Making the ‘Gibraltar of Unionism’: Union
Organising and Peak Union Agency in Broken Hill, 1886-1930

Bradon Ellem and John Shields

Broken Hill’s reputation as a bastion of union organising and influence warrants close reconsideration since even here the pattern of union growth and development was anything but unilinear. During its first half century, the town experienced four distinct cycles of union growth, decline and renewal. Each phase of growth saw the local unions learn from organising experience, but each also involved new contexts, constraints and opportunities along with new ideological and spatial agendas of mobilisation. Each phase also involved the emergence and active agency of a local peak union body. Union development in Broken Hill was shaped by four key factors: firstly, the globalised scale and cyclical nature of the metal mining industry; secondly, the importance of labour migration and worker itinerancy; thirdly, the paradoxical agency of the state; fourthly, the occupational and spatial divisions between local workers themselves.

If Australian labour historians have devoted little attention to the organising activities of individual unions, they have devoted even less to the role of peak union bodies as agents of organisation and mobilisation. This is particularly so of peak unionism on a local scale. Nor, despite the evidence of the cyclical nature of union growth, have there been many attempts to draw out the temporal comparisons between rounds of union renewal in the one locality. This article examines four cycles of union growth, decline and renewal in the lead-zinc-silver mining town of Broken Hill during the town’s first half century. Each phase of growth saw the local unions learn from organising experience, but each also involved new contexts, constraints and opportunities along with new ideological and spatial agendas of mobilisation. Each phase also involved the emergence and active agency of a local peak union body. Indeed, the centrality of peak union mobilising agency is perhaps the single most striking feature of Broken Hill’s emergence as the self-proclaimed ‘Gibraltar’ of Australian unionism, with no less than five inter-union federations emerging in the town down to the mid-1920s. Each phase of union organisation and worker mobilisation also represented what economic geographer Andrew Herod has called a labour ‘spatial fix’. 1 Here, too, peak unionism played a key role. In general, local peak bodies may become particularly important because they occupy specific spaces and, in the processes of formation and development, they reflect and achieve different spatial reaches as well as different breadths of occupational reach and different depths of organisation. Here we are concerned with how these bodies become powerful social forces within particular spaces and how they use control over space to organise and defend the interests of workers. We argue that peak union bodies, especially those on a local scale, can play vital roles in shaping particular spatial fixes and in driving union growth. In Broken Hill, the BIC was instrumental in that ultimate ‘spatial fix’, the making of a ‘union town’. This raises important questions about why some peak unions assume an organising role and others do not, and about the possibilities and limits of local peak union action in achieving union growth and renewal. We also suggest that this historical comparison highlights significant issues and challenges associated with what the ACTU, in unions@work, calls ‘the potential for collective approaches to union organisation in regional Australia’. 2	1
Peak Unions, Worker Mobilisation and Union Organising
As we have argued elsewhere, peak unions can best be understood as negotiated and historically and spatially specific compromises between the opposing pressures of ‘breadth, unity and solidarity’ and ‘parochialism, sectionalism and exclusiveness’. 3 Where the forces of fragmentation predominate, union confederation will be weak and unsustainable; where those of unity override, loose confederation is likely to develop into a powerful union centre or to give way to formal amalgamation or even calls for ‘one big union’. Likewise, peak union purpose will vary precisely because of the shifting balance between pressures for unity and fragmentation. Following Briggs, we suggest that peak unionism has two main purposive dimensions: as an agent of worker mobilisation; and as an agent of exchange with wider social forces. 4	2
Mobilising agency entails activity directed towards defining and furthering the ‘common interests’ of affiliate unions. The formation of a peak body is itself an act of mobilisation. Inter-union mobilisation via a peak body represents a strategic intervention to neutralise some forces of fragmentation which may divide unionised workers and their unions: divisions grounded in occupation, place, race, ethnicity, gender, religion and political ideology. As such, mobilisation is necessarily also a normative phenomenon; it is ideologically informed. In this respect, the concept is consonant with Coles and Flanders’ notion of ‘movement’:	3
Movement … ‘implies a common end or at least a community of purpose which is real and influences men’s [sic] thoughts and actions, even if it is imperfectly apprehended and largely unconscious.’ The members of a movement combine because, sharing in some measure the same sentiments and ideas, they want to achieve the same things. 5
Without a normative glue of this sort, there would, at best, be ‘organisation’ only, or the institutional mechanisms of inter-union co-ordination and discipline. Organisation and movement are intertwined. Organisation is the vehicle through which the norms of unity are articulated. If ‘movement’ informs organisation with normative purpose, then organisation furnishes the structures through which the norms of closer unity are channelled. To reiterate, because it occupies the continuum between intra-class fragmentation and closer unity, a peak union is uniquely placed to initiate and organise collective mobilisation.
Mobilising agency may take one of three forms: industrial, political and social. Industrial mobilisation involves managing inter-union relations, containing inter-union disputes over demarcation and ideology, running inter-union campaigns for improved wages, hours and conditions, co-ordinating and possibly leading multi-union collective bargaining, and co-ordinating further union organising activity, including sponsoring the formation of new unions. Political mobilisation involves organising propaganda campaigns on specific issues, promoting political ideologies, fostering forms of collective consciousness, including class consciousness, among organised and unorganised workers, and campaigns of an electoral and party political nature. Social mobilisation, is something else again, for it entails activity directed towards galvanising social actors additional to union members. Wider mobilisation of this sort may be decidedly cross-class in nature and may include campaigns on social, cultural and human rights and environmental issues. It is here, in particular, that the mobilising agency of local peak bodies may seek to harness collective norms other than those of class – namely various forms of place consciousness – and in the process, expose such peak unions and their affiliates to the opposing pressures of wider class affinity, on the one hand, and the inward-looking ideology of ‘community’, on the other. 6	4
A peak union’s ability to act as an agent of mobilisation is predicated on effective organising. As Cooper notes, 7 organising takes two main forms. It may involve the creation of wholly new unions to recruit members in hitherto unorganised areas of employment. Organising may also involve campaigns to recruit additional members to existing unions. Peak unions have typically been charged with undertaking both forms of organising as a means of mobilising workers on particular scales – locally, regionally, nationally or, in some cases, internationally. Such organising may take a post-entry or a pre-entry form. In the former, recruitment occurs after employment is taken up; in the latter membership becomes a prerequisite for employment, as in the case of the pre-entry closed shop. Further, organising is inherently spatialised; it is shaped and constrained by the scale of the work involved. This point is highlighted particularly well by the distinction which Savage draws between ‘traditional’ and ‘service-sector’ models of organising. 8 Traditional models – those typically applied in manufacturing and mining – are based on a number of spatial assumptions: they are designed mainly for large, centralised work sites with few points of entry and regular shift changes to which picketing and membership checks can be easily applied and where there is already some union presence and a culture of collectivism. It is to workplaces of this type that the tactic of the organising strike is particularly well suited. As we shall see, this was the preferred organising tactic of the mining unions at Broken Hill. In service sector work, however, workplaces are often small, numerous and widely dispersed, with workers in direct contact with both their employer and customers. A classic instance is the small retail shop. However, the intimacy of the employment and service relationship in such workplaces presents a number of alternative organising possibilities, including the use of employer ‘white’ lists, consumer boycotts and the provision of materials and supplies. Again, as we shall see, these were the organising tactics used in the non-mining sector in Broken Hill in the 1910s and 1920s.	5
