7.
‘Work or riot’: The unemployment crisis
During the seventies poverty and unemployment ceased to be issues at the fringes of society and began to invade its core, in previously comfortable middle class areas as well as amongst the working class. At the start of the decade it was thought no government could survive unemployment higher than two or three percent, and jobless figures of four percent had played a part in Whitlam's fall. Malcolm Fraser, however, was able to survive much higher unemployment levels. His government had the dubious distinction of establishing, in a population used to relative prosperity, a grudging acceptance that mass unemployment was “normal”. He did this partly by taking the offensive.
In the monetarist framework unemployment became a tool of policy, helping the government to “fight inflation first” by reducing consumer demand and by discouraging industrial militancy. Of course if put this baldly Fraser's methods would have aroused public outrage, so he resorted to strategems aimed at deflecting public blame away from himself and onto the victims.
The myth of the “dole bludger” was originally contributed to Australian folklore by the Whitlam government, but it was fully developed and enriched in the middle to late seventies. Victorian Liberal MLA Jeff Kennett set the tone magnificently in July 1977 with his claim that only about 17 percent of people on the dole were really unable to find work, estimates he said derived from “commonsense evaluations”. The efforts of opportunist politicians like Kennett were backed up by the media, who portrayed the jobless as “bludging on beaches” while “being paid for doing absolutely nothing”.
Fraser had taken office pledging to crack down on this supposed abuse, and his successive moves to tighten the rules brought applause not only from the media but also from a large proportion of ordinary people. Partly this resulted from media manipulation. For example the Australian reported in 1976 that the “number of people prosecuted for abusing unemployment benefits doubled in the first six months of 1976 compared with the previous half year. Figures compiled by the Department of Social Security show 47,000 people had their benefits ended in the last year after investigation by the Department's field officers.” Casual readers might think 47,000 people had been prosecuted, though the small print revealed that the total was 115. The Department had stopped benefits to most of the 47,000 for reasons far removed from “dole bludging”.
The pervasiveness of the “bludger” myth could not, however, be fully explained by media hype, for large numbers of people seemed remarkably anxious to embrace it. Working in a sheet metal factory at the end of 1975, I was astonished at my fellow workers' angry demands to “get the bludgers off the dole”. When I pointed out that unemployment had soared in the previous year, asking whether an epidemic of laziness had suddenly hit the country, I was met with belligerent assent. These were well-meaning people with no apparent reason to attack the unemployed, but they were also poorly paid and trapped in a dirty, oppressive workplace, making them prime candidates for a syndrome Keith Windschuttle explained very well:
For most people, work time and labour are given grudgingly ... Often the worker doubts the fairness of his rewards. There exists widespread suspicion that the sacrifices are not worth the rewards received. Under these circumstances, the person who demonstrates how to get the rewards without making the sacrifices is a subversive ... This provides the basis for a dual response by the mass media. On the one hand, the reader is fascinated by the concept of breaking the rules, of rejecting the socially approved goals and the socially-sanctioned means towards them. But on the other hand, the reader feels such breaches are not possible for him. He is encouraged by the media to feel strong moral indignation towards those who achieve that freedom, particularly if he believes their indulgence is at his expense.
As the jobless levels rose higher and time passed, more workers began to see through the myth if only because people they knew, often their own children, were unable to find jobs. Under such circumstances the hostility could give way to solidarity and a consequent public backlash against the government; therefore Fraser sought from the start for ways to distract attention from the problem, or to fiddle the statistics, or to force people off the dole. The very first full cabinet meeting in January 1976 decided on stern measures. The government would deny the dole to people who moved to areas with few jobs, as well as those who made themselves unacceptable to employers by their dress or appearance. It would allow the Department of Social Security to postpone benefits if you were “voluntarily” unemployed or were sacked for “misconduct”.
Two months later the eligibility criteria were tightened further: school leavers couldn't get benefits until the next school year began, skilled workers had to take unskilled jobs, “voluntary” unemployed had to wait six weeks before benefits started, and income statements had to be lodged in person rather than posted. None of these measures created any jobs (except, perhaps, behind the counter at dole offices), but they helped keep down the numbers on benefits.
Fraser's next step was to cut back on the benefits. In January 1977 he made them taxable. In March 1977 he abandoned the Whitlam Government's plans to gradually increase them in real terms, announcing they would be indexed to the CPI. The August 1977 budget announced they would be paid two weeks in arrears. The effect of these decisions was to drive increasing numbers of people into the arms of private charities, for many of the jobless had scant resources of their own. In fact an October 1975 survey had found that 40 percent of people registered with the Commonwealth Employment Service had no savings at all. The attacks continued off and on throughout the Fraser years, concluding with an unsuccessful attempt in 1981 to eliminate benefits for under-18s.
Though harassing the jobless served no socially useful purpose, the government persisted for political reasons. In March 1979 the Bulletin reported that senior officers in the Department of Social Security (DSS) “argue that application of the work test is futile” but that Employment minister Ian Viner thought aspects of it might need to be tightened. Of course there were those advocating more drastic measures. The national president of the Returned Services League (RSL), for example, suggested conscription of all young men for two years at the age of eighteen.
