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

In 1953, the Sydney Morning Herald published a series of three articles entitled ‘Broken Hill To-day’ (available here, here, and here). Written during a period when the conservative state Opposition was making a fuss about the Silver City’s culture of drinking and gambling, they provide an interesting glimpse of how the city’s unique social system was viewed by outsiders.

In the second article, it is noted that the city had thirty-nine hotels and nine licensed clubs serving a population of 32 000. There were also twelve thousand motor vehicle registrations there (roughly one per family), and Broken Hill reputedly had the highest bank savings per capita of any Australian city. This highlights the level of prosperity among ordinary people in Broken Hill. The city could also boast lower rates of drunkenness, crime, and juvenile delinquency than the state at large.

The articles also add to the picture of the BIC’s power: the writer labels the Council “the most remarkable feature of Broken Hill, apart from the line of lode itself”. The Council owned a greyhound racing track, which put on races “two Saturdays out of three” (and on the other Saturday, punters could attend the horse racing track, owned by the mining companies).

The third article describes in detail the lead bonus, which dated from a 1924 round of wage negotiations and had first kicked in when the price per ton of lead had hit £16 in 1934 – at the time of writing, it was £111, giving mine employees a bonus of £12 per week, almost one-half of which went into a superannuation account. The result of this was that miners actually earned more than the government-appointed mine inspectors.

The little workers’ utopia on the Barrier didn’t last, however. The bargaining power of workers in a mining town is very much dependent on the continuing high export prices of its commodities (in this case silver, lead, and zinc). Furthermore, the BIC’s conservative social policies would eventually bring it unstuck: its bar on married women working in unionised occupations eventually fell foul of anti-discrimination laws. After the mining companies managed to wriggle out of the six-decade-old wage negotiation arrangements in 1986, the mines’ workforce dropped to 1300 within the decade, and the city now depends on fads like eco-tourism. Macquarie Street’s nanny-statism also destroyed the city’s culture; its world-famous two-up school was closed in 1984.

Broken Hill’s exceptional system of industrial relations created an economic environment in which the city’s labour force was virtually entirely unionised, wages were high, prices were kept at reasonable levels, and BIC control of the labour market prevented capitalists from using the threat of unemployment to discipline workers. The BIC could have extended its power further: it could have established its planned network of co-operatives, or it could have used the superannuation fund created by the ‘lead bonus’ to purchase shares in the mining companies (à la the Meidner Plan, proposed by left-wing Swedish social democrats in the 1970s). Still, the working class of the Silver City achieved more freedom from capitalism than any other people in Australian history.

(Fun fact I learned while researching these posts: Srebrenica is also a silver-mining town; its name means ‘silver mine’.)