Report to the AMWSU 1980 National Conference

By Laurie Carmichael

Published by the AMWSU, authorised by the 1980 National Conference

CLICK HERE to read the Report

Introduction – Don Sutherland

The AMWSU National Conference decision to endorse the report and reproduce it in this pamphlet form made sure that its members were learning more than the general community about the impact of the computer revolution on their daily lives and on society as a whole.

The contents reveal Laurie Carmichael’s widespread reading on the subject and an unerring capacity to link technological change to its impact on daily lives, changes in the workplace, and the broader national and international political economy.

Carmichael delivered the report orally to the National Conference of union delegates – most of whom being shop stewards (union delegates) and union organisers and officials who had left secondary school at around their fifteenth birthdays. The plain language does not at any time dumb down the content and pays full respect to the Conference’s ability to deal with the material.

The pamphlet was read and discussed in shop stewards training courses at the AMWSU and also in the Trade Union Training Authority.

There is no defeatism and no resignation. He argues for why and how workers must organise to take control of the technology.

Carmichael would work on this right through to his retirement, especially in the significance of award restructuring and new vocational education that would enable.

Introduction - Don Sutherland

In August of 1977, Laurie Carmichael delivered a speech under this title to the Political Economy Conference in Melbourne.

This pamphlet was authorised by the National Administrative Committee of the AMWSU for public distribution and to promote discussion and learning about the issues it deals with.

Click here

The speech has been posted to this archive in a different, more readable format. Click here.

By Andrew Dettmer, National President of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union

CLICK HERE

Introduction – Don Sutherland

Val Carmichael arrested and carried dragged along the street

Laurie’s son, Laurie Jr, was active as a draft resister. When, along with others, he was required to appear in court, a demonstration outside grew angry leading to the violent arrest of first, his mother, and then his father.

Tony Duras elaborates on the events, and the aftermath:

“The links between draft resisters and unions in Melbourne were strengthened by the case of Laurie Carmichael Jr, the son of the State Secretary of the AEU. When the younger Carmichael appeared at Williamstown Court to answer charges relating to his refusal to report for a medical examination, he was whisked away by supporters. Angry scenes erupted and Laurie Carmichael and his wife Val as well as twelve other people were arrested. In protest against the "brutal treatment" the police meted out to demonstrator, especially Val Carmichael, who was knocked over and dragged along the ground by her feet, the Rebel Unions issued a statement that:

we recommend to Unions that a campaign of lunchtime and stopwork meetings be held and that contact be made with sister organisations in other states, finally aimed at National action on the part of the worker.

A week later, when the Carmichaels appeared at Williamstown Court, unionists held meetings and demonstrated outside the court.

According to Ken Carr, "...at the Williamstown Naval Dockyard the blokes just dropped their tools and marched towards the court." Approximately five hundred workers from the dockyard and seven hundred meatworkers from Newport stopped work to attend the demonstration.

Moreover: after the Carmichael case, Union leaders like George Crawford (Plumbers Union), Ray Hogan (Miscellaneous Workers Union) and Roger Wilson (Seamen's Union) were readily available to meet with draft resisters and student activists at short notice. Unions continued to assist in organising factory meetings and addressing shop steward seminars.

It is difficult to gauge the effect of the Carmichael trial on individual unionists but it almost certainly influenced the declaration of two to three hundred union officials from the Rebel Unions in Victoria:

We encourage those young men already conscripted to refuse to accept orders against their conscience and those in Vietnam to lay down their arms in mutiny against the heinous barbarism perpetuated in our name upon the innocent, aged, men, women and children.

In August 1971, ten union officials were charged with violating the National Service Act because they were handing out leaflets which encouraged young men to refuse to register for National Service. They were among a group of thirty union organisers and officials from a variety of unions who were handing out anti-registration leaflets outside the offices of the Department of Labor and National Service in Melbourne. In their court statement the unionists, who were found guilty and fined between $20 and $50 each, declared that:

As Trade Union Officials, representing many thousands of organized workers, we firmly believe that the continued conscription of young Australians to be sent to Vietnam to kill or be killed is a criminal act. We therefore, as a matter of conscience with 30 other like-minded Trade Union Officials deliberately handed out leaflets in Flinders Street outside the Department of Labor and National Service.

To read the whole story CLICK HERE. ( http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/workers.htm )

Also, Laurie Carmichael Jr reflects on this:  CLICK HERE.

For more from Laurie Carmichael on union building at the Williamstown Naval Dockyard: CLICK HERE.

Personal Solidarity, Carmichael and Japan

Introduction - Don Sutherland

Laurie Carmichael developed strong relationships between Japanese and Australian metal unions.

