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'The skilful unskilled labourer': The Decline of Artisanal Discourses of Skill in the NSW Arbitration Court, 1905–15
Ben Maddison*
For several centuries artisanal meanings dominated Anglophone discourse on skill. By the start of the twentieth century this dominance was being eroded. The records of the New South Wales Arbitration Court show that older artisanal meanings were losing the credibility that they used to have and were being contested by new understandings of skill more attuned to the commodified labour regime of industrial capitalism. Heydon's apparent oxymoron reflected his position as a mediator of these changes, trying to balance the historical stability presented by artisanal classifications, with the taxonomy that was developing to describe new and more-intensively commodified industrial realities.
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| In a 1910 case in the New South Wales (NSW) Industrial Court, Justice Heydon remarked that he found the 'ironworkers assistant ... difficult to classify, ... a useful skilful man'. Several years later he had refined this into the apparent oxymoron 'the skilful unskilled labourer'.1 While all around many were using the newly-coined term 'semi-skilled' to describe 'the skilful unskilled', Heydon's glorious doublespeak suggests that he found the term complex and problematic. He was not alone in this. The employer who described the operation of stationary steam engines as neither skilled nor unskilled, but 'skilled labouring', evidently shared Heydon's anxieties. So too, it appears, did a union representative when he described certain types of work in sawmills by commenting that 'Any labourer cannot do it; it is an intelligent skilled labourer who can do it'.2 |
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I argue in this article that the use of such apparent oxymorons by Heydon and his contemporaries made perfect sense when considered in a broader historical context. As Darnton and many others have pointed out 'individual expression takes place within a general idiom'3 and this article identifies the general idiom and broader context within which these terms and phrases were set. The internal contradictions within terms such as 'skilful unskilled labourer' or 'skilled labouring' captured in crystalline form wider social and industrial contradictions, as the new order of industrial capitalism sought to eradicate the older artisanal practices and meanings of skill, and replace them with industrial meanings and practices that facilitated the intensification of labour commodification. |
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Arbitration Records and Historical Research | |
| This article is principally based on transcripts of cases in NSW Arbitration Court (1905–08), and Industrial Court (1910–15). These transcripts constitute an unparalleled body of evidence of the usages and meanings of skill current in early twentieth century New South Wales. While similar evidence can be found scattered through newspapers, parliamentary papers, company archives and labour movement records, extensive gleaning of these sources is required in order to bring the fragments together and make them useful for intensive research on the historical meanings of skill. While this process reveals much about the range of meanings of skill and their patterns of usage, the fragmented nature of the evidence requires the active intervention of the historian to bring those meanings and discourses into dialogue with each other. |
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