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Issue No. 129 | 22 March 2002 |
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Not So Happy Campers
Interview: Pulling the Pin International: At the Crossroads Unions: A Case Of Lost Identity History: Rocking the Foundations Industrial: Rocky Road Economics: Cracking a Coldie Poetry: The Right Was Wrong Satire: Heffernan�s Evidence Conclusive: Proves He's An Idiot Review: Upstairs, Downstairs
The Soapbox The Locker Room Postcard Cole-Watch Week in Review
 Letter to Howard #1Letter to Howard #2Letter to Howard #3Jump Before You're Pushed
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History Rocking the FoundationsExtracted from The Foundation of Labour
***************** In the late 1880s and early 1890s, some parties of a quite new type appeared in a few small countries at opposite ends of the earth. The called themselves labour parties. As their name implied they saw themselves as representing in particular 'the workers' of their countries; that is, those who gained their living by working for wages. Not surprisingly, they were closely associated with the trade unions to which many of these workers belonged. Unions not only took the leading part in establishing these parties but, actually belonged to them, through the process of affiliation. Such parties were founded in Norway in 1887; in Sweden in 1889; in Queensland and New South Wales in 1890; in Victoria in 1891; and in the other Australian colonies during the next few years. All used the title 'labour', though the Swedish party called (and still calls) itself the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party. Although the Australian Labor parties (to use the spelling which most of them adopted from a very early stage) were thus not quite the first in the world, they were certainly among the first and clearly preceded those of Britain and New Zealand. Moreover, they gained strength very quickly, winning parliamentary majorities in the Commonwealth and in all States except Victoria by 1915. These simple facts reflect two very different aspects of the Australian Labor Party (as it was called after federation in 1901) which have marked it, and similar parties, throughout their history. On the one hand, they seemed to be, in a very direct and obvious manner, parties of the working class. At that time nearly all unions were of manual workers and this was certainly true of all those which, either directly or through colonial union federations, helped establish Labor parties. But the parties' very rapid rise to electoral success shows that they could not have been supported only by unionists and people like unionists. And, indeed, the parties themselves made no secret of their wish to secure the support of many sections of the community as well as of unionists. Was this a dilemma or, worse, a recipe for betrayal? Was such a party bound to desert its essential core of supporters, they working class, in its attempt to secure the votes and support of others? This is an old question in Labor history. V. Gordon Childe wrote in the early 1920s: To avoid giving offence to middle class supporters Labour Governments have followed a vacillating policy and have tried to govern in the interests of all classes instead of standing up boldly in defence of the one class which put them in power. Nearly 40 years later, Robin Gollan spoke of the party 'moving away from a distinctive Labour position' early in the 20th century because its leaders 'adopted purely opportunistic policies' in the pursuit of marginal votes. And, of course, some who would not say this of labor's earliest years say that it has occurred more recently. Thus Dean Jaensch has argued that Labor has now changed from a 'mass' to a 'catch-all' party and his study 'concludes that the Australian Labor Party is in the process of becoming "something entirely different".' The paradoxes which face Labor parties which wish to gain majority support are real enough; there are problems in giving a special place to trade unions while at the same time trying to maximise support from the rest of the community. But these are in no sense new problems; they go back to the parties' very earliest days. Bede Nairn, to whom we are indebted as the major historian of New South Wales Labor, refers to 'inherent conflict between trade unionism and politics', with reference to the time of the party's foundation. Such a conflict is always potentially present and sometimes, such as during the inter-war period, has been disastrously prominent. But the problems it raises are not insuperable, as can be seen from the fact that at the end of its first century the ALP is still largely composed of unions and is in office in the Commonwealth parliament and in five of the six States. For our present purposes, I shall concentrate upon the party's very early days in New South Wales, but with some glances at more recent times. When Labor first appeared in the New South Wales parliament in 1891, George Black made two speeches on successive days which, among other things, have provided many a question for university exam papers. Black was a man of paradoxes, which may have made him an appropriate representative of the party at that time. For example, he announced that Labor would give its support to whichever of the old parties offered it the greater concessions; but in the same speech predicted, only a little optimistically, that after the following election the other parties would be forced to combine against Labor. He also made two rather different statements about the sort of people (or, as he said, 'men') who would support Labor. 