Bradon Ellem and Peter Franks | Trade Union Structure and Politics in Australia and New Zealand | Labour History, 95

Trade Union Structure and Politics in Australia and New Zealand

Bradon Ellem and Peter Franks^*

This thematic and comparative analysis of more than 150 years of unionism in Australasia explores the similarities and differences in the economic and political contexts in which trade unions have sought to define themselves and represent their members. The state and employers have followed a similar path in Australia and New Zealand for much of that time, and in both cases that journey has been to the detriment of unions for the last generation. In this context, unions in the two countries have exhibited very similar patterns of union growth and decline, policy, and lines of inclusion and exclusion. This is not to say that there are no differences between context and unions in these two Tasman countries. The politics of the labour movement and the relationships between unions, peak bodies and political parties have at times been quite different, and different sorts of unions have been the most influential within each labour movement. Overall, however, the similarities between the two movements have been greater than the differences. By the early part of this century, Australian and New Zealand unions faced similar problems as their relationship with the state, the labour market and employers became much more problematic than it had been for most of their history.

Today, most union movements in market economies and political democracies, regardless of origins and politics, are in crisis. This is certainly the case in Australia and New Zealand where the collapse from historically high levels of membership has been very striking in the last generation. In both countries, union activists and scholars are seeking lessons from the past and trying to understand how and why the current context appears so different from the long and often rich history that unions have made in the two countries. This article argues that we can learn much about the present crisis from both comparative and historical analyses; this article of course attempts both kinds of analysis. Rather than producing a comparative chronology, we take a thematic approach.

We argue that unions must be understood in terms of both context and contingency. As many scholars have long argued, the nature of union purpose cannot simply be read from what unions do: what they do is shaped, often implicitly, by other social forces and by the weight of history.¹ In approaching the particular problem of comparative analysis of union history, we build on earlier work, most notably by Bray and Rouillard, which examined Australian and Canadian unions and was similarly attentive to the external factors shaping union development. Drawing on Martin's typology, Bray and Rouillard argued that the union movements in those countries were 'autonomous' union movements, 'dominated by neither the state nor political parties'.² Nonetheless, relationships with the state and parties were important; indeed, they explained the nature of union history. In broad terms, we accept this characterisation in our trans-Tasman comparison: Australian and New Zealand unions are more alike than many other union movements and the similarities between them are greater than the differences.

We add recent work by Hyman to Bray and Rouillard's formulation to show that, although 'autonomous' in Martin's sense, unions in Australian and New Zealand were shaped by the pull of the competing demands of 'market' and 'class'. Unions mainly sought to regulate particular labour markets but necessarily became involved in politics, with the state being a powerful influence on industrial relations and unionism.³ We go on to show that two particular elements must be given great weight in comparing unions in Australia and New Zealand. First, national political structures and internal ideological struggles differed between the countries and were important drivers of difference within and between the two union movements. Second, there are some importance differences in the timing and depth of recent changes in unionism which reflect some differences in state policies and employer orientations.

Drawing these theoretical approaches together, the article therefore begins with an assessment of the economic and political contexts in which these union movements developed. In so doing we provide a brief overview of union history in each country. The themes and topics which we traverse are grounded in more than a generation of scholarship in both industrial relations and labour history which has deepened our understandings of unions. Following the work of Turner, we believe that an analysis of union development must begin with an examination of the unions' membership base and the forms of union structure.⁴ Only then can union policy or, put more simply, 'what unions do', be appreciated. While unions developed powerful rhetorics of unity as they sought to defend workers, their structures and policy were often restrictive, so we go on to address these boundaries of 'inclusion and exclusion'. We also insist that although these union movements are not creatures of the state or political parties, neither are they simply 'business unions'. Following Hyman, we argue that they have been shaped by, and have also driven, intense debates about the next theme in the article, 'ideology and politics'. Finally, we assess the problems faced by unions today in Australia and New Zealand in the light of their similar but different histories.

Context and Overview

Trade unionism Australasia is almost as old as the white societies of Australia and New Zealand, because many unions in these colonies were shaped by the prior experience of their members in Britain. In one case, the Australasian branch of a union was established aboard the vessel bringing the men to Australia. The first formal unions in Australia and New Zealand emerged among the most skilled employees, not those labouring under the most abject of circumstances. They were unions of male workers, the craftsmen and the semi-skilled, their ability to organise aided by distance from Britain, which strengthened their local bargaining power and, from the gold rushes of the 1850s, by booming colonial economies.⁵

The outlines of unionism thereafter are familiar enough. At first, in neither country was the union movement a truly national one. These colonial unionists, though influenced by the 'old country', were intensely local: workplace and residence were close by each other. The first unions were town-based; they were not colonial bodies at all, far less national ones.⁶ Olssen observed of New Zealand that local forms of production, politics, culture and unionism varied immensely. Indeed, he began to wonder in what sense there was a genuinely New Zealand working-class and union movement at all even when writing about the class movement par excellence, the 'Red Feds'.⁷ For Australia too, we must be cautious in speaking of a national union movement. Not only are there locally-specific economies and cultures across this massive land mass, but there have been important differences between union development between the various Australian states and between state and national unions. Nonetheless, we do seek to generalise at this national level in this article, not least because unionists themselves did try to build such a movement in both countries.

With changes in forms of capital and methods of production, along with urbanisation and emergent class consciousness, some Australasian unions spread beyond the male crafts to organise the unskilled and, much more hesitantly, women workers. By 1890, over 20 per cent of the workforce was unionised in New Zealand and some of the Australian colonies, high levels by international standards. Thereafter, employer hostility, state repression and economic depression undercut the power of these unions.

Without accepting that unions were reliant upon the state, we argue that the peculiarities of the nation-state in both countries were vital in shaping union history. One of the telling differences between the two countries has been that New Zealand has a unitary political system where Australia has been a federation. Industrial relations was perhaps the pre-eminent area in which this political difference was significant. In Australia, state-based unions (or more accurately colonial ones) preceded national unions and in many instances remain more important than loosely federated national unions. In the contemporary era, state governments often introduced legislation which modified, anticipated or opposed the policies of national governments. In the late 1990s they provided some buffer against the anti-union laws of the Howard government. However, New Zealand unions had no such respite with the radical changes brought in by the Employment Contracts Act (ECA) in 1991.

The importance of the state was particularly striking at times of crisis. In the depression of the 1890s, the state aided the employers' assault in the Maritime Strike, and then locked unions into a particular, gendered 'national settlement', with the emergence of a wage-earners' welfare state. The new Commonwealth of Australia after 1901 – with its tightly integrated and consciously planned set of policies around wages, trade protection, white Australia, population control and state-sanctioned gender divisions of labour – introduced not just 'arbitration unionism' but a much wider programme. Similar policies were followed in New Zealand by the Liberal Government that took office after the 1890 election.⁸ Despite the challenges from both hardline employers and militant workers, this particular form of social settlement lasted nearly a century. It played a powerful role in shaping gender politics in both countries by at first sanctioning unequal pay but then under wartime pressure and later economic and political pressure delivering significant increases in female wage rates.

After the misery of another depression, in the 1930s, labour governments in both countries began to create Keynesian states which would underpin the post-war boom. The New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) won office for the first time in 1935 and in 1941 the Australian Labor Party (ALP) began what was until the 1980s its longest tenure in national office. These governments established regimes which afforded new protections to unions, albeit indirectly, through policies designed to deliver full (male) employment. A commitment to full employment was a plank in the 1944 Australia-New Zealand Agreement and was energetically promoted by both governments in post-war international forums.⁹ There were, of course, limits. In both countries, the aftermath of war was marked by defeats for more militant unions – miners in Australia in 1949 and waterside workers in New Zealand in 1951. Both union movements recovered from cold war factionalism (far more intense in Australia because both Catholicism and Communism were more important) to come to organise well over half the workforce before suffering under the adjustments of post-Keynesianism and the outright assault from 'neo-liberal' states from the mid-1980s in New Zealand and the 1990s in Australia.

As agents seeking to organise and represent men and women as workers, unions were of course shaped by changes in the structure of the economy, labour processes and employer strategy as well as by the state. The basis of unionism beyond skilled workers lay in sectors of the economy that were from the beginning 'globalised', namely, shearing, mining and transport. In some senses it would remain so, at least in Australia. The urban building industry and an increasing array of mostly small-scale manufacturing plants with only limited application of mass, Taylorist, techniques also soon developed. This environment encouraged unionism. Unions also came to prosper in the growing public sector later in the twentieth century.

Only the rise of a massive and fragmented private services sector would, in concert with state and employer hostility and legislative changes at the end of the twentieth century, undermine unions' numerical strength. Changes in the structure of work damaged unions in two ways. First, unions lost members as the number of jobs fell in manufacturing, mining and transport, in the heartlands of metropolitan sites and major industrial centres. Second, it was the most militant unions, the leaders in wage campaigns and, often, in political agitation, which were hardest hit. Meanwhile, employment grew in areas of union weakness like services and information technologies. Job loss, privatisation and contracting-out undermined union power in the public sector and then density began to decline in heartland industries and occupations too.¹⁰ The growth in 'precarious' work, such as part-time and casual, 'on call' jobs, also contributed to the decline in union density.