As well as fulfilling a mobilising purpose, a peak union may also act as an agent of exchange; as the representative of affiliate unions in their collective dealings with external forces. As with mobilising agency, exchange agency has three possible modes. A peak union may engage in industrial exchange with employers, industrial tribunals or with other union federations at a range of scales. For instance, it may engage in direct bargaining with employer associations on behalf of affiliates. Exchange may also assume an explicitly political nature, with the peak union representing affiliates in political exchanges with political parties, whether socialist, social democratic, laborist, populist or even with parties of an anti-labour bent. A third possible mode of exchange is that with constituent parts of the wider social formation. For instance, the peak union may engage with social protest or environmental protection movements on various scales. Like Briggs, we suggest that mobilisation and exchange agency hold the key to understanding variation in peak union purpose and power. Without the power conferred by affiliates as an agent of mobilisation there can be no exchange with wider industrial, political or social forces. Yet, engagement with wider forces can also achieve wider organisational legitimacy. By entering into what Briggs refers to as a ‘structural coupling’ with either employers or the state, a peak body may be able to increase its power very radically, including its power to direct and discipline wayward affiliates. 9 As we shall see, this is precisely what eventuated in Broken Hill in the 1920s.	6
Initial Mobilisation: Mining Unions and the Barrier Trades and Labour Council, 1886-90
Union organisation came early to Broken Hill in the form of a local branch of the Victorian-based Amalgamated Miners Association (AMA). Founded at nearby Silverton in early 1886, the Barrier AMA soon relocated its base of operations to the Broken Hill ‘line of lode’, where the Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) had commenced open-cut lead-silver-zinc mining two years before. In its initial years of existence, the Barrier AMA’s moderate industrial stance reflected the craft outlook and Methodism of the Cornish miners who where the primary agents for the transmission of the collectivist ethic to the Barrier Ranges from the older copper mining localities of South Australia. However, the move to underground mining in the later 1880s brought to the fore a new, more militant AMAleadership supportive of the organising strategies of the ‘new unionism’ favoured by the AMA parent body, including the tactics of the post-entry closed shop and the mass strike. Prominent among the new leadership was Scottish immigrant Richard Sleath. At the same time, the diversification of the mine workforce led to the emergence of occupationally-based unions in the local mine workforce, including engine-drivers, engineers, boilermakers, carpenters and others. 10 These developments set the stage for an epic struggle over wages, conditions and union representation on the line of lode; a struggle which, as we shall see, shaped both the pattern of industrial conflict and the contours of union organising in Broken Hill for the next three decades.	7
The initial trial of organisational strength went unequivocally to the unions. A concerted union organising campaign extending through the latter half of 1889, and culminating in an organising strike, saw 2,500 of the 3,000-strong mine workforce unionised, although, as local labour movement chronicler George Dale later observed, the process was far from being unproblematic:	8
Stewards having battled for months and ‘roped in’ many recruits, reports at meetings showed that there were still many men working who resolutely refused to join hands with their class; then notices were posted, naming a date after which unionists would refuse to work with those outside their ranks. This brought in a further number, but still there were non-unionists on the fields. 11
The organising drive culminated in a week-long mass strike in November of that year. The locality’s first industrial conflict, the 1889 strike, established new minimum time-wages for underground miners and surface workers, with mine management undertaking to collect union dues. Further strike action in September 1890, in response to a company lockout coinciding with the maritime strike, won a reduction in the standard working week from 48 hours to 46 and management agreement to submit future disputes to a local bipartite ‘board of arbitration’ or, if necessary, to a judicial arbitrator. Significantly, these gains were underwritten by close inter-union cooperation and coordination in the form of the locality’s first peak union, the Barrier Ranges Trades and Labour Council. This was formed in 1889, seemingly to present a united front in negotiations with the local peak mine management body, the Mining Managers Association (MMA). At the same time – and signalling the first turn to localism – in the wake of the successful 1889 organising drive, the AMA seceded from the Victorian AMA to become an autonomous entity within the national AMA. 12
Defeat, Disorganisation and the Turn to Arbitration, 1892-1906
These early union successes proved short-lived. In mid-1892, in the face of a slump in global silver and lead prices, the mining companies, led by BHP, repudiated the 1890 agreement and announced their intention to replace uniform day wages with the stoping of ore by contract (that is, tonnage-based piece-work for underground miners). The companies also ignored their earlier undertaking to adhere to voluntary arbitration, thus setting the stage for direct confrontation with the unions and the now 7,000-strong mine workforce. The ensuing 18-week strike witnessed the first systematic use of outside strike-breakers by the mining companies and the first of a series of decisive interventions by elements of the state apparatus in the industrial affairs of Broken Hill. Equally, the events of the 1892 strike highlight the centrality of space and place in industrial conflict. Strike-breakers were trained in from the capital cities, protected by contingents of armed police despatched from Sydney. Sleath and other members of the union Defence Committee were arrested, charged with seditious conspiracy, sent off to trial in the pastoral town of Deniliquin, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment in Sydney. Within a month of the jailings, the strike was declared off. 13 Wages were reduced by ten per cent, the 48 hour week was restored, piecework contracting replaced time rates underground, work above and below ground intensified, union activists and members were systematically victimised, and the rate of underground injury and death rose dramatically. The defeat and ensuing depression sounded the death knell of the locality’s first peak union as union membership and smaller affiliate unions themselves collapsed. In 1897, AMA density on mines was less than 50 per cent; by 1903 it stood at just one-third. 14	9
As elsewhere, in the face of industrial defeat, the unions looked to electoral politics and parliamentary representation to maintain relevance and momentum. For Broken Hill unionism, success at the ballot box was one of the few positive developments of the decade following the defeat of 1892. In 1894 the Trades and Labour Council successfully sponsored local Labor Electoral League candidates in the State seats of Broken Hill and Wilcannia. Two years later, the first Labor candidate was elected to the Broken Hill Municipal Council, and by 1900 Labor candidates had won control of the Council. 15	10
The unions’ continued industrial weakness made them all the more favourable to engagement with the state and, with the advent of compulsory arbitration in New South Wales in 1901, the AMA was quick to embrace the new system. In June 1902, the AMA filed a log of claims for increased wages, reduced working hours and changes to the system of underground contracting. The union’s optimism, however, soon dissipated. The MMA, under the chairmanship of BHP mine general manager, G. D. Delprat, responded to the union’s claims by refusing to collect union dues and when the case came before Justice Cohen in 1903, the company lodged a counter-claim for a ten per cent wage cut. Cohen’s two-year award merely codified pre-existing wages and conditions and afforded the AMA a union preference clause which was so qualified as to be meaningless. 16 So this first encounter with the arbitral state merely served to persuade many in the AMA of the merits of a return to the strategies of organising on the job, concerted bargaining, and, where necessary, direct mass action.	11