'The men we represent are the wage-earners - those who labour with either hand or head, with either mind or muscle...' but on the previous day he had said: We have been told that we have come into this House to represent a class. Well, that may be; but that class is the class of all classes. It is a class as wide as humanity - so wide that you may describe it as the class out of which all other classes are built up. The first of these quotations seeks to emphasise that Labor was particularly concerned with the wage-earners, although not merely with the manual workers. The appeal to the common interests of employees, irrespective of differences of status, has been a very old Labor and socialist theme but, until recently, it has not been a very fruitful one. In 1890 the Queensland socialist and union leader William Lane hopefully drew attention to the fact that the strikes of that year had been set off by the determination of the Marine Officers' Union to remain affiliated with the Melbourne Trades Hall Council. He wrote: Here is an opportunity to show that all workers can rally round one banner whether they wear gold lace or sweat rags, for the officers are honest workers claiming the right to organise and insisting through organisation on a living wage. Some 18 years later Andrew Fisher, as federal leader of the ALP, was being similarly hopeful. 'Under Socialism', he said ambiguously to the party's 1908 Commonwealth Conference, 'we find that the very men who were against us are coming to us. I refer to the clerical workers, who find that their skill does not protect them.' In fact the party has had a very long wait for these 'men'; but not a fruitless one. By the 1920s there was a considerable range of white-collar unions. It took until the 1980s to bring them under lane's 'one banner'. If joining the ACTU can be so regarded. Very few such unions have ever shown any sign of affiliating with the ALP; but perhaps that is no longer of great importance. More seriously, non-manual workers on the whole remain non-labor voters, though to a diminishing extent. Nevertheless, the bringing together of blue and white-collar workers in a single trade union movement is one of the most notable achievements of Australian labour during the last 15 years. And it is important to note that, although it was not achieved quickly or easily, it was truly a basic objective of the movement in that it dates from the earliest days of the Labor Party. This is one respect in which Australian labour could now be said to be well ahead of many other countries. The trade union movements of West Germany and of Sweden have often been forward as models from which Australia could learn - and so they are in many respects. However, neither has so far brought about that linking of 'those who labour with either hand or head, with either mind or muscle' of which George Black spoke in 1891 and which was largely achieved in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. What the early Labor parties sought to achieve was inevitably related to the people from whom they sought support. The original Labor platform in New South Wales was limited and down-to-earth. Many of its 16 planks were clearly related to conditions of employment such as the introduction and enforcement of a Factories Act and the amendment or repeal of legislation used against employees; a legal maximum eight hour day; the stamping of Chinese-made furniture; and, more broadly, 'Any measure which will secure for the wage earner a fair and equitable return for his or her labour'. But there were other planks not specifically related to employees, such as electoral reform; 'free, compulsory and technical education - higher as well as elementary - to be extended to all'; mining in private property; the taxation of land values; and a few words of municipal socialism, hidden away under the heading 'Local Government and decentralisation' and reading 'the extension of the principle of the Government acting as any employer, through the medium of local self-governing bodies'. It was not surprising that the platform had this heavy bias towards industrial questions and union demands, since it was a slightly modified version of one adopted by the Trades and Labor Council some months earlier. Yet the limited range of this platform did not prevent the success of the new party at the 1891 election. It gained 22 per cent of the formal votes and won 35 of the 141 seats, or 25 per cent. Clearly many people outside the unions had voted for the party; indeed, many who were not unionists were elected as Labor candidates. Nairn tells us that 12 of the 16 metropolitan members were unionists but only 9 of the 19 country members. At all levels, the party had emerged as one with a recognisable trade union component but able to appeal successfully to many for whom union membership was impossible or irrelevant. So it has remained and its success has depended on its ability to maintain this sometimes difficult balance. While this was going on it New South Wales, something similar but not identical was going on in Queensland. In August 1890 the General Council of the Australian Labour Federation held its first meeting, producing a very different document from the spars and industrially orientated platform of the New South Wales party. It had a preamble of some 7900 words, followed by a longer and more general platform than in New South Wales. It showed the authorship of William Lane. Much of this text has an attractive and a 'modern' ring, and should have appealed to broad sections of the community which received no specific attention in the New South Wales platform. It included 'The