Membership and Structure

In Australia, union density peaked, on one count, at 61 per cent of the workforce in 1954 while total membership numbers continued to grow until 1992. For most of the twentieth century, density was high and relatively stable. Even in the Great Depression of the 1930s it did not fall below 40 per cent. However, it began to decline in the 1970s; by 1992 it was 39.6 per cent of the workforce. When aggregate membership started to fall, density fell precipitously. By 2007, the recorded membership was 1,696,400 and the density figure was 18.9 per cent.¹¹ In New Zealand, union density was more volatile than in Australia but remained higher for longer. It was 52 per cent of employees in May 1991; the month the ECA became law and undid a century of conciliation and arbitration.¹² Density had fallen to 22 per cent by 2006.¹³ Over a quarter of New Zealand workers were unionised at the time of the 1890 Maritime Strike.¹⁴ However the number of unions and union density fell sharply after the strike was defeated and did not reach 30 per cent until 1920. At the end of the Depression, only 21 per cent of workers were union members.¹⁵ After the first Labour Government introduced compulsory unionism, membership of private sector unions more than trebled in the four years before World War II. State sector unions, which were largely voluntary, also enjoyed large membership increases.¹⁶

In Australasia, working-class fragmentation was reproduced in unions. Ethnicity and race shaped unionism. The presence of large numbers of Irish Catholics gave unions and working-class politics in Australia a decidedly republican edge at times. More so than in New Zealand, religious sectarianism shaped unions and politics.¹⁷ The lot of Indigenous Australians was exclusion, if not annihilation. In New Zealand, the Maori population was overwhelmingly rural until the large migration from country to town beginning in the 1950s.¹⁸ In both countries, when Indigenous peoples did come under the scope of the market economy, mainly as stockmen and domestic servants, they had few allies in the organised working class until well into the twentieth century.

Until the last generation, unions were predominantly male in membership as well as leadership. In Australia, during the recent years of membership loss, women's union density has fallen by less than men's. The gender composition of union membership has therefore changed. In 1992, when aggregate membership started to fall, women made up 39 per cent of union membership and 44 per cent of the labour force. By 2007, 45 per cent of unionists were women, while women made up just under 47 per cent of the labour force.¹⁹ However, it appears that in Australia women's leadership roles have diminished whereas, perhaps under the influence of feminist politics, they had been increasing in the 1970s and 1980s.²⁰ The gender composition of unions has also changed in New Zealand. In 1971, women were 28 per cent of private sector union members and 27 per cent of the labour force. In 2006, they were 54 per cent of union members and 46 per cent of the labour force. This reflects their high representation in health, education and government administration. These industries are now the bastions of New Zealand unions. Density is 68 per cent in the public sector compared to only 13 per cent in the private sector where union membership is concentrated in manufacturing and transport. In Australia, the figures are now 41 per cent density in the public sector and 14 per cent in the private.

If changes in gender composition are striking, so is the transformation in the profile of the union movement overall. In Australia a century ago, the largest union was the Australian Workers Union (AWU), almost all male, made up of shearers and other rural workers, labourers, construction workers and, in some states, miners. Today, the largest union is the Shop, Distributive and Employees Association. Most unionists are to be found in education, hospitals and nursing homes, supermarkets and grocery stores, and government administration. Significantly, some of these industries are also the areas of highest non-membership.²¹ For now, however, we wish to highlight the almost complete transformation that has come over the profile of unionism.

Table 1: Trade Union Membership

	Australia			New Zealand
Year	Membership	Potential	Density	Membership	Potential	Density
1905			n/a	32,830	269,039	12
1915	528,000	1,465,200	36	80,796	302,161	27
1925	795,700	1,696,000	47	120,863	414,673	29
1935	790,800	1,772,500	45	102,934	496,563	21
1945	1,200,400	2,752,200	44	282,448	473,684	59
1955	1,801,900	3,019,600	60	373,656	661,294	57
1965	2,116,200	3,889,000	54	448,225	879,920	51
1975	2,813,900	5,001,000	56	604,991	1,087,350	56
1985*	2,593,900	5,683,400	46	678,779	1,287,400	53
1995	2,251,800	6,886,200	33	362,200	1,357,500	27
2005	1,911,900	8,526,600	22	377,348	1,719,500	22

* 1986 for Australia because of data collection years.

Sources:

Australia

Figures for 1905 not available for Australia; there are good estimates of nine per cent density for 1901 and 25 per cent for 1911 in G.S. Bain, and R. Price, Profiles of Union Growth: A Comparative Statistical Portrait of Eight Countries, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, pp. 121,123.

Figures for 1915 to 1975 from J. Hagan, Australian Trade Unionism in Documents, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1986, Appendix, pp. 278–82.

Figures for 1985 to 2005 from Australian Bureau of Statistics, 6325.0, Trade Union Members, Australia and then 6310.0, Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership, Australia, surveys which replaced previous ABS data sets which typically gave higher figures and are the basis for the data in Hagan.

New Zealand

Figures for 1900 to 1975 from H. Roth, 'The Historical Framework', in John Deeks, Herbert Roth, James Farmer, Graham Scott, Industrial Relations in New Zealand, Methuen New Zealand, Wellington, 1978, Table 6, p. 32.

Figures for 1985 from Robyn May, Pat Walsh, Raymond Harbridge and Glen Thickett, Unions and Union Membership in New Zealand: Annual Review for 2001, Industrial Relations Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, 2002.

Figures from 1995 to 2005 from Goldie Feinberg-Danieli and George Lafferty, Unions and Union Membership in New Zealand: Annual Review for 2006, Industrial Relations Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, 2007.

Most Australian unions were, for most of their history, occupational unions, many of which developed from craft unions. Important exceptions were two general unions, the AWU, which grew from its origins as a shearers' union, and the Miscellaneous Workers Union (the 'Missos'), which grew from unpromising origins as a union organising lift attendants and cleaners.²² Unions had their membership coverage recognised by the state through the arbitration system. The 'conveniently belong' clause meant that if a union existed which workers could join, no new unions would be registered. This effectively froze union form for most of the twentieth century. As to internal structure, with exceptions such as coal-mining, printing and some sections of the metal trades, union structures remained weak at the shop-floor level. Winning 'recognition' through the award system meant that many unions had been built from the top down.²³

It was not until a national merger process driven by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and in part enforced by the state under a Labor government that union structures changed substantially. Hybrids of general and industry unions, driven more by factional alignment than workplace imperatives, emerged as the number of national unions fell from 134 to 52 in the first half of the 1990s. By the middle of that decade, 98 per cent of the members of ACTU affiliates were members of the largest twenty unions.²⁴

In New Zealand, geography and economy created small, scattered enterprises. The arbitration system reinforced this decentralisation by creating local, occupational unions. In 1921 there were 418 registered unions with an average membership of 234.²⁵ Labour's reforms in the 1930s aimed to encourage national organisation. However in 1943 there were 399 unions with an average membership of 537. Forty years later there were 248 unions and the average was only 2,127.²⁶

New Zealand membership density was 59 per cent in 1945 and remained high and relatively stable until 1991. Union membership and density then fell sharply under the impact of the changes introduced by the ECA. Density dropped to 35 per cent in 1992, to 24 per cent in 1996 and to a low of 21 per cent in 1999, the year Labour regained office. Since then, there has been a 26 per cent increase in union membership. However density is only 22 per cent. Union membership is around 380,000 compared to 600,000 in 1991.²⁷

Since World War II, the Public Service Association (PSA) and the New Zealand Amalgamated Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (commonly referred to as the EPMU or the Engineers Union) have consistently been New Zealand's largest unions. However, the profile of the union movement has changed markedly. In 1945 unions covering public works, postal services, railways, the waterfront and the timber and building industries were among the country's largest. In 2006 the biggest unions (after the PSA and EPMU) represented primary school and early childhood teachers, nurses, service workers, distribution (including retail) workers, meat workers, and secondary school teachers.

The structure of union movements reflects not just membership but how union organisations relate to each other. Unionists in both countries built a labour movement, a set of structures beyond their individual unions. In Australia, unions in the global sectors of the economy built inter-colonial unions before there was a nation-state. If they did so because their employers' product markets were global, labour markets were fluid and capital was national (if not global), these bodies were also testament to emerging forms of class consciousness. So, too, were the labour councils which had emerged in all the capital cities of the colonies by 1890.²⁸ The first of these, in Melbourne in 1856 and in Sydney in 1871, were among the first bodies on such a scale anywhere in the world. After many false starts, an equivalent body was formed in 1927 for national cohesion and representation, the ACTU.²⁹

Trades and labour councils were formed in Auckland in 1876 and in New Zealand's other main cities in the 1880s. The first national congress of New Zealand unions was held in 1885. Private sector unions were not united until 1937 when the New Zealand Federation of Labour (NZFOL) was formed. The state sector unions co-operated nationally from 1916. By the 1980s, the Combined State Unions were working closely with the NZFOL. In 1987 both organisations were dissolved with the formation of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU).³⁰

What Unions Do

The union movement was at first narrow in scope and ambition. Many craft unionists were concerned with finding ways to become 'masters' themselves. However, while they remained employees, they wanted their union to help them win time to spend with their families and to educate themselves. Australian unions could point to significant advances, the most important being the building unionists who secured the eight-hour day in 1856. Although perhaps less markedly than in Britain, Australasia's early unions provided support for injured or out-of-work members and funeral benefits for their families. This meant that these unions often took a decidedly actuarial approach to enrolling members, preferring sober and reliable workers above all else.³¹

These unions were not, though, afraid of strike action, typically the 'strike-in-detail', with at-work members supporting striking shops or building sites. Successes were episodic and collective bargaining uneven until the building of a wider 'labour movement' in the 1880s when unions were keener to undertake wider strikes.³² However, the defeats of the 1890s turned many unionists from these methods to a commitment to state-sanctioned arbitration. Until the end of that system under the legislative assault between 1996 and 2005, Australian unions by no means eschewed the strike, despite its being unlawful. Once more however, the role of the state was important. Many strikes were mainly designed to bring matters on for conciliation and arbitration; most were short. The exceptions were disputes at times of heightened class conflict, wage militancy and union confidence, notably after the two world wars and in the 1970s. In Australia, working days lost per thousand employees (the most useful comparative measure) were typically higher than in New Zealand, peaking at over 4,000 in 1919 and reaching a more recent high of nearly 1,300 in 1974.³³ In both countries, perhaps especially Australia, legislative changes have been instrumental in reducing the numbers to record lows, although in Australia this decline began earlier as a result of the 1980s partnership with a federal Labor government and economic conditions.