Here Kaye Hargreaves describes meeting Laurie Carmichael in the offices of the Japanese Metal Workers when both were visiting the union for unrelated reasons. We see Carmichael’s genuine personal solidarity making a difference for a young Australian intellectual navigating the Japanese unions.

Kaye Hargreaves Remembers Laurie Carmichael (https://kayehargreaves1.wordpress.com/japan/metalworkers/ )

“… this is my good friend Kaye, who has been doing wonderful work with our union in Australia. She is here in Japan doing research into women workers, and I hope you will give her every assistance.”

Among many other things, Kaye Hargreaves was the author of the widely read Women at Work. Click here for more on her valuable book.

Laurie Carmichael Jr describes Laurie's rich personal life

With Organising Works Trainees 1997 

In this excerpt we see one aspect of Laurie Carmichael’s approach to union education.

He is working with Organising Works trainee organisers from several unions, based in Melbourne.

Organising Works was set up by the ACTU and participating unions as a union education program that synthesised learning in the field with regular 2- and 3-day courses in the training room.

Key concepts in this excerpt include "learning by doing", the significance of awards, awards as a record of class struggle, history and the immediate priorities.

As the industrial relations system developed this seminar marks a transition from the primary importance of awards and award-based disputes in the conciliation and arbitration system to the system of enterprise bargaining that replaced it, eventually into what is now the Fair Work Act 2009 (as amended).

In those times industry, company specific and occupation awards set the minimum standards that would apply to all workers covered by them. Awards could be changed – for better or worse – by creating either a real dispute (strike, go slow etc.) or a “paper dispute”. At some point conciliation and arbitration would occur under the direction of a commissioner or a panel of commissioners.

Workers, through union membership, could use industrial action to pursue their claims or to prevent the employer from not “sticking to the award”, that is running the work process in some way that breached or weakened the award.

They could also use a simple application, either with or without the consent of the employer(s), to vary the award.

Carmichael was a leading figure in the tradition that said the best result from the Commission (The Conciliation and Arbitration Commission) came from the determination of members to exercise strikes and other actions as counter-power against the opposition of the employers and the pro-employer bias in the Conciliation and Arbitration Act.

Education and learning – in a union way – was an essential element of Carmichael’s approach to industrial disputes and the conciliation and arbitration process that went with them. He was a renowned advocate and had a thorough knowledge of the award system, including the pay relativities across different awards.

Carmichael saw awards as fluid industrial instruments, each one a compromise for a period that reflected the relative balance of power between the employer(s) and the workers and their unions.

The right wing of the union movement that included the Catholic organised “Groupers” usually opposed and even undermined the use of strikes and other forms of collective action to advance workers’ demands. Others took a middle ground.

Interview conducted by Lesley Dormer for Workers Weekly, Radio 5UV, University of Adelaide. (Produced by Ray Broomhill.)

Introduction - Don Sutherland

This interview was run about 12 months into the Hawke Labor government’s operation of “The Statement of Accord by the ALP and the ACTU regarding Economic Policy” (The Accord), created in February 1983.

Interviewer, Lesley Dormer, enables Laurie to explain what had been achieved in the first 12 months, outline the character of the Accord from his point of view as a medium for “higher intervention” by workers, and why that was necessary. He starts by emphasizing a point about strategy: that in that first year the Liberals’ monetarism had been rejected.

Carmichael also outlines the problems and obstacles that have not been overcome and introduces the crucial question of the relationship between the industrial wage and the social wage in defining living standards.

Presciently, he describes the potential of the finance system to be a defining "nuisance" in the efforts to get the full value out of the Accord strategy.

His discussion on the industrial wage raises vital questions; for example, “militant” unionism can, in a particular form, promote a wages struggle that aligns with the free-market approach of the employers. Thus, here in 1984, he suggests “enterprise bargaining” is in that framework.

The interview concludes with a brief discussion that links his approach to the Accord to earlier views he had expressed about an open-ended transition to socialism.

Also CLICK HERE.

Laurie Carmichael was a renowned organiser as a shop steward, senior shops steward and in his various roles as a union official.

In this excerpt from the Organising Works Trainees’ seminar, Carmichael explains his methods of organising at the workplace level, including the “thrippance” technique.

It is worth noting the educating character of his organising method.

Laurie Carmichael Speaks at Organising Works, Melbourne, Victoria, 1997: Excerpt

Key ideas in Carmichael’s presentation are summarised at the start of the video. 

