in their midst, almost no organic traditions of radicalism and no broader working class revolt to attach themselves to, telephonists’ views on their predicament were shaped predominantly by bourgeois ‘common sense’ and the week to week experience of working for a wage. For most, a job was the only realistic means to a life of modest comfort. So long as they were able

66 Karl Marx, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works Vol 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), p. 398.

376 to conceive of roles in Telecom where their particular skills could be useful, they believed they had a just claim to continuing employment. But once technology had fractured capital’s dependency on living labour, these claims soon ran up against Telecom’s class power at its most inflexible. Trade unionism was ill-equipped to mobilise workers for such a challenge. As Telecom continued to shed labour, telephonists struggled to see what else could be done. Their intolerance of the situation eventually gave way to a mood of resignation. From a position of strength in 1983, the union amalgamated much weakened in 1988, and although efforts to hold the line against job loss have not abated, the automation/computerisation trend in telecommunications proper has never been reversed.

Though there are few conventional telephonists left, it could be said the occupation has re-emerged outside the realm of telephony in the form of call centre personnel, one of the fastest growing occupational categories in the country. The call centre industry as a whole employs approximately 240 000 people in Australia, according to the 2004 Australian & New Zealand Call Centre Industry Benchmark Study.67 In most cases the operators (known as consultants or customer service officers) are, ironically, a version of the information providers envisaged in the ATPOA’s proposal for a community information service. Their work and relations of production, however, have far more in common with the profit centres pioneered by Telecom, while the conditions on the job in many cases hark back to the excesses condemned by Lillias McLeod in 1910: “some one has termed the work of the telephone attendants as “sweating” – it is even worse than that; it is white slavery. It cannot be called sweating. It is physical exhaustion.”68 The parallels do not end there. Like McLeod, many of today’s sweated attendants look to unionism as their weapon of defence. Most of them, though, are probably unaware of the complex and at times potent tradition of resistance they have inherited.

67 Cited by Simon Lloyd, “Keep On Calling’, Business Review Weekly, 21 October (2004). 68 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission into the Postal Service, Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Papers, Vol. IV, 1910, p. 1741.

377 Conclusion

With a critical eye on Marxism, gender studies, labour history and the sociology of work, this study has interrogated the history of telephone exchange workers for what it can tell us of the lived experience of wage labour and the nature of trade unionism. It has investigated who the telephonists were and how the demographic profile of the workforce was determined. It has asked why telephonists behaved the way they did, when they did, and why their behaviour changed over time. It has asked how the relations of production and the relations in production shaped the form and politics of telephone exchange unionism. It has asked why the workers and their trade unions took up certain issues and not others, and, finally, why they were unable to prevent the destruction of their own occupation.

The study has argued that full and relevant answers to these questions required an account of the industry’s political economy for it is there that we can grasp how relations of production are determined and economic power is exercised. The study therefore directly engaged with the issue of the state as employer and producer, an area which has attracted only occasional academic attention despite the large volume of writing on the relation of the state to the economy and civil society at large. The Australian state, the study has argued, is a capitalist entity not simply because of its support for and reliance on the operation of a capitalist economy but also because its internal relations are themselves inherently capitalist, defined by regimes of wage labour as exploitative and oppressive as anything found in ‘outside’ industry. The telephonists’ story confirms that in the case of state sectors engaged directly in the production of goods and services, the fact of state ownership has had a negligible mitigating effect on the drive for maximum productivity and revenue. Telephonists in Australia were subjected to strategies similar to those deployed in the private sector to expand the value of the labour expended over the value of the labour power paid for in wages. Whether the ensuing surpluses were appropriated by Treasury as consolidated revenue or reinvested in the telephone network, it was income generated by and expropriated from the workers of the industry.

378 As members of Australia’s consuming masses, there can be no doubt that telephonists benefited from the growth in and affordability of telephone services. Yet freedom defined by standards of material comfort and consumer choice never adequately compensated them for a life of truncated freedom in the workplace. Others, moreover, benefited more. Corporations profited enormously from a reliable and efficient communication network deployed as a tool in the production and circulation of commodities. Suppliers to the telecommunications sector benefited from the Department’s drive to increase surpluses available for future capitalisation. Telephony’s own managerial elites consolidated power and position by ensuring the enterprise focused on commercial imperatives which would increase their own autonomy at the expense of Treasury and Parliament.