Table 2: Industrial Disputes – Working Days Lost per Thousand Employees

Year	Australia	New Zealand
1921	601	311
1926	694	115
1931	122	104
1936	224	38
1941	475	55
1946	752	60
1951	310	1,985
1956	378	37
1961	186	51
1966	197	113
1971	669	174
1976	773	469
1981	797	376
1986	242	1,284
1991	265	83
1996	131	49
2001	50	36
2006	15	16

Sources:

Australia

Kenneth D. Walker, Australian Industrial Relations Systems, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 132–33 to 1966 inclusive.

Thereafter, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 6101.0, Labour Statistics, Australia; 6321.0, Industrial Disputes, Australia.

For 2006, the figure is an approximation, drawn from quarterly returns in Australian Bureau of Statistics, 6321.0.55.001, Industrial Disputes, Australia.

New Zealand

Department of Statistics, Statistics of Prices, Wages and Labour, 1921 to 1975.

Department of Labour, Trends in Work Stoppages 1976–1985, 1976 to 1985.

Thereafter, calculated from Statistics New Zealand Work Stoppages quarterly releases.

In Australia, as in New Zealand, twentieth century unionism came to be characterised by its use of (or some would say subservience to) the processes of state-sanctioned compulsory conciliation and arbitration. Unlike in New Zealand, access to the federal arbitration system required of unions a national structure but it was only a minimal one that was required, a loose national federation. However, many unions either chose to ignore, or by virtue of the nature of their membership were excluded from, the national jurisdiction. Nevertheless, for national and state unions alike, the state was vital. Arbitration awards provided the same conditions for unionists and non-unionists alike, which meant that unions were not compelled to organise the unorganised or build strong workplace or local structures.

Many unions, it must be emphasised, still did organise. Recent scholarship has qualified the argument that unions depended solely on the state by demonstrating how unions set out to re-organise themselves and to recruit in new areas, not least female ones, after the 1890s.³⁴ Nonetheless, it was through a system of union-based awards that unions did most of the work of improving and defending wages and conditions. The ACTU took a leading role in co-ordinating union claims in what became 'national wage cases' where minimum standards were set for all workers. Until the legislative changes of the 1990s, the peak body also undertook 'test cases', seeking to expand entitlements, albeit somewhat episodically, in areas of emerging importance such as maternity and then parental leave. By and large, these test cases made little impact on managerial prerogative, with the exception of the need to consult under the Termination, Change and Redundancy clauses added to awards from 1985 – a victory which proved a godsend to unions in the harder years that followed.³⁵

Unions such as the Engineers, later to become the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union and then the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), along with strategically placed workers in waterfront, transport and oil refining, not only led successful campaigns for wage increases and hours reductions but also for holiday loadings and leave entitlements. Most importantly, until the attacks on arbitration and industry-wide bargaining of the 1990s, these unions were able to spread these gains to other workers in their sector. Other unions then followed, winning similar benefits for less well-placed workers through arbitration by using the initial gains as precedents.

By the 1980s, over 90 per cent of Australian employees had their wages and conditions determined through awards, be they state or federal. However, the shift from a regulatory framework premised on awards, with pockets of 'over-award bargaining', to a system based on enterprise bargaining meant that the wage equity that unions had pursued would be harder to achieve. This 'decentralism' began under ALP governments and was followed at the national level from 1996 by 'decollectivisation' as the Workplace Relations Act allowed for individual contracts to be made within the labour law system. There are some problems with how award coverage is now measured but by 2006 it was likely that as few as 19 per cent of the workforce had their wages and conditions determined solely by awards. About 35 per cent were at least in part under some form of individual contract.³⁶

New Zealand's unions had similar origins to Australia's. Agitation by workers for the eight-hour day and against wage cuts in the 1840s predated the formation of unions in New Zealand.³⁷ However, New Zealand's first enduring unions were formed by skilled craftsmen in the 1860s. They were conservative organisations with a strong sense of independence, fraternity and exclusiveness. Like their Australian counterparts, they provided comprehensive benefits for members and some were branches of British craft unions. Although they kept unskilled workers out of their own ranks, the leaders of the craft unions helped to organise the new unions of the 1880s and 1890s such as watersiders and tailoresses. Unions of teachers, railway and postal workers and public servants also emerged at this time.³⁸Australian unions also played an important part in organising unskilled and semi-skilled workers in New Zealand, including seafarers, shearers and miners.³⁹ Until World War I there were significant trans-Tasman migrations by workers.

Organising the unorganised was a central activity of the early unions. In the wake of the 1890 Maritime Strike, the Liberal Government introduced a raft of labour laws, the centrepiece of which was the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. The arbitration system spawned small, craft or occupational unions limited to a particular city or district. They were focused on wages and conditions and obtaining awards from the Arbitration Court, rather than organising. Members were passive and internal democracy weak.⁴⁰

This was the predominant form of unionism but there were others. Some of the long established craft unions, for example the carpenters, engineers and printers, embraced arbitration but retained strong organisations and were willing to fight when they had to.⁴¹ Although they were conservative and cautious, the state unions were also well organised. At first they were focused on achieving classification systems, superannuation, professional issues and official recognition, rather than collective bargaining. A minority of unions bridled under the arbitration system. They represented workers with economic punch such as the miners, watersiders, seafarers and meat workers. A number of their leaders advocated industry unionism and the syndicalist ideal of 'One Big Union'.⁴²

From the late 1930s, wage-fixing and industrial relations became highly centralised. A largely quiescent union movement, numerically dominated by arbitrationist unions, accepted the conservative leadership of the NZFOL. Wage bargaining was overshadowed by national wage cases argued by the NZFOL before the Arbitration Court. From the end of World War II until the mid-1960s, the court was very successful in keeping wage increases closely aligned with price rises.⁴³

By the mid-1960s the arbitration system had been undermined by union frustration at the conservatism of the court, the National Government's threats to introduce voluntary unionism and by the growth of enterprise bargaining outside the system. An economic downturn in 1967 marked the end of the post-war prosperity. In 1968 the Arbitration Court shocked unionists and alarmed employers and the government by issuing a 'Nil Wage Order'.⁴⁴ There was a sharp increase in strikes and widespread direct bargaining between unions and employers.⁴⁵ Under centralised wage-fixing, tight relativities between different occupations helped restrain wage growth. As collective bargaining and industrial action grew, relativities helped spread wage increases across the economy.⁴⁶ Governments, both National and Labour, and leaders of the NZFOL and the New Zealand Employers Federation, scrambled to try to prop up the arbitration system. The 1970s and 1980s were a see-saw of wage controls, confrontations and compromises between unions, employers and governments against a backdrop of growing economic instability with rising inflation and unemployment.⁴⁷

The rise of collective bargaining and industrial action from the 1970s was paralleled by other changes in the activities of unions. Most tried to encourage greater membership participation through networks of workplace delegates, union publications and trade union education. Although superannuation schemes and welfare benefits were largely the preserve of the state unions, a number of unions offered retail discounts, holiday homes and other services.⁴⁸ From the late 1980s, the NZCTU promoted union amalgamation as a means of reducing dependence on legislation. While there were a number of mergers, the policy was not successful in insulating unions from the effects of the ECA.

