It was a time of hope. While most unions had melted away amidst the gold rushes of the early 1850s, workers rebuilt them from scratch by the middle of the decade. The subsequent thirty-five years saw three peak periods of strike activity, mostly associated with the struggle for the eight-hour day. The first, and most successful, was centered in Victoria shortly after the gold rushes. The second and third, in New South Wales during the early sixties and early seventies, featured metal workers and coal miners.

Some New Zealand building trades had achieved an eight-hour day in the 1840s, and Sydney stonemasons were the first to do so in Australia. It was Victoria, however, that experienced a great campaign extending beyond the purely industrial sphere. The issue preoccupied far more people than the minority of workers who actually won the shorter hours; it was a defining, long-term aspiration for the labour movement as a whole. ‘By 1881, fifty-six of the seventy-six unions in Melbourne had their origins in demands for an eight hour day.’

Although the Victorian economy was still fragile, wages were significantly higher than in Britain, allowing some skilled workers to focus more on improving working conditions. They aspired to more leisure time as part of a climate of social optimism which was strongest in the middle classes but also vibrant among the skilled trades. Cultural life flowered, including Mechanics’ Institutes seeking to uplift the labouring classes through libraries, lectures and musical performances. The future would surely be more edifying still, and workers wanted to share in the improvements; indeed they needed to share in them, since working men would soon be called upon to exercise the franchise. To prepare themselves, they needed ‘the sacred gift of time’.

Shop Assistants had been agitating for early closing since 1846, and the most pious elements in the community endorsed the call for shorter hours, hoping greater leisure would encourage church attendance. Besides, some thought the hot Australian sun made longer hours intolerable for delicate Europeans. This was, in other words, a very respectable demand; small wonder that the conservative Mayor of Melbourne became president of the Early Closing Association. By mid-1856, shops were closing earlier throughout the colony, adding further momentum to union demands for shorter working hours.

When on 5 March the Operative Masons approached the Builders’ Association, the bosses were generally agreeable. Other building trades followed rapidly, and 21 April was set as the day to introduce the new arrangements. 11 April saw a public meeting of various trades and occupations:

Two major employers resisted. To bring them to heel, Melbourne’s construction workers marched from the University, pulling unionists off building sites as they went. The concluding rally at Eastern Hill (East Melbourne) endorsed a strike. One of the recalcitrant bosses caved in that evening, and government pressure ensured the other complied next day.

The agitation spread, with an Eight Hours League mobilising the general citizenry. Painters and paper-hangers, plumbers and cabinet-makers, all trades close to the building industry, gained the eight hour day with no reduction in pay. Other trades found it much harder going. Construction faced no foreign competition, so it could sustain a considerably higher cost structure than in Britain. However many other industries were more exposed. In the 1850s the building industry was still full of small subcontractors who had only recently been employees themselves, and thought they might soon be again. To them the eight-hour day seemed to be in the interests of the industry as a whole. Bosses in other sectors were less likely to think this way.

So saddlers, harness- and collar-makers, ironworkers and coach-makers all had to accept lower pay to get shorter hours, the coach-makers doing so after a prolonged strike in 1856. The following year bakers and butchers, who worked in small establishments alongside the employer, did win shorter hours without pay cuts. Outside Melbourne, however, the shorter hours’ movement did not extend much beyond the building trades.

1858 brought the start of railway construction from Melbourne to Bendigo, and Geelong to Ballarat. This eased the unemployment problem, wages rose, and the unions demanded a shorter working day on the construction projects. Unfortunately, the work was so dispersed that employees couldn’t organise to get full benefit from the economic conditions. Sub-contracting arrangements undermined pay and conditions, and workers sometimes found it hard to collect wages. The employers tried to break the union by importing labour, first hiring ten masons from South Australia to work a ten-hour day. When the new arrivals discovered what was afoot, they joined the strike. After the bosses had them arrested and charged, two radical barristers successfully defended them.

Then in November the union, having learned that two hundred German masons were on their way, managed to contact them on the ship and convince the majority not to scab. Most absconded to find jobs in the bush, though a few were forced to fulfil their contracts. Industrial conflict continued while they remained employed, ‘but it remained a remarkable feature of the dispute that all attempts to set off "foreign" against British workmen were unsuccessful.’

