88  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
May, 2005
Previous
Next
Labour History

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 
 

Postscript: Australian and British Labour Compared

Gregory S. Kealey

At the outset I should make it eminently clear that I am expert in neither Australian nor British labour history. As a Canadian labour historian, I have read broadly in both fields but can claim no particular research expertise in either. I can claim, however, a broad interest in the development of comparative and transnational approaches to the study of the working class. Undoubtedly, this interest was the basis for Greg Patmore and Neville Kirk's request that I produce a brief afterword or postscript for this collection of essays. 1
      In April 1987 a group of Canadian labour historians met with Welsh colleagues in the beautiful setting of Gregynog Hall new Newtown in mid-Wales. Under the joint leadership of Deian Hopkin, then editor of Llafur, and myself, Canadian and Welsh colleagues learned much from each other in comparing working-class development in the two geographic areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Approximately 20 months later, a similar group of Canadians traveled to Sydney, Australia to participate in a joint conference with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.2 Both of these conferences, while undoubtedly productive and stimulating, left their organisers frustrated with the limitations of simply placing two national perspectives side-by-side with no explicit effort to tease out the comparative insights. 2
      Hence, Patmore and Kealey devised the technique utilised in a second Australian-Canadian conference in Sydney, and repeated in this British-Australian volume. Experts from each national context wrote theme papers on their country but then they were asked to work together to develop a truly comparative essay. The results of the first effort appeared in 1996, and this collection represents the fruits of the most recent collaboration between the Australian and British Societies for the Study of Labour History.3 3
      One significant difference between the two efforts is that fewer of the final matchups are contained in the current volume. As Kirk suggests in his introduction, it is to be hoped that the conference presenters on historiography, race, gender and the passages of radicalism and culture will submit their final essays for publication.4 For these would provide a broader context in which to situate the essays published here; in this regard, the historiographic essay would be particularly beneficial. The absence of these essays leave the existing collection rather too narrowly focused on work and the labour movement at the expense of an array of other aspects of workers' lives. The editors are evidently well aware of this fact as the Berger/Patmore essay itself highlights 'the importance of transnational transfer processes for the development of nationally constituted labour movements'.5 4
      We have spoken already about comparative and transnational labour history. It is important that we clearly distinguish these approaches because, while related, they are not identical. As recently refined by Michael Hanagan, 'Transnational labour history studies state border crossings that result from labor market demand, state labor policies, the actions of workers, or the practices of working-class institutions'.6 Hence, not all comparative labour studies qualify because not all of them involve the crucial 'border crossings' component of Hanagan's definition. In this collection of essays, this distinction is not always made as clearly as it might be, although Neville Kirk does make the same point in his introduction. 5
      Kirk, a key practitioner in the development of comparative labour history, offers a useful introduction to this collection, which argues that such historical work 'stands in sharp contrast to the "defeatism" of post-modernism'. While sympathetic to Kirk's political perspective, I think that a strong counter argument might be advanced — that elements of global and transnational historical approaches are deeply rooted in the same soils as much postmodernist discourse.7 6
      Berger and Patmore provide a provocative discussion of the comparative method and then provide a comprehensive survey of comparative work in both countries. One striking fact that goes unmentioned by the authors is that the bulk of the British comparative work concerns European history while in the Australian case the focus is resolutely on Australia. 7
      Bell, Martin, and McCausland offer us a guided tour of British and Australian archives with some brief comments on the thorny issues of copyright and access to information/privacy. The latter issues are, of course, always of great interest to labour historians because of the richness of sources compiled by the state's varied apparati of repression. Australia in my experience has a much better record in making its state security archives at least partially accessible. 8
      The five thematic essays demonstrate the range of approaches available within comparative history. McIvor and Wright systematically survey 50 years of British and Australian management practice and convincingly demonstrate a striking consistency of practice between the two countries. They suggest as a tentative explanation the social and cultural linkages between Britain and Australia based on a shared heritage, ongoing linkages, and the Commonwealth itself. The discussion concludes in 1950 and one can but wonder how quickly American practices displaced British thereafter. Management practices in general are probably a prime research area for a regenerated transnational labour history. Deery and Redfern's article on the Cominform represents a significantly contrasting approach to comparative history. Sharply focusing on the years from 1945 to 1950 they analyze the steep decline in the fortunes of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Interestingly, while the two parties behaved in radically different ways, they both ended up in considerable disarray with much of their trade union support lost. This intensive analysis is perhaps the most satisfying of the comparative essays in this collection. Needless to say the forces of international communism from Comintern to Cominform are proving to be a significant growth area in transnational and comparative labour and working-class history. The historiographic boom is fueled by the vast array of new archival sources available because of the demise of the USSR and its colleague states in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War which has had a similar, albeit smaller, liberating effect on western state security archives. 9
      With Weinbren and James we return to comparison via catalogue. This essay polemicises against the relative dearth of historiographic attention to Friendly Societies in labour studies and to a Whiggish view that they represent little but 'pre-modern' unions. While persuasive in their overall argument about the importance of such voluntary associations in working-class life, their refusal to categorise and define these overlapping institutions is a significant weakness. In addition, the piece fails to analyse its comparative material, instead simply providing empirical linkages between Australia and Britain. 10
      One important theme from the Weinbren and James account of friendly societies, namely self-help, provides an important linkage to the Smith and Oppenheimer essay on voluntarism in the labour movement. Here the authors argue convincingly for an important voluntarist strain throughout the history of labour, one which has been given relatively short shrift by the more usual emphasis on statism. Reflections on this voluntarist tradition in turn lead to the volume's final article by Patmore and Coates. 11
      In their analysis of labour in power in Australia and Britain, Patmore and Coates closely examine the ideology and record of the Hawke/Keating governments in Australia, and 'New Labour' under Tony Blair. Basically they argue that a combination of neo-liberal ideological hegemony and the failure of state socialism had led to a dramatic shift in both the Australian Labor Party and the Labour Party in Britain, especially in the realm of the economy and in their relations with organised labour. In the social realm, change has come more slowly but much of it in the British case might be seen as consistent with the voluntarist/self-help strain of the labour movement delineated by Smith and Oppenheimer. 12
      In closing, I think that this collection of essays represents another solid contribution to the trend to reach beyond the national in our exploration of the working class and the labour movement. Comparative and transnational studies as promoted by scholars such as Kirk and Patmore here, and van der Linden and Hanagan in numerous places are clearly emerging as a major agenda item for international scholars of labour and working-class history.8 A meeting will be held in July in Sydney at the International Congress of the Historical Sciences to explore the creation of a new international labour history organisation. I feel certain that the Australian and British Labour History Societies will be active participants. 13