Inclusion and Exclusion

For all the rhetoric of solidarity and, at times, class cohesion, union history is marked as much by exclusion as by inclusion. In the Australian case, the negotiation of these boundaries was very striking because the process was shaped by and contributed to the creation of national identity in a massive land mass isolated from the 'mother country' and surrounded by apparently threatening races, or at least countries with seemingly mobile labourers and low costs of production.⁴⁹

There was also exclusion within each country. Particularly in Australia, the Indigenous peoples were not only excluded from the spaces which the market economy opened up but were typically regarded as a dying race. When there was interaction with unions, usually around rural work, these exclusions were usually reinforced, although the most important 'bush union', that of the shearers, admitted Indigenous men along with Maori and 'American Negroes' as members after 1891 while the ban on 'Chinese and South Sea Islanders' remained. In 1944 and again in 1955 and 1964, the AWU sought award coverage for Indigenous stockmen in the pastoral industry though without any success. These failures were partly because the Indigenous population had no citizenship rights until 1967 although equal pay was won in Western Australia in 1964.⁵⁰ Stockmen in the Pilbara region of that state had taken matters into their own hands with support of communist and other militants and begun a strike on May Day 1946. Some of the leaders and sympathisers were arrested and gaoled in a dispute, which, according to some accounts, did not formally end: there were fresh demands, and new sets of workers would join the strike. Many of the original strikers never returned to their jobs. In the early 1950s, there were moves to establish cooperative forms of production and some successful Indigenous-owned properties were set up.⁵¹

In New Zealand the early shearers' unions made particular efforts to organise Maori; many became active members. Maori were also active in the waterside and freezing workers' unions.⁵² Urbanisation greatly increased Maori membership of unions. However unions paid little attention to their particular interests until the 1980s. An important national Hui⁵³ of Maori unionists in 1986 decided, after heated debate, that they should remain within the established unions and not form their own movement. Several unions established separate Maori structures. Nga Toa Awhina Runanga, within the PSA, was the first, in 1987. The same year the new NZCTU's constitutional and policy conference voted narrowly that Maori and women's structures should not be simply advisory but have full voting rights. These debates exposed conflict within unions about whether representation should be based on class and occupation alone or also race and gender.⁵⁴

In both countries the state's commitment to population growth and to whiteness shaped gender relations and unions. In this context, the traditional craft union tactic of restriction of labour supply to control work processes and drive up the price of labour was likely to thrive. It would be going too far to say that the state endorsed the craftsmen's use of this power but arbitration did shape access to the labour market by defining jobs in terms of gender and enforced women's dependency through awarding women only a little over half of the male breadwinner basic wage until World War II.⁵⁵ In Marilyn Lake's words, arbitration 'was locking men into breadwinning just as surely as ... confirming women in dependency'.⁵⁶

World War II and its aftermath brought what turned out to be irresistible challenges to these gendered and ethnic exclusions. In Australia, high levels of immigration were needed to rebuild and drive the post-war economy. Changes in ethnicity did not cause fragmentation of the union movement. The arbitration system acted as a force for social cohesion: wage rates applied to the job, not the worker. Marginalisation took other forms: workers from non-English speaking countries joined unions in droves but typically did not play leading roles in those unions. And for women, homework, especially clothing outwork, was a source of employment which, through and beyond the post-war boom, escaped state regulation altogether.

However, gender wage inequality remained hard to shift. Through the Council for Action on Equal Pay, established in 1937, a number of feminists and some sympathetic left-leaning union officials had been pushing equal pay as a matter of justice, not for the preservation of men's jobs.⁵⁷ After the war, though, the dissonance between social change and union leadership became more, not less, marked. In many unions, equal pay slipped off the agenda after the female basic wage had been raised from 54 to 75 per cent of the male rate in the wage case of 1949–50.⁵⁸

In the late 1950s state public sector unions and some state trades and labour councils began to push for equal pay once again. After some limited legislative gains and, from the mid-1960s, with a new wave of feminism, national unions and the ACTU began to push more substantially for equal pay for women. The ACTU prepared a test case in 1969 from which came the first national equal pay decision but as this awarded equal pay only for work of 'a like nature' it was, given entrenched gendered occupational segmentation, of little use. Aided by a change of government in 1972, unions won a more helpful decision, 'equal pay for work of equal value'.⁵⁹ Thereafter, the gendered division of the workforce and men's greater capacity to win 'over-award' rates and bonuses meant that full wage equity was elusive. Union claims and government inquires at the state scale in the 1990s were much more effective in winning change than any moves in a national arena which varied between the indifferent and the hostile.⁶⁰

In New Zealand, patterns of inclusion and exclusion were shaped somewhat differently at first. Until 1937 most workers were excluded from the New Zealand arbitration system. Attempts by clerks and agricultural labourers to form unions were overwhelmed by employer opposition.⁶¹ Rural workers remained largely excluded from the benefits of unionism. The New Zealand Workers Union mainly represented public works employees. It did not have the industrial and political clout of the AWU or its influence in rural areas. A Farm Workers Association was formed in the 1970s but failed to organise more than a quarter of the rural workforce.⁶²

Paid work in New Zealand has been highly segregated by sex, and women have traditionally been employed in a narrow range of occupations.⁶³ The arbitration system systematised this gender segregation.⁶⁴ After the well publicised exposure of sweating in the clothing industry, male union leaders helped tailoresses to form unions in the 1890s.⁶⁵ However, dressmakers, whose conditions were equally bad, were not organised until after World War I. Dressmaking had always been female-dominated and men had little contact with it. Tailoring, though, had originally been a male occupation and there was a tradition of unionism in this part of the clothing industry.⁶⁶ The first Labour Government's industrial reforms brought large groups of women into unions, particularly clerks and shop assistants. However attempts to organise domestic workers, the largest female occupation, failed. The NZFOL's policy of encouraging centralised organisations resulted in a drive in the late 1930s and 1940s to integrate separate women's unions, for example the tailoresses and female printing workers, into general unions.⁶⁷

The earliest demands for equal pay were made by suffragists in the 1890s. In the 1940s, women members of the PSA initiated a spirited campaign.⁶⁸ Most unions were not interested and employers were hostile. When the Clerical Workers Union took a case to the Arbitration Court in 1949 for equal pay for its largely female membership, the employers' advocate sneered that it was 'subject to petticoat government'.⁶⁹ The equal pay campaign was revived by the PSA in the 1950s and a broad-based Council for Equal Pay and Opportunity established, including a number of unions. State sector workers won equal pay in 1960. It took another 12 years, and further campaigning, led by the clerical and shop workers' unions, to get equal pay legislation in the private sector. However the effect of the legislation was only to equalise award rates. Because of occupational segregation, women's greater domestic responsibilities and continuing discrimination, the pay gap between men and women persisted and a campaign for pay equity began in the 1980s.⁷⁰ While the arbitration system reinforced gender segmentation by confining most women to low-paid, 'unskilled jobs', its relatively egalitarian wage structure and regular wage increases benefited women and other low paid workers.⁷¹ As attacks on the arbitration system grew in the 1980s, female-dominated unions and women unionists were vocal in defending the advantages of centralised wage-fixing.

Before the 1980s, women held only a handful of union positions. By the 1990s, women had a strong voice in the union movement and a number of unions had women leaders.⁷² This was paralleled by the rise of women's activity and influence in the Labour Party but was in contrast to decline in Australia. In 1991 the NZCTU elected its first woman secretary, Angela Foulkes, and in 2007 its first woman president, Helen Kelly. The rise of women's influence was also associated with moves in the NZCTU and some unions to become more inclusive and representative in other ways, establishing structures for Pacific Island workers and recognising the particular interests of young workers, gays and lesbians. There were similar trends to inclusion and openness in Australia but also, in the 1990s, a drift of capable women leaders away from unions and into politics and the public sector, reversed advances from the 1970s and 1980s.

Ideology and Politics

For Australia, the familiar story of the 1890's 'turn to politics' after depression and strikes needs to be qualified. Not all the colonies suffered depression – in Western Australia the economy boomed in a gold rush – and not all the eastern colonies quickly accepted labour parties – Victoria, as many scholars have noted, remained under the dominance of liberalism.⁷³ These differences led to enduring differences between labour movements, most notably between New South Wales and Victoria.⁷⁴ Furthermore, socialist parties remained very influential in the unions. Nonetheless 'labourism', a belief in parliamentary politics and arbitration unionism, was to become the norm.

In New South Wales, after the 1890s defeats, unionists saw re-organisation of their own structures as vital to success. The unions' Sydney Defence Committee saw the need for political action – specifically forming labour parties – as the most important lesson of their defeat in the Maritime strike. It also noted that lower entrance fees and central control of unions along with '[s]ome form of federation is imperative'.⁷⁵

Even when the ALP was emerging as a successful political force, militants in the mines and factories were quick to challenge labourism. The year 1907 saw not only the Harvester judgment which delivered 'fair and reasonable' wages to male employees, but also the arrival in Australia of the Industrial Workers of the World, made up of syndicalists who promised delivery from wage slavery itself. As many scholars have shown, the workers' parties that emerged after 1891 were consumed by debates over fundamental questions: class, the state and power. Grounded as much in country as city, with itinerant workers, farmers and their unions, notably the AWU, to the fore, the ALP was not the vehicle for socialism that some workers in the militant industrial unions wanted.⁷⁶ From a plethora of the small socialist parties which shared this view of the ALP, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) emerged as the dominant force from 1920.⁷⁷ There were tensions between all these groups and also within the ALP itself which was prone to splits from World War I, splits which often reflected divisions between unions.