Holding the Line: the Industrial and Organising Role of the Combined Unions Committee, 1906-09
Despite the continued parlous state of union membership in the early 1900s, there were indications of renewed confidence, a sense of organisational permanency, and the first, hesitant signs of a greater openness to radical ideas. Unionism began to re-emerge amongst hotel workers and other employees in the town sector, and the completion of a new and imposing Trades Hall building in 1905 provided local unions not only with expanded administrative space but also with a public structure of powerful symbolic significance. The first years of the new century also saw the injection of a new socialist impetus into local union affairs. The arrival of Queensland socialist activist, R.S. Ross, in 1903 to edit the local labour movement weekly, the Barrier Truth (established in 1898), heralded the beginning of a new era of radical agitation in Broken Hill. Ross’s influence is evident in the formation of the Barrier Social Democratic Club in 1903, the first celebration of May Day in the town in 1904, the creation of a local Socialist Propaganda Group in 1906, and his launch of the radical weekly, The Flame, following his removal from the editorship of the Truth in late 1905 for editorialising against arbitration. 17	12
With the expiry of the 1903 Award in late 1905, the AMA filed a new log of award claims. However, in the absence of a formal dispute, the union’s application was ruled inadmissible and, with lead prices on the rise, the way lay open for a return to direct bargaining, inter-union concertation and a new round of organising. In early 1906, 11 mine unions formed a Combined Unions Committee (CUC) to present a united bargaining front to BHP and the other mining companies. 18 When BHP management sought to have non-unionists represented in the ensuing negotiations, the CUC resolved that its members would refuse to sit with nonunionists and the AMA moved to strengthen its presence above ground by forming a branch to organise surface workers. For the moment, the advantage lay with the unions. Under a two year agreement, concluded between the CUC and the MMA in December 1906 and subsequently registered under the NSW Industrial Arbitration Act 1901, the unions secured minimum wage increases ranging from ten per cent to 15 per cent. 19	13
Within months of the agreement being finalised, the parties began positioning themselves for the next round. The AMA’s hold over surface workers began to unravel when, in mid-1907, its surface branch broke away to form the Barrier Non-Political Union (NPU). Promptly repudiated by the AMA as a ‘bogus’ organisation, the NPU was the only local union to register under the anti-Labor Wade government’s Industrial Disputes Act 1908. 20 Whether or not the NPU was company-inspired remains unclear. What is clear is that its presence posed a threat to the AMA’s influence above ground and to mine worker unity in general. Its emergence also marked the beginning of a cycle of ideological and sectional conflict within the local union movement which took 15 years to run its course. In response to the NPU’s emergence, and in anticipation of the expiry of the 1906 agreement, the unions revived the CUC. Then, in September 1908, the CUC launched a membership drive, inviting visiting British unionist and Victorian Socialist Party activist Tom Mann to accept the post of CUC organiser. The transformation of the local weekly labour newspaper into the Barrier Daily Truth at this time also enhanced the unions’ ability to communicate with their members. Within three weeks of his arrival, Mann had recruited 1,000 new members. By November, the AMA had recruited over 1,500 new members in Broken Hill and unions were claiming a 93 per cent coverage of the local mine workforce. The AMA acquired a further 700 members at the BHP lead-zinc smelting facilities at Port Pirie in South Australia, where a separate Combined Unions Committee was also established. 21 As well as carrying considerable strategic significance, the unionisation of the Port Pirie work force left open the possibility that any subsequent dispute would be of an inter-state nature and therefore justiciable by the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, which under its second president, H.B. Higgins, was gaining a reputation as being more sympathetic towards labour.	14
This surge in union strength precipitated a fracturing of employer unity. When the MMA sought to open private negotiations with the NPU, a mass meeting of 4,000 CUC unionists voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action should such negotiations proceed. The MMA relented and agreed to meet with the CUC. However, when the CUC presented the MMA with a claim for higher time rates and a 44-hour week (in the form of a Saturday half holiday), Delprat resigned as MMA chairman and BHP withdrew from the negotiations. This left the affairs of the MMA in the hands of mine managers associated with the emerging Collins House base metals conglomerate, who promptly offered a compromise in the form of an extension of the 1906 agreement. This proposal was then put to a referendum of members of CUC unions and accepted by a large majority. On the day of the referendum (7 December), BHP announced its intention to revoke the 1906 wage increases from 1 January 1909, a move interpreted by the CUC as being tantamount to a lock-out. Having held the line with the other companies, the unions were not about to concede a wage cut to BHP. The ensuing conflict, which lasted five months, saw the CUC and its affiliates pitted against the combined power of BHP, the Wade government and a contingent of armed police despatched from Sydney. Between the warring parties stood Justice Higgins. In March 1909 he handed down an award which, while denying a CUC claim for union preference, upheld the 1906 minimum rates for time and contract work on the basis of a 48-hour week and awarded Port Pirie workers a six-day week and overtime. In April the High Court handed down a judgement on an appeal by BHP which, while upholding the Broken Hill sections of the award, overturned the Port Pirie provisions, which were found to be beyond Higgins’ jurisdiction. After 21 weeks on strike, the dispute ended inconclusively, with Broken Hill unionists voting narrowly, and in an atmosphere of deep internal division, to return to work. The fate of the Port Pirie provisions precipitated a damaging rift in union solidarity, with the Pirie workers voting to abandon further struggle and Mann, fresh from a stint in jail, being attacked by some Broken Hill die-hards for failing to stave off the capitulation. 22 For its part, BHP simply sought to avoid the provisions in Higgins’ award by suspending underground operations for two years. 23 In sum, Broken Hill unionism’s second encounter with compulsory arbitration confirmed the lingering doubts arising from the first and also highlighted the need for more permanent forms of inter-union solidarity. 24	15
Mobilising for Militancy: the Barrier Labor Federation and Mining Unionism, 1909-14
If the 1909 dispute further eroded the trust of the local unions in arbitration, it also confirmed the worth of closer and wider unity in union organisation. As CUC and AMA secretary W. D. Barnett remarked in winding-up the CUC’s affairs after the lockout:	16
The fight has demonstrated to the workers of the Barrier and other places the utter futility of the present-day system of organisation, and has had the good effect of bringing the members of the various unions closer together. Our hope – and we consider our only salvation – is to get the unions banded together into a Federation, not only in Australia, but right throughout the world, irrespective of craft or calling. 25
Whereas the CUC had been an ad hoc body with only limited capacity to exercise power for and power over affiliate unions, Barnett and other AMA leaders now argued the case for a permanent body to organise, unify and mobilise the mine workforce – under the aegis of the numerically dominant AMA. The AMA leadership’s call for a permanent peak body was no doubt informed in part by continued concern over the division between underground and surface workers; a concern which can only have been heightened by the formation, during the 1909 dispute, of a new body representing non-craft surface workers, the Trades and Trades Labourers Union (TTLU). To some AMA radicals, the TTLU was little more than an extension of the despised Barrier Non Political Union. Yet neither its presence, nor that of other long-established unions on the mines, such as the Federated Engine Drivers and Firemens Association (FEDFA) and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, could be ignored.