In Melbourne, a revived Eight Hours League held large public meetings in support of the strike. There was much discussion of tariff protection as a way to guarantee shorter wages and hours, so that these public mobilisations fed into the protectionist movement.

Conditions for unions were generally less favorable in New South Wales, and apart from some of the building trades, unionists found it extremely hard to win the eight-hour day. The first major battle was the 1861 strike at P.N. Russell and Company, Sydney’s main engineering works.

Labour relations here were poisonous. Workers reported that management underpaid them and hit them with blacklists as well as various petty tyrannies. When management demanded a ten per cent pay cut, twenty to thirty blacksmiths, fitters and turners struck work; over the following two months another thirty left the job. Within weeks some three hundred tradesmen had affirmed their support for the strike, and £50 a week was coming in from as far away as Newcastle and Melbourne. Next the company’s moulders demanded the eight hour day, joining the strike when management refused. The ironworkers then added this demand to their own claim. The Engineers’ union (ASE) helped the unskilled workers form a separate association and join the struggle.

The wages issue now had second billing, with unions calling for an eight-hour day throughout the trade. Some smaller employers were sympathetic, but most waited to see the outcome at Russell. Management prosecuted two unionists on conspiracy charges. The trial ended in acquittal, but the legal costs drained the strike fund, and in addition the company was recruiting scabs. Increasing number of strikers drifted into other jobs, off to the New Zealand goldfields or back to work.

The strike thus largely ended in failure, as did the push for shorter hours, although some moulders achieved an eight hour day, and sections of the building trades were inspired to go out and get it as well. Perhaps the unions had made a mistake in tackling Russell at this stage, and in linking the eight hours issue to the dispute. Although unemployment had fallen from a peak in 1860, economic conditions were still not favourable to the unions.

They weren’t especially good in the coal fields, either. The coal mining industry had begun with convict labour under the Australian Agricultural Company (AAC). Until the seventies it was based overwhelmingly in the Hunter Valley. Under the impact of the gold rushes, coal prices and wages rose between 1851 and 1855, a period that saw three successful strikes. But by 1855 gold production was falling, and the AAC imposed wage cuts. The miners struck to no avail: with coal stockpiles high and demand falling the strike front broke after two and a half months, militants were victimized, and management boasted that the ‘incorrigible and turbulent hands had been got rid of’.

However the industry kept growing. Coal production grew fivefold between 1850 and 1860 owing to demand from the railways, and by 1861 there were four major employers in the Newcastle area. Worker organisation revived to the point where, for the first time, miners set about uniting the various local lodges into a wider organisation. Up to a thousand assembled in May to launch the Hunter River Coalminers’ Protective Association, the Minmi lodge marching up behind a tricolour flag reading, ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall’. It was a timely sentiment, for by October the Minmi lodge were on strike; the new Association organised a five hundred-strong demonstration and convinced non-unionists to stop work in their support.

The four main proprietors responded by joining forces against ‘the unjust and exorbitant demands of the miners’ – giving fourteen days’ notice of a twenty per cent pay cut and laying plans to import four hundred strikebreakers from England. The unionists struck again, their wives and daughters fighting alongside them, as was already traditional in the coal fields:

The bosses backed down temporarily, but returned to the offensive a year later led by AAC manager, J. B. Winship. Winship’s main tactic was to import unemployed miners from the now-depressed Victorian gold fields. Some of these were indeed desperate. ‘In fact they are almost starving,’ wrote a gleeful Winship, who took a direct hand in recruiting them. Even so, many refused to scab. Though he recruited three hundred, he believed he could have signed up a thousand if news of the strike had not reached Victoria. Out of these three hundred, probably half were won over on arrival by unionists, who slipped them leaflets and invited them to meetings at night.

Nevertheless, after seven months the miners’ resistance collapsed. Once again, unionism seemed to be thoroughly smashed. Coal production continued to rise throughout the decade, but always ahead of demand, ensuring cut-throat competition between the companies and weakening workers’ bargaining position.

The union defeats of the sixties in New South Wales owed much to a difficult economic climate, yet this doesn’t explain everything. Economic conditions were by no means ideal in the early seventies, when organised labour did rather better. The defeats also resulted from unions’ inexperience and inability to control the flow of labour. By the seventies, the industrial movement had gained in both experience and organisation. A rise in the sheer numerical size of the work force, and consequently in union numbers, also lent the unions greater stability.