In the aftermath to World War II, the ALP was in national office as it had been since 1941. Trade union membership was high and rising. Alarming to many, and of most importance for understanding unionism in this period, the CPA's membership also peaked when the war ended. So did communist influence in unions organising mining, transport, and manufacturing workers. It also reached white-collar workers, among teachers and clerks. Communist-led unions pushed arbitration tribunals and Labor governments for improvements in wages and hours and for broader social justice, building on pent-up expectations following labour's full collaboration with the war effort.⁷⁸

Below the surface, however, external and internal tensions threatened the CPA. The international alliances which had defeated fascism in World War II had given way to cold war hostilities in Europe. For moderate Australian unionists, not to mention employers, the rise of the CPA was deeply troubling.⁷⁹ These concerns had seen the establishment of the church-sanctioned Catholic Social Studies Movement, a body set up to lead the fight against communism in unions.⁸⁰ In 1945, the ALP in New South Wales established 'Industrial Groups' to fight communist influence in unions. Other states followed. For the next few years most unions were the site of truly bitter struggles between the communists and their allies and the 'Groupers' and their supporters.⁸¹ Two major prizes fell to the NSW Groupers early on, the Clerks and the Ironworkers. By the mid-1950s, the Groupers had increased their influence in several other unions but by then the ALP had split under the pressure of these divisions.⁸²

Not all of the political activity undertaken by unions was party-oriented nor were all their activities based in labour market regulation. After World War II, there were major ideological tensions in the Australian union movement over these questions – that is, party politics, wage militancy and the like – but there were also divisions over what role unions should play in questions such as women's rights, Indigenous issues, the independence of near neighbours from colonial rule, the war in Vietnam, and apartheid in South Africa. Typically, left unions argued that peace, social rights and freedoms were inseparable from more immediate matters. Some unions in the building industry also showed an early interest in environmental causes, by instigating 'green bans' and working with residents' groups to protect local areas against developers.⁸³

Throughout the twentieth century, the most important political relationship that unions had was not with socialist parties or other political groups but with the ALP. In those states where the ALP was electorally successful, most notably New South Wales and Queensland, close organisational, factional and personal relationships were established early on between the ALP and the unions from which the party sprang. In those two states (unlike in Victoria), these ties were both cause and effect of that electoral success, arguably moderating the politics of the unions and delivering parliamentary power to the ALP. In New South Wales, this history confirmed the importance of the state's Labour Council as the pre-eminent voice for almost all unions. In Queensland, it was the AWU which exercised the dominant influence over the ALP. Closest of all were the ties in Western Australia where the ALP and the labour council were one combined organisation until 1963.⁸⁴

At the national scale, these relationships were slower to develop and were shaped by different kinds of internal union politics. The relationship between unions and the national ALP was not solely mediated by the national peak body, the ACTU, because the biggest union in the country, the AWU, was not an affiliate and, largely from its base in Queensland, exercised its own direct influence on the ALP. However, from 1967, when the AWU did join the ACTU and from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when white collar and public sector peak bodies merged with the ACTU, the role of the national peak body was much enhanced. This relationship – and more broadly the relationship between Australian unions and the state – reached its apotheosis on the eve of the 1983 federal election with the signing of a Prices and Incomes Accord between the ALP and the ACTU. This committed the unions to wage restraint in return for the maintenance of the 'social wage' and other measures. Later agreements shifted to more micro concerns, largely designed to try to drive both efficiency and fairness, re-gearing both industry and award regulation as a century of protection through arbitration and tariffs came to an end. Much, though not all, of this strategy reflected the ways in which left unions, notably the AMWU, were responding to changes in the global economy and local production.⁸⁵

In New Zealand, as in Victoria, liberalism cast a long shadow over the political aspirations of the labour movement. In comparison with Australia, New Zealand unions have been politically moderate and less prone to ideological conflicts. The NZLP was not formed until 1916, a quarter of a century after the ALP.⁸⁶ From the early 1900s, there were three competitors for unionists' political loyalties. The Liberal Government enjoyed much working-class electoral support and close links with many union leaders. An Independent Political Labour League was formed in 1904 and labourism slowly gained influence. On the Left, the New Zealand Socialist Party was formed in 1909 but Syndicalism, rather than Marxism, had the greatest impact on militant workers. A revolt against the arbitration system saw the formation of the 'Red' Federation of Labor in 1909. The 'Red Feds' championed collective bargaining and industrial action and urged unions to withdraw from the arbitration system.⁸⁷ After the bloody Waihi Strike in 1912, the militants were in retreat. They were decisively defeated in the Great Strike of 1913. Nearly a quarter of unionists took part in the strike, the most violent confrontation between capital and labour in New Zealand's relatively peaceful industrial history. However the great majority of unions rejected the call for a general strike.⁸⁸ Melanie Nolan has argued that the Great Strike was a battle over democracy in which New Zealanders rejected both democratic centralism and the extreme right and decided to support parliamentary democracy.⁸⁹ Most of the strike leaders concluded that control of Parliament was the best means to advance socialism and this ideological shift was instrumental in the formation of the NZLP.⁹⁰

Although a small Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) was established in 1921, the NZLP quickly became the dominant political voice for unionists. In 1918 it won 25 per cent of the vote. After this promising start, the party's electoral support stalled and Labour did not win office until 1935. While the NZLP had good relations with the craft-dominated trades and labour councils, it had a tense and often sour relationship with the Alliance of Labour (which represented the more militant unions) and the large NZ Workers Union whose leaders saw industrial and union action as superior to political action. Harry Holland, the NZLP's leader from 1919 to 1933, campaigned vigorously against 'political non-unionism', the failure of union organisations like the Alliance and the Workers Union to affiliate or co-operate with the NZLP.⁹¹

Once it had won office, the NZLP cemented a firm grip on the political loyalties of workers. Its reforms of the arbitration system, particularly restoring compulsory arbitration, introducing compulsory unionism and allowing national registration of unions, helped treble union membership. Unions rushed to affiliate to the party. Union votes were important in expelling John A. Lee, a dissident MP, from the party in 1940⁹² and unions became important pillars of the Labour establishment.⁹³ After World War II, there was an upsurge of militant unionism and communists became prominent in several unions, although they had limited influence over the most militant union, the watersiders. The NZFOL and NZLP were uncompromising in opposing the militants whose nadir came in the Waterfront Lockout in 1951.⁹⁴ In 1951 the NZLP became the first Labour or Socialist party in the western world to abandon the socialist objective.⁹⁵ The suppression of dissent in the party and the unions spread a pallor over the movement. Louise Overacker, an American scholar who studied the NZLP in the 1950s, was critical of its lack of democracy and domination by the executive and the parliamentary party.⁹⁶ Anti-communism gripped the NZFOL. One CPNZ member suggested sarcastically that one day of the annual conference be set aside for condemning communism so the conference could then get down to some real business concerning workers.⁹⁷ Trade unions' political activities were largely expressed through the NZLP and NZFOL until the 1960s when the Vietnam and anti-apartheid campaigns created space for independent political activity and a renewal of left politics. NZFOL conferences became important forums for debate on these issues. After the CPNZ split in 1966, the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party became an influential force among unions.⁹⁸

The relationship between unions and the NZLP remained close until the election of the fourth Labour Government in 1984. Unionists' loyalties were severely strained by its policies which led to large job losses. However they were successful in resisting attempts by some in the government to re-regulate the labour market.⁹⁹ For most of the 1980s, unions focused on wages and living standards in contrast to the ACTU's approach with the Accord. By the end of the decade the NZCTU advocated a broader agenda focusing on jobs, equality and stability.¹⁰⁰ In its last two years in office, the Labour Government was torn apart by ideological conflicts. Most unions and union activists in the party remained loyal but a minority broke away to support the New Labour Party, which later became part of the Alliance.¹⁰¹ After Helen Clark became leader of the NZLP in 1993, the party and the NZCTU developed a very close relationship. Strong links with unions have been fostered by the Labour-led governments of the early twenty-first century.

Unions Today

If Australasia was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a 'social laboratory' in the late nineteenth century, then a hundred years later the same was the case – to opposite effect. In the early 1990s, in New Zealand and the states of Victoria and Western Australia, conservative governments launched legislative assaults on arbitration and unions which prefigured the national laws introduced in Australia in 1996 and 2005.¹⁰² These changes took place against the backdrop of fundamental changes in the structure of work, with sharp increases in casual labour, rapid decline in 'heartland' employment, and then the collapse of the 'male breadwinner' model of family, wage-earning and indeed unionism itself that had characterised the twentieth century.

The National Party swept to office in New Zealand in 1990. It quickly passed the ECA which ended nearly a century of arbitration. It abolished compulsory unionism and replaced awards with collective and individual employment contracts. The Act gave a strong nod to the latter. Strikes in support of multi-employer contracts became illegal. Unions were reduced to the status of bargaining agents.

When the conservative coalition was elected in Australia in 1996, it was clear that it intended to wind back union power in an elemental way, promoting not only non-union enterprise bargaining but also individual contracts, hallmarks of the ECA in New Zealand. The Workplace Relations Act 1996 introduced individualised Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) and heavy fines for 'unprotected' industrial action, stripped back awards to only twenty matters, made union access to workplaces more difficult and reduced the power of the Commission to settle industrial disputes. The Work Choices laws in 2005 completed the legislative rout, putting in place a number of other anti-union measures which the government had been unable to pass in 1996.¹⁰³

In contrast to Australia, unions' fortunes in New Zealand improved. After Labour regained office in 1999, the ECA was repealed. Its replacement, the Employment Relations Act, promoted good faith collective bargaining and restored unions as central players. However there was no attempt to return to the compulsion and centralism of the past – just as has been the case since the election of the ALP in Australia in November 2007. In New Zealand, Labour made substantial increases in the minimum wage, increased annual holidays, introduced paid parental leave, reformed health and safety laws and renationalised accident compensation. It consulted regularly with the NZCTU and Business New Zealand (the employers' peak council) and encouraged public sector employers to negotiate partnership arrangements with unions. The effects of these changes on unions were uneven. The state unions experienced a substantial boost in membership, bargaining strength and influence. Private sector membership increased but density remained low.

