The AMWU organised a 50th anniversary dinner to recognize and celebrate Laurie Carmichael’s 50th anniversary membership of the Amalgamated Engineering Union through to the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
Here, Julius Roe, then National President of the union, speaks to Laurie’s participation and contribution to the AMWU, the broader labour movement and the CPA. In doing so he integrates well-wishes from labour movement identities in all levels of the movement, and covers some of the major events in Carmichael’s 5 decades of contribution.
Celebration dinner for Laurie Carmichael’s 50th anniversary membership of the AMWU:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v-ck7a3Z6M&t=71s
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxWkR0sp0c
Julius Roe was a friend and confidant of Carmichael, before and during his own time as a senior official and then National President of the union. Among other things, he especially worked closely with him on how the union could integrate vocational and university-level learning as a feature of workers’ rights in the Metal Industry Award (later the Manufacturing Industry Award).
In the commentary below, Roe briefly describes the occasion and the award – vocational training connection.
Extra commentary and links
Julius Roe’s memoir of the dinner that celebrated Laurie Carmichael’s 50th anniversary membership of the AEU through to the AMWU, May 2025
The 50th anniversary dinner was heralded by a massive Brisbane thunderstorm, and outside the windows during the event, dramatic thunder and lightning continued.
I invited John Dawkins to join the event because he was Labor’s Minister for Education and Training when Laurie Carmichael chaired the government’s review of the Australian vocational education system. Laurie was particularly pleased that he agreed to join.
During the event many of the union delegates present took the opportunity to talk to Laurie and as usual he listened attentively and provided plenty of advice.
I worked closely with Laurie during the last few years he was at the AMWU and throughout the period he was Assistant Secretary of the ACTU.
After he retired from paid employment, he continued to make himself available to provide advice about union affairs including specific advice about union campaigns. He was also very supportive during our internal union election campaigns, particularly in the contests with the so-called “workers first” group.
Despite his leading role in the processes associated with the Accord and in working with Government around education and training and manufacturing industry policy, he always remained focused on the need for union member, and particularly union delegate, involvement, campaigning and education.
He consistently raised this aspect in discussions about strategy or tactics.
Although Laurie supported the move towards some decentralisation and freeing up of the bargaining and wage fixation process in the Accord processes after 1991, particularly to increase the opportunities for campaigning and rank and file involvement, he did not support the move to fragmented enterprise bargaining.
I recall that during the first rounds under the ”enterprise bargaining” system he, as Assistant Secretary of the ACTU, intervened in the national Metal Trades Federation of Unions bargaining with the Metal Trades Industry Association (now the Australian Industry Group). At the time this was very unusual as the MTFU traditionally would not allow ACTU involvement in its bargaining. Doug Cameron, some others and I were resisting pressure to move to a purely enterprise approach and Laurie was very supportive of the push to maintain a strong and consistent outcome bargained at the industry level.
Laurie was a guiding hand behind the process of award restructuring and the creation of a skills-based career structure for the metal industry award. He then passionately, through his role at the ACTU and his links with the Federal Labor Government, sought to reform the vocational training system to become a driver for wider worker access to that skills-based career structure in the award and to drive higher skills and a value added and more elaborately transformed industry. Unfortunately, the advance of neo-liberalism meant that the market-based aspects of the reforms, including privatisation of training, came to dominate other aspects, and that combined with the descent into isolated and fragmented enterprise bargaining which focused on multi-tasking rather than genuine upskilling, undermined the agenda pioneered by Laurie Carmichael.
- Julius Roe (May 2025)