Masters and Servants

Abstract

On 4 June 1911, the sugar workers of the Lower Burdekin district declared themselves to be 'on strike', thereby precipitating the first major, prolonged and acrimonious industrial dispute that the Queensland sugar industry had experienced. By the end of the month, the conflict, involving both field and mill labourers, had extended into all the significant cane producing areas of the state?Mossman, Cairns, Innisfail, Ingham, Ayr, Mackay, Sarina, Bunda berg and Childers?with the singular exception of the Maryborough area, where employer and employee maintained a formal if strained and mutually resentful relationship. As various related unions such as the Waterside Workers', Seamen, Carters' and Engine Drivers' entered the dispute in sympathy with the principle of an eight hour day and 30/per week which the sugar workers, as members of the Amalgamated Workers' Association (awa) were seeking, and varied attempts at negotiation and reconciliation failed, it seemed that there was 4a grave danger' that the strike would 'result in general upheaval'.1 This confrontation was exacerbated by several factors. The continued use of alien indentured servants undermined the unionists' demands for basic improvements in pay and conditions. White organised wage labourers in sisted upon a total dissociation from all forms of legal servitude which had characterised labour relations in the Queensland sugar industry since its inception half a century before. The 1911 strike challenged the nature and structure of this master-servant relationship; conflict was inevitable when white employees would no longer assume the persona of 'servant' while the employers were still comfortable in the role of 'master'. Furthermore, unionists by 1911 resented any inference or treatment which might place them on the same social or economic level as alien indents who remained bound to their masters by repressive legal restrictions. The unionists main tained violently expressed racial antagonisms to these Italian, Chinese and Japanese indents. Their racial ideology thus prevented them?one segment of the working class?from forming an effective alliance with this other