As the Fraser years wore on, the dimensions of human suffering became clearer. Most attention focused on the youth. As in most western countries, youth unemployment had been rising more rapidly than the adult jobless totals since the mid-1960s, a problem which the economic recession simply brought to crisis point. In August 1976 Peter Kirby of the Department of Employment and Youth Affairs (DEYA) told a conference that about 35 young people were registered as unemployed for every vacancy listed with the Commonwealth Employment Service, and that the national average concealed “such alarming ratios” as 600 to 1 for unskilled junior males in some country areas. By the time Kirby spoke, nearly 20 percent of unemployed youth had been out of work for over six months.
The “dole bludger” myth ensured that many of these unemployed young people blamed themselves or faced harassment from their parents. A 17-year-old told journalist Anne Summers: “I keep getting hassled at home, with Mum saying, Why don't you practise [typing]? But I keep going for interviews and keep getting knocked back and I just feel so useless.” More sophisticated blame-the-victim arguments suggested that rising youth wages had priced young people out of the job market, but calculations by economist Peter Sheehan showed that the wage relativities between juniors and adults had not changed much at all -- if anything, wages for young women had deteriorated relative to those for adults, while their unemployment levels had shown a long term increase.
The dole was lower for under-eighteens than for adults. Parents were supposed to be taking care of their kids, but in reality nearly a third of them had to survive on their own and many were homeless. Inevitably some of them turned to illegal forms of work, as in Sydney's King's Cross, where a floating population of up to 4000 teenagers survived from prostitution and drug deals, living in fear of the police. A visiting journalist spoke to one young man working as a prostitute:
I asked Ivan if he would call himself basically gay or bisexual. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, “basically broke”.
It became harder and harder to deny that young people were the innocent victims of the unemployment crisis, and gradually both the government and the experts grew alarmed at the dimensions of the problem. A 1978 submission from DEYA said “the trend towards an increasingly higher level of unemployment shows no signs of abating”, and warned that for the foreseeable future unskilled school leavers would find jobs very scarce. Fears mounted that an entire generation of workers was being traumatised. These fears were accentuated by a number of riots among young people.
The most spectacular took place in September 1979 at Newcastle's Star Hotel, a favourite venue for unemployed and poorly paid young workers. When the owners made a commercial decision to close the pub, a crowd of 2000 gathered on the final night. Stimulated by alcohol and probably also by the band's last number, which featured the lyrics: “I want action, I want fighting in the streets”, hundreds responded to a police car driving into the crowd by hurling bottles and abuse at the cops. Other pitched battles occurred during the 1982 recession at beach locations in South Australia and Victoria.
The Fraser Government responded to this generational crisis with an array of training schemes. Most important was the Special Youth Employment Training Program, which subsidised employers to hire young people. Critics pointed out that employers often simply used the scheme as a source of cheap labour, letting kids go when the grant expired and replacing them with new, subsidised trainees. Often the “training” was a myth, with jobs restricted to stocking shelves and running messages. Other schemes included rebates for apprenticeship training (which aroused little interest among employers pessimistic about the future) and the Community Youth Support Scheme (CYSS). CYSS funded a rag-bag of activities ranging from community work to letter writing. None of the schemes seriously addressed the youth unemployment problem; at best they recycled it, as those who got jobs through them did so at others' expense.
Of stress and scapegoats
If the youth only got bandaids, unemployed people at the other end of the age scale did little better. By 1982 almost half of people aged 55 to 59 were outside the workforce. For many of them, “early retirement” was an unexpected, deeply resented descent into poverty. Metal worker Dulcie Howard was one of 700 who “retired” from Sunbeam in Campsie, NSW in 1982. She reported that the company had put great pressure on older workers to “get out voluntarily”:
They pushed this supervisor that had worked at Sunbeam for 40 years. He had started as a young boy in the tool room and worked his way up, as they did then. He was easily 57 or 58. They pushed him off to where he didn't know anything. We were shocked because he was the sort that had made Sunbeams his life, that Sunbeams always came first with him. I thought, “Well, that didn't get him anywhere.”
Many older unemployed were confronted with a particularly cruel irony: steady long term work for one company had left them too narrowly skilled to find other jobs. A survey of migrant women retrenched from the clothing industry found some could only sew dresses but not shirts, and vice versa.
Unemployment meant stress, bringing serious medical consequences. Two academic studies during the 1970s found that Melbourne suburbs with high jobless rates also had higher death rates, while in Adelaide the unemployed were more likely than other people to report heart trouble. The economic crisis was a killer. But the emotional damage that unemployment and the “dole bludger” stigma could do was illustrated in more spectacular fashion in April 1979, after 34-year-old cabinet maker Domenico Speranza became Australia's first international hi-jacker. Police shot Speranza dead when he tried to seize an aeroplane at Sydney airport. His family revealed he had been deeply unhappy, and had been ridiculed by the neighbours for being out of work.
Women were often hard hit. Early fears that females would be driven back into the home in large numbers proved unfounded, but some other consequences were drastic enough. The number of homeless women grew while those looking for work became particularly vulnerable to abuse, as one teenager recalled:
My sister ... went for a job in advertising, and the bloke said we need photos of you just for identification and she said fair enough, and he said, drop your clothes, and she said, what? And he said, do you want to work here? and she desperately wanted to work there, and ... she got done. She got raped -- by all these high class blokes who worked in the place.
