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Interrogating Arbitration: Reflections on Work, Nation and History
Raelene Frances
| When the various Australian jurisdictions adopted industrial arbitration at the turn of the twentieth century, they created not just a 'new province for law and order', to use Higgins' famous term.1 They also created a new arena in which workplace contests could be fought, a new space in which discourses could be elaborated and a stage on which power relationships could be performed. The articles in this thematic section engage with all of these dimensions, drawing on the transcripts of proceedings as well as other written and oral evidence to explore the many levels on which the courts operated. |
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W.M. Robbins and Ian Harriss remind us particularly of the theatrical dimensions of the early Commonwealth Court, arguing that Higgins deliberately extended the time taken for the hearing in order to convey to the public a sense of the historic importance of his pending decision – the 'creation of a sense of dramatic suspense'.2 The transcripts in this case reveal that Higgins formed his judgement despite the evidence presented at the hearing: his judgement was rather shaped by his own ideas about the needs of a modern young nation. In this sense, 'we see in the Harvester transcripts a discernible sub-text through which a distinctively Australian sense of modernity pulsates'.3 |
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Mark Hearn is also interested in the discourses of nation embedded in the transcripts of two later cases: the 1912 Fruitpickers case and the 1919 Clothing Trades case, both cases over which Higgins also presided. Hearn's interest is in the gendered dimensions of Higgins' approach to citizenship and in how wages awarded to each sex affected their ability to carry out their roles as citizens of a modern state. As Hearn's use of the testimony of Florence Wootten in the 1919 inquiry shows, Higgins was vitally interested in the ways in which workers spent their money. Did they spend it on frivolous luxuries or did they set aside funds for civic and self-improving activities such as library and lodge subscriptions? Wootten's allegedly extravagant expenditure on dress and her failure to spend on self-improvement apparently influenced Higgins' decision to award lower wages to female workers. |
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Sixteen years ago in this journal, Gail Reekie also explored the ways in which discourses around working women's wardrobe reflected the ways in which modern consumerism was sexualising the body of the female worker. She also notes how the interrogation of women's attire by wage-fixing courts provided opportunities for men's sexual pleasure at the expense of women's discomfort: courtrooms assumed a sexually-charged atmosphere where male judges could inspect and handle items of female underwear whilst simultaneously interrogating female witnesses about their own needs and preferences in this regard. Again we see the court as stage, where men (both judges and advocates) acted out their control over women's bodies in a sexual farce. As Reekie comments, 'the men of the court not only appeared to enjoy looking at and touching articles of women's underwear; like the patrons of some forms of contemporary prostitution, they derived pleasure from listening to women speak about their bodies.' Nor were male employers left out of the act: the need to provide their own evidence to the court gave them license to require women in their employ to come to their offices individually and in confidence tell them the details of their wardrobes.4 |
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Discussions around women's consumption patterns continued to play an important part in the deliberations of tribunals throughout the 1920s, but increasingly women contested the interpretations put on their spending by male judges. As my own research into the 1920s' Commonwealth Clothing Trades cases reveals, female union witnesses to the Court were more carefully selected and better prepared to defend themselves against the condescension of the Chair and the employers' advocates. They asserted the need to be 'decently' and fashionably dressed in order to meet the expectations of employers and also to increase the chances of securing a 'better class' of husband.5 And they also asserted their claims to responsible citizenship. As coat-hand, Elizabeth Tighe, told the Commonwealth Court in 1927:
The sum of £6/17/0 for amusements includes the purchase of a crystal wireless receiving set and license. Having neither money nor leisure to enable me to follow interests sufficiently varied amongst other things to make me vote with a broad outlook, I consider this item an absolute necessity.6
As she pointed out, a wireless was a much cheaper way of keeping abreast of news and current affairs than the daily purchase of a newspaper. Tighe's testimony also challenges Higgins' tendency to judge the extent of 'self-improving recreations' by the amount of money spent on them. In discussing the reading habits of factory women, she reported that
amongst the girls there is a lot of this sort of thing: one buys a paper and exchanges it for another. They lend papers and books to one another. That saves money and they read them just the same. There is a lot of that sort of thing. Most of the girls belong to a library. I belong to a Public Library.7