The emergence of a new and very different peak body, the Barrier Labor Federation (BLF), in the immediate aftermath of the 1909 conflict is best understood as an attempt by the AMA radicals to fulfil three objectives: firstly, in the short term, to continue the habit of inter-union co-operation fostered by the CUC; secondly, to forge common cause between the mining unions in relation to the issues of shorter hours and improved mine safety; and, thirdly, to create a vehicle capable of achieving and sustaining a mass mobilisation of local workers for avowedly political ends. While most of the mining unions, with the exception of the Amalgamated Engineers, affiliated with the BLF, it remained, in essence, the creature of the AMA. In 1914 AMA members comprised three-quarters of the Federation’s total affiliate membership. 26	17
More to the point, the BLF was the vehicle of a new generation of AMA activists who arrived in the town during and after the 1909 lockout, radicals like Michael Considine, J.J. O’Reilly, George Kerr, Ern Wetherell, Torlev Hytten, Paddy Lamb and Percy Brookfield. From this group came the ideological and strategic leadership which determined the fate of the AMA and the BLF in the turbulent years between 1913 and 1920. The 1909 struggle had made Broken Hill the focal point of debate and planning amongst Australian radicals and it was more than emblematic that, in the wake of the dispute, the town was the venue for the annual conference of the Socialist Federation of Australia. The BLF’s organising activities relied heavily upon the work of activists whose strategies and enthusiasm were shaped in whole or in part by socialism and syndicalism. The Federation’s rules declared that ‘desired change can only be achieved by political action, directed by workers organised in industrial unions’ and that a key objective as to ‘propagate the principles of the Labor Movement by circulation of literature, or by any means deemed desirable.’ The Federation’s ability to pursue this latter end increased considerably in 1913 when it assumed ownership of the Barrier Daily Truth from the AMA. 27	18
In early 1913, however, the AMA radicals initiated a membership referendum of their own as the first step in an ‘all-union’ organising drive on the mines under the auspices of the BLF. The members of all BLF affiliates were asked to vote on the following question: ‘Are you prepared to refuse to work with non-unionists after March 31, next?’ The vote was overwhelmingly in favour of such a campaign. The organising drive began with the AMA and BLF placing notices in the Truth and appointing pence card examiners authorised to visit each mine on 1 April to turn away non-unionists and unfinancials. When the managers signalled that they would refuse examiners entry to the mine sites, the BLF announced that it would issue badges to financial members instead. This first attempt to enforce a post-entry closed shop on the mines was markedly successful. Two thousand men had joined by the deadline with mine managers for the most part staying on the sidelines. By August 1914 the AMA claimed that 95 per cent of the 8,700-strong mine workforce were members of a union. Even the Amalgamated Engineers, who remained aloof from the BLF, complied with the badge show. The drive, it was said, had confirmed Broken Hill’s status as Australia’s ‘Gibraltar of unionism’. 28	19
With metal prices at high levels and mine labour in short supply, mine management could do little other than decry the BLF’s drive for compulsory unionism on the mines. However, according to one account, the issue may have been played out by proxy in a concurrent dispute over unionisation of the Silverton Tramway workforce. This company operated the railway linking Broken Hill with South Australia, the route for the shipping of ore and concentrates out of Broken Hill and for the supply of most commodities. In his 1918 history Dale claimed that:	20
by arrangement with the mining authorities, [the railway was] the medium through which this all-Union crusade was to be smashed. As controller of the transport industry this company could starve the whole community in a few days. 29
When, in the lead-up to the badge day, tramway management claimed that their clerks were exempt from coverage by the Silverton Tramway Union, the BLF threw its support behind the STU and the union instituted a strike. The workers at the centre of the dispute formed a branch of Clerks Union but were still refused employment. The unions and the workers stayed solid and, critically, received local support despite the beginnings of food shortages. In the course of three weeks in April, the majority of the workforce was successfully unionised – a significant victory in itself but also one which pointed to the interconnection of town and mine, despite recurring division. 30
he achievement of an effective closed shop on the mines gave the AMA militants a powerful basis from which to resume the union’s long campaign for shorter hours and improved mine safety. Prompted by a rising incidence of underground death and accident, the AMA instituted a 24-hour stop-work at any mine where a fatality occurred. In early 1914 it persuaded the Holman State Labor government to establish a Royal Commission to investigate the contract system, underground conditions, any link between pulmonary disease and the compensation for industrial accident and illness, and compulsory unionism. The resulting inquiry, which was headed by B. R. Wise, the architect of the 1901 Arbitration Act, began taking evidence in Broken Hill in June 1914 and reported its findings five months later. The outcome simply confirmed the radicals’ suspicions of the state. Wise recommended against the abolition of the contract system, open stope mining and the underground night shift. Moreover, his report offered the miners little in the way of significant amelioration of the issues of working hours, accident prevention and workers’ compensation. 31 Equally, the outcome strengthened the syndicalists’ commitment to organising and direct action in pursuit of these objectives.	21
The Barrier Labour Federation and Unionism in the Town Sector, 1913-16
As earlier conflicts had made increasingly clear, the miners’ ability to sustain an industrial campaign was critically dependent on the support of workers and small business people in the town sector and there are indications that in the aftermath of the mine drive the BLF began to turn its attention to organising and mobilising town employees. While this impetus was cut short by the war and cannot be said to have amounted to a concerted organising campaign, it is nevertheless important because it reveals the organisational and strategic connections between mine and town on both sides of the class divide.	22
Broken Hill was, after all, a mining town. While the mines were the main source of jobs in the locality and the principal focus of union activity, the town sector was an important secondary site of paid employment. Unions had been present in the town sector since the later 1880s but organising town workers presented a greater challenge than did unionising those on the mines. Whereas the mine workforce was highly concentrated, the work highly regulated, and access to the major mine sites quite easily monitored, town employees were dispersed over a large number of occupations and small workplaces where they were typically in direct contact with their employer. Equally, while the mines were an exclusively male domain, the town sector was a source of paid work for women as well as men. Males were occupied primarily in warehouses and retail shops, hotels, offices, factories and processing plants, tram, rail, buses and road transport, local government, public utilities, and building and construction. Women in paid employment worked chiefly as barmaids, shop assistants, cooks, nurses, cleaners and laundry workers. 32	23
Following the mine drive, several disputes arose in the town sector which were indicative of the BLF’s role and which revealed both the possibilities and limits of its ‘all-union’ campaign. Two such disputes were of particular significance in these respects. The first was an attempt to organise the town’s shop assistants who struck work on 15 August 1913. The second was the hotels dispute of 1915.	24
The first dispute appears to have arisen from an attempt by the BLF to organise the town’s retail workers. The organising was undertaken by AMA activist Tom Gamboni, who had been AMA president at the time of the 1909 dispute. The BLF was quickly involved, representing the workers in conference with employers. The newly established union and the BLF eschewed state intervention, deciding instead ‘to stand or fall by direct action’. However, as was the case in many other occupations and industries, this was a high-risk strategy without solid organisation on the ground. A Wages Board was called and met, with bogus union representatives. When it published an award with small wage rises the BLF called mass meeting of all affiliated unions for 15 September to maintain the strike. The AMA put in £1000 and called for a consumer boycott but within a few days it was clear that many had been enticed back to work. According to Dale, the mainly female workforce was unable to rise above ‘the usual “shoppie” environment’. However, Gamboni continued his organising work and subsequently served briefly as Shop Assistants Union secretary. 33	25