Organising Works was an ACTU young organisers traineeship programme introduced in the early 1990s to support union efforts to reverse the decline in union density. The program concept and the organising method it taught the trainees drew heavily from the US unions that were organising relatively well in a hostile anti-union political climate.

This excerpt focuses on Carmichael’s method of union organizing including his “thrippence method”, “the active 10%”, and networked shop stewards’ committees.

The method he describes was an Australian method of organising – including within the context of the award system – that was established well before the Australian unions’ discovery of the core ideas in the US unions’ methods.

Carmichael’s election to his first full-time role as the Secretary of the AEU’s Melbourne District would not have been possible without the application of this method developed during his time as Convenor of the AEU and Combined Shop Committees at the Williamstown Naval Dockyard. As Secretary, he extended this method through his dedicated, strong-minded team of organizers and, that led to the successful union campaigns that followed.

Around the same time Carmichael was working with two other renowned, retired union leaders to contribute to the Organising Works Programme: Tom McDonald from the CFMEU and Tas Bull from the MUA.

Each gave a very important lecture about their experiences over decades of activism and leadership at an Organising Works Residential Course later in 1997. Those lectures were recoded but, regrettably, the recordings have been mislaid.

Carmichael’s lecture elaborated on the theme of strategy and leadership, providing a theoretical framework for strategy in a union and left political context, using three case studies out of his own direct experience: the defeat of the penal powers in 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium Movement against the war in Vietnam, and the shorter hours campaign.

Laurie Carmichael was a prominent Australian working class and trade union leader throughout the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in Coburg, (Melbourne, Victoria) 1925, and died on August 18th, 2018. (Click here for more.) 

It is possible to locate Laurie Carmichael's participation in the Australian working-class movement over 5 primary periods: 

• his activity in the 1940s as a fitter and turner apprentice and political activist in the Eureka Youth League, Young Engineers, and Communist Party; 

• his role from 1948 as a shop steward representing fitters and turners and other metalworkers at the Williamstown Naval Dockyard in Melbourne, Victoria; 

• his role as an elected Melbourne District Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineer's Union, that included significant growth in union membership and active participation, building the strategy that defeated the anti-union laws of the fifties and sixties, putting into practice his belief that “peace is union business” in the great Vietnam Moratorium movement; 

• his contribution as the Assistant National Secretary of the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union, including building international solidarity in the International Metal Workers Federation, and in other roles; and 

• finally, his role as the Assistant Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. 

Throughout his decades of union and political activism, Carmichael was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Australia, acting as its National President from 1978-81. 

Carmichael started his union activism as an apprentice fitter and turner and continued as a shop steward and then the Convenor of the shop stewards' committee at the Williamstown Naval Dockyard. From there he was elected by the members of the union to be the Secretary of the Melbourne District of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and later the Assistant National Secretary of the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union. At the end of his union years, he was the Assistant Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. During that time he led a major national government review of the Australian vocational education system.

Carmichael was the classic, self-taught working-class intellectual. He read very widely for pleasure, for the sake of learning, and to inform his practical activity. His reading ranged broadly from the Marxist classics, non-Marxist political and economic commentary, classical and modern history, technology and computerization, and classical music. 

From 1983 to 1993 the Australian Labor government operated a method of consultation with big business and Australian unions, commonly known as the Accord(s). Carmichael was a "linchpin" of the union team that represented workers in the consultations between the government, employers, and unions.

Memorial services were held to pay respects to his unique contribution to Australian life in Melbourne on September 6, 2018, and Sydney on October 10, 2018. 

The Melbourne memorial was chaired by Andrew Dettmer (current National President of the AMWU) and the speakers were: Laurie Carmichael Jr., Senator Doug Cameron, Bill Shorten M.P., Bill Kelty, Max Ogden, and Sally McManus. 

The Sydney memorial was chaired by Judy Mundey (former National President of the C.P.A.) and the speakers were: Andrew Dettmer, Laurie Carmichael Jr (by video), Marie Armstrong (Laurie’s former administrative secretary), Laurie himself by a 1997 video recording, Bruce Campbell (retired AMWU organizer and leading shop steward in the shorter hours campaign in the late 70’s and early 80’s), Tom McDonald (former National Secretary of the BWIU), and Sally McManus (current Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.) 

At both memorial services, Carmichael’s son Laurie Carmichael Jr, provided insights into his personal life and the broad range of his recreational interests. These included classical music, ice-skating, ballroom dancing, gardening, mechanical and electronic tinkering, and above all, reading. 

Laurie Carmichael Jr’s Sydney speech will be posted soon. He was the first of the speakers at the Melbourne Memorial and his tribute to his father can be listened to here.