1932
A Waterside Workers banner
The power of the union
This banner was created by the Sydney branch of the Waterside Workers Federation in 1902. Made from two joined oil-painted canvases more than 3 metres square, it would have been used for May Day and Labour Day parades. One side is dedicated to members who died in the Great War, and the other glorifies the hard yakka of the workers.
There was significant pride in the union movement at the turn of the last century. Their gains had been made in blood. In Melbourne, wharf labourers congregated at the ‘Wailing Wall’ on Flinders Street. In Sydney they called Hickson Road in The Rocks ‘the Hungry Mile’. These were places where itinerant workers would front up twice a day in the hope of getting a day’s stevedoring work on the docks to put a meal on the table that night.
This ‘bull’ system was as cruel as the work was backbreaking and dangerous. Everything from wheat to concrete and metal was shifted from ships on wharfies’ backs. They carried coal and coal dust filled their lungs, sulphur burned their skin and, later, asbestos dust covered everything. If they didn’t break their backs, they were liable to fall to their deaths.
In the late 19th century, workers on the wharves organised themselves into unions. The Sydney Wharf Labourers’ Union and the Seamen’s Union in Melbourne formed in 1872. The Waterside Workers Federation of Australia was established in 1902; two prominent members were future prime ministers Billy Hughes and Andrew Fisher. These unions eventually amalgamated into the Maritime Union of Australia, now the oldest continuing maritime union in the world.
The Depression, which peaked around 1932–3, caused great rifts in Australian society, with the formation of proto-fascist groups on the right and communists on the left – especially in the trade union movement. Organised labour on the docks has become a powerful force on this island nation. Many of the most militant unionists this country has known have worked in maritime industries, and are or were communists. Any strike on the docks is and was expensive, too. With so much at stake, the waterside workers became known for steely determination. The stevedoring companies played hard as well, employing gangs of thugs as strikebreakers.
The first issue for waterside workers was the abolition of the bull system, which they wanted replaced by rosters or a ‘gang’ system free of nepotism and the whims of bosses. The issue was contested at different times at different ports over almost 30 years, but eventually all Australian ports changed.
In 1938 Japan Steel Works Ltd chartered the British tramp steamer The Dalfram to carry pig iron from Port Kembla to Kobe. The ship docked in Port Kembla on 15 November. The Waterside Workers Federation, disapproving of Japan’s invasion of mainland China, refused to load the boat. Prime Minister Robert Menzies came out strongly against the union but the strike lasted two months and finished only when the government agreed to end further pig-iron shipments. Three years later, Australia was at war with Japan.
In 1945 the maritime unions sided with Indonesian rebels against the colonial Dutch government and refused to load 559 Dutch ships in Australian ports. The Seamen’s Union of Australia refused to allow merchant ships to carry weapons to Malaya in 1948 during a communist uprising.
If the Seamen’s Union was tied down by Marxist dogma, the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union, established in Balmain on the Sydney waterfront in May 1883, was tied up in a different business. The shipyards were at the centre of the Balmain economy and community. In the 1970s the Melbourne branch of the Painters and Dockers was overtaken by powerful gangsters, notably Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh.
Frank Costigan QC headed a royal commission into the activities of the Painters and Dockers in 1980. He found that ‘The Union has attracted to its ranks in large numbers men who have been convicted of, and who continue to commit, serious crimes’ and that ‘Violence is the means by which they control the members of their group. They do not hesitate to kill.’
Costigan’s findings listed 15 murders, 23 possible deaths and 23 other acts of violence by members of the Painters and Dockers. Costigan also found that the union was involved in taxation fraud, social security fraud, ghosting (the practice of having non-existent workers on the payroll), compensation fraud, theft on a grand scale, extortion, drugs and weapons.
Increasing mechanisation changed the waterfront in the 1970s. Most of the trades on the docks became redundant, the workforce shrank by 60 per cent, and by 1992 the Waterside Workers Federation and the Seamen’s Union amalgamated to form the Maritime Union of Australia. Although diminished in size, the MUA still exercised authority on the waterfront. The Howard government colluded with the National Farmers’ Federation and a stevedoring company called the Patrick Corporation to break union control of the docks and introduce non-union labour.
On the night of 7 April 1998, the Patrick Corporation sacked its entire workforce and introduced a scab crew they had secretly trained in Dubai. A 14-day lockout followed until Justice Tony North ordered the reinstatement of the 1400 sacked MUA workers. The union survived but was severely wounded, and a tradition of radical leftist trade unions was effectively ended.