Gamboni also featured in the second organising dispute, that among the hotels and restaurants, which arose from the employers’ attempts to reduce conditions in March 1915. Prefiguring later developments, this strike succeeded largely because it drew on the combined support of other unions and working class consumers. Moreover, unlike the shop assistants’ case, this dispute involved a well-established town union, the Hotel, Club and Restaurant Employees Union (HCREU). Having failed to secure award provision for union hiring and union preference, the HCREU, of which Gamboni was now the secretary, looked to the mining unions for support. When the AMA promptly pledged support to the employees, this was enough for some of the publicans who just as promptly withdrew their demands. Those who did not found themselves facing a strike from 24 March. The BLF began to give specific form to the pledges of support. The strategy was one which would be perfected after the war, namely the consumer boycott alongside dividing the employers one from another. The BLF organised a system of cards which were prominently displayed in the windows of the ‘white houses’, that is those who had agreed not only to the union terms but also to hire only union labour. The Barrier Daily Truth also published regularly updated lists of the white and black houses. As with so much of Broken Hill’s industrial life, there was much public spectacle associated with the union drive. The boycott tool was widely used. When the Licensed Victuallers’ Race Club organised the Easter Saturday races on 3 April, the event was boycotted because some of those on the committee were opposed to the unions. According to Dale, a seasoned punter as well as writer, the club lost money on the day. Nonetheless, the dispute ‘dragged on’, with an unsatisfactory award and some employees returning to work. It seemed it might be a re-run of the shoppies’ dispute until the HCREU wrote to the AMA reminding them of their pledge of support. On 30 May the AMA held a mass meeting which endorsed the union refusal to work with scabs and threatened a blanket ban on all the remaining black establishments. In Dale’s pithy summation: ‘the “free laborers” were immediately dispensed with’. 34 It is hard to think of a clearer example of the transmission of union and consumer power from one site to another. Prefiguring later developments, this strike succeeded largely because it drew on the combined support of other unions and working class consumers. When, in late 1916, the union secured a new award reducing standard hours from 56 to 48, Gamboni exhorted local unionists to support award enforcement by taking evening meals earlier so that waitresses could enjoy the benefits of their new eight hour day. 35	26
Gamboni was also instrumental in the formation in mid-1917 of the Town Employees Union (TEU). While its origins remain unclear, the TEU may well have represented an attempt by the AMA-BLF radicals to institute ‘one big union’ in the town sector. With Gamboni occupying the secretaryship of both unions, the HCREU became the Hospital, Club and Restaurant Employees Section of the new union. Within weeks, a second Section had also been created to extend union coverage to hitherto unorganised hospital employees. 36	27
Divided Unities and Competing Mobilisations, 1916-21
What the AMA radicals could not have foreseen was the outbreak of war and its paradoxical consequences for their cause. The Broken Hill labour movement would be very different after the war, sundered by sectionalism while trying to rebuild a new kind of unity. At first sight this ‘divided unity’ seems ironic because in 1916 and again in 1920 the underground miners won unparalleled industrial gains which in themselves seemed to confirm all the strategic arguments of the syndicalists. These gains might have laid the foundation for an expansion of militant organising and class mobilisation in and beyond Broken Hill – but it was not to be.	28
As we have seen, the syndicalists had been quick to build upon the organising drive of 1913. Within the AMA, newer arrivals like Percy Brookfield, J. J. O’Reilly, George Kerr, Mick Considine and Ern Wetherell joined with older leaders like W.D. Barnett and Tom Gamboni to form a powerful core of activists determined to use the union’s numerical strength to pursue the issues of higher minimum wages, shorter hours and improved safety conditions underground. When the Wise Royal Commission failed to deliver significant improvements, the radicals decided to settle the matter at the point of production. After an abortive hearing before Justice Higgins in mid-1915, the underground miners – the elite of the AMA membership – decided to take matters into their own hands and voted to institute a 44-hour week by simply refusing to work the Saturday afternoon shift. When Higgins threatened to prosecute the union, however, the membership voted to resume working the 48-hour week. The vote caused a bitter rift within the union itself between the underground men and the surface workers, with the former, led by radicals George Kerr and J. J. O’Reilly, deciding to continue the campaign by themselves. When the companies began dismissing miners who failed to work a 48-hour week in January 1916, the underground men struck work leaving the incumbent officials (Barnett and Considine) and the rest of the membership with little choice but to support the strike. Although none of the craft unions supported the strike, underground workers belonging to other unions did not breach the AMA picket lines. The AMA also found an unexpected, if reluctant, ally in the form of its main surface rival, the Trades and Trades Labourers Union. The month-long strike was a clear challenge to arbitration, union moderation and, more broadly, wartime patriotism. Most importantly, it was successful. On this occasion, at least, there was no attempt by management to introduce outside strike-breakers and no desire on the part of the state to use coercive force. With base metal production crucial to the war effort, the Federal Labor government actively encouraged a resumption of work on terms favourable to the miners. An Award handed down by Higgins in April 1916 confirmed the gain, giving underground miners an official working week of 44 hours and a new minimum rate per shift for contract work. For their part, the surface workers and members of the other mining unions were obliged to adhere to Award provisions of the 48-hour working week. 37	29
The AMA’s victory therefore exacerbated the sectional differences within the mining workforce. In part these had arisen because of changes in the work processes on the mines. During the early stages of the war, changes in the mining labour process combined with a decline in overall mine employment to produce a shift in workforce composition which, in turn, heightened tensions over job demarcation. These sectional and organisational differences were overlaid by increasingly bitter ideological divisions over arbitration. The pro-arbitrationist FEDFA, the second largest union on the mining ‘line of lode’, refused to support the strike, as did the largest of the surface unions, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Significantly, both of these unions were constituents of national unions with a strong preference for arbitration. As the editor of the BLF-owned Truth exclaimed: ‘The Gibraltar of unionism; and some jellyfish on the rock’. 38 Yet the craft unions’ refusal to support the AWA action left the BLF itself bereft of any role during the dispute. The AMA was not only isolated within Broken Hill but across space as well. For the Port Pirie branch of the AMA also scabbed on the Broken Hill strikers during 44-hours campaign. For this and other reasons, the AMA lost its presence there, further damaging the strategic position and organisational ambitions of the syndicalists. 39 As it happened, the end of the Port Pirie association also removed the possibility of further claims before the Commonwealth tribunal, though this, of itself, was hardly cause for concern to the AMA radicals.	30
At the same time, wider debates and struggles inflamed divisions in Broken Hill. The syndicalists were not content to organise workers into existing unions; rather, they hoped to mobilise them through the One Big Union which would, ideally, enable them to seize back from the capitalists the ‘full fruits’ of their labour. So, workers should not be subject to the whims of capital and the state – and they should most certainly not die for them. The syndicalists were the most vociferous and anti-patriotic of the opponents of conscription for wartime military service. They supported the activities of the local Industrial Workers of the World and in 1916 Brookfield and others formed a Labor Volunteer Army to oppose conscription. 40 On all these counts, the militants alarmed the craft unionists as much as they appalled employers and governments. Little wonder that, in this context, a new inter-union body would emerge, at first heightening still further the organisational divisions of the Broken Hill labour movement.	31
The surface and craft unions established this new body, the Broken Hill Trades and Labour Council (TLC), in February 1916 as a direct challenge to the BLF and the AMA. 41 By this time, the AMA’s campaign for closer unity through the BLF had, in any case, all but collapsed. War-time economic dislocation saw the AMA’s membership dwindle to just over 4,000. 42 The Council’s emergence left the AMA isolated from the rest of the local union movement and the BLF faded away, having become little more than a mouthpiece for the AMA. The creation of this rival peak body also ruptured the short-lived alliance between the AMA and the Trades and Trades Labourers, with the latter soon affiliating with the TLC. The TLC also provided a forum for another of the AMA’s rivals, the Barrier Workers Association, which emerged during 1917 to compete with the AMA for the elite of the mine workforce – the underground contract miners. Unlike the other key unions on the Broken Hill line of lode, both were purely local bodies and therefore confined to the state arbitral jurisdiction. Their willingness to embrace state award coverage and, in particular, the anti-strike provisions of the 1918 New South Wales Industrial Arbitration Act, further inflamed AMA hostility towards them. 43	32