The result was an unrelenting regime of class pressure in the telephone exchanges, permeating the objective and subjective realms of the work experience. The work imposed itself objectively as a sweated reality dominated by machines, routines and the ubiquitous supervisor. The terms under which workers functioned were also mediated by agencies outside the subjective realm: the state, the corporation, the trade union, the broader social structures of class, gender and race. All of these helped define the lived experience of class in telephone exchanges.

Class itself was a relationship embodying particular subjectivities. The subjective here is not simply a matter of ideas and ideology. For workers the subjective dimension was experienced as alienation. It was about being trapped in a labour process where subjectivity could not be freely expressed, where free association was illusory and work simply “bosses’ time.” Telephonists like all other groups of unfree labourers reacted against this predicament. Subjection gave rise to resistance. This necessarily produced its corollary on the employer’s side. For capital, labour was simply a problem to be managed, and in managing it a subjectivity of manipulation and control took hold. Resistance and control are thus foundational themes of the study. In telling the telephonists’ story as a narrative of class relations, the chapters have chronologically charted the bases and limitations of management control, and the bases and limitations of telephonists’ resistance, in the

379 process engaging with various theoretical debates over how power is generated, exercised and obscured.

The study began with an account of management’s role in the creation of the telephone exchange workforce. While Australia’s telephonists may have been present at their own making, it was telephony’s managers and planners who were the decisive force in determining who the telephonists were and what their skills would be. Telephone work had no occupational precedents and therefore no pre-existing tradition of craft or industrial skills on which to draw. In this sense telephony began as a capitalist enterprise par excellence. Workers entered the industry with no prior knowledge of the labour process, no defined body of skills with which to strike a bargain and no craft tradition of autonomous production to defend. From the outset control over production was unequivocally a managerial function. Managers could recruit from the labour market as they saw fit and create the workforce that suited them most without being inhibited by craft traditions of resistance.

Organising production along industrial lines helped ensure the balance of power remained in management’s favour. The total labour required to keep the network alive and growing was carefully divided into a multitude of discrete tasks, each one forming the basis for a single occupation. Segmentation not only gave monopoly control of overall technical knowledge and planning to engineer-managers, it created the basis for segregation and ideological division amongst the wider workforce. In the case of telephonists, it allowed management to create a dual labour market based on gender. Although switchboard work began as a male occupation in many places, by the turn of the nineteenth century managers and relevant Government ministers had made a decisive switch to women. Notwithstanding contemporary references to women’s “natural suitability” for the job, subsequently echoed in some feminist accounts of the influence of gender socialisation, the most compelling reason for feminising switchboard jobs lay in the control that management was able to exercise over female recruits due to their vulnerable position in the labour market. Economic depression and a rise in the numbers of women wanting and needing paid employment meant that those recruited to the switchboards were placed under

380 enormous pressure to become the compliant, efficient and polite operators that management needed.

This is not to say that gender ideology did not play a role. The labour market itself was structured by a wider gender order that assigned women primary responsibility for unpaid child rearing in the confines of the home. This helped management depress telephonists’ wages by manipulating the social assumption that women in the workforce were not financially independent let alone family breadwinners in their own right. It was also here that the natural skill claim had its impact. By promoting the view that women brought skills into the job that were gender specific and innate or at least ‘naturally’ acquired in the home, the market value of their labour-power could be discounted. Finally, the social sanction and legal prohibition against married women holding permanent jobs made women a more expendable source of labour and ideal for an occupation which quickly became notorious for inflicting physical injury and mental exhaustion on its incumbents. All of these factors coalesced to ensure the feminisation experiment was a success. The state gave the definitive imprimatur to the change in 1917 when Justice Powers of the Arbitration Court declared switchboard work a woman’s occupation. While there would always be a significant number of men working the boards, and the proportion would increase in the 1970s and 1980s, the exchanges would remain enclaves for female labour, labour market ghettoes from which women were discouraged and for many years prevented from gaining promotion.

