The 1945 Steel Strike: Trade Unions, the New Order and Mr. Chifley

Abstract

This article endeavours to analyse the course and settlement of the 15-week stoppage which occurred in the New South Wales steel and associated industries in late 1945, involving at its height the loss of some half million jobs. An earlier paper analysed the particularly complex causes of this dispute1 the longer term ingredients of which included (a) the lamentable industrial relations which had always prevailed in New South Wales steel production; (b) the jurisdictional rivalry in a number of fields between the main steel union, the Federated Ironworkers' Association (FIA), and the nation's largest general union, the Australian Workers' Union (AWU); (c) the recent growth of membership, efficiency and confidence of the FIA in the increasingly tight wartime market for unskilled labour; (d) the increasing predominance of communists among FIA officials headed by the dynamic and publicity-conscious General Secretary, Ernie Thornton; and (e) the growing resentment felt by FIA members towards the steel arbitrator, Judge M. E. Cantor of the NSW Industrial Commission. The specific flashpoint was reached as a result of a jurisdictional dispute with the AWU when 150 FIA members engaged in two chemical plants at Newcastle and Botany walked off the job when an industrial judge inspected their works in connection with an AWU log of claims. The FIA stood on its dignity and refused to make formal apologies on behalf of its members to the Commission which thereupon deregistered all 18,000 FIA members in New South Wales from 18 September 1945. To all outward appearances the steel monopoly Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd. (BHP) seemed then to move rapidly to take advantage of the new legal situation. On 22 September an FIA shop delegate, D. Parker, was dismissed from BHP's subsidiary plant, Australian Iron and Steel (AIS), at Port Kembla on a seniority issue and the company refused to recognise any FIA official in negotiations. The immediate spread of the strike throughout the AIS plant and into related South Coast industries followed the introduction of 'operative staff labour in the original strikers' jobs and the use of 'black' gas and electric power. In reality BHP had not commenced a carefully planned campaign to crush the FIA. The company's executives certainly had no intention of allowing the steel industry to move out of the familiar and slow-moving arbitration system into a potentially dynamic world of collective bargaining. Yet the explosion at AIS was triggered by the fact that they saw the unrest over Parker as threatening the key management right to 'hire and fire' which had, coincidentally, just been restored to them (14 September) by the relaxation of the wartime Manpower Regulations. Similarly, the rapid escalation of the dispute was not part of a preconceived BHP master plan. Rather it represented the inflexible reaction of the company as the tripwires surrounding several aspects of jealously guarded management prerogatives were touched off.2 Given BHP's reputation, its inscrutability and the