In Australia, many employers took advantage of the opportunities offered to them by the changes to labour law. Indeed ten years before the legislative assault, workers in union strongholds had suffered attacks from employers and lobbyists known as the 'New Right'. From abattoirs in the Northern Territory, to manufacturers in Melbourne, plumbers across Sydney's building sites, state electricity workers in Queensland, and iron ore miners at Robe River in Western Australia's Pilbara, unions were besieged. The anti-unionism promoted by the New Right shifted from what a Labor Prime Minister called the 'lunatic fringe' to the mainstream by the 1990s. The aggression of mining employers in Australia seems to have been one element in this difference with New Zealand, although it is worth noting that one of the major companies involved in this assault launched its first de-unionisation drive in New Zealand, at the aluminium smelter in Invercargill.¹⁰⁴

In general, New Zealand employers were not as aggressive in industrial disputes, although lockouts increased as a percentage of industrial stoppages in the early years of the ECA.¹⁰⁵ From the mid-1980s, the influential New Zealand Business Roundtable campaigned for radical labour market deregulation.¹⁰⁶ At the start of the decade, the traditionally conservative New Zealand Employers Federation argued that 'most New Zealanders would prefer a modified system of industrial conciliation and arbitration to either red tape or the law of the jungle'.¹⁰⁷ By the end, it was also advocating radical deregulation.

The decline of unionism in the current period had commonalities in new kinds of exposures to the global economy and changes in the structure and nature of employment. There were some differences in reaction and outcome though: at first, Australian unions drew closer to the 'their' labour party and they became proactive in workplace change. Until 2005, Australia's federalism tempered the worst excesses of this attack because most state Labor Governments ensured that collective bargaining and arbitration remained accessible to unions operating within state boundaries. How unions can rebound after the 2007 ALP victory remains to be seen. In New Zealand, the attack on arbitration and the withering of union power was almost without parallel.

In one way, however, the major source of change in unions in response to these threats has been a common one, drawn from the example of the beleaguered union movement in the United States where the 'organising model' emerged. The proponents of this strategy argued that unionism had for too long relied on a 'transactional' relationship between union members and union organisation. In Australasia, this was strikingly so because of the reliance upon the state in general and arbitration in particular. Unions were now exhorted to adopt organising with its 'transformational' vision for union activity centred on growing membership, building union workplace activism and enhancing internal democracy.¹⁰⁸ There have been good relations between Australian and New Zealand unions in a number of industries for many years but the new emphasis on organising strengthened these ties and there were, as there had been a century ago, important exchanges of personnel and ideas across the Tasman.

There certainly is evidence of persistent 'institutional sclerosis' in many unions, with officials preferring to continue with familiar practices in a much changed world.¹⁰⁹ But some unions have chosen to alter their structures, cultures and organising tactics in an attempt to revitalise themselves. In some respects these developments have represented a return to unions' origins though with the emphasis now on inclusion, not on exclusion.¹¹⁰

Conclusions: Challenges Today

What can be learnt from a comparative analysis of these trans-Tasman histories? While Australia and New Zealand are more alike than many other union movements, there have been important differences. With a few exceptions – such as the 1913 Great Strike and the 1951 Waterfront Lockout – industrial relations in New Zealand have been more peaceful and less fractious than Australia. In general, the levels of industrial action have been lower and unions and employers less aggressive. Labour market re-regulation has also been milder. While the ECA was a major assault on unionism, it extended employment protection rights to all employees, without exception.

In Australia, strategic unions have been drivers of change and have helped define the overall nature of the movement. An early example is the AWU's influence on the ALP through its rural base and populist policies. A more recent example is the AMWU's role as a driver of post-war wage claims and major intellectual force behind the Accord. Individual unions have not had such influential roles in the New Zealand movement. In broad terms, the bastions of unionism in both countries in the early twenty-first century are the same: education, health, government administration and manufacturing. There are also interesting dissimilarities. For example, despite assaults by governments and employers, the construction unions in Australia remain important. In New Zealand cleaners are better organised than construction workers. This is not just because of the collapse of unionism in construction. The Service Workers Union of Aotearoa has been very successful in establishing strong roots among the largely Pacific Island, female cleaning workforce. Having said this, the 'Missos' have embraced new strategies in Australia and the Nurses Association is one of the fastest growing unions in the country.

Australian unions have been, in the broadest sense, more political than their New Zealand counterparts. Though 'labourism' was secure in both countries for most of the time, communists played a much greater role in Australia. In New Zealand the high water mark of radicalism was before World War I. Unsurprisingly, factionalism was more marked in Australia, fuelled in part by federalism. Peak bodies were more important in some states than others, especially in mediating links with the ALP, but from 1983 to 1996 the ACTU had unparalleled influence through the Accord. Although the NZFOL was an important economic player for most of its existence, its overall influence declined after the NZLP lost power in 1949. Australian unions have exercised more power in 'their' labour parties than in New Zealand. However after the collapse of the Fourth Labour Government, New Zealand unions – individually and through the NZCTU – re-established a very close relationship with the NZLP. More broadly, the vital relationship between unions and the state was perhaps more complex in federalist Australia than in unitary New Zealand. In Australia, state level union politics and state systems of arbitration were, for many workers, of more direct importance than the national. In recent years, until Work Choices, the states, under Labor rule afforded unions some respite from the hostility of the national government.

Despite these differences, our main conclusion is that the similarities between the two movements are much greater than the differences. Australian unionists, grappling with a conservative government and the major divisions within the ALP, looked enviously at the NZLP's achievements in the late 1930s. Yet, by the end of World War I, both parties had reconstructed very comparable wage-earners' welfare states. In the 1980s New Zealand unionists, fighting a losing battle against re-regulation, looked jealously at the ACTU's compact with the Hawke/Keating ALP governments. However, by the end of the twentieth century, union density had fallen dramatically in both countries. Our thematic analysis shows that over the last 150 years, there have been very similar patterns of union growth and decline, structure and strategy, inclusion and exclusion.

Bradon Ellem teaches employment relations in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Industrial Relations, an Associate Editor of Labour History, and co-convenor of us: union strategy research group. He has published books and articles on many aspects of unionism. His research now concentrates on government industrial relations policy, union strategy, and the changing geographies of work and regulation. He is writing a history of industrial relations in the Australian iron ore industry.
<b.ellem@econ.usyd.edu.au>

Peter Franks was a trade union official for over 20 years and is a former secretary and committee member of the Trade Union History Project. He now works as an industrial mediator. He has published numerous articles on NZ labour history. His history of the New Zealand printing trades unions, Print and Politics, was published in 2001.
<Peter.Franks@paradise.net.nz>

Endnotes

^*� We are grateful to the journal's anonymous referees for very useful comments and to the guest editors for their helpful advice. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors.

^1.� Most notably perhaps Richard Hyman; see his early work, Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction, Macmillan, London, 1975, especially pp. 85–93.

^2.� Mark Bray and Jacques Rouillard. 'Union structure and strategy in Australia and Canada', Labour History, no. 71, November 1996, p. 198.

^3.� Richard Hyman, Understanding European Trade Unionism: Between Market, Class and Society, Sage Publications, London, 2001.

^4.� Herbert A. Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy, Allen and Unwin, London, 1962. This was by no means the first or only account to argue this but it was perhaps the most influential.

^5.� For important work on pre-gold rush unionism, see Michael Quinlan, 'Early trade union organisation in Australia: three Australian colonies, 1829–1850', Labour & Industry, vol. 1, no. 1, October, 1987, pp. 61–95.

^6.� The key unions were in building, the 'iron trades', and some areas of manufacturing. See Jim Hagan, 'The Australian union movement: context and perspective', in Bill Ford and David Plowman (eds), Australian Unions: An Industrial Relations Perspective, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 2^nd ed., 1989, pp. 18–48; see also Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988, esp. ch. 10; and union histories such as Jim Hagan, Printers and Politics: A History of the Australian Printing Unions, 1850–1950, ANU Press, Canberra, 1966; Ken Buckley, The Amalgamated Engineers in Australia, 1852–1920, ANU Press, Canberra, 1970; Bradon Ellem, In Women's Hands? A History of Clothing Trades Unionism in Australia, UNSW Press, Kensington, 1989.

^7.� In Kerry Taylor, 'Writing the Left into the picture: an interview with Erik Olssen', in Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (eds), On the Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, NZ, 2002, pp. 190–2.

^8.� James Bennett, 'Rats and Revolutionaries': The Labour Movement in Australia and New Zealand 1890–1940, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, NZ, 2004; Francis Castles, The Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand 1890–1980, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985.

^9.� Melanie Nolan, 'The reality and myth of New Zealand egalitarianism: explaining the pattern of a labour historiography at the edge of empires', Labour History Review, vol. 72, no. 2, August 2007, pp. 113–134.

^10.� Mark Cole, Chris Briggs and John Buchanan, Where are the Non-Members?, unpublished research paper, Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training, Sydney, 2002.