In addition to those identified as jobless, there were huge numbers of hidden unemployed. Polls and surveys in 1973 and 1974 showed that 24-32 percent of women would work if convenient child care was available. Applying these results to the 1978 jobless figures, Keith Windschuttle estimated there were over 800,000 women who could be considered hidden unemployed.
The female workforce also became a scapegoat for the economic problems of the time. Popular prejudice had it that married women were stealing jobs from men. The Weekend Australian embraced this proposition with a 1978 feature article headlined: “If Mum Quit Work There'd Be Jobs For The Boys (And Girls)”. Apparently not only men but also single women were being victimised by greedy mums! Agitation of this sort had a considerable impact, particularly in regional centres dependent on hard-hit traditional “male” industries such as steel or ship-building. Thus in Wollongong during the 1982-83 recession, Meg Fowler of the Lake Heights Community Centre reported: “I had so many people ringing up and saying it was the fault of those women in David Jones behind the counters, with all their rings on their fingers. I was so shaken up I took my rings off for a few weeks ... “
Several federal ministers sought to manipulate this irrational reaction to distract people's attention from the government's economic failures. Ian Viner, Ralph Hunt and Eric Robinson all accused women of taking jobs from men and school leavers. Hunt went one better, arguing that married females were causing unemployment by having abortions!
If these arguments ran out of legs, there was a handy alternative: in 1977 Ian Viner suggested that the rapid introduction of equal pay was to blame -- it should, he said, have been brought in more slowly, and paid for by cutting men's wages. On the same day Claude Forell declared there was “no doubt” equal pay had increased unemployment. The fact that wage equality had been introduced by gradual stages -- insofar as real equality was achieved at all -- apparently cut no ice with Viner or Forell. Such inane reasoning naturally provoked replies, one of the most sophisticated coming from Joy Selby-Smith of the Australian National University. Smith published research in 1979 showing that while women were continuing to join the workforce, many were not taking jobs to which men aspired. If anything, men were moving into so-called “women's jobs”: an additional 54,200 males had been employed in teaching, caretaking and cleaning between 1972 and 1977.
There were occasional attempts to enlist public sympathy for retrenched managers, and no doubt some middle-level executives and their families did suffer severe blows, but by and large, working class people saw a double standard at work. For example in February, 1979 Ian Viner announced that anyone refusing to travel to seasonal work such as fruit picking could lose their dole. Only days later it emerged that a top public servant was being paid $860 a week to stay on his farm while a suitable post was found for him, prompting several letters to the press suggesting he be redeployed to the orchards. After the closure of GMH's Pagewood plant in 1980, sixty employees out of 12,000 saved their jobs by transferring interstate. Details of the conditions offered to the managers and to the rest of the workforce varied greatly -- a “perfectly natural” arrangement according to the company's public relations manager. Others saw it as a class system.
While unemployment was the dominant issue, the Liberals' small-government agenda caused them to attack social welfare of all kinds, and the attacks left great bitterness in their wake. In 1979 the Director General of the Department of Social Security decided to “clarify” the law on invalid pensions. Where previously doctors assessing people's eligibility had been allowed to consider educational, psychological, social and environmental factors in borderline cases, the new ruling eliminated this option. In early 1980 the Health Department's NSW Division tightened requirements further, telling Commonwealth Medical Officers that a person's incapacity to work related to any useful work, not just what they were accustomed to. The implications could be horrific:
A rehabilitation worker told the National Times that under the new guidelines a person in an iron lung might not be considered 85 percent incapacitated since there was undoubtedly some small job he could do even though no employer would hire him.
The new approach was used to withdraw pensions from borderline cases, who were then told to apply for sickness or unemployment benefits. This meant they lost $9.55 a week in pension income as well as a range of other entitlements. The National Times reported:
One man who lost his pension is a spinal injury victim whose disability makes it impossible to drive, lift heavy objects or sit at a desk for long without suffering crippling spasms that last up to three days.
In 1981 the government launched yet another assault on welfare programs, as part of a “Review of Commonwealth Functions” -- better known by its nickname, “the Razor Gang”. Nevertheless, despite the meanness which millions felt characterised Fraser's every step, welfare expenditure actually rose slightly from 26.4 percent of budget outlays in 1976 to 27.8 percent in 1981. This reflected the levels of unemployment benefits and an increased number of aged pensioners. The irony, however, to many of the government's establishment supporters, was that Fraser was managing to sow immense social bitterness without delivering the smaller government he had promised. In addition, the diversity of the attacks on social welfare created a greater potential for his opponents to form alliances and develop a general critique, both of Fraser's policies and of the capitalist society that spawned them.
Into the streets
The economic crisis gave birth to a host of activist groups fighting on welfare issues, such as the Unemployed Workers' Union, the Coalition Against Poverty and Unemployment, and the Right to Work Campaign. These were generally initiated by one or another radical left grouping, but had a wider resonance, because ideologically they stood on firm ground. Very few Australians were initially prepared to accept mass unemployment. However because there was no coherent political movement with the determination and the social weight to mobilise large numbers of people, in and out of work, consistently around the issue, the labour movement ultimately failed to defend this ideological terrain.