This inter-union rivalry contributed greatly to the origins and course of the ‘Big Strike’ of 1919-20. The impending expiry in 1919 of the award which had settled the 1916 strike and the issuing of new logs of claims by all of the mining unions increased sectional conflict. Early in April 1919 an elite group of certified engine-drivers broke away from the FEDFA to form its own body. The AMA, still hoping to eliminate craft unionism altogether, accepted the breakaways into its ranks. The FEDFA retaliated by refusing to work with the AMA, while the TLC called its other affiliates out on strike. Although this inter-union dispute was settled in May, the AMA then raised the stakes by refusing to resume work until all of its claims on employers – including a 30-hour week, the abolition of night shift and contract mining, and full compensation for miners affected by occupational disease – were met. 44	33
The 18-month strike was marked throughout by friction between the AMA and the other unions and by disunity between the TLC unions themselves. At the heart of these differences lay the issue of arbitration. The AMA rejected it altogether; for their part, the TLC unions were deeply divided as to arbitral jurisdictions. The FEDFA and the Carpenters Society had instituted award proceedings before the Commonwealth Arbitration Court prior to the strike’s commencement. Other craft unions followed suit. On the other hand, the Barrier Workers and the TTLU lodged claims for smaller wage increases under the state arbitration system. 45	34
The disunity deepened when the TLC unions, including the FEDFA, began returning to work as a precondition for their claims being arbitrated. Determined to hold out, the AMA set up picket lines and there were sporadic outbursts of violence against members of the TTLU. From September, when the carpenters returned to work, until November, when the Big Strike finally ended, the AMA carried on alone, eventually securing a major victory. 46 Although the union failed in its claims for the abolition of contracting and night shift work, it won a 35-hour week for underground miners and the promise of full compensation for miners affected by industrial disease. 47	35
Thus, by 1920, the industrially successful AMA was isolated from all the other unions and the moderates’ peak body, the TLC, was itself divided. The AMA would soon come under pressure as the local economy began slowing and mine employment contracted. At the same time, unionism in the town sector had all but collapsed. How was unionism to be renewed? How could the gains which the AMA had won be defended and built upon? Critically, what role could any peak body hope to play in answering these questions in so divided a movement?	36
Mine Union Renewal and the Birth of the Barrier Industrial Council, 1921-25
The re-building of inter-union unity and the specific forms of union renewal depended upon the changing balance of power between the remaining AMA syndicalists in the key mining union and the other unions in the local labour movement. Of these, the FEDFA was the most important, given the control this union’s winder-operators exercised over access to the underground worksites. These shifts in union power and strategy overcame the sectionalism which had accompanied the triumph of syndicalism and led to a very different style of union organisation and mobilisation in and beyond the interwar years.	37
In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the AMA formalised its commitment to the syndicalists’ much hoped-for One Big Union. When the Miners Federation reconstituted itself as the Workers Industrial Union of Australia (WIUA), the AMA renamed itself as the Barrier Branch of the new body, retaining this title despite the collapse of the wider WIUA in 1924. However, the generalised decline of syndicalism had its parallel in Broken Hill. The post-strike recession left the Barrier WIUA financially and organisationally depleted, with its remaining membership less enamoured of direct action and syndicalism. At the same time, the introduction of the workers compensation scheme provided an immediate need for the two largest mine unions, the WIUA and the FEDFA to cooperate with each other. The two unions also had a shared interest in organising a renewal of union membership on the mines. These circumstances encouraged a new unity between these unions and allowed for the creation of a new peak body, the BIC, which in turn would oversee further organisation on and beyond the mines. 48	38
Within the TLC, there was some recognition that, as had been the case before the war, the local unions would need the power and active support of the WIUA in order to rebuild unionism in the town. The FEDFA leadership was to play the leading role in this rapprochement. However, it insisted that the quid pro quo for making common cause on the line of lode would be WIUA affiliation with the TLC and, by implication, the abandonment of the WIUA’s one big union agenda. As early as January 1921, the FEDFA leadership had made overtures to the WIUA about cooperating to achieve ‘closer organisation’ on the mines. 49 Over the ensuing two years, in a series of extraordinarily complex manoeuvres, a new peak body would be constructed. For a time, the WIUA radicals fought a rear-guard action to keep the union true to the syndicalist cause – and out of the TLC. For their part, the TLC unions retaliated by refusing further cooperation with the WIUA until it affiliated. 50 Gradually, the WIUA leadership came to the realisation that it could not subordinate the other unions, while most of the TLC unions no longer believed that this would happen. In June 1923, TLC President E. P. (Paddy) O’Neill and his allies overcame TLC opposition to co-operation with the WIUA. This set the stage for a new union organising campaign, albeit one aimed as much at other unions, the WIUA’s rivals, as at non-union labour. 51	39
The FEDFA now re-opened discussions with the WIUA for a new drive to organise a closed shop for underground workers. This would take the form of a ‘ribbon show’ by financial members, the 1920 award having explicitly prohibited the traditional practice of ‘pence card shows’. Held in September 1923, this first ribbon show not only cemented the unity between the FEDFA and the WIUA but effectively wiped out the Barrier Workers Association, the ‘Blue Whiskers’. After all the months of stand-off and then the detailed negotiations between unions, the process on the day was perfectly straightforward. The FEDFA winder-drivers simply refused to lower not just non-unionists but any miner not wearing the WIUA’s ribbon. The show day was a success, helped by a newly booming labour market on the mines. The Barrier Workers Association collapsed almost immediately. The next month, the WIUA membership voted to join the TLC, opening the way for the Council’s transformation into the BIC. The other unions agreed to sacrifice the WIUA’s other rival for coverage of mine labourers, the TTLU, by forcing its absorption into the WIUA. In short, a closed shop had been achieved and the path for further inter-union unity had been laid. 52	40
The BIC now instituted a system of quarterly ‘badge shows’ on the mines. This, too, came to differ from pre-war practice. At first, there was continuity as the show days enforced a post-entry union shop on the mines. However, this gave way to a pre-entry closed shop system, in which union membership was a pre-requisite. By 1925 both underground and surface operations were fully unionised and the mining unions, under the BIC, were organised into a powerful coalition. Indeed, the BIC had become one of the most powerful union bodies in Australia, instituting and controlling a regime of peak-body collective bargaining for mine and town which effectively removed the town from arbitration and which endured until the 1980s. 53 When the depression of the late 1920s began to affect Broken Hill’s mines, the local unions and the BIC moved to regulate and organise local labour markets still more closely, by imposing a bar on outsiders. The BIC imposed a strict residential qualification for union membership and, hence, access to paid employment. This closure was as complete and sustained as Broken Hill’s notorious marriage bar. From 1931 on, only those males who had been born in Broken Hill, or resided there for at least eight years, or married a woman meeting these residential requirements were admitted to union membership and local jobs. Local labour market closure was fully supported by the BIC and was taken up by all affiliates, with the BIC assuming the mantle of guardian of the local interest. 54 Elsewhere, following the insights of economic geographer Jamie Peck, we have argued that this process of closure is best understood in terms of the local specificity of labour market regulation and the role that unions may play in the social regulation of such markets. 55	41