Endnotes

1. Many of the papers from this conference were published in Deian R. Hopkin and Gregory S. Kealey (eds), Class, Community and the Labour Movement: Wales and Canada, 1850–1930, joint publication of Llafur and the Committee on Canadian Labour History, Aberystwyth/St Johns, NS, 1989.

2. A small selection of the papers appeared in Gregory S. Kealey and Greg Patmore (eds), Canadian and Australian Labour History: Towards a Comparative Perspective, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and the Committee on Canadian Labour History, Sydney/St Johns, NS, 1990.

3. Most of the papers are included in Gregory S. Kealey and Greg Patmore, Australia and Canada: Labour Compressed, joint issue of Labour/Le Travail, no. 38, Fall 1996 and Labour History, no. 71, November 1996.

4. Neville Kirk, 'Why Compare Labour in Australia and Britain?,' in this issue, Labour History, no. 88, May 2005. For an account of the papers presented at the original conference, see Neville Kirk, 'UK-Australian Labour History Conference', International Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 65, 2004, pp. 166–67.

5. Stefan Berger and Greg Patmore, 'Comparative Labour History in Britain and Australia', in this issue, Labour History, no. 88, May 2005.

6. Michael P. Hanagan, 'An Agenda for Transnational Labor History', International Review of Social History, no. 49, 2004, pp. 455–74.

7. For an insightful perspective with a similar political framework see Marcel van der Linden, 'The "Globalization" of Labor and Working-Class History and its Consequences', International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 65, 2004, pp. 135–156.

8. van der Linden, 'The "Globalization" of Labor', and Hanagan, 'An Agenda for Transnational Labor History'.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

 



May, 2005 Previous Table of Contents Next