In Sydney, the Right to Work Campaign began operations in February 1977 with a picket at the Dunlop factory in Drummoyne, in protest at the retrenchment of 600 employees. They leafleted two shifts with multi-lingual literature, brandishing placards calling for a 35 hour week and nationalisation of Dunlop. A member of the Socialist Workers' Party, which was heavily involved in the group, wrote:
Last year Dunlop raked in a tidy $26 million [profit] ... What [the rubber] companies are doing is taking advantage of this period of economic crisis when the labour movement is on the defensive ... to “rationalise” their operations -- to close down the more inefficient plants, transfer operations overseas where labour is cheaper, effect speed-ups and so on. And if they're lucky, they may even receive government compensation and subsidies to assist this reorganisation.
Two months later a Demand for Work Campaign in Melbourne drew a thousand people, largely migrants, to hear Gough Whitlam speak at Collingwood Town Hall. The meeting was partly a manoeuvre by pro-Whitlam forces in the ALP leadership tussle then in progress, but it showed the depth of working class concern about unemployment. There were lots more smaller rallies and actions around the country over the following year or two, some of them respectable events addressed by Labor politicians but others a bit more aggressive. In Melbourne one Virginia Kane, tired of trying to extract a dole cheque from DSS, chained herself to a desk at the Department's main headquarters. She got her cheque but refused to budge until police arrived. “There were people there in worse situations than I was,” she said. “I wanted to show them that if they stood up for themselves they could get somewhere.”
Fraser himself was an inviting target for angry young agitators. When the Prime Minister arrived to open the Harold McCracken nursing home in Fitzroy (Melbourne) in March 1979, he was met by a 1000-strong hostile crowd, whereupon “there was a mad scramble to move the 600 official guests into the church ... They did it just in time for the Prime Minister to enter the church through a barrage of eggs and tomatoes.” Some of the eggs found their mark (a demonstrator subsequently remarked that “lots of people are now heavily into throwing food”). Confrontations with police led to nine arrests, and the subsequent march to Russell Street police station to demand their release sparked the formation of a Coalition Against the Fraser Government, which organised further demonstrations.
In November 1982, Melbourne's Coalition Against Poverty and Unemployment announced it would hold a “March To Stop The City”, winning endorsement from 28 trade unions, the ALP State Executive and various social welfare groups. The State government got a hint of what was in store during parliamentary question time, when six women and four men unfurled a protest banner in the public gallery and shouted “join us to stop the city” as they were being escorted out. Three days later, a sizeable crowd gathered in the City Square, where one banner read: “Work Or Riot”. They heard former Maoist union leader Clarrie O'Shea call for a “revolution to overthrow this rotten system”, then marched to the Stock Exchange, where they hauled down and burned Australian and Stock Exchange flags before sending red and Eureka flags aloft. The marchers then headed up Collins Street to the Melbourne Club, symbolic home of the Establishment.
On arriving, the crowd hurled bricks through windows and surged against the doors, taking police by surprise. The doors caved in, allowing a crowd of demonstrators to enter the building, where they caused havoc while staff hurriedly snatched paintings off the walls. The cops detained fifteen people, but the crowd outside demanded their release so vociferously that only three were eventually taken off to Russell Street police station to be charged; a section of the crowd marched to Russell Street to demand their release. One of the fifteen who had invaded the building later declared, “We want to let them know that we are very angry. That is the ruling class in there, that's the tax evaders.”
While the unrest was valuable in keeping the issues alive, the unemployed won few actual victories. Squatters sometimes won the right to live in unused public housing. The Unemployed Workers Union did force the Victorian government to provide free travel on public transport for people going to seek work. But the travel vouchers were accompanied by too much red tape to be very useful and were no help in getting the job when you arrived. Probably the most important win concerned the Community Youth Support Scheme, which the 1981 federal budget sought to abolish.
Although CYSS was really just a band-aid measure it did create drop-in centres, some of which had become organising centres for the more political unemployed, so there were people ready to defend the scheme. Following the budget, 60 of them occupied Liberal Party headquarters in Canberra, 500 people yelled “No jobs, no money, no CYSS, no future” as they marched through Sydney, and an even bigger crowd packed Brisbane's town hall, where they shouted down Liberal MP Don Cameron. In September there was a demonstration in Melbourne. Protest groups began to proliferate and ultimately Fraser was forced to extend the scheme.
In general, though, the activist groups could make little lasting impact. They were simply unable to mobilise most of their potential constituency. Most of the unemployed were too preoccupied by the struggle for survival, or too demoralised by their circumstances to take readily to the streets on the instigation of a minority of agitators -- or if they did, they had little staying power. Only a wider social movement could have mobilised them effectively. The unemployed groups did periodically call for unity between employed trade unionists and the unemployed, pensioners and the poor -- and rightly, for it was only the organised labour movement which could have provided the necessary leadership. But given the politics of the existing union leaderships, such an alliance was almost impossible to build.
Some responsibility lay with the more ultra-left activists, for example those who portrayed staff in the Department of Social Security as repressive agents of the state and abused them during demonstrations at dole offices. While some DSS clerks might be guilty of the charge, far more of them were sympathetic to the unemployed, and their unions might have done more to help had they been approached constructively. For example DSS clerks in Victoria banned a new set of work test guidelines in September 1979, demanding more staff and training. While it wasn't spelt out, some of them also wanted to prevent crackdowns on the unemployed.