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Court transcripts reveal a great deal more than the reports of judgements about these challenges occurring within the court room. They also suggest the ways in which judgements were shaped by factors outside the formal hearings. Thus, although the judges in the early arbitration courts were all male, we can discern informal ways in which women outside the courtroom influenced judges' decisions and the arguments of employers. As George Dethridge, judge in the 1927 Clothing Trades Case confessed, 'My problem is I don't know much about women'. He was not alone: Mr Letcher, the employers' advocate, also clearly felt out of his depth in dealing with the cost of living for women. In challenging 'the regimen and the prices' submitted by the Union, he explained that 'I asked my daughters last night about some of them and I was informed that the prices are very high. For instance, my wife told me she would not pay 25/- for an umbrella'. Dethridge chimed in: 'I got the same impression from my daughter, that the prices in many cases are high'.8 Similarly, George Beeby, presiding over the Bootmakers case in 1937, took his daughter with him on inspections of boot factories. Her assessments of the levels of skill involved in machining uppers influenced him to increase the margin for skill awarded on this work.9 |
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Despite their best endeavours, women's claims to equal pay were marginalised in a court that continued to privilege the male breadwinner and the female dependent as the 'norm'. But if women were marginalised in the courts, another group of workers was entirely excluded. And here we return to the articles in this collection Thalia Anthony's study of the 1965 'Equal' Wage Case for Aboriginal Station Workers shows how evidence to the court proceeded without the input of those most directly affected: Aboriginal workers. Indeed, the hearing was held without the presence of the union advocate for much of the time. And just as the early twentieth century deliberations were centrally concerned with the making of modern white citizens, so too this later case was concerned not just with wages for Aboriginal workers but also with broader questions about the relationship of such workers to the white nation. Anthony argues that the decision of the court was motivated by a desire to provide a mechanism whereby Aboriginal workers could be removed from 'tribal' camps on stations in order to promote their assimilation. Removed from their traditional lands and tribal associations, Aboriginal workers could be placed on government settlements or missions where they could be educated, trained and instilled with Australian 'lines of thought'. Only after thus being suitably trained would they qualify for Award wages. The court provided the opportunity for the employers' representative to justify lower wages for Aboriginal workers by drawing on a modern discourse of racial difference derived from anthropology and ethno-psychiatry as well as more popular understandings of Aboriginal inferiority. In this process, any obvious skills displayed by Aboriginal workers – in tracking, for example - were devalued as being 'instinctive' rather than acquired through training: Aboriginal skills were racially-based, and therefore not deserving of reward, in much the same way as women's allegedly instinctive nimbleness disqualified them from allowances for skill in so many 'female' trades. Whereas a black man or a woman might perform a task by simply following their nature, the same work performed by a white male assumed the status of an acquired 'art' and therefore deserved greater remuneration.10 |
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Discourses about skill are also a concern of Ben Maddison in his illuminating study of the ways in which modern methods of manufacture eroded traditional artisanal practices and meanings of skill. And again the degree of 'art and mystery' is central to the contest over meanings. In this case, however, traditional artisanal discourses valorised the 'instinct' of the craftsman, who could sense, for instance, the precise temperature at which metal should be worked. The 'natural gift' demonstrated by skilled blacksmiths was symptomatic of the sense of quasi-biological, internal, intrinsic quality of skill insisted upon by witnesses for the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in 1908. Their insistence was countered by the employers' advocate, who sought to 'demystify' the definition of skill and place it within a modern, scientific frame, more appropriate, he argued, to the context of mechanised production. This case provides a particularly vivid example of the ways in which the court provided a venue not just for the articulation of discourses but also for their contestation.11 |
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The court as an arena for contest is also the theme of Naomi Segal's study of the Western Australian gold mining industry in the early years of the twentieth century. In this case, 'arbitration, rather than resolving conflicts, became the focus of disputes'.12 Segal's study is especially interesting for the light it sheds on employer strategies in the context of rising worker militancy and the advent of arbitration. The records of the Chamber of Mines are juxtaposed with those of the Court to show how mine-owners united to fund a broad propaganda campaign as well as well-financed representation in the Court. |