In 1871 New South Wales had a sharp recession, but as it faded real wages began to rise and there were again signs of union revival. The Hunter River miners began rebuilding their regional organisation, waging ‘a continuous struggle ... to establish the authority of the association and police job conditions.’ In 1873 they demanded a ten-hour shift. The employers insisted on eleven hours, sacking those who refused. After a six weeks’ lockout, stoning of scabs, several shots fired by police, and the jailing of one woman for assaulting a constable, the two sides agreed to implement the ten-hour shift by 1874.

Unionism was also advancing in the iron trades, with the rise of organisations for plumbers, boilermakers, tinsmiths and moulders. This was part of a general trend symbolised by the 1871 formation of the Sydney Trades and Labour Council. Progress on the eight-hour day was slow at first, because of union disagreements over whether to accept a proportionate cut in pay. Some tradesmen accepted this, reckoning that a shortening of hours would tighten the labour market and push wages up again, but labourers, already on near-subsistence wages, had no patience with such theories. By 1873 only one major firm, the A.S.N. company, was working the shorter day.

Finally the engineering unions put together a common set of demands, including the eight-hour day with two breaks. A few days later Mort’s Dock sacked several men, provoking a mass walkout. In negotiations, proprietor T.S. Mort apparently convinced the strikers the dismissals were not industrial victimisation, then conceded the shorter day -- but he demanded wage adjustments, only backing down after further strike action.

The other company to resist was that old union bogey, P.N. Russell and Co, which opposed the afternoon meal break. Although a short stoppage forced the company into line, the meal breaks issue quickly re-emerged throughout the trade. The two-break system meant that late in the day, forges had to be relit and casting run-offs prepared anew for the last two hours. The proprietors claimed this was uneconomical, and imposed roster changes, causing two thousand unionists to stop work for two months.

The TLC was raising funds from its affiliates and from Melbourne, while the local companies were losing contracts to Victorian rivals. Yet the proprietors grimly held out. Union delegates proposed arbitration, as did the TLC; the employers said a technologically unworkable system could not be arbitrated. The TLC organised ‘monster meetings’ to mobilise public support, while the press fulminated against the ‘narrow, selfish and irrational views of a few’ allegedly manipulating the strikers.

As the public weighed up the opposing arguments, the ironmasters fretted that £50,000 worth of orders had been lost. Finally they and the TLC settled on a ten minute break. When union members rejected this offer, ‘an emergency meeting of strikers was called on 2 March, at which the delegates were empowered to reach a settlement without reference back to the rank and file.’ The meeting accepted a compromise involving two breaks in summer and one in winter. The employers also agreed not to alter rosters again without ‘the concurrence of the majority of the mechanics in the shops’.

At the end of the post-gold rush period, despite some cruel setbacks, the unions could congratulate themselves on winning gains, and then defending and entrenching them. With success, however, came conservatising tendencies. The first signs of a top-down, bureaucratic leadership style had appeared in the metal trades dispute, when rank and file metal workers lost decision-making power after rejecting a strike settlement. Unions were also beginning to call for arbitration as an alternative to industrial struggle.

Even in the coal industry with its turbulent history and militant traditions, there was a certain respect for the ‘masters’, expressed in invitations to attend union picnics (offers the proprietors generally ignored), and a certain notion of common interest. The latter was reinforced by union attempts to encourage cooperation among the employers to reduce competition. Although the 1873 coal strike was very bitter, still the miners declared they were ‘following the example of the English miners, not the Communists of Paris.’ The general agreement ending the strike provided for pegging wages to profits and the settling of disputes by arbitration, so that ‘strikes and lock-outs would be a thing of the past.’ Vain hope!

Union actions were growing bigger. Where perhaps three hundred masons had waged the biggest dispute in Victoria in the fifties, more like a thousand New South Wales coal miners had struck in 1861, and two to three thousand in 1874. The number of striking New South Wales ironworkers was also larger in the seventies than in the sixties. In addition, new sectors were emerging, for example in transport where carters and drivers unionized, and existing sectors were becoming more union-conscious. In 1874 twelve Victorian metal miners’ unions merged to form the Amalgamated Miners’ Association (AMA). Four years later William Guthrie Spence organized the miners at Creswick.