A greater responsibility, however, rested with the union officialdom, whose support for the poor and jobless seldom extended beyond rhetoric, and who almost never actively mobilised their members in struggle around the issue. The unions never even seriously attempted to ban overtime in order to create more jobs. Building an unemployed movement would have required an alternative leadership in the working class. Many of the activists looked to the unemployed campaigns of the Depression years as a model; but those campaigns had been built by a rapidly growing Communist Party, which despite the impact of Stalinism still embodied some revolutionary impulses. Nothing similar existed in the Fraser years.
Resisting the sack
The closest the ACTU came to seriously tackling the jobs issue was in the area of new technology. The arrival of the microchip had caused great foreboding in much of the Australian workforce. The Myers report on technology estimated that the number of word processors in Australian offices could rise from 9,500 in 1979 to 80,000 by 1985 and automatic tellers seemed set to slash employment levels in banks, while robots, already at work on Japanese assembly lines, would inevitably make their appearance in Australian car plants. A labour movement already beset by double-digit jobless figures wondered whether far, far worse was on the way. And how believable were the assurances of the computer companies that their technology would also create jobs?
In 1979, the ACTU adopted a 13-point resolution about technological change, which demanded six months' notice of retrenchment, improved severance pay, portable long-service leave, assistance in finding other employment, and various forms of compensation. These were worthy objectives, the trouble was that the resolution suggested no means of fighting to save jobs. By this time a campaign for the 35 hour week was also underway, and nominally the shorter working week was conceived as a means of creating employment. In reality, however, the campaign was part of the 1979-81 “wage push” with the job creation issue mostly peripheral to it. Some left unions did seriously try to link the two issues. But the ACTU Congress made only a token response to proposals from the AMWU and the printing union PKIU to ban overtime in an effort to save jobs. Similarly the impressive 1978 campaign by telecommunications workers to assert union control over the pace of technological change (discussed in chapter eleven) remained largely distinct from the more direct struggles over unemployment.
The unions did resist retrenchments, and there was often a major public uproar when large enterprises closed or cut back, with furious posturing by union leaders. The rank and file were sometimes prepared to put up a stiff fight. For example, at Chrysler's Tonsley Park plant in South Australia, car workers pelted union officials with fruit when they argued for acceptance of a four-day week in July 1977. When the union official chairing the mass meeting, Robert Walker, moved to close it, he was roughed up. Retrenchments a few days later were greeted with a virtual riot. The militants were led by a Maoist-influenced rank and file group in the plant, and their resistance ended when Chrysler used the sackings to weed out the rank and file leaders, with the acquiescence (if not complicity) of union officials, who had denounced them as “a violent rabble”.
Clearly the union officials weren't always your best allies in fighting the sack. Labor Party leaders were even less reliable, as two struggles centred in NSW demonstrated.
Australian dockyard workers discovered their jobs were at risk in August 1976, when the federal government pre-empted an Industries Assistance Commission report by announcing that shipowners could place orders overseas for four 15,000-tonne bulk carriers. Australian shipbuilders had been counting on increased government assistance so they could build the vessels profitably, but the government said existing subsidy levels would not be changed. A planned graving dock was to be scrapped. In practice, this was the death knell for the construction of big ships in Australia. 2000 jobs were now on the line at Newcastle, along with many more across the country including Whyalla in South Australia. The NSW government said it would consider buying a floating dock for Newcastle so smaller scale work could continue. That, however, couldn't solve the basic problem: Australian shipbuilding was uncompetitive even with the 35 percent subsidy which had applied for some years. To save these jobs required huge outlays from somewhere. To get them from the public purse -- let alone make the rest of the employing class pay the price -- was something the Labor leaders never contemplated.
Premiers Don Dunstan and Neville Wran and the federal Labor opposition naturally denounced Canberra. Wran pronounced himself “dismayed, shocked and disgusted,” alleging Malcolm Fraser had “declared economic war on NSW”, while Tom Uren called it “sabotage of the Australian shipbuilding industry and its workers”. Neither criticism had much credibility, though. Since the policy change affected Whyalla in South Australia as much as Newcastle, it could hardly represent an attempt to victimise NSW. As for federal Labor's complaints, Transport minister Nixon had only to reply that the 35 percent subsidy had prevailed throughout the life of the Whitlam government; the coalition was just adhering to it. Workers who might initially see Wran as their champion against Fraser were quickly disappointed when the Premier capitulated to Fraser's demagogic attempt to blame the workers for the industry's troubles, saying: “I acknowledge that the industrial record at the dockyard is bad.”
In reality, there were other factors at work. As the generally anti-union Melbourne Herald reported, overseas countries made finance available to their shipbuilders on far more favourable terms than the Australian government, while the small Australian industry could achieve no economies of scale because it was repeatedly obliged to construct one-off, custom-made ships.
The government pressed rapidly ahead, announcing on 18 August that at least 1,800 workers would be dismissed at Newcastle within weeks, including more than 200 apprentices. The dockyard workforce would be halved. Similar consequences were foreseen for Whyalla, where the overall consequences would be more serious given the town's isolation. The ACTU warned of “catastrophic” implications but in practice never played more than a mediating role.
