Silver and Red: a history of working-class power in Broken Hill (part one)

During the heyday of its mining industry, Broken Hill was arguably the most politically radical city in the Commonwealth. Its history provides us with a model of what an Australian model of socialism/social democracy looks like.

Following the First World War and a massive strike in 1919, the Amalgamated Miners Association, which organised the city’s miners, came under the influence of syndicalism and industrial unionism. In the spirit of the industrial unionist desire for ‘One Big Union’, it renamed itself the Barrier District of the Mining Division of the Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia, and sought to lure ‘surface workers’ (i.e. non-miners employed at the miners, such as engineers and train-drivers) away from their existing craft unions. By 1925, the city’s mines were entirely manned by union labour. In this era, the Silver City was a hotbed of left-wing radicalism. It elected to state Parliament the syndicalist sympathiser Percival Brookfield, and to federal Parliament Michael Considine, an unapologetic supporter of the Russian Revolution.

The WIUA played a key role in forming the Barrier Industrial Council in 1923. This represented a move away from its attempts to be the ‘One Big Union’ in the city’s mining industry, as it involved a truce with the unions who competed to organise the surface workers. The BIC also included the unions representing non-mine workers in the city. Such trade union peak bodies are common across Australia, but the BIC distinguished itself from most others in three main ways:

Firstly, it went to great lengths to mobilise workers to join its unions, and to similarly great lengths to enforce the closed shop in all workplaces where it organised. Four times a year, the Council would hold a ‘badge show day’, in which members of its affiliated unions were required to wear their membership badges to work, where a BIC official would inspect them, and all businesses in the town were required to show a sign in their window issued by the BIC to confirm that they only employed union labour. The Council’s efforts in this field were so successful that a 1953 report in the Sydney Morning Herald declared it “impossible…to employ non-union labour in Broken Hill for any length of time”.

Secondly, the Council as a whole, rather than its individual unions, negotiated with the mining companies, the city’s dominant group of employers. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the negotiations between the BIC and the mining companies took place, by mutual consent, outside the framework of the federal industrial relations system. One concession won during the 1920s, which bore fruit in later years, was the ‘lead bonus’, which tied workers’ wages to upward spikes in the price of Broken Hill’s lead on the London Metal Exchange, with just under one-half of the resulting bonus to be paid into a superannuation fund.

Thirdly, the Council used its power to influence the economic and social life of the city. It appointed a Prices Committee, which kept a watchful eye over the cost of living; for example, in 1941, the BIC responded to an increase in the price of beer at the city’s pubs and clubs by boycotting them. A resolution passed at a mass meeting declared that an “increase in the price of beer is a direct attack on our living standard”, and people were forced to journey to Menindee and Cockburn (over the South Australian border) to have a drink. In one of Australia’s most Catholic cities, the BIC also enforced a paternalistic labour market policy, ensuring that women found it impossible to continue working after marriage. It also usually limited work on the mines to those born or educated in Broken Hill, or married to a woman from the city.

The BIC’s original ambitions went even further, however. Its original name was the Barrier Industrial and Political Council, indicating its desire to usurp the functions of the local section of the ALP. It also planned to establish a series of co-operatives which would compete with private businesses in the city. On the other hand, it was successful in establishing its own newspaper, the Barrier Daily Truth, to counter the pro-mining company editorial line of the Barrier Miner.

What the BIC succeeded in creating was arguably the closest thing experienced in the Anglo-Saxon world to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The workers’ representatives on the Council enforced a city-wide closed shop, virtually dictated wages and prices, and were so powerful that Macquarie Street was unable to enforce six o’clock closing and other ‘blue laws’. Decisions on a variety of matters – from bread and butter wage claims to the question of supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War – were taken by mass meetings of workers rather than by union officials.

All this isn’t to say that the unions ruled Broken Hill without opposition. The mining companies were powerful, but hampered by the fact that their owners and directors didn’t live in the city. Non-Labor independents were a permanent feature on the city council, and the RSL encouraged the formation of yellow unions during and after the First World War. The BIC also faced down challenges from its left: communists at regular intervals, the unemployed movement during the Depression, and the (quasi-spontaneist) ‘job committee’ movement later in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the ‘Broken Hill model’ was, while it lasted, the most pro-worker socio-economic regime to have existed on this continent this side of 1788.