Other new unions were forming. Seafarers united in Melbourne and Sydney in the mid-seventies. This union set two historic precedents in 1878, one baleful but another more encouraging. After the Australian Steam and Navigation Company moved to replace Australian crews with lower-paid Chinese, Australian seamen walked off ships in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane and ports further north. The dispute ended in a political victory for those opposed to Chinese labour.

Industrially, the victory was not terribly impressive. The union initially offered a no-strike agreement in exchange for sending the Chinese home; and the final settlement, reached with ample strike funds remaining, allowed scabs to remain employed while well over a hundred unionists remained out of work. The successes owed as much to public opinion and government pressure on the company (due to the race issue) as to industrial action. However the sheer fact of an inter-colonial strike by unskilled labour was significant.

In the course of the 1880s, union membership reached sixty thousand. Unionism came to the railways, the maritime and the pastoral industries, drawing new layers of workers, many unskilled, into what has been called a ‘new unionism’.

The term itself, drawn from British labour history, can be misleading. It has been taken to mean that organisation of the unskilled and semi-skilled was a radical innovation, that the new unions were all committed to industrial unionism, and that they were more militant than traditional craft organisations. Strictly speaking, none of this is true. Mass organisation of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in mines and on the waterfront existed well before the 1880s. On the other hand the Australian Shearers’ Union operated much like the craft unions, organising the elite of the pastoral work force, and it was by no means more militant than the stonemasons.

Yet something new certainly happened in the eighties, driven by changes in capitalist industry. Where companies had previously brought together concentrations of relatively expensive skilled labour, they now began replacing that labour with machinery. As industry became mechanised, the need to use capital equipment efficiently led to larger concentrations of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. Mechanisation also stimulated other industries by increasing the demand for such raw materials as meat and sugar, and for expanded rail and sea transport. Here too, sizeable new workforces emerged. In enterprises where large numbers of poorly paid labourers all did the same work, common experiences bred solidarity, while unskilled workers’ lack of individual bargaining power made the case for organisation and mass action more compelling.

The term ‘unskilled’ can also be misleading. Many with no formal craft status did have skills; what they lacked was a strategic monopoly in those skills. Women in the clothing trades were adept at sewing, but since most other women could also sew, companies could easily replace them; so they were in a similar industrial position to the genuinely unskilled. But we’ll use the term for want of a better one.

The majority of the unskilled were not unionised, nor did unskilled or semi-skilled workers come to dominate the labour movement. On the contrary, delegates to the 1888 Inter-colonial Trade Union Congress still lamented that ‘tradesmen were united as a rule, and unionists were pretty well protected; but what was wanted was the organisation of unskilled labour, so that all might be protected.’ Even so, unionism had reached enough unskilled and semi-skilled workers to alter the industrial scene. Strikes became bigger and longer, providing practical experience of solidarity. Where workers formed a new union or won a strike, others followed their example.

In addition, some unions set about organising others. Seafarers and railway workers were always on the move, carrying ideas of unionism wherever they traveled. So were shearers. The westward expansion of the pastoral industry lengthened the shearing season as well as concentrating workers in larger gangs, conditions that fostered solidarity. In the cities, meanwhile, settled working class suburbs grew up whose residents could mobilise in support of union action just like mining towns.

Numerical growth in union membership, alongside the merger of local organisations into intra- and inter-colonial unions, began to raise the conflict between employer and employee from a series of local episodes to an on-going, continental affair. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers, denied the modest element of individual self-sufficiency and control of the labour process enjoyed by craft labour, were more interested in ideas that the union movement should fight for control of the workplace, or that the state should intervene.

We begin to see why so many embraced unionism (in Spence’s words) ‘as a religion’, why some capitalists felt so threatened by it, and why radical ideologies began to make themselves heard. It is not that unionism, let alone socialist politics, developed spontaneously. A small army of agitators moved amongst the workers fighting to convince and organise them, with many heartbreaking failures amongst the successes; but capitalist development opened up the possibilities.

