The late 19th century brought major labour upheavals that decisively influenced the further development of unionism in all three countries. In Britain, a tendency for unionism to expand beyond its narrow craft confines, apparent in the early 1870s, was curtailed during the depression of the mid-1880s. In the business upswing of 1888â92, the formation of new unions of less skilled workers was resumed, this time with the aid of socialist activists. The movement received an enormous stimulus through the victory of London dockers in their great strike of 1889, secured in the last resort by Australian financial supportâa gesture from the New World to the Old. However, in 1890 employers in the maritime sector counterattacked against new unions of seamen and dockers, and the new union established in the gas industry also suffered major setbacks. Even certain craft unions experienced stronger resistance from employers, who were alarmed by the injection of a greater militancy into union behaviour at a time when they faced increased foreign competition in their established markets. Following a national lockout in 1897â98, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was obliged to accept the introduction of new machinery and payment systems on employersâ terms. In both the maritime and engineering industries, employers had asserted their power by combining in national federations. Perhaps most serious of all for the unions, employer reaction spilled over into the courts, where a series of judicial rulings, culminating in the Taff Vale judgment of 1901, undermined the legislation of the 1870s.
A crisis in labour relations was also reached in Australia and New Zealand in 1890. From 1870, the craft character of unionism in those countries had also been modified by the emergence of national industrially based unions in the mining, shipping, and pastoral industries. The most notable examples in Australia were the Minersâ Association and the Shearersâ Union; these extended their organization to New Zealand, where union development closely paralleled that in Australia. Greater scale and militancy in labour organization, clearly apparent by the late 1880s, drew forth a corresponding response from employers, leading to major confrontations in the early 1890s. The first was the great maritime strike of 1890, involving seamen and wharf labourers in both Australia and New Zealand and also extending to shearers and coal miners. These new unions, however, had embarked on a trial of strength with associated employers at a time when the economy had turned against them, boom turning into prolonged depression. In conditions of heavy unemployment, the maritime strike was broken, and there followed further defeats for the shearers in 1891 and 1894 and for the miners in 1892.
Industrial defeats led unions to turn to politics with greater urgency than before. In New Zealand they gave their support to the Liberal Party, which won a historic victory in December 1890. The Liberalsâ social and economic reforms that followed attracted attention throughout the developed world, but they also may have delayed the emergence of labour as an independent political force, since the modern Labour Party emerged as late as 1916 and did not form a government for the first time until 1935. In Britain also the break with Liberalism came slowly, but interest in direct labour representation quickened in the 1890s, leading at the turn of the century to a political alliance between unions and moderate socialist groups. The Labour Party so created remained in the shadow of the Liberals until after World War I, but thereafter it developed rapidly to assume office for the first time in 1924. The link between the industrial defeats of the 1890s and direct union involvement in politics was most clearly manifest in Australia. By 1900, Labour parties had emerged in four of the colonies, consisting of affiliated trade unions and electorate branches. The federation of the colonies in the following year led to the formation of a national parliamentary party, and by the end of 1915 Labour governments were in office at the federal level and in five of the six states. Despite differences in timing, the experience of all three countries was remarkably similar, with enhanced union interest in politics from the 1890s leading to the formation of Labour parties and, ultimately, Labour governments. However, the outcomes of such political involvement, in regard to the unionsâ situation within the wider society, diverged widely between New Zealand and Australia on the one hand and Britain on the other.
Compulsory arbitration and union growth in Australasia
To remedy their industrial weakness, unions in Australasia turned to the state and the law for support, through the installation of systems of compulsory arbitration that would oblige employers to deal with them. It was the Liberal government in New Zealand that enacted the first effective measure. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 was drafted by that governmentâs most radical member, William Pember Reeves, a socialist among liberals. Addressing the problem of employersâ noncompliance with arbitration decisions, Reeves devised a system in which participation was voluntary for unions but compulsory for employers. A union that chose to register under the act could bring any employer before the Arbitration Court, whose awards had legal force.
Following the New Zealand legislation, compulsory arbitration was introduced in Australia at both the state and federal level. The major landmarks were the Acts of 1900 and 1901 in Western Australia and New South Wales, respectively, and the federal statute of 1904. The new system was not installed without a struggle; employer opposition was strong, and it was overborne only by a combination of political forces that included Liberals and the new Labour parties. The New Zealand experiment also attracted attention in Britain. Within the TUC, support came from weaker, newer unions that had not yet achieved employer recognition and saw compulsory arbitration as a means of enforcing it. The temporary operation of such a system in World War I did indeed have this effect, but at the turn of the century most unions were skeptical. Legally enforced collective agreements would entail closer involvement with the judiciary, and British judges were regarded as incapable of delivering impartial rulings on labour issues. Following the 1901 Taff Vale judgment, union support for the Labour Party developed rapidly, with a view to securing maximum freedom from judicial interference. In the 1906 Trade Disputes Act, British unions secured the legal immunities they desired, and the principle of legal abstention remained fundamental to the conduct of British labour relations to the 1970s.
The 1912 general strike in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
State Library of Queensland
In a different social setting, Australasian unions believed that compulsory arbitration would work to their advantage, and so it proved. In 1890 there was little to suggest that the propensity to unionize was exceptionally high in these countries, but 20 years later Australia was the most highly unionized country in the world, and union coverage had been greatly extended in New Zealand as well. Apart from a slight drop in the early 1920s, growth in union membership in Australia was virtually unchecked until 1927, the proportion of the work force organized rising from 9 to 47 percent. Compulsory arbitration explicitly recognized and protected unions, and under it even the weakest unions could force employers to have the pay and working conditions of their employees fixed by an arbitration court. This capacity drew in recruits, and in both countries growth was further encouraged by the practice of handing down arbitration awards that conferred preference in employment on union members. In the case of New Zealand, a 1936 amendment to the legislation of 1894 provided for compulsory union membershipâa change that led to a dramatic increase in union coverage. In Australia a further crucial development came in 1907, with the Arbitration Courtâs judgment in the Harvester case. This ruling held that a living wage was a first charge upon industry, and it set a basic wage for unskilled labour at a level substantially higher than existing ratesâan approach to wage determination that unions could certainly live with. Within both countries, however, the degree of dependence of unions upon legal support varied. Unions with a small or scattered membership (and there were many such) were almost wholly dependent; but for larger and more concentrated organizations, a real alternative existed in the shape of direct bargaining and strike action.
In the years immediately before and after World War I, that alternative found increasing support in unions of miners, railway men, and wharf workers, where, as in Britain, the syndicalist ideology of direct action had acquired some influence. Syndicalist rejection of parliamentary politics, and hostility to the state in all its forms, was given particular edge in the context of compulsory arbitration. In New Zealand a militant Federation of Labour developed in opposition to the arbitration system, and in 1912â13 a violent confrontation occurred in ports and mining towns, but the strikes were broken by employers (now mobilized in defense of arbitration), farmers, and the government. It was significant that the majority of unions valued their registration under the Arbitration Act too highly to affiliate with the Federation of Labour. In Australia, compulsory arbitration also survived an increased advocacy and practice of strike action. During and after the war the idea of the âOne Big Union,â which would unify existing organizations and maximize striking power, gained a certain currency. It seems to have delayed the emergence of an Australian counterpart to the TUC, toward which the intercolonial congresses of the previous century had been moving. Eventually hopes of realizing the grander plan faded, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) was formed in 1927. Though some of the impetus behind the ACTUâs emergence came from those who saw it as an instrument for the coordination of strike activity, in practice its survival owed much to the function it performed within the federal arbitration system in representing unions in basic wage and other national test cases.