The response from shipbuilding unions was more serious. At the initiative of the AMWU, dockyard workers in most major centres held a 24-hour stoppage on 26 August. When Don Dunstan called their action “counter-productive” because only the State government would be economically affected, the secretary of the Whyalla Combined Union Council replied sharply: “Every time the workers want to do any sort of strike action we get people saying it is counterproductive ... It is not a strike in the normal sense ... It is a political strike against the decision of the Federal Government.” In Newcastle wharfies, seamen and firemen and deckhands joined the stoppage and on the day of the strike about 150 unionists staged a sit-in inside the NSW parliament, with a number shouting at MPs from the public gallery. Their determination forced Fraser to resort to some fancy footwork.
Fraser offered to have some ships built in Australia after all -- if the unions would ban strikes and accept a wage freeze for a year. The proposition was unrealistic, both because it clashed with the wage indexation system and because the union movement was not prepared to allow the precedent of a no-strike agreement. Even NSW Liberal leader Eric Willis thought the wage freeze idea unreasonable, suggesting a six-month rather than 12-month time span for any exercise in union restraint, but from Fraser's point of view, the proposal had the great political merit of putting all the pressure back on his critics. The workers would have to decide, with the Labor Premiers assigned the task of trying to sell the deal. “I am not asking (and neither is Mr Fraser) the dockworkers to do anything,” said minister Nixon smugly. “Mr Wran will be doing the asking.”
Mass meetings of dockyard workers voted overwhelmingly to reject the plan, denouncing the “harsh and excessive demands to exploit the threat of unemployment.” This was a principled stand, but in itself entirely negative, and from here on in the unions seemed to lose direction. Another contingent invaded NSW State parliament at the end of September, carrying signs reading: “Four destroyers: Fraser, Lynch, Nixon, Cotton”, while a strike around the same time won the temporary withdrawal of 373 dismissal notices at the NSW State Dockyard; however these were all rearguard actions. Unionists' increasing desperation was reflected in a rash of occupations of Japanese ships: unable to defeat their domestic foe the workers, who had earlier sent telegrams to Japanese unions seeking solidarity action, now began to see Japan rather than Australian bosses as the enemy. This was sadly misguided. Although a Japanese firm had won the tenders for building the Australian ships, shipyard workers in that country were hardly facing a jobs bonanza. Rather their industry was itself in a severe slump, with 20,000 laid off and cutbacks underway which would reduce it to 65 percent of its previous capacity.
In October, the dismissals began to flow at Newcastle and Whyalla. By April 1977, as the NSW State Dockyard launched the 25,000 tonne bulk carrier Selwyn Range, there were signs around Newcastle reading: “Drive carefully -- there are over 17,000 unemployed walking the streets.” As the ship was launched, effigies of Fraser and Nixon hung from the bow. Amidst the crowd of workers, sadly, were placards reading, “Why give our jobs to the Japs?”
Three and a half years later the vehicle unions faced a crisis in Sydney when General Motors Holden decided to close its Pagewood car assembly plant, threatening 1500 jobs. While the economy as a whole was by this time in an upswing due to the “resources boom”, the car industry was slumping and GMH set about rationalising its operations. Pagewood was its oldest assembly plant and to modernise it, the company claimed, would cost $100 million. In June, the Financial Review broke the news that GMH had told the federal government it would close the plant, though it had supposedly not bothered to inform the State ALP government.
Stung by the news, Wran accused Fraser of “treachery” and threatened to stop buying GMH cars, while the State secretary of the Vehicle Builders' Union (VBU), Joe Thompson, warned of “massive retaliation” if Pagewood closed. As with the dockyards issue, Wran's righteous anger was just for show; apart from image-building, its main purpose was to persuade car workers that they should look to the government for salvation rather than to industrial action. To enhance the impression that the State government was on the job, Industry minister Don Day flew off to America, where he went through the motions of lobbying General Motors' top management.
Joe Thompson's warnings had slightly more substance. When shop stewards discovered that 500 cars had left the plant in a week, compared to the normal 120, the union imposed bans on the removal of any further vehicles. Next it banned the unloading of GMH cars arriving on rail trucks for sale in NSW, and said it would consider halting all rail transport of the company's vehicles. Later the Labor Council threatened to ban dismantling of equipment when the plant was shut down. While this was hardly the “war” between the unions and GMH which Labor Council secretary Barrie Unsworth claimed was on the cards, it did suggest the impact that a concerted industrial campaign might have made. Indeed there were those in the union movement who called for a general strike, though Bob Hawke was quick to explain that the problem was too “complex” to solve by such simple means.
In the absence of an escalating campaign of industrial action, the union effort was repeatedly pushed into largely empty talk of boycotts: boycotts by the Wran regime, by local councils (a few of them did take such action), by union members at large. Militants such as the VBU's Paul Ford called for more determined action, saying “we have to fight to keep this plant open”. This would have required very different methods of struggle: for example, a serious occupation of the plant, visits to other workplaces to organise solidarity strikes, calls for the bosses rather than the workers to pay for an economic crisis in the bosses' own capitalist system. Ford and a few others inside and outside the plant argued for a struggle along these lines, but Joe Thompson had the resources of his union office and of Trades Hall whereas the militants were disorganised and isolated. And it had become increasingly clear that the VBU officials' real agenda was simply to extract the best possible redundancy deal.