^11.� ABS 6310.0, Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership, Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, various years; recent statistical returns appear to have had some methodological problems: see David Peetz, 'Trend analysis of union membership', Australian Journal of Labour Economics, vol. 8, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–24.

^12.� Robyn May, Pat Walsh, Raymond Harbridge and Glen Thickett, Unions and Union Membership in New Zealand: Annual Review for 2001, Industrial Relations Centre, Working Paper, Victoria University of Wellington, 2002. Available at: <http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vms/disciplines/IRC/IRC_Working_Papers.aspx> (accessed July 2007). The 2001 report also appears in the New Zealand Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 28, no. 3, October 2003, pp. 307–321.

^13.� Goldie Feinberg-Danieli and George Lafferty, Unions and Union Membership in New Zealand: Annual Review for 2006, Industrial Relations Centre, Working Paper, Victoria University of Wellington, 2007. Available at: <http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vms/disciplines/IRC/IRC_Working_Papers.aspx> (accessed July 2007).

^14.� Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies, Auckland University Press, Auckland, NZ, 1990, pp. 122–123.

^15.� H. Roth, 'The historical framework' in John Deeks, Herbert Roth, James Farmer and Graham Scott, Industrial Relations in New Zealand, Methuen, Wellington, 1978, p. 32.

^16.� A.E.C. Hare, Report on Industrial Relations in New Zealand, Whitcombe & Tombs, Wellington, 1946, pp. 178–179; E.J. Keating, 'Trade unionism in state organisations' in John M. Howells, Noel S. Woods and F.J.L. Young (eds), Labour and Industrial Relations in New Zealand, Pitman Australia, Carlton, Vic., 1974, pp. 22–52.

^17.� Among many works, see Patrick O'Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, Nelson, Melbourne, 1977; Colm Kiernan, 'Irish in Australian politics', in James Jupp (ed.), The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2^nd edn, 2001.

^18.� Malcolm McKinnon (ed.), New Zealand Historical Atlas, David Bateman and Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Auckland, 1997, Plate 91.

^19.� Calculated from ABS 6310.0, Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership, Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008.

^20.� Barbara Pocock (ed.), Strife: Sex and Politics in Labour Unions, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1997; Rae Cooper, 'Fighting on the inside: Jennie George in the women's corner', in Kate Deverall, Rebecca Huntley, Penny Sharpe and Jo Tilly (eds), Party Girls: Labor Women Now, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2000, pp. 54–68.

^21.� Cole, Briggs and Buchanan, 'Where are the non-members?'.

^22.� For the AWU, John Merritt, The Making of the AWU, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986; Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union 1886–1994, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996; for the 'Missos', Christopher Sheil, The Invisible Giant: A History of the Federated Miscellaneous Workers' Union of Australia, 1915–1985, PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 1997 and Margo Beasley, The Missos: A History of the Federated Miscellaneous Workers Union, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1996.

^23.� The strongest (and much contested) argument about the impact of arbitration on unions lies in William A. Howard, 'Australian unions in the context of union theory', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 19, no. 3, September 1977, pp. 255–73. For views of shopfloor strength, see Ron Callus, Alison Morehead, Mark Cully and John Buchanan, Industrial Relations at Work: The Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1991 for survey material about the end of this period; David Peetz, Unions in a Contrary World: The Future of the Australian Trade Union Movement, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, especially chapter 5; and for earlier accounts see Malcolm Rimmer, 'Work place unionism', in Ford and Plowman (eds), Australian Unions: An Industrial Relations Perspective, pp. 122–44.

^24.� ABS 6323.0, Trade Union Statistics, Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics; ACTU Congress Reports, 1995; the best overview of union structure remains Malcolm Rimmer, 'Long run structural change in Australian trade unionism', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 23, no. 3, 1981, pp. 323–43.

^25.� Sir Arthur Tyndall, The New Zealand System of Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration, Government Printer, Wellington, 1960, p. 4.

^26.�Industrial Relations A Framework for Review, Volume 2, Department of Labour, Wellington, 1985, p. 25.

^27.� Feinberg-Danieli and Lafferty, Unions and Union Membership in New Zealand: Annual Review for 2006.

^28.� Bradon Ellem, Ray Markey and John Shields (eds), Peak Unions in Australia: Origins, Purpose, Power, Agency, The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2004; Perth is perhaps something of a special case; see Bobbie Oliver, Unity is Strength: A History of the Australian Labor Party and the Trades and Labor Council in Western Australia, API Network, Perth, 2003; for Tasmania, see Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891–1991, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 1991, p. 39; for South Australia, R. Felmingham, '"To unite more closely": the first year of the South Australian United Trades and Labor Council', Labour History, no. 45, November, 1983, pp. 17–29 and Jim Moss, Sound of Trumpets: History of the Labour Movement in South Australia, Wakefield Press, Netly, 1985. For a forceful argument about class consciousness and labour organisation, see Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900, University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, 1988.

^29.� Cathy Brigden, A Vehicle for Solidarity: Power and Purpose in the Victorian Trades Hall Council, 1948–1981, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2003; Raymond Markey, In Case of Oppression: The Life and Times of the Labor Council of New South Wales, Pluto Press, Leichhardt, with Lloyd Ross Forum, 1994; Jim Hagan, The History of the ACTU, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1981.

^30.� Peter Franks, 'History of national union organisations', New Zealand Official Yearbook 2000, Statistics New Zealand and David Bateman, Wellington, 2000, p. 337.

^31.� For examples, see Hagan, Printers and Politics; Buckley, The Amalgamated Engineers in Australia; Ellem, In Women's Hands; for an overview see Buckley and Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers.

^32.� Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1960; Markey, The Making of the Labor Party.

^33.� Kenneth D. Walker, Australian Industrial Relations Systems, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 131–2; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 6101.0, Labour Statistics, Australia; 6321.0, Industrial Disputes, Australia, various years.

^34.� Peter Sheldon, 'Arbitration and union growth: building and construction unions in NSW, 1900–1912', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 35, no. 3, 1993, pp. 379–97; Ray Markey, 'Explaining union mobilisation in the 1880s and early 1900s', Labour History, no. 83, November 2002, pp. 19–42; Rae Cooper, '"To organise wherever the necessity exists": the activities of the organising Committee of the Labor Council of NSW, 1900–10', Labour History, no. 83, May 2002, pp. 43–64.

^35.� Marian Baird, 'Parental leave in Australia: the role of the industrial relations system', Law in Context, vol. 23, 2005, pp. 45–64; Sue Williamson and Marian Baird, 'Family provisions and Work Choices: testing times', Australian Journal of Labour Law, vol. 20, no. 1, 2007, pp. 53–74.

^36.� David Peetz, Assessing the Impact of Work Choices One Year On, Industrial Relations Victoria, Melbourne, 2007.

^37.�Workers' Holidays in New Zealand, Trade Union History Project, Wellington, 1997, pp. 5–20; Jim McAloon, Nelson: A Regional History, Cape Catley Ltd, Nelson, 1997, pp. 37–39.

^38.� E.J. Simmonds, NZEI 100: An Account of the New Zealand Educational Institute 1883–1983, NZ Educational Institute, Wellington, 1983; Bert Roth, Along the Line: 100 Years of Post Office Unionism, NZ Post Office Union, Wellington, 1990; Bert Roth, Remedy For Present Evils: A History of the New Zealand Public Service Association from 1890, NZ Public Service Association, Wellington, 1987.

^39.� Conrad Bollinger, Against The Wind: The Story of the New Zealand Seamen's Union, NZ Seamen's Union, Wellington, 1968; John E. Martin, Tatau Tatau – One Big Union Altogether: The Shearers and the Early Years of the New Zealand Workers Union, New Zealand Workers Union, 1987; Len Richardson, 'British colliers and colonial capitalists: the origins of coalmining unionism in New Zealand', in Erik Fry (ed.), Common Cause: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Labour History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney and Wellington, 1986, pp. 59–75.

^40.� N.S. Woods, Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration in New Zealand, Government Printer, Wellington, 1963; James Holt, Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand: The First Forty Years, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1986.

^41.� J.F. Ewen, A History of Trade Unionism Among the Carpenters and Joiners of the City and Suburbs of Auckland 1873–1937, unpublished MA thesis, Victoria University College, 1949; Shaun Ryan, Men of Metal: The Amalgamated Society of Engineers in Dunedin c. 1874–1923, MA thesis, University of Otago, 1997; H.O. Roth, Advocate, Educate, Control: The History of the New Zealand Engineers Union, 1863–1983, New Zealand Engineering, Coachbuilding, Aircraft, Motor and Related Trades Industrial Union of Workers, Wellington, NZ, 1984; Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1995; Peter Franks, Print & Politics: A History of Trade Unions in the New Zealand Printing Industry 1863–1995, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2001.

^42.� Len Richardson, Coal, Class & Community: The United Mineworkers of New Zealand 1880–1960, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1995; P.N. Pettit, The Wellington Watersiders: The Story of Their Industrial Organisation, Wellington Branch, NZ Waterside Workers Union, Wellington, 1948; Bert Roth, Wharfie, 'From Hand Barrows to Straddles': Unionism on the Auckland Waterfront, Auckland Branch, NZ Waterfront Workers Union, Auckland, NZ, 1993.