Despite the gains in union security, there were costs for the WIUA in making common cause with smaller unions. These point to the wider concerns of this article and this special issue of the journal, reflecting both changes in organising strategy, visions of mobilisation and the politics of the local labour movement. Two points must be made in concluding this section: the first relates to the structure of the BIC and the problem of sectionalism; the second to the effective de-politicising of, or at least loss of militancy from, the local peak body.	42
As with most peak bodies, the BIC’s delegate structure was weighted so as to minimise the possibility of the Council being dominated from within by one major union, in this case the WIUA. The miners were limited to nine delegates, and other unions to anywhere between two and nine, depending on their size. The delegate structure also gave the smaller unions greater collective say in who was elected to the Council’s highest post – the presidency. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the smaller unions and most BIC officials were wary of the potential of the WIUA. This anxiety was to shape the BIC’s campaign strategy for organising town workers because the BIC leadership preferred to create many small occupational unions rather than a ‘one big union’ of town workers. Thus, despite the occasional rhetorical flourish about class solidarity, union renewal would lead to still greater sectionalism, or, put another way, ‘further organisation’ would be a counter to ‘closer organisation’. 56	43
The changing nature of union organising in Broken Hill was also evidenced in the very title of the new peak body. In its initial incarnation, the new all-encompassing peak body was invested with the role of industrial and political mobiliser. It was to be called the ‘Barrier Industrial and Political Council’ and was intended to absorb the local branch of the ALP. No doubt, this was an attractive feature of the new body to many in the WIUA with an eye to wider political struggles. However, the new body’s role as a political mobiliser proved short-lived. In 1924 the Labor Party State Executive intervened, insisting that the local party remain a separate entity and refusing the Council’s application for affiliation. In November 1924, the Council was restyled the ‘Barrier Industrial Council’. The BIC had been born – with the party politics left out. 57	44
The Barrier Industrial Council and the Consolidation of Town Unionism, 1924-31
The reunionisation of mine workers left an important component of the local paid workforce still largely unorganised. Once it had consolidated closer unity and coalition bargaining on the mines, the BIC moved to organise town workers along similar lines.	45
This ‘town drive’ was masterminded by Paddy O’Neill, the BIC’s first and longest-serving president. O’Neill drew on his own standing and experience as a town worker. Working as a night-soil carter for the local council, he was perhaps all too familiar with just about every aspect of Broken Hill life. His devout Irish Catholicism which would shape Broken Hill’s union and social relations in ways quite distinct from either the pre-war Methodism or war-time syndicalism. The drive to organise the town drew on strategies which had characterised the earlier era of militant unionism: mass meetings, badge shows, a preference for direct bargaining and direct action, inter-union support and the use of consumer boycotts to force recalcitrant traders into line. However, where those disputes had been episodic, these were strategic; where those had built upon a broad class-based mobilisation, these increasingly constrained that mobilisation. O’Neill and his allies also knew that as mining employment recovered, the WIUA would regroup and that, within that union, the more militant members might well seek a return to something like the militant industrialism and radical politics of the war years. A plethora of small unions organised in and through the BIC would be a counter to these influences. 58	46
There were two main phases to this process of union growth. The first, in 1924-25, involved wages and hours campaigns by several strategically well-placed town unions, including the Town Employees Union (covering mainly hotel and hospital workers) and O’Neill’s own union, the Municipal Employees. The second phase, beginning in 1926 and extending through to the early 1930s, entailed a series of highly successful membership drives in occupations where unionism was weak or non-existent, particularly among male and female workers in retail shops and hotels. Here we provide an overview of how the campaigns were run and then highlight two episodes which underscore how different these strategies and outcomes were from those of the earlier periods.	47
In this campaign to organise town employment, the unions’ rhetoric drew explicitly upon the notion of Broken Hill as an ‘All-Union Town’. 59 The BIC’s weapon was to be what the Barrier Daily Truth called ‘that deadly one of the peaceful boycott’. 60 Clearly, this strategy could not succeed without broad support from all sections of the local working class. It was also, however, a strategy which relied upon organising employers and consumers. As had been prefigured in the hotels dispute of 1915, the boycott strategy required storekeepers to approach the BIC, asking to be placed on the unions’ ‘white list’. They would then receive window cards declaring that ‘Union Labor Only’ was employed. The Truth regularly published and updated these ‘white lists’. By the end of September the BIC reported that the ‘cards [were] being freely issued’. 61	48
Overall, whilst the drive did not deliver 100 per cent unionism, membership increased substantially. In the final report on the campaign, discussed at the BIC in November 1926, the BIC claimed that membership of the Shop Assistants Union had increased by about 40 per cent in 1926, whilst for the Town Employees Union, membership had increased by 30 per cent. In part, the TEU’s growth stemmed from an extension of its coverage to embrace hotel and restaurant employees. In the case of the Shop Assistants, growth came mainly from the recruitment of women. Available membership data suggests that there were well over 2,000 union members in the town sector by the end of 1926, which suggests an overall union density significantly in excess of 50 per cent. 62	49
Of the many gains made by town unionism during the decade 1925-35, the most extraordinary were those which flowed from a major confrontation with local traders over standard hours. This revealed just how far the organisation of the town workforce had come since the failure of the shop assistants campaign in 1913. The immediate cause of the dispute lay in State industrial relations and politics. After the Bavin government legislated for the 48-hour week in 1930, employers belonging to the local branch of the Country Traders Association promptly decided to increase standard hours. The employers insisted that they did not want to deal with the BIC but with the unions directly concerned. O’Neill responded thus:	50
You talk about conferring with the individual union and you have been rushing around the town trying to pool anybody who has any employees to start an offensive to tramp on the workers … You … have established yourselves as a clique in Broken Hill to rob the people of the town, drumming people out of the town who were prepared to give us the necessities at a reasonable figure. And the workers have supported you, with your hypocritical “Buy in your own town” propaganda! You have canvassed the whole district for support for your little monopoly … Well now, you have pulled on the unions, and let me tell you that before this fight is over you will find that you undertook something, and some of you will wish to God you never pulled it on! 63
The union position was almost undermined by the Shop Assistants Union, which quickly caved-in but a mass meeting of all unions on 2 July decided to oppose ‘the planned offensive of the employing class’. The BIC organised ‘white’ lists and established a union bakery. The unions’ position had been strengthened by the opening, in October 1927, of a direct rail link with Sydney. This weakened the traders’ control over local commodity supply (which hitherto came mainly from Adelaide) and gave the unions and ‘white’ shops an alternative source of supply. After three weeks the traders conceded, agreeing to a conciliated proposal to restore the 44-hour week pending the outcome of the forthcoming State election. 64	51
The second specific example discussed here is that of the organisation and defence of the town’s barmaids. This exemplifies the BIC’s approach to single women workers and, more broadly, the ‘demobilisation’ of one section of the working class. Since 1925, hotel employers had been holding out against the TEU’s demands for pay increases for bar workers. This came to a head in 1928 when the BIC guaranteed to support the hotel workers in a new wages campaign. 65	52
Many publicans conceded wage increases to some, mainly male, bar workers but attempted to divide the workforce by holding out on wage increases for women employed in dining rooms and boarding houses. When some male unionists expressed doubts about their favourite pubs being blackbanned in support of women’s wages, O’Neill put them right. At a mass meeting he pointed out that:	53
many of the fathers of the girls on strike had been reared in the school of militant unionism and played their part in the bitter fights along the line of lode. The girls had had the fighting spirit bred in them and they were prepared to fight for better conditions. Were the other unionists of Broken Hill prepared to fight with them?