A horror budget
If the unions were ever going to stage a real fightback around issues of poverty, unemployment and government cutbacks, their best chance was the 1978 “horror budget”.
Having announced big tax cuts in 1977 in order to win that year's election, Fraser reversed himself a year later, announcing steep increases under the influence of Treasury secretary John Stone, who thought cutting the budget deficit would help attract foreign investment. In the same budget he produced yet another new health policy, abolishing Medibank Standard. Despite some talk of “Medibank III”, in reality Medibank had finally been scrapped. While analysts generally saw the new health policy as somewhat more equitable than the system introduced amidst the sound and fury of 1976, the changes served to revive much of the working class bitterness surrounding healthcare issues.
These major initiatives were accompanied by numerous smaller annoyances: petrol, beer and cigarette prices were to rise, a range of welfare payments were to be cut, and nine-month delays for home ownership assistance were to be matched by a $77 million cut in money for welfare housing. Only those unemployed who had dependents got any increase in the dole, and pensions were to be indexed annually instead of every six months. The “vampire's budget”, as John Halfpenny dubbed it, summed up everything workers disliked about Fraser. Here was an opportunity to unite all the anti-Fraser forces and give the bastard a bloody nose.
Within 24 hours, waterside workers in Port Adelaide and Melbourne had walked off the job, and hundreds of Melbourne construction workers had taken to the streets. Within two days, the ACTU was reported to be “canvassing rank and file reaction ... to decide whether to call a 24 hour national stoppage.” Raw eggs and a paint bomb narrowly missed the Prime Minister as 600 demonstrators greeted him outside a business luncheon. When Bob Hawke expressed a personal view that workers would prefer more moderate alternatives to a general strike, it sounded rather like wishful thinking, for the momentum of protest was clearly building. An Adelaide protest rally drew 7,000 people, then in Melbourne Fraser was jeered at a football game.
Sydney saw an initial protest march on 17 August. A mass meeting of railway workers at Chullora the next day called for a national stoppage. Three days after that they stopped work, along with watersiders, metal workers, the Garden Island dockyards, printers and meatworkers to attend a 10,000-strong rally in Town Hall Square. Speaking alongside Neville Wran, the ALP's new leader Bill Hayden told the crowd that Malcolm Fraser was displaying “a total lack of regard for the people”. Several hundred of the people decided Fraser's big-business supporters were equally to blame; they marched down George Street to the Stock Exchange:
The demonstrators arrived at the Exchange at 2:15 pm, cramming into the narrow corridor on the ground floor that led from O'Connell St. They surged towards the glass door tearing fixtures from the wall. One person sprayed slogans onto the lift doors and on the walls. All the slogans were the same: “Make the rich pay.”
Of ten people arrested two young socialists, Martin Hirst and Phil Lee, had severe charges laid against them. It took a long political campaign to eventually get the most serious charges dropped.
On the same day as the Sydney events, police arrested 129 people attempting to march from Brisbane's King George Square after an anti-budget rally. The struggle over Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen's ban on street marches (discussed in the following chapter) was underway.
Fraser claimed that ALP leader Bill Hayden was deliberately stirring up the trouble, however by 1978 this sounded pretty inane. The Hayden leadership was not likely to stir up anything. Indeed Hayden cynically pointed out that some of the Stock Exchange demonstrators had carried placards reading “Sack Hawke, Hayden and Wran”. It was not, as he suggested, that these were “closet members of the Liberal Party”. Quite simply, a lot of people who hated Fraser were beginning to wonder whether the rightward moving ALP leaders were much better. Their problem was they lacked an alternative political organisation that did want to incite unrest and was big enough to do so effectively.
While the Canberra pollies traded nonsense, Melbourne's Trades Hall Council was organising a rally in the Bourke Street mall. Although the unions didn't call stoppages, 8,000 people turned up. After some speeches the organisers led the crowd to State parliament where they were appealing for it to disperse when, in a smaller scale re-run of the 1975 breakaway march, teacher activist Julie Ingleby called on the crowd to proceed to the Stock Exchange. A thousand or more heeded the call. As in 1975, the International Socialists popped up at the front of the march. Yet once again, they were able to accomplish little with their apparent leadership, because they were still too small. Finding itself faced with locked doors and rows of police, the crowd milled about aimlessly before eventually breaking up. As at the time of the Constitutional Crisis, there were angry people looking for a lead, but there was no one both willing and able to provide it. Only the left union leaders could have done so, and they had once again gone home.
The rank and file of Victorian unions kept calling for action. 1000 shop stewards and job delegates came to a mass meeting at Festival Hall, but by this time the left unions had decided to dampen the unrest, so John Halfpenny offered the shop stewards a motion demanding that the ACTU organise half-day national stoppages each week. An alternative call for a one-week strike, previously endorsed almost unanimously by 700 workers in the Latrobe Valley, was not put to a vote although several delegates spoke for it. Halfpenny's motion was less militant than it sounded, since a campaign of repeated short stoppages can easily lose momentum. His later suggestion that “the government could ride out a one-week general strike but they could not ride out half-day stoppages every week,” was not really very sound. Still the weekly stoppages would have sent a powerful message to the government, were it not for the fact that Trades Hall had no intention of holding them.