The detailed and rigidly policed division of labour within telephony was the basis for arguably one of earliest Australian examples of scientific management. Some pioneer telephonists were relatively unsupervised and enjoyed considerable discretion over how the job was done. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, all except the most geographically remote operators were functioning under oppressive levels of supervision and a mountain of instructions detailing the correct procedures and time standards for every possible task. Although many of the worst manifestations of this approach were rolled back over the decades, management never completely abandoned the view that operators could be treated like automatons. Supervisors became frontline agents of worker

381 control. They policed not only the operational performance of their charges but their standards of social conduct and dress as well. For most of the century they had the right to inspect lockers, deny staff on duty access to the toilet, even visit a worker’s home to verify sick leave. They were usually feared and often resented and were the source of more grievances and workplace conflicts than any other aspect of telephonists’ working life.

From the 1920s the Department complemented the rigours of their ‘scientific’ approach with a strategy of control best described as welfarist. Originating in the United States as a response to the rise of militant labour during and after World War One, welfarism aimed to undercut the attraction of radicalism by offering ameliorative measures for some of the material causes of discontent and company unionism as an alternative to the independent labour movement. While company unions were not a feasible option in the Australian context, some welfarist ideas did successfully make the transition. Management propaganda to staff celebrated their communal contribution to the public good as loyal public servants and represented the Department as one big caring family, committed to the welfare of its members. Union efforts to create independent social forums for PMG workers were stymied and official departmental Postal Institutes were created in their stead with the express purpose of developing a sense of loyalty to the enterprise. It would prove an enduring strategy. Whereas company welfarism in America collapsed during the dramatic class confrontations of the late 1930s, in Australia the PMG continued to rely on the welfarist approach into the 1960s, especially through the national Postal Institute created from the separate state bodies in 1945.

PMG’s control over its labour was never absolute. Even during the seemingly non-eventful 1950s and 60s, telephone exchanges were regularly sites of conflict as individual operators reacted against the bureaucratic and often petty authority exercised over them by line managers. If close supervision was the cause of these numerous small eruptions, welfarism and other strategies of ideological containment functioned to ostracise the culprits as shirkers and troublemakers. But it was a never-ending battle and highlighted an inherent constraint on management. The fantasy of turning humans into automatons aside, so long as capital needed living labour, it necessarily relied on people capable of critical thought

382 and action, people, in short, able to recognise and act in some way in defence of their own interests. Managers and the plethora of state and ideological resources at their disposal thus tended to function pragmatically, aiming not so much to crush resistance completely as to ensure minimal conflict and harm.

There was, though, a counter-constraint. The need to generate surpluses meant that even the price of non-conflictual resistance could eventually become too high. After a decade of arbitrated concessions to labour, telephony in Australia reached this point in the 1920s. The problem was ‘solved’ only when the Depression and the ensuing ruling class offensive enabled telephone bosses to cut labour costs and intensify the labour process. A similar crisis of profitability emerged in the 1950s. On that occasion technology was the saviour. With new automatic and then digital equipment at their disposal, management began a strategic shift from labour control to labour replacement, culminating in the mass redundancies of the 1980s.

Managerial practice, then, both shaped and was shaped by the resistance of telephone exchange workers. There was a constant interplay between the two. In this process the will to resist took many forms and found expression in a disparate range of demands. Individual acts of defiance were common throughout the history. Small groups of telephonists sometimes banded together to present grievances to management or parliament. The more determined and far-sighted of them formed trade unions. Male telephonists founded the first known exchange workers’ union in Sydney in 1903. It was followed in 1907 by the Women’s Telephone Attendants’ Association and then, in 1914, by the Commonwealth Telephone Officers’ Association, a Melbourne initiative which became the telephonists’ first national union and their most enduring, surviving under different names until 1988.

Like most trade unions, the organisations created by telephone workers were simultaneously of the workplace and separate to it, entities in their own right governed by their own rules and led by officials who would eventually have no formal ties to the employing organisation. This fracturing of collective resistance and collective organisation would create the basis for two narratives and potentially two foci for analysis. There were,

383 in the first instance, the employees occupying the world of work bounded by the walls of Australia’s telephone exchanges. Theirs was a story of people as telephonists and supervisors, with all the nuances of meaning and the associated practices and identities that came to be attached to these roles in Australia, where state ownership and public service were defining features of the industry.