O’Neill made the BIC’s position clear, linking town and mine, women and men: in this dispute, offending unionists would ‘be dealt with in the same manner as offenders along the line of lode’. All unionists should quit the blacklisted hotels. The publicans’ tilt at gender division failed and the dispute resulted in both an improvement in all-round conditions in the industry and the consolidation of unionism. 66
However, the obverse of wage campaigns such as this was an unwritten policy designed to systematically exclude married women from paid employment. As early as 1925, the BIC had challenged the employment of married women at the hospital laundry. The expansion of union coverage in those areas employing single women – particularly retailing, bar work, clerical work and nursing – enhanced the ability of the BIC to police the marriage bar. 67	54
Between 1924 and 1931, then, the BIC presided over an organising drive which remade Broken Hill as an enduring ‘union town’. As was the case during the mine reunionisation of the early 1920s, the organising strategies used in the subsequent town drive invoked and built upon earlier practices. However, the remobilisation over which the BIC presided was also very different in character to earlier experience. Controlled by moderates from town as well as mine unions, the BIC pursued a strategy of organising ‘from above’, guided democracy, closed shop unionism, patriarchal exclusion, and from 1931 on systematic local labour market closure.	55
Conclusion
There was nothing predestined about Broken Hill’s emergence as a stronghold of organised labour. The question is not that this happened, but why and how it happened. Writers such as Kennedy have argued that Broken Hill unionism was essentially a product of geographical isolation. However, we argue that while space was certainly of pivotal importance, its effects were more subtle and mediated than a geographical-determinist explanation would suggest. We contend that union growth and development was shaped by four key factors: firstly, the globalised scale and cyclical nature of the political economy of the metal mining industry; secondly, the importance of labour migration and worker itinerancy; thirdly, the paradoxical agency of the state; fourthly, the occupational and spatial divisions between local workers themselves. Each of these factors created its own particular challenges and opportunities for worker collectivism.	56
Broken Hill may have been remote from the major eastern capitals but it also lay at the epicentre of an emerging global base-metal industry. Its ore and concentrates produced by BHP and the Collins House companies were integral to the further development of industrial capitalism in Britain and Germany. It was the very volatility of global base metals markets, and the strategic responses of mining company management, which shaped the markedly cyclical nature of local mine employment. As we have seen, organising in the context of such instability presented the mining unions with particular challenges. The syndicalists certainly appreciated that Broken Hill was literally at a special place in this intersection of international markets, Melbourne capital and local ore bodies. The challenge for them was how best to interrelate internationalism and the local in shaping worker mobilisation.	57
As Kennedy and others have pointed out, these shifts in the tenor of collectivism were also informed by patterns of labour mobility. The Broken Hill experience illustrates very clearly the contradictory links between worker mobilisation and labour migration. Unionism was first transmitted to the line of lode by Cornish ‘cousin Jacks’ – copper miners from Moonta and silver miners from nearby Silverton. As we have seen, the influx of a new group of workers and activists during and after the 1909 lockout provided the foundation for a quite different ethic of collectivism. By the same token, the decade-long weakness of unionism after the 1892 strike is attributable, in part, to the departure of activists blackballed by the victorious mining companies. There is certainly truth in Kennedy’s contention that the turn away from the syndicalism and openness of the period 1909-17 to the growing localism of the 1920s is attributable to demographic stabilisation and the disappearance of the young nomadic miner from the line of lode.	58
Here, too, was a workforce which was far from being a homogeneous mass. There were marked and enduring occupational divisions between mine workers themselves. These also intersected with spatial divisions between underground and surface workers, between workers at different mine sites, and between workers at Broken Hill and at Port Pirie. In turn, these distinctions were overlain by fissures of an ideological nature. In general terms, the nature of the problem is familiar enough: divisions over ideology and strategy sat alongside and in part sprang from divisions derived logically from the sectional nature of occupational identity and organisation. There were also clear socio-spatial divisions between workers on the line of lode and those in the town sector and between town sector workers themselves, including, most importantly, divisions based on gender. Organising and mobilising such an internally diverse workforce posed no less a problem for unions in Broken Hill than was the case elsewhere.	59
The persistence of internal division holds the key to understanding the prominence of peak unionism in each phase of union growth and renewal. Across the time frame examined here, the role of successive peak bodies in phases of growth and renewal must be understood in terms of the management of these varieties of sectionalism. Each peak body aimed to solve the problem of sectionalism in its own particular way. In the syndicalist period, the AMA tried to bury sectionalism by becoming itself the one union for mine workers and by becoming in effect the ‘one big union’ in the town through the BLF. The persistence of sectionalism on the mines undercut the first of these ambitions. More importantly for our purposes, it was the very success of the BLF in partially organising the town which lay the foundation for the emergence of a rival peak body, a precursor to the BIC. The BIC, of course, would eventually be the agent, though not the cause, of the AMA/WIUA losing its pre-eminent position in the local labour movement. Thereafter this occupationallybased unionism was further – and quite deliberately – entrenched by the BIC, limiting the power of the WIUA even when mine employment and membership recovered. Coupled with a delegate structure which, as in most peak bodies, meant that larger unions were under-represented, this meant that union renewal was as much about controlling internal power relationships as about wielding inter-class power.	60
What of the role of the state? Did the state help or hinder union development in Broken Hill? Above all else, the town’s experience highlights the dangers of over-simplification in this regard. On the one hand, the use of coercive police power and the legalism of the arbitration system certainly impeded the miners’ drive for compulsory unionism and improved wages and conditions; on the other, it was the state which broke the impasse between the AMA and the companies in 1916 and again in 1920, delivering unprecedented gains to the underground miners. Overall, however, the role of the state is best characterised as being paradoxical. As we have seen, frustration and anger with the judiciary and the police gave a clear fillip to grass roots organising and confirmed in the minds of local unionists the superiority of collective bargaining to arbitral determination.	61
On the mines, the primary weapons were the organising strike and the badge or ribbon show where the wearing of the union badge signalled to fellow workers and to managers the status of the unionist. Unfinancial members and non-members were sent back to the union office to pay up or join up. Union rules forbade members from working with a non-unionist although it was certainly the case in the early days that no such rule was required, a