The THC endorsed the plan only insofar as it, too, requested action from the ACTU. It was counting on the national union leaders to bury the plan. Sure enough, a special telephone hook-up of the ACTU executive on 1 September made short shrift of the idea, and another opportunity to challenge the Fraser regime had been squandered.
Wollongong's ‘out of workers'
The finest industrial fightback against sackings occurred in Wollongong on the NSW South Coast towards the end of 1982. In September, Australian Iron and Steel announced that because of a deepening slump in demand, 250 people would be retrenched with another 500-700 job losses possible; shortly after that, BHP announced that 206 Kemira miners were to lose their jobs. Wollongong had already been prostrated by recession and unemployment so for many local trade unionists, these announcements were the last straw. Graham Jones, then a rigger at Port Kembla, recalls the feelings of resentment:
Over the years, BHP had made vast profits and siphoned them off into resource investments. Then when the steel industry went bad they started to cry poor -- said they couldn't cross-subsidise.
6000 southern district miners struck for 24 hours, seven bus loads of them travelling to Sydney to occupy some of BHP's offices before proceeding to parliament, where they called for nationalisation of the mines. Unimpressed, AIS announced two weeks later that 285 final year apprentices would be without jobs at year's end. Concluding that conventional strike action would have little effect on employers already running production down and holding large stockpiles, the Kemira miners resolved on a different tactic: they occupied their mine. After their first night of occupation 1000 workers from other mines turned up to demonstrate in support, then a day later 4000 miners rallied at the showgrounds, where union president Bob Kelly declared that “eventually, we are going to have to storm Parliament House.” Sensing the popular mood, the Illawarra Mercury also backed the occupation.
On 21 October, 10,000 South Coast unionists packed the showgrounds to vote overwhelmingly for lightning strikes in the steelworks and mines, with a minority demanding stronger action. By this time the union leaders had met with Neville Wran and BHP, and concluded only federal intervention could resolve the issue in their favour, so on 26 October, 2000 unionists boarded trains for Canberra. Three bus loads also travelled from Newcastle.
The plan was for a conventional rally with Bill Hayden speaking, but the marchers went right past the speakers' platform, hopping over barricades and charging up the stairs to the glass doors of Parliament House. “It was a real good turnout,” says Graham Jones, “you could feel the adrenalin pumping.” Finding the doors locked angered the crowd: “We thought, stuff this, this is supposed to be the people's parliament, we have a right to put our case.” In a “mad surge” they began to heave against the doors, which cracked, then opened, and the marchers poured inside. After Fraser refused to speak to them they eventually went back out, but the political impact was considerable. Three days later the Kemira miners, who had also seen their occupation mainly as a political pressure tactic, came out of the pit after 16 days underground to a heroes' welcome.
The October struggles on the South Coast probably contributed to a Coal Industry Tribunal decision granting better redundancy pay to the Kemira miners. However their decision to occupy was important quite apart from that. After seven years in which organised workers had done relatively little about sackings, this time they had stood and fought, a fact that was not lost on the employers or the government.
Wollongong was also the launching pad for the last round of protest marches of the Fraser era, initiated by the Wollongong Out Of Workers' Union (WOW), one of the more successful of the unemployed groups. It grew out of a collection of graffiti artists called Young and Pissed Off, and its first major action was a 100-kilometre, week long “march for jobs.” The marchers were greeted in Sydney by a 20,000 strong rally, after Cockatoo and Garden Island dockyards came out for the day along with several metal shops and groups of building workers.
WOW went on to lead the 1983 Wollongong May Day march, and join a nationally-organised hunger strike in Canberra on the occasion of the new Labor Government's first budget. Treasurer Paul Keating set the tone for a new era of Labor rule by ignoring their pleas completely, announcing he would increase the youth unemployment benefit by a mere five dollars, so the next day the hunger strikers invaded the National Press Club where Keating was speaking. They were thrown out.
This display of arrogance by the new Labor government brings us back to a question which began the chapter: how could the Fraser government survive such high levels of unemployment -- compounded by attacks on social welfare -- for seven years? After all, many of the components for an effective resistance were present. The government's manipulation of prejudices against “dole bludgers” had become less effective over time, a range of activist groups had sprung up and there was a large mobilisation against the 1978 horror budget. Workers in the dockyards and the car industry fought battles against redundancy which showed some potential, and later on the Kemira coal miners showed how a workplace occupation over sackings could be used to launch a political campaign. At every crucial moment, however, Fraser was helped by the official leaders of the labour movement.
Neville Wran's posturing about the Newcastle dockyards and Pagewood was duplicated, in a sort of shadow-play, among the union bureaucracy; then, after the ACTU had suffocated the 1978 anti-budget protests, Bill Hayden went into the 1980 election offering economic prescriptions only a little to Fraser's left. Bereft of jobs, unemployed workers found themselves bereft of leadership as well. An episode in the Fraser government's last months brought this home with particular cruelty. The Socialist Left council in Northcote (Melbourne) ordered the Unemployed Workers' Union to vacate their offices; when they refused, police threw them out in a dawn raid and bulldozers moved in. Builders' Labourers Federation officials, having banned demolition, made no real effort to enforce the ban while the UWU, though they claimed grandly to represent all of the unemployed, had far too few forces to resist. Their supporters were left staring at a flattened building, embodying more than a few flattened hopes.