Jock Blair: Laurie Carmichael and the union’s internal computerization
Jock Blair was a senior shop steward in the Pilbara and, because of his study of computerization in the 1970’s was recruited by Laurie Carmichael to help build the union’s own computerization of its office administration and, later its word processing capacity.
Carmichael was an avid student of developments in technology and computerization. He applied what he learned to union policies and strategy for union members to gain as much control as possible in their workplaces. He also argued, successfully, for the union to be in the forefront of applying the technology for the benefit of the members in its own operations.
Jock Blair mentions the team that implemented the decisions made at the National Council of the union that Carmichael had proposed or argued for.
Read moreOn Tom Mann
Tom Mann was one of the greatest figures of the global union movement and socialist left at the end of the nineteenth century and into the first part of the 20th century.
In 1976, Laurie Carmichael, (himself becoming, unconsciously, one of Australia’s finest labour and socialist movement leaders), introduces Tom Mann to the members of the metal workers union.
Carmichael had been elected as the “Assistant Commonwealth Secretary” after the amalgamation process that created the Australian Metal Workers Union from a set of metal industry unions.
“The Greatness of Metalworker – Tom Mann”, by Laurie Carmichael, Assistant AMWU Commonwealth Secretary
The image shows Tom Mann’s renowned sketch of how the unions’ picket lines should be laid out against the employers and scabs in the Broken Hill dispute of 1908-9.
We show it here with thanks to Neale Towart, Librarian and Heritage Officer, Unions NSW.
Extra commentary and links
The article coincides with the decision of the National Council to name the new theatre on the ground floor of the new national headquarters of the union in Chalmers St, Surry Hills, as the Tom Mann Theatre. He is explaining some of their heritage to the members of the newly amalgamated union.
The article says much about Laurie Carmichael himself. It required detailed research and reading, and of course serious thinking about the then modern legacy that Mann had left. Mann’s emphasis on the union as a centre of the recreational and cultural development of its members resonated deeply.
Carmichael developed that in several ways, including the AMWU sponsorship of a tour of Australia by the famed and much-loved folk movement leaders, Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, and the distribution of the union’s audio tape of one of their performances.
Carmichael alerts the members to Mann’s activities as a socialist unionist and its synergy with political intervention into both the Labor Party and socialism to the left of the Labor Party.
Some years after this article was published, new research was published on Mann’s life, that was used in the union’s education program for shop stewards/delegates and organizers. There is an updated version of this original Carmichael article that takes account of this research, available on request.
- Don Sutherland
Links
Excerpt from Tom Mann’s Memoirs that describes his experience of the Broken Hill Dispute 1908-9
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mann-tom/1923/memoir/chXVI.htm
“Tom Mann’s Memoirs”, edited by Ken Coates, Spokesman Books
https://spokesmanbooks.org/product/span-stylefont-size-14pxtom-manns-memoirsspan/
“Tom Mann: Social and Economic Writings”, edited with an Introduction by John Laurent, Spokesman Books
https://spokesmanbooks.org/product/span-stylefont-size-14pxtom-mannspan-1610702438/
The AMWU Remembers Laurie Carmichael
By Andrew Dettmer, National President of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union