^43.� Deborah Mabbett, 'Labour market policy and New Zealand's welfare state, an overview of developments since World War II', in Report of the Royal Commission on Social Policy, Volume III, Part One, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, H.2, April 1988, pp. 563–592.

^44.� Pat Walsh, 'An unholy alliance: the 1968 Nil Wage Order', NZ Journal of History, vol. 28, no. 2, October 1994, pp. 178–193; Jo Burton, Patterns of Continuity and Change: Continuing Trends in New Zealand Labour Relations and Industrial Legislation, 1968 and 1991, BA Hons Research Paper, Victoria University of Wellington, 1995.

^45.� Patrick J. Walsh, The Rejection of Corporatism: Trade Unions, Employers and the State in New Zealand, PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1984; Raymond Harbridge and Pat Walsh, The Evolution of Enterprise Bargaining in New Zealand, Industrial Relations Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, 1999.

^46.�A Description of Wage Fixing and Industrial Relations in the Private Sector, Long-Term Reform Committee, Wellington, 1983, p. 19.

^47.� Jonathan Boston, Income Policy in New Zealand, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1984; John Gould, The Rake's Progress: The New Zealand Economy from 1945, Hodder and Stoughton, Auckland, 1982.

^48.� Peter Brosnan, David F. Smith, Pat Walsh, The Dynamics of New Zealand Industrial Relations, Jacaranda Press, Auckland, 1990, pp. 121–122.

^49.� These issues were canvassed in a special issue of Labour History published as Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus, Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney, 1978

^50.� Hearn and Knowles, One Big Union, pp. 66–7, 229–30.

^51.� Michael Hess, 'The Pilbara pastoral workers' uprising of 1946', Papers in Labour History, no. 3, 1989, pp. 18–34; Oliver, Unity is Strength, pp. 175–77. There are still few accounts of Indigenous workers but for examples of innovative work, see Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987 and Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories for Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1991.

^52.� Tom Murray, Kerry Taylor, Joe Tepania and Nora Rameka, 'Towards a history of Maori in trade unions', in John E. Martin and Kerry Taylor (eds), Culture and the Labour Movemen: Essays in New Zealand Labour History, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1991, pp. 50–61.

^53.� The Maori word for a meeting or conference.

^54.� Brosnan, Smith and Walsh, The Dynamics of New Zealand Industrial Relations, p. 111, 124.

^55.� Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, Penguin, Ringwood, 1970; Bruce Scates, 'Mobilising manhood: gender and the Great Strike of 1890 in Australia and New Zealand', Gender and History, vol. 9, no. 2, August 1997, pp. 285–310; Bruce Scates, 'Gender, household and community politics: the 1890 Maritime Strike in Australia and New Zealand', Labour History, no. 61, November 1991, pp. 70–87.

^56.� Marilyn Lake, 'The politics of respectability: identifying the masculinist context', Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 86, 1986, p. 130.

^57.� Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, Nelson, Melbourne, 1975, pp. 121–2; Pat Ranald, 'Feminism and class: the United Associations of Women and the Council of Action for Equal Pay in the Depression', in M. Bevege, M. James and C. Shute (eds), Worth Her Salt: Woman at Work in Australia, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, p. 279; Ellem, In Women's Hands, pp. 181–3

^58.� Bradon Ellem, 'Women's rights and industrial relations under the Postwar Compact in Australia', International Labor and Working Class History, vol. 56, Fall, 1999, pp. 45–64.

^59.� Ryan and Conlon, Gentle Invaders; Zelda d'Aprano, Zelda: The Becoming of a Woman, [self published], North Carlton, Vic., 1977; Zelda d'Aprano, Kath Williams: The Unions and the Fight for Equal Pay, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 2001; Gillian Whitehouse, 'Justice and equity: women and indigenous workers', in Joe Isaac and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The New Province for Law and Order: 100 Years of Australian Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 207–40. For examples of activities the states, see Oliver, Unity is Strength, pp. 248, 262–3 and Markey, In Case of Oppression, p. 377–8.

^60.� Michael Lyons and Meg Smith, 'Gender pay equity, wage fixation and industrial relations reform in Australia: one step forward and two steps backwards?', Employee Relations, vol. 30, no. 1, 2008, pp. 4–19.

^61.� Peter Franks, 'Organising the 'unorganisable': the formation of the clerical unions and the Labour press', in John E. Martin and Kerry Taylor (eds) Culture and the Labour Movement, Essays in New Zealand Labour History, The Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1991, pp. 104–20; John E. Martin, The Forgotten Worker, The Rural Wage Earner in Nineteenth Century New Zealand, Allen & Unwin and the Trade Union History Project, Wellington 1990, pp. 198–99.

^62.� Nancy Angrove, 'The New Zealand Farm Workers Association: its rise and fall 1974–1987', in Pat Walsh (ed.), Trade Unions, Work and Society: The Centenary of the Arbitration System, The Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1994, pp. 155–75.

^63.� Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2000, pp. 230–66.

^64.� Stephen Robertson, 'Women workers and the New Zealand Arbitration Court, 1894–1920', in Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates (eds), 'Women, work and the labour movement in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand', Labour History, no. 61, November 1991, pp. 30–41.

^65.� J.T. Paul, Our Majority, Dunedin Tailoresses Union, Dunedin, 1939.

^66.� L.C. Duncan, A 'New Song of the Shirt'? A History of Women in the Clothing Industry in Auckland, 1890–1939, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1989.

^67.� Megan Cook, 'Domestic Workers Unions, 1890–1942' and Melanie Nolan, 'Employment Organisations' in Anne Else (ed.), Women Together: A History of Women's Organisations in New Zealand, Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs and Daphne Brassell Associates Press, Wellington, 1993, pp. 211–13 and pp. 195–201.

^68.� Margaret Corner, No Easy Victory: Towards Equal Pay for Women in the Government Service, 1890–1960, NZ Public Service Association and Dan Long Trust, Wellington, 1988.

^69.� Peter Franks, 'Hurrah, hurrah for F.P. Walsh? The Clerical Workers Union 1938–1940' in Pat Walsh (ed.), Trade Unions, Work and Society, p. 137.

^70.� Megan Cook, Just Wages: History of the Campaign for Pay Equity, 1984–1993, Coalition for Equal Value Equal Pay, Wellington, 1994.

^71.� Sue Iverson, 'Why women get paid less', Broadsheet, January/February 1987; Peter Brosnan and Moira Wilson, The Historical Structuring of the New Zealand Labour Market, Industrial Relations Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, 1989. The way in which the male leaders of the printing unions used the arbitration system (among other means) to restrict women to unskilled and semi-skilled work is discussed in Franks, Print & Politics.

^72.� Melanie Nolan and Shaun Ryan, 'Transforming unionism by organising? an examination of the 'gender revolution' in New Zealand trade unionism since 1975', Labour History, no. 84, May 2003, pp. 89–111.

^73.� The starting point for this literature is Dennis Murphy (ed.), Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880–1920, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1975.

^74.� These differences are captured in Ellem, Markey and Shields (eds), Peak Unions in Australia.

^75.� In N. Ebbels, The Australian Labor Movement, 1850–1907: Historical Documents, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1983 edition with introduction by L. Churchward, p. 150.

^76.� Markey, 'Explaining union mobilisation in the 1880s and early 1900s', pp. 19–42; A. Blok, K. Hitchins, R. Markey & B. Simonsen, Urban Radicals, Rural Allies: Social Democracy and the Agrarian Issue, 1870–1914, Peter Lang, Berne, 2002, pp. 111–44.

^77.� For some of these elements and institutions, see: Ian Turner, Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Easter Australia, 1900–1921, ANU Press, Canberra, 1965; Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement, 1920–1950, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1975; Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985; Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995; Hearn and Knowles, One Big Union; Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1998.

^78.� The best analysis remains Tom Sheridan, Division of Labour: Industrial Relations in the Chifley Years, 1945–1949, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 1989.

^79.� For overviews of this period see Robert Murray, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1970 and most recently Bruce Duncan, Crusade or Conspiracy? Catholics and the Anti-Communist Struggle in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001 and Brian Costar, Peter Love and Paul Strangio (eds), The Great Labor Schism: A Retrospective, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2005

^80.� On the origins of the movement, see P. Ormonde, The Movement, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1972; also Duncan, Crusade or Conspiracy, esp. pp. 73–93.

^81.� Greg Patmore, Australian Labour History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991; Costar, Love and Strangio (eds), The Great Labor Schism, esp. pp. 1–20.

^82.� Robert Murray and Kate White, The Ironworkers: A History of the Federated Ironworkers' Association of Australia, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982; Susanna Short, Laurie Short: A Political Life, Allen & Unwin in association with the Lloyd Ross Forum, Sydney, 1992; Bradon Ellem, 'Ideology and union purpose: the Federated Clerks' Union in New South Wales, 1946–58', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 43, no. 3, December 1997, pp. 344–60.

^83.� See for example Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1998.

^84.� Markey, In Case of Oppression; Brigden, 'A Vehicle for Solidarity'; Simon Fry, John Shields and Bradon Ellem, 'The industrial and political role of the Trades and Labour Council of Queensland since 1922', in B. Ellem, R. Markey & J. Shields (eds), Peak Unions in Australia, pp. 99–115; Oliver, Unity is