The manufacturing boom drew thousands of women into factory life and into outwork, especially in Victoria. Large numbers joined the garment trade. Some of this industry’s features mirrored traditional domestic labour and it offered the option of outwork, so that joining it didn’t seem to be such a radical departure from the established female role. Soon, however, women’s experience in industry began to challenge that role. In tailoring, especially, young females set out to acquire marketable skills and thereby achieve a certain independence, so that ‘the tailoring factories seem to have attracted a more outspoken and independent type of woman.’ In the late 1880s, the Chief Inspector of Factories complained that ‘the factory work girl’ was ‘a very difficult person to deal with’, apparently for the very reason that she was ‘as a rule able to take care of herself’.

Unfortunately, growth in the work force also put downward pressure on women’s piece-rates. With the number of clothing and textile factories in Victoria rising from around seventy to well over two hundred in the decade ending 1881, intensified competition drove employers to cut costs. Local, sporadic strike action in the tailoring factories failed to prevent this, because the bosses easily found strike breakers. Ellen Cresswell, soon to be a leader of the Tailoresses Union, was herself victimized after a strike in 1879.

These pay cuts reached a crisis point in 1882, when companies began making tailoresses do order work at the rates applied to ready-made garments. In December 1882 the workers struck, beginning at Beath, Schiess and Co. Hundreds of women came to the Trades Hall seeking help in forming a union. At a second meeting of four to five hundred, supported by another five hundred sympathisers assembled outside the building, the Tailoresses’ Union took shape. The strikers elected a committee to lead the struggle together with a group of Trades Hall officials. The first round of the campaign ended before Christmas, with the company agreeing to meet union demands if others did the same.

As with the eight-hour day campaigns, the new union enjoyed support from some employers and a wide cross-section of the community. Increasingly, the ideology of protectionism united the union movement with sections of capital. Not only did The Age newspaper back the strike, but Beath, Schiess and Co were themselves not entirely opposed to it. Company manager J.R. Blencowe attended a meeting at Trades Hall, indicating the firm would meet the demands as long as the whole industry was organised. He added that ‘so far as Beath, Schiess and Co. were concerned, they did not care if the prices were increased by one hundred per cent if all the other firms joined in the movement.’ Some other major employers apparently also hoped it would prevent the smaller shops undercutting them. Victoria’s system of protective tariffs had allowed a variety of small operators to spring up, and those with less than ten employees were exempt from the 1873 Factory Act. If unions could enforce uniform rates throughout the industry, the big companies would benefit.

In the new year, the other bosses showed less enthusiasm for the union’s claims, and by mid-February around twelve hundred tailoresses were on strike. At the end of the month most employers seem to have acquiesced, though picketing continued as late as April. Some accounts say that the union rates prevailed for a couple of years, but nine of the strikers later told the Shops Commission ‘that while the manufacturers had, at the time, agreed to pay the log, very few adhered to it for more than a few weeks after the return to work.’ It appears the companies got around the union by contracting work out.

During the course of the eighties the union declined, from more than two thousand in 1883 to a hundred or so in 1890. The strike was nonetheless a landmark in raising public awareness about working conditions. It gave a huge boost to the anti-sweating campaign and also to the struggle for the eight-hour day. Of course it is also important as the first major industrial struggle by women, making it the subject of considerable debate.

The example of solidarity between male and female trade unionists seems to rankle with some feminist historians. For example, Anne Summers suggests it was motivated entirely by male tailors’ selfish desire to avoid competition from cheaper, female labour. Influenced by this argument, Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright similarly remark that such acts of solidarity were ‘not always as altruistic as they seemed’. However such comments miss the point. No large body of people ever forgets about self-interest for long; the issue is how they pursue it. Rather than dividing along gender lines, the Victorian labour movement understood that it was in the interest of all workers to support the tailoresses. The triumph of solidarity in 1882-83 was important because it demonstrated a viable alternative to sex divisions in the working class.

Raelene Frances makes a more sophisticated argument. In her eyes the unity, while a positive thing, nevertheless came about partly because women were ‘accustomed to the direction of men’ and because these ‘helpless girls’, as The Age called them (but Frances seems to agree) needed help in a way male unionists did not -- male unions being ‘generally jealous of their own independence.’ Yet elsewhere Frances herself reports that the tailoresses had tried striking on their own, and only approached Trades Hall after they failed. They didn’t lack independent spirit, they just wished to learn from experience and benefit from solidarity. Frances notes that the strike set a precedent for other unions -- in other words, the tailoresses were pioneers. A few years later the Yarra River waterside workers were to learn many of the same lessons.

