Arrested on the Pilbara
Carmichael, other AMWSU and union representatives arrested for union activity in the Pilbara, 1979
Here, Laurie Carmichael reports to the National Council of the AMWSU June 13th, 1979, on the circumstances leading to his arrest, with Jack Marks and Don Bartlem and then others, by the Western Australian police for participating in union activity associated with an industrial dispute in the Pilbara.
The National Council held a lengthy discussion having received comprehensive reports from other leading officials and covering the WA State Council decision of the day before.
Carmichael’s account of the arrests was written into the Minutes of the National Council. The Minutes also show details of the circumstances and the responses of the WA Trades and Labour Council, the ACTU, and other unions that led to industrial actions across the country and negotiations with the Fraser and WA Court governments for a compromise.
These show that Carmichael, Marks and Education Officer, … McTiernan were visiting the Pilbara to report on the union’s education programme, and to conduct a seminar (part of a series across the country that started in April) on “Arbitration – Awards and Agreements”.
The arrests were connected to a major industrial dispute involving Hamersley Iron (now part of Rio Tinto) in the Pilbara.
Around 1,000 workers at Hamersley Iron’s (later Rio Tinto) Pilbara mines (including Tom Price and Paraburdoo) were on strike over wages, improved safety standards, and conditions. The unions involved included the Australian Workers' Union (AWU) and the Amalgamated Metal Workers' and Shipwrights Union (AMWSU).
The Western Australian Liberal government (led by Premier Charles Court) actively encouraged Hamersley Iron’s hardline stance, refusing to negotiate and threatening legal action.
The company sought injunctions against the strike, to declare it illegal.
The government extended its support for Hamersley Iron by engineering the arrests, using the Trade Unions Act to charge them with "inciting an illegal strike."
In these pictures (courtesy of Jock Blair) striking workers are gathering in front of the Roebourne Court House for Carmichael, Marks, and others arrested to answer the charges against them. Carmichael is standing third from the right in the first photo.
The story of the arrests is also recounted in the biography of Jack Marks, Marksy by Jolly Read.
There was an extraordinary union and public reaction against the arrests that led to public protest demonstrations and strikes.
At the Perth mass meeting of workers from many unions BLF shop steward, kevin Reynolds, said:
"If they jail Laurie and Jack today, they’ll come for the rest of us tomorrow. We’re not asking for solidarity—we’re demanding it!"
(Speech at Forrest Place rally, June 12, 1979; recorded in WA Trades Hall minutes)
Bob Hawke, ACTU President at the time, said:
"On June 20, we stop the nation. Not for ourselves, but for every worker who’s ever been bullied by a boss or arrested for standing up. This is our line in the sand."
The ACTU called a 24-hour national strike on June 20, 1979, with 1+ million workers participating—Australia’s largest industrial action in years. Key industries (transport, manufacturing, docks) shut down to protest the WA government’s anti-democratic actions. TWU truck drivers refused deliveries to Hamersley sites.
In Melbourne (June 18) 10,000 workers gathered at the Melbourne Town Hall, with Carmichael and Bob Hawke (ACTU President) speaking.
In Sydney the next day 8,000 workers at the Sydney Trades Hall voted to extend strikes if arrests continued.
Young AMWSU organiser, Doug Cameron, said:
"They want us to beg for crumbs. We’re not begging—we’re taking. And if they try to stop us, we’ll take more."
(Tribune, June 20, 1979)
These actions forced negotiations, with PM Malcolm Fraser pressuring WA Premier Charles Court to de-escalate.
Carmichael and Marks were released without severe penalties, but the event hardened union opposition to WA’s industrial laws.
The Court government was publicly condemned for using authoritarian tactics to suppress workers rights on behalf of the powerful mining corporations.
Veteran unionists involved in the dispute, like Jock Blair Kevin Reynolds, are still alive having never retired from the struggle.
Laurie Carmichael as Union Trainer
In these photos we see Laurie Carmichael in action as a union trainer, while Assistant National Secretary of the AMWSU, at the Clyde Cameron College in 1978.
The Clyde Cameron College was the national, residential “training centre” for the Trade Union Training Authority (TUTA).
This is probably one of the first courses conducted at the CCC, which was a residential college with advanced facilities (including a seriously good library) in a modern building of its time. Carmichael was one of its great champions.
The participants in this course come from several unions including from the AMWSU, Carmichael’s own union. Jim Baird (a national organiser at the time) and Ted Wiltshire, from the union’s national research team, are there. Wiltshire was a prominent figure in the research and education work for Australia Uprooted, Australia Ripped Off, and the similar union pamphlets that followed in the next 12 years or so. He also played a prominent role in the Australia Reconstructed project in 1987.
It is likely that the material in these pamphlets, the rationale for them and the associated industrial strategy for which they were produced, was primary content in this course.
We acknowledge and thank Tribune – SEARCH Foundation for making these photos publicly available through TROVE.
On 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/
"Activity of Shop Stewards Councils", by Laurie Carmichael, AMWU Monthly Journal, 1976
Introduction - Don Sutherland
Nowadays, shop stewards are more commonly known as “delegates”. Shop Stewards Committees were formal and informal leadership groups inside the workplace. Shop Steward Councils were regular joint meetings of Shop Committee reps from several workplaces at once.
This article, Activity of Shop Stewards Councils, was presented to all union members for discussion on the job, using the AMWU Monthly Journal in July 1976. Its purpose was to explain a National Conference decision taken just 7 months after the defeat of the Whitlam Labor government in November 1975.
Through Carmichael’s voice, the union leadership was explaining to the members not just that it would continue to fight militantly in the hostile climate of the Fraser LNP government, and how it would do so.
Carefully reading the article reveals Laurie Carmichael’s understanding of strategy for unions and their allies.
Not long after he became Secretary of the Melbourne District of the AMWU, Carmichael used his annual leave to concentrate on a comprehensive study of strategy. He used the Mitchell Library and other resources so that he could access the best available material on the subject, including new developments in business strategy.
He is not coy about putting forward his explanation as “theoretical assistance” for shop stewards and members. He believed strongly they could cope with “theory”; that he could connect the day to day experience of shop stewards to a sensible theory of strategy that they could grab hold of and contribute to through their own efforts starting in their workshops.
It’s worth paying attention to and thinking through some key concepts in the article:
- The “starting points” for strategy,
- Using shop level experience,
- “Perspective” on the campaign,
- “Stages of development” of a strategy,
- “Moving from one stage to another”,
- Collectively developing the strategy,
- Adjusting and aligning tactics and actions based on the growth of power,
- The ebb and flow of the campaign.
Later, in his “retirement”, Carmichael gave some lectures to prospective union leaders on the importance of strategy, and the role of leadership in starting and guiding it. His notes started with: “Without Strategy You are Flying Blind”.
He described how he used these ideas in the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, the defeat of the penal powers in 1968, and the shorter hours campaign. The deliberate intent is, in every moment of a campaign, to build strong workers’ consciousness, Carmichael led the 38-hour week and wages victory over the Fraser government that helped its defeat in 1983.
Laurie Carmichael as Union Educator
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.