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Sandra Cockfield's article is a contribution to the ongoing assessment of the impact of state regulation of employment on collective mobilisation of workers in the metal trades. Refreshingly, she distinguishes between the very different regimes adopted in Victoria and New South Wales. She concludes that the Victorian system of Wages Boards 'neither constrained nor supported collective mobilisation' while in New South Wales the impact of arbitration was 'uneven and contradictory, both assisting and constraining collective mobilisation and action'. The critical factor in explaining levels of collective action was not the existence of tribunals so much as workplace politics.13 |
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In contrast, Peter Sheldon's account of the sewerage maintenance workers in Sydney shows how Judge Heydon's administration of the New South Wales Industrial Disputes Act, 1908, fostered the formation and expansion of a house union within the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage, thus excluding more militant 'outside' unions from coverage of these workers. Sheldon's rich evocation of working life in Sydney's sewers draws attention to the powerful factors drawing employers and workers together in this occupation: the employer needed a reliable maintenance workforce who could be trusted to work largely unsupervised in the foul conditions underground; workers were prepared to take on this heavy, dangerous, distasteful and low status work in exchange for regular employment. Heydon's recognition of the employees of the Water Supply and Sewerage Board as a separate 'industry' jurisdiction meant that for many decades after 1909 the Board's house union 'was to remain an inward-looking and industrially compliant body that encouraged a continuing identification with the Board as industry and employer'.14 |
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Christine Yeats' contribution to this thematic section is a valuable listing of the various tribunals in existence in New South Wales and the surviving records relating to them held in the State Archives.15 Such descriptions by archivists working in other jurisdictions would also be very valuable for future researchers. This would help, one would hope, redress the balance in relation to studies of state tribunals, which to date have concentrated on New South Wales, Victoria and the Commonwealth. Segal's article in this volume is a welcome corrective, but South Australia, Queensland and particularly Tasmania are crying out for more attention from labour historians. That the transcripts of tribunal hearings provide a rich source for the historian – whether approached from the perspective of industrial relations, workplace culture, intellectual, cultural or social history – has been amply demonstrated by the contributions to this volume. |
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Raelene Frances has taught Australian history for the last 20 years and has published extensively on the history of women, gender and work in Australia, including prize-winning books on The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939 and Women and the Great War (co-authored with Bruce Scates). Her most recent book, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution was published by Allen and Unwin in 2007. She is Dean of Arts at Monash University in Melbourne.
<rae.frances@arts.monash.edu.au>
Endnotes
1. H.B. Higgins, A New Province for Law and Order, Dawsons of Pall Mall, London, 1968.
2. W.M. Robbins and Ian Harriss, 'A Theatre of Words and Wages: Reading the Script of the Harvester Hearing', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007, p. 104.
3.Ibid., p. 105.
4. Gail Reekie, 'Decently Dressed? Sexualised consumerism and the working woman's wardrobe, 1918–1923', Labour History, no. 61, November 1991 [special issue Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates (eds), Women, Work and the Labour Movement in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand], p. 49.
5.Ibid., pp. 42–56. See also The Amalgamated Clothing and Allied Trades Union of Australia (ACATUA) vs ANA Clothing Company (ANACC) et al, Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration (CCCA), 1927, transcript of hearing, E138/18, p. 4193, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU, Canberra (NBAC).
6. ACATUA vs ANACC et al, CCCA, 1927, transcript of hearing, E138/18, p. 2467, NBAC.
7.Ibid., p. 2486.
8.Ibid., p.2411.
9.Unity, 14 July 1938, p. 11. For a detailed discussion of the clothing and boot trades, see Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880–1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
10. Thalia Anthony, 'Reconciliation and Conciliation; the Irreconcilable Dilemma of the 1965 'Equal' Wage Case for Aboriginal Station Workers', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007.
11. Ben Maddison, '"The skilful unskilled labourer": The Decline of Artisanal Discourses of Skill in the NSW Arbitration Court, 1905–15', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007.
12. Naomi Segal, 'War conducted under certain rules, but nonetheless war': Arbitration, Capital and Labour in the Western Australian Gold Mining Industry, 1901–14', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007, p. 109.
13. Sandra Cockfield, 'Mobilising at the Workplace: State Regulation and Collective Action in Three Workplaces, 1900 to the 1920s', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007.
14. Peter Sheldon, 'The Dirtiest of Jobs: Maintaining Sydney's Sewers 1890–1910', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007, p. 128.
15. Christine Yeats, [Research Note] 'Industrial Arbitration Transcripts and Related Sources in the NSW State Archives, 1902–91', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007.
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