In any case, as Frances also reports, waging a strike helped women break out of conventional roles. They picketed outside factories, using ‘violent language and threats’ against scabs, and employers complained that they were ‘very difficult to deal with’, having ‘no faith in what you say’.

The following years saw a strike by male bootmakers. Theirs was a highly competitive trade whose bosses had a history of ruthless wage cuts, victimization and child labour. When the Operative Bootmakers’ Union arose in 1879 it grew rapidly, claiming a thousand members by 1882. Union secretary W.A. Trenwith was a one-time boxer who finished his career as a member of parliament; in the 1880s he also proved a dynamic industrial organiser, producing posters identifying scabs by name and branding them as traitors. A series of strikes in 1883 compelled the employers to accept a union log of claims, and a board of conciliation was formed with fourteen representatives from each side.

This union had low fees, did not initially provide benefits, and in 1884 began admitting semi-skilled workers. It was a good example of ‘new unionism’. Late in the same year, the bosses locked the men out in a dispute over outwork, provoking a major industrial conflagration. The THC assumed leadership and raised over £9,000 in contributions and levies. There were brawls on picket lines, and hardship for the strikers, though the greatest hardship confronted the seven hundred women and girls stood down with no strike pay.

Within three months the bosses began to give way, agreeing in February 1885 to eliminate outwork except where special safeguards applied. On the other hand the union gave away its right to enter workplaces. Although not a complete union victory, the bootmakers’ strike alarmed employer representatives, who felt that the owners were proving unable to match the solidarity of organised labour. A meeting of capitalists in early 1885 called for the formation of a militant bosses’ organisation. Bruce Smith, who wrote at the time that bosses’ and workers’ interests were ‘antagonistic’, made the keynote speech at the Employers’ Union’s founding meeting; he later recalled he had been in a ‘savage’ frame of mind because of industrial unrest in the maritime industry. Before the decade was out this body had five hundred member firms. Just as capitalism had given rise to a labour movement, now labour’s struggles were stimulating more coherent organisation among the capitalists. Both began to take on continental dimensions, beginning with the maritime industry.

Victoria’s waterfront unions first took root in the bayside communities of Sandridge (Port Melbourne) and Williamstown in the 1870s. The Yarra River wharves near central Melbourne remained unorganized until 1885, though there had been some local strikes. In 1884, the Yarra watersiders staged their first total walkout over hours, pay and hiring practices, but found themselves at a disadvantage without stable organisation and solidarity from other unions. When in 1885 the ship owners outraged wharfies by refusing to let them attend the Eight Hours’ anniversary march, Trades Hall representatives stepped in and the Melbourne Wharf Labourers’ Union was formed. The union served a log on the employers in September, had it refused and on 1 January 1886 around nine hundred workers shut down the Yarra shipping industry. During the eighteen-day stoppage mass pickets effectively prevented deliveries, with Port Phillip stevedores refusing to work ships diverted from the Yarraside. Yardmen and draymen also struck, as did the wharf labourers of Geelong who established a union of their own.

The Employers’ Union declared it ‘the bounden duty of every employer’ to back the waterfront bosses, and put the screws on one company which had settled. Ship owners, aware of unemployment in other colonies, offered attractive pay to strikebreakers. Ninety-four unemployed men came from Adelaide, but were won over by the unionists. Attempts to secure ‘volunteer’ labour from Bendigo and even from New Zealand were also unsuccessful, though farmers were willing to load the potatoes they delivered to the quayside. The main effect of these strike-breaking efforts was to anger the Seamen’s Union, which banned vessels carrying scabs. A series of union bans in other cities helped isolate Melbourne and secure victory for the strikers.

Inter-colonial action had been needed, said the Seamen, because the struggle had ‘assumed a new phase, viz., Capital v. Labour.’ The great strikes of the nineties were not far away. Yet the means of resolving the dispute pointed in quite another direction. After the return to work, Professor Kernot of Melbourne University convened a Board of Arbitration comprising equal numbers of management and union representatives, which granted most of the workers’ demands. Bruce Smith no longer felt savage; he announced his delight with the peak union leadership whom he found ‘cool-headed, exceedingly amenable to reason’. If the great strikes of the nineties were on the horizon, so was the establishment of Australia’s famous arbitration machinery.

