Union history has long been a staple of our field. Articles in this issue include studies of specific unions and also explore larger questions of unionism’s history. These start with Bradon Ellem’s engagement with the question of union decline, a subject other scholars have investigated. Ellem’s approach is to challenge the general claims which see reasons for decline within the union movement. With a specific case study of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, across the entire period of the mining industry there, Ellem tracks key moments of state intervention and employer strategy in the rise and fall story of mining unions. Drawing on a long time-frame and the geographic texture of union and employer power enables Ellem to pinpoint the causes of union decline in an argument that brings a fresh perspective to the debate.
Timothy Minchin takes on another well-studied union, the United Automobile Workers in the United States. His focus is on a lesser examined period as he takes the questions of rank-and-file restlessness back into the decade of the 1950s. Despite wage gains achieved by their national union, members had grievances they brought to the attention of union leaders, demonstrating that plant conditions were often more important to them than winning higher wages. Using the records of the UAW executive board, Minchin’s argument complicates the usual national story, as it brings attention to union leaders’ handling of these localised pressure points.
Shifting to the 1980s, the period of the Hawke Labor government’s Accord, authors Lucie Newsome, Danielle Miller, and Tony Ramsay concentrate on the activism of the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees Union to raise their wages. Their research included oral history as well as documentary evidence as they questioned the agency of unions under the Accord. Their case study approach found unions engaging in industrial action faced considerable opposition and this union’s survival was threatened by legal sanctions.
Other articles in this issue take the subject of strikes and explore their wider and larger significance. Jennifer Clark locates the foundation of the Council for Aboriginal Rights in 1951 in the strike of Northern Territory Indigenous workers for better wages and conditions. The new organisation moved the tactics from the specifics of a strike to an educative agenda about Indigenous disadvantage at a national level, pulling together a broad coalition of activists and laying the important groundwork for change. Iain Macintyre takes the consumer boycotts against hotels in the first two decades of the twentieth century as examples of working-class activism, showing how they used union methods of organisation and drew on ideas about fair prices and rightful compensation for work. The frequency and patterned nature of these “beer strikes” in Australia is a phenomenon that was also primarily regional. Macintyre thus presents a case for the role and significance of consumer boycotts as labour history.
Alcohol and hotels also feature in our other two articles. David Williamson and Candice Harris focus on the hotel industry in a study of New Zealand labour in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Their argument is that current conditions, poor pay, and vulnerability of migrant labour were constructed historically, a context in which changes in the law and changing ownership played a critical role. Their argument resonates with Ellem’s. The authorial team of Shannon O’Keefe, Matthew Allen, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, and Michael Quinlan focus their attention on the role of alcohol itself, and the culture of drinking in the early colonial period of Australian history. Showing how alcohol was used to motivate labour, and how distinguishing sobriety at work from drunken leisure was a feature of changing practice, the authors draw on court records in the convict period to make their case. They apply concepts of moral economy of work and policing of drunkenness as labour management.
We have an Historical Note on the important subject of heritage. Russell Deyell and Aisla Hart present the story of the campaign for the international standing for the Rūnanga Miners’ Hall, in New Zealand. We can only applaud their mission to have workers’ assembly halls recognised, protected, and celebrated for their part in the international labour movement history. We pay tribute to one of Australia’s most outstanding historians, Lyndall Ryan, who was long a member of our Editorial Board and, with her sister Julia, a generous donor of a prize named in honour of their mother Edna. Her legacy is in both inspiring and rewarding future historians.