Whereas this narrative posited a worker-subject as victim of cooption and manipulation, the alternative story tells of telephonists as agents of collective resistance. It is about people as trade unionists, or more specifically it is about their union as an institution. Taken separately the form of these two stories is familiar. The trade union history in particular has been a mainstay of Australian labour historiography, while ethnographic studies of workplaces as sites of coercion and consent form a discrete field in sociology. It has been a central contention of this study that each story offers only a fragmentary understanding of how class control and resistance is effected. Industrial sociologists preoccupied with how managers secure (or fail to secure) control over labour at the point of production have often ignored the complicity of unionism, while trade union histories have typically celebrated labour resistance without any systematic attempt to link it back to the lived experience and culture of resistance of workers on the job. Each group, moreover, has ignored the central claims of the other, one seeing only workforce acquiescence, the other only a tale of labour movement progress. It has been left to an unlikely alliance of Marxists and human resource management theorists to proclaim the significance of unions as vehicles of resistance and co-option.

This study has sought to extend the Marxist critique of trade unionism by linking it back to the workplace and conceptualising it as a structural and ideological manifestation of the politics of production. This is not to refute arguments about the conservatising impact of the trade union form in its own right. As classical Marxism has argued, the trade union imposes political limitations on labour because of its separate bureaucracy and mediating role within capitalism. But the converse is true with even more force. Trade unionism’s strengths and weaknesses, its potential and its limitations, derive from the nature of labour resistance on the job.

384 The telephonists’ history shows that workers adopt identities interpellated by work ideologies created, appropriated and altered in struggle. The early switchboard operators responded to the regime of class pressure by creating an identity drawn from the ideology of sweatshop labour. This helped them sustain the class energy required to organise the sector’s first unions. The ideology was then in effect transferred to the union and became an ongoing motif in many union campaigns to reduce work intensity and reclaim a sense of dignity. In fighting to humanise their occupation, telephonists also demonstrated they could succumb to the management ideology of career public service. Its notionally positive representation of their role in the community, bolstered by a sense of inclusiveness and unity engendered by the Department’s welfarism, offered workers a sense of self-worth, dignity and social status that belied their actual treatment. Again, once the ideology reached a certain critical mass in the workplace it permeated union forums. Notions of a career in service would in fact supplant the sweating ideology as a defining influence on union philosophy and practice from the 1920s until the 1970s. The structural separation of supervisors and operators would play an important role here as the more senior and long serving telephone exchange staff came to dominate the union’s leadership bodies and see the union as an instrument for promoting their own managerially-defined service contribution. While the Department built a web of ideological incorporation with the notion of career service, the most active unionists amongst the telephone exchange staff responded with a corporatised career service unionism that offered rank and file members little redress for the injuries and exploitation of life on the boards.

Career service ideology, of course, was about co-option as a mechanism of control. Once control gave way to redundancy as management’s preferred approach to its labour force, the service ideology was left to atrophy. It formally ended with the waves of commercialisation that swept the industry from the mid-1970s. Ironically, its place was taken by workers’ own producerist conceptualisation of the service they delivered. Drawing on the notion of labour as producer and defender of the universal public good, workers took their struggle over jobs to the community, arguing for producer-consumer alliances against an employer depicted as self-serving and parasitic. The union again became the torchbearer for an ideology that had its origins in the workplace.

385 If the period of career service unionism showed the workers’ collective resistance at its weakest, the union struggles informed by producerism during the late 1970s and 1980s marked the highwater point in telephonists’ class defiance. While union leaders played an important part in each outcome, their actions, to paraphrase Ian Turner, were effective only within limits set by the union’s masses.1 Or more accurately, within limits set by these masses in their relationship with capital. Management and the wider ruling class set agendas in response to the economic and political constraints imposed by labour. Labour responded in turn. But the response was always marked by previous encounters, and always carried the weight of capital’s overall hegemony. The very process of class struggle continuously changed the subjective makeup and objective form of both sides, ensuring they continually confronted each other anew, each freshly uncertain of the other’s strengths and weaknesses. But so long as the overall dominance of capital remained undisputed, the struggle was confined to the question of what constituted tolerable subjugation. Behind the ebbs and flows of overt conflict lay a more fundamental narrative of structural and subjective factors bearing down on workers’ thinking, forcing them constantly, and often subconsciously, to reassess their predicament and reset their own threshold of toleration.