Two other national organisations emerged in the second half of the decade. Under Spence’s leadership, the Amalgamated Miners’ Association (AMA) grew from the unification of local coal and metal mining unions. The AMA fought numerous largely defensive strikes in the years before 1890; the most important being the 1888 dispute in the coal fields of northern New South Wales.

Coal was vital for the ever-increasing numbers of steamships, railways and factories. Over the previous decade, coal production in the region had doubled and the workforce had risen to six thousand, so this strike had a much greater social impact than earlier conflicts. The dispute concerned a union log of claims and employer demands to introduce a tributing (subcontracting) system. The AMA sent delegates throughout New South Wales to raise funds and rally support, while Victorian miners levied themselves a shilling per week. After violent confrontations with blacklegs, strike leaders were arrested and charged with riot; the authorities even brought out a machine gun. The dispute ended with neither side clearly victorious, but was memorable for the miners’ manifesto, which showed hints of socialist thinking with its demand for ‘the equal distribution of wealth’.

Another significant dispute took place in Broken Hill, where in November 1889 a one-week strike forced BHP to implement the closed shop. Broken Hill was on its way to becoming a centre of militancy. Here however the AMA was overshadowed by the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union (ASU), founded in 1886, with Spence again prominent.

Three local shearers’ unions already existed, in Moree, Wagga Wagga and Tasmania, but station owners seem to have provoked a general mobilisation by announcing a cut in the shearing rate. Angry letters poured in to country newspapers, and unions began to form around Young in eastern New South Wales, then at various places in the west of the colony. Next, Spence along with David Temple set up a shearers’ union at Ballarat in Victoria. By July, South Australia had joined the movement, and in August Temple was in the Riverina organising shearers. By the end of the year there was movement throughout Victoria and attempts were in train to organise New Zealand. Not all efforts succeeded -- Tasmania and New Zealand were disappointments -- yet from 1887 the capitalists were facing unions across a vast stretch of eastern Australia. During disputes in 1887 and 1888, the ASU consolidated itself as a national organisation, defeating plans to cut the shearing rate.

Unionisation on some parts of the wool track had been stimulated by the pastoralists themselves gradually withdrawing from involvement in day to day shearing. A lot of stations, especially inland, were effectively run by managers or junior partners whom the workforce thought remote or arrogant. This occurred just at a time when shearers were beginning to getting fed up with bossy managers. The legendary dissolute ex-convicts, capable of drinking a season’s earnings in one debauch, were giving way to another type. The shearer of the seventies and eighties, commented itinerant writer Francis Adams, was ‘a man who arrives on a horse, leading another’ and who sent money home to his wife. He expected the bosses to treat him with respect.

Yet the union was actually strongest in far-western New South Wales, where conditions were harsh, rations expensive, the local union branch full of landless workers. Strike camps were large and easy to hold together. The Bourke branch was a key centre of militancy in the ASU. Here, most sheds accepted union demands or something close to them. In still another type of area, where large numbers of small holding farmers sheared on a part time basis, union consciousness was weak. Some smallholders owned the pastoralists money, so they feared antagonizing them; others were fairly prosperous and for that reason less interested in class struggle.

The Riverina and Victoria’s western district saw bitter conflicts, with the union suffering defeats because of the availability of casual labour. In Victoria:

1889 was quieter, because wool prices had risen so the bosses preferred to avoid strife. Some employers became friendlier towards the union: in February 1889 several pastoralists and two of their associations attended its national conference. On the other hand shearers in many places were accepting terms inferior to the ASU’s official position.

The ASU officials themselves generally tried to avoid conflict. Apart perhaps from W.W. Head, who ‘subscribed to some ill-defined socialist beliefs and was far more inclined to confront pastoralists than to negotiate with them,’ the AWU leaders were moderates. Spence himself was a Christian preacher, a member of the Creswick militia, prominent in the temperance movement, and a justice of the peace who informed a Royal Commission that ‘I do not believe in strikes at all.’ He thought unionists ‘must demand the respect of capitalists to such an extent that the latter would ultimately come to the former and say, "We will go mates on this or that concern."’ Despite conciliatory tendencies on both sides, however, the show-down of the nineties appears inevitable in retrospect.

Wages were not really the central issue. The Australian Town and Country Journal said of the notorious 1886 advertisement: ‘A reduction of 2s 6d per hundred was not worth the trouble. The saving was too small to give relief.’