pensioning by the State authority of all children, aged and invalid citizens.' It also paid specific attention to women, noting that 'Women are working for miserable wages and often for slavish hours.' Like the New South Wales Platform, it provided for various electoral reforms; but, unlike the New South Wales platform it specifically demanded votes for women. (It also illustrated the racism of the time, and especially of Lane, but putting this in the form of 'Universal White Adult Suffrage'.) These were ways in which the Queensland party could be said to have widened its appeal and to show that its concerns were much broader than the specific industrial demands of the trade unions. In fact, this Queensland platform contained no specifically industrial planks at all! What it did contain was an unequivocal endorsement of socialism. By this it mean, to quote the first of the party's 'political aims', 'The nationalisation of all sources of wealth and of all means of producing wealth'. This was not presented as some ultimate goal, which would follow from a period of less sweeping reforms. On the contrary, 'The Reorganisation of Society upon the above lines [is] to be commenced at once and pursued uninterruptedly until social justice is fully secured to each and every citizen.' Viewed from a century later, it is clear enough that this was an objective which, if publicised and believed, would greatly limit the new party's appeal. To subordinate immediate benefits to workers in favour of an immediate quest for universal state-dominated socialism would seem to confine support for the part to a radical minority, probably a small minority. But is that the way it seemed in the 1890s? Was such a party consciously turning away from the majority of citizens, and even the majority of trade unionists, in pursuit of a particular type of socialist goal which is not only unpopular now but was unpopular then? Was it, in fact deliberately putting ideological purity above mass support? It was indeed doing just that, as can be seen from a comment in the Brisbane Worker on this platform: What the Council aimed at was evidently to lay down a basis defining as clearly as possible the ultimate aim of the labour movement so that from the moment of its adoption, if it be adopted, labour in politics would take up a position which would place it at once beyond the narrow party lines with which the masses have hitherto been deluded, and would raise a distinct political issue which none but workers or true sympathisers with the workers would pretend to adopt. This was indeed a different spirit from that of the prosaic New South Wales platform but, with its preoccupation with total state socialism, not a more productive one. In this respect it represented a different kind of narrowness, but a narrowness all the same. Labor in Queensland, even in its earliest years, was never wholly composed of extreme nationalisers; any more than the New South Wales party was composed only of down-to-earth industrial reformers. But there were differences of degree and they lasted for a long time. Thus in 1906 the New South Wales Labor politician and future Premier, WA Holman, spoke of the Queensland Labor Party as consisting 'almost wholly' of socialists, in contrast to his own party, in which many members 'did not profess themselves to be Socialists at all'. In 1893, the year in which Lane departed to found his socialist colony in Paraguay, Labor faced the Queensland electors for the first time. In terms of votes it did even better than Labor in New South Wales in 1891, gaining just one-third of the formal votes. In terms of seats it did a shade worse than in New South Wales, winning 16 out of 72, or 22 per cent. Perhaps what this early history of Labor in two States shows is that, fortunately, the electors do not take too much notice of party platforms! Certainly Labor made a very impressive start in both States, despite having in one case a platform that was too narrow and industrially orientated, and in the other a platform that was unrealistically radical. A Labor Part must be able to maintain a special relationship with unions, or it ceases to be a Labor Party by definition. But it will never gain the support of all unionists and unionists are likely to be, as they certainly where in the 1890s, a minority of the electorate. It must therefore seek to gain other support; as the 1905 Commonwealth Conference report put it, the support of 'every interest in Australia...except the interest of the parasitic classes'. This, as the past century has shown, is easier said than done. But, as the century has also shown despite its failures and disasters, it can be done. The union movement of 1990 is not simply a larger but a far broader and more representative basis for such a venture than the movement of 1890. The balance between union interests and broader social interests continues to be difficult to achieve and continually changes in content. Gender and (especially) environmental issues are the most obvious current illustrations of this. But gender issues, at least, go back to the party's earliest days, as can be seen from Queensland confronting and New South Wales evading the question of women's suffrage in its platform in 1896. Labor parties need to avoid a preoccupation with narrow industrial ends on the one hand and fruitless ratbaggery on the other. The first party platform in New South Wales illustrates the first; that in Queensland the second. Fortunately, neither proved to be a mortal weakness. The Foundation of Labour, Lloyd Ross Forum, published by Pluto Press in 1990
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