Though embedded in the lived experience of work and articulated through work ideologies, this never-ending re-evaluation of circumstances and weighing up of options was open to influences from beyond the immediate confines of the workplace. The ideologies of sweating, service and producerism were themselves exogenous to telephony, with links to much older traditions of work-based class struggle, while gender ideology, so implicated in the telephonists’ story, also emerged from a broader social context. External events affected telephonists’ views and practices too. The direct antecedent of the CTOA may have been the Victorian Women Public Servants Association, a union created by some of the leading activists of first wave feminism. The resurgence of the ATPOA in the 1970s was also linked to feminist struggles, particularly through the changes in public service employment patterns engendered by the repeal of the marriage bar in 1966, and more generally through changes in the ideas held by women themselves as female workforce

1 Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: the Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900-1921 (Canberra: ANU, 1965), p. 289.

386 participation rates increased and a series of social reforms beneficial to women took effect. Second wave feminism was itself part of a wider radicalisation that transformed the political landscape and permeated Australia’s workplaces. Although many ATPOA activists were not conscious of it, their defiant and combative approach to work problems drew deeply from the general radicalism of the times. There were also more overt political influences from outside telephony. Over the course of the twentieth century, anti- communism and, occasionally, radical Left ideologies affected what telephonists thought and did about their workplace problems. Similarly, certain widely held ideas about the nature of the capitalist state influenced union strategy.

In one way or another all of these events and ideas dampened or deepened the will to engage in conflictual resistance. There was always, however, a more fundamental determinant; the experience of work itself. Over time the segmentation and segregation of workers in telephony became more than a structural mechanism of control. Workers came to identify with ‘their’ occupation and saw their work experience and the terms under which they laboured through the lens of their particular place in the division of labour. The daily experience of exercising unique skills in a spatially distinct setting reinforced this sense of differentiation. For its part, the state fostered a sectional perspective by creating discrete sets of conditions for each work area and then recognised only trade unions which sought to bargain on an occupational basis. Gender consciousness demarcated an occupational identity even more sharply. The feminisation of the operator group was a defining and conscious feature of their sense of self. Occasionally called the petticoat workforce, they preferred the term hello girl. In both cases a group identity was invoked vis a vis a broader male workforce defined by gender and in many cases by superior conditions (such as higher wages and permanency). For telephonists, class was experienced as gender ghettoisation, while gender functioned to inhibit a sense of affinity with a wider class cohort.

When telephonists turned their attention to work grievances, then, they invariably thought and acted as subjects of a particular labour process embedded in a particular industry. This gave them a basis for exercising collective economic power while at the same time

387 constraining their understanding of what that power represented and how it could be extended and deepened. Work ideologies were invariably refracted through this prism. Sweating ideology functioned to unite telephonists around a set of ameliorative demands while leaving unchallenged the underlying relations of sweated production. Producerism empowered them to defend the particular social value of their occupation but not their general political right to control the production decisions alongside all other producers. Here, then, the structural and ideological dimensions of worker resistance converged, the one reinforcing the other. Here also the boundaries of trade unionism were set. The ATPOA could improve conditions, it could deliver members some degree of sovereignty over their working lives, it could address some of the hidden injuries of class. But when Telecom ceased to need telephonists, the ATPOA’s ability to impose its will on Telecom slipped away. It could not save its members’ jobs, it could not deliver labour from the machinations of capital. Eventually the occupation would die and with it the trade union itself.

The telephonists’ history should not be allowed to suffer the same fate. As an occupational group, telephonists made a substantial economic and social contribution in often very difficult circumstances. Their story provides a useful entry point into debates over how workforces and work skills are constructed and how managers secure and obscure the creation of surplus value. As a cohort of trade unionists, the telephonists’ history is possibly even more significant. It shows the impulse to resist collectively was not confined to the more celebrated, male-dominated sectors of the Australian working class. It shows how a union founded as a weapon of defence could degenerate into a tool of conformity, even servility, without a strong culture of class at the point of production and a union leadership committed to class mobilisation. It shows how worker-activists could transform a coopted union into a fighting organisation once more. With their economic base eroding away, the ability of ATPOA members to stymie Telecom’s agenda, albeit temporarily, provides a significant insight into the real potential of organised labour in a contrary world. In the face of seemingly impossible odds, their story shows, as Michael Saunders says, what actually could (and can) be achieved.

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