Later on employers commonly offered good pay to shearers willing to accept the bosses’ terms, in order to undermine the ASU. George Mair, bitter enemy of unions, thought that the shearing rate was ‘comparatively unimportant ... The question is whether we shall preserve to ourselves the control of our business, or put ourselves under the rule of our own workmen.’ To be sure, the bosses also feared that should they lose control, ruinous wage demands would follow. From 1889 the anti-union elements among pastoralists began to mobilise, and stronger employer organisations took shape.

The ASU’s conciliatory stance was genuine. At the same time, however, its leaders saw collaboration with management as a means to institutionalize their presence in the industry and enforce the closed shop. This was incompatible with employer demands for ‘freedom of contract’. For both sides, therefore, the key issue was who controlled the industry.

By 1890, pastoral unionism was losing momentum and the bosses were becoming more aggressive. Union strength was also under threat from new shearing machines that made it easier to replace skilled shearers with novices. A concerned ASU leadership began looking to the maritime unions for assistance, as did the Queensland Shearers’ Union, an independent body competing with the ASU. During a conflict over the closed shop at Jondaryan station on the Darling Downs, the Queenslanders explored the possibility of a port blockade to stop the transport of non-union wool. They also looked to the Australian Labor Federation (a force in Queensland, though virtually non-existent elsewhere) to organise solidarity.

The ASU likewise allied itself with the New South Wales maritime unions, ensuring that the Sydney Trades and Labor Council also fell into line, although some conservative elements would have preferred not to back the shearers. An ASU manifesto called on unionists ‘to draw such a cordon around the Australian continent as will effectively prevent a bale of wool leaving unless shorn by union shearers.’ Ultimately, however, these initiatives were swallowed up in the great 1891 strikes. The Queensland union as well as Spence and Temple had hoped that the wool issue would remain isolated from other work on the wharves, which in turn might allow the unions to divide the pastoral employers from the shipping companies. But the generalized conflict of 1891 was to have just the opposite effect.

The climate of worker optimism and union advance during the late eighties had begun to breed solidarity across sectional boundaries. Although craft unions generally still guarded against incursions from the less skilled, craft barriers were not absolute. In 1886 workers in one of the New South Wales railways formed a single union open to porters, signal operators, guards and blacksmiths. Around the same time, the 250-strong Mildura Land and Labour Union combined engineers, shed hands and unskilled grubbing gangs. It was more than symbolic unity: at times skilled workers combined with grubbbers in strikes to support shedhands’ claims for higher pay.

One test for the quality of union solidarity was efforts to organize women. This was an area where sectional prejudice ran deep. New South Wales unions only tackled the task in the late eighties, when union confidence was high. Yet the Boot Trade Union, established in August 1889, was open to both males and females; a male member later told the Commission on Strikes that the women’s work was ‘better done than the men could do it’. The TLC then attempted to create a Tailoresses’ Union, holding an initial meeting of thirty workers. Peter Strong, former leader of the Tailors’ Association, became the first President. ‘Two years later Strong was to admit how he had fought against female labour for thirty years, and how it had only been during the late eighties that he had recognised the futility of the exercise. It was only then that he had set about trying to organise women workers.’

In 1890 the TLC established a general organising committee, which moved to organise laundresses and to create a Female Employees’ Society. The laundresses struck in September, 1891 over the sacking of a fellow worker. During the dispute Creo Stanley, a socialist, became the first female delegate to the TLC, winning applause when she declared that she was ‘not afraid of any man in the council; no, nor any press representative at the table yonder.’

The Sydney unions also had many failings. Stanley was to resign her seat five months later, protesting at the ‘unmanly and insulting conduct of brother unionists’. The Typographers declared women’s membership unconstitutional, and even female-dominated industries were generally represented by male delegates on the Trades and Labor Council. In 1899 the TLC settled a dispute at Hirschman’s factory in Redfern on terms that excluded women from the union. However this decision was only approved by a small majority, and it quickly provoked criticism in the pages of The Worker.

The General Labourers’ Union allied with the ASU sought to organise women workers in Sydney, Melbourne and a number of country centres, while Rose Summerville worked with tailoresses, domestic servants and boot trade employees. Unfortunately these efforts were not very successful, and misfortune overwhelmed them in the crisis years of the 1890s.