We share this excellent piece of history about the Builders Laborers Federation in Australia. We reprint it from Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal. It is a bit long and click on the link below to read the rest of it.
A glimpse of what could be: The NSW BLF, the most radical and innovative union the world has ever seen
By John Tully
Fifty years ago, a group of dedicated left-wing activists wrested control of the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) from the corrupt gangster types who had used it to feather their own nests. The militants, who included Jack Mundey, Joe Owens and Bob Pringle, rebuilt the union into a radically democratic, socially progressive and environmentally-aware organisation the likes of which Australia—and the world—had never seen. Today, we live in dark times for trade unionism. Only around 7% of workers in private industry are organised and unionists face ruthless attacks by the bosses and the state. The achievements of the NSW BLF, however, give us a glimpse of the liberating potential of the working class and are a beacon for the future.
It is to the great credit of militant building workers in Australia that almost 50 years ago they nailed their green colours to the mast and insisted that ecology was as much the concern of workers as wages and conditions. Jack Mundey asked “What is the use of higher wages alone, if we have to live in cities devoid of parks, denuded of trees, in an atmosphere poisoned by pollution and vibrating with the noise of hundreds of thousands of units of private transport?”
The union did not claim to be perfect—it was a work-in-progress, inventing itself as it went—but it showed that an alternative kind of unionism was possible. Its innovative radicalism shocked the bosses and conservative politicians, and confounded right-wing union bureaucrats by its daring larrikinism. It shook up Sydney in a way that had only been the stuff of dreams for socialists and surprised many who had written off the working class as a force for progressive change. Sadly, as the years go by, its achievements risk being forgotten under the crushing weight of neoliberal ideology.
As elsewhere in Australia, the BLF covered the unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the building and construction industry: labourers of various types; concrete finishers; jackhammer-men; excavation workers; hoist drivers; steel fixers who placed the steel rods and bars for reinforced concrete; scaffolders; powder monkeys or explosives experts; riggers, who erected cranes, gantries, hoists and other structures, along with structural steelwork and bridges; and dogmen, who slung loads from cranes and “rode the hook” hundreds of metres above the city streets in a spectacular, but hazardous aerial performance. Due to technological change in the industry, much of their work became at least as skilled as that of the traditional craftsmen, who had served traditional apprenticeships, and who were organised in separate unions at that time.
Much of the union’s membership was born overseas. In the years after World War II, millions of immigrants poured into Australia, many of them from southern and eastern Europe. Few made their fortune, although many had been lured with stories of streets paved with gold. Most of them became fodder for the factories, mines and mills that sprung up during the post-war boom. Many became construction workers and unless they had specific transferable skills, that meant working as builders’ labourers, mixing and placing concrete, carrying bricks, or digging deep into the Sydney sandstone for the foundations of the new high rise buildings. Immigrants did the dirty, hard, and dangerous jobs that the “native born” were often reluctant to do. By the 1960s, by Jack Mundey’s reckoning, around 70 per cent of the NSW BLF’s members were foreign-born.
For many decades the NSW BLF was run by gangsters; corrupt elements including defrocked lawyers and apolitical thugs who would bash opposition activists on command. One official was notorious for collecting the union dues, then spending the money on protracted drinking bouts. He even collected money from workers on the Snowy Mountains scheme, over which the BLF had no coverage, and drank it away! These characters had no interest in winning better wages and conditions for the members, nor did they want to see strong on-the-job organisation, which would undermine their power, and imperil the sweetheart deals they made with the bosses which personally enriched them. Many of the union’s members spoke little or no English, but bureaucrats who were in any case uninterested in their opinions did not see that as a problem. There was no translation of reports when meetings were held—in fact the members could be more easily sold out when they had little inkling of what the organisers were talking about. As a consequence, BLF members were paid a fraction of the wages of the carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other skilled tradesmen in the industry.
The gangsters too, were uninterested in health and safety issues. As Pete Thomas writes in his book Taming the Concrete Jungle, in three years in the 1960s, there was “an appalling total of over 61,000 compensation cases—some fatal, others creating permanent disabilities, others lesser but still cruel— ... in NSW building construction and maintenance.” In one year alone in the early 1970s, 44 building workers died in NSW. Fourteen dogmen died in another year. Nearly 250 Sydney excavation workers died from silicosis between 1948 and the 1960s, victims of the dust from the hard sandstone that they cut and blasted. There was little change until after the militants began the hard battle to “civilize” the industry. Even then, as building workers know to this day, health and safety is a constant battle in a hazardous industry in which corners are cut to boost profits.
Conditions on some sites were disgusting, with rat-infested humpies masquerading as lunch rooms and toilets—where they were provided—overflowing with filth. Nor did the existence of a legally-constituted union award or contract mean that workers automatically received the correct pay rates. Many bosses paid what they could get away with, particularly for youngsters who had little idea of their rights and entitlements.
The militants gained control of the union only after a bitter struggle lasting over ten years. One of those activists was a young man called Jack Mundey. Born into a poor Irish Catholic family in North Queensland, Mundey came to Sydney in 1951 to play Rugby League for Parramatta. A little later, after spending time in other jobs, he started work as a builder’s labourer and joined the union and then the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). [1] Mundey was elected Secretary of the NSW BLF in 1968. In 1973, he was succeeded by another CPA member, Joe Owens, an ex-seaman who had jumped ship to work as a rigger and dogman in Auckland and Sydney. The son of a Geordie miner who had contracted black-lung down the pit, Owens had an unswerving commitment to improving the health and safety of his fellow workers. In the 1950s and ’60s, the CPA was still an industrial force to be reckoned with, although its star had waned since the heyday of the 1940s when it all but controlled the peak council of the union movement, the ACTU.
The CPA was a contradictory force. During the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the Cold War was raging, it had identified itself slavishly with the Soviet Union and at the same time it had sunk to rigging ballots in elections to maintain its tight grip on unions under its control: most notoriously in the case of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association. Despite this, many of the best militants in the labour movement continued to look to the CPA for leadership and by the 1960s the party leadership had abandoned much of the old sectarian dogmatism, which had isolated them from the majority of trade union members who supported the ALP.
Inside the NSW BLF and other unions, party members adopted the tactic of “unity tickets” with left wing members and supporters of the ALP. The tactic bore fruit and when the militants ousted the gangsters, a real unity had been forged between Communists such as Jack Mundey and Labor Party members such as Bob Pringle and Mick McNamara. Pringle, who was elected union president, was a socialist who insisted in defiance of dog-eat-dog capitalist ideology that “the strong should defend the weak”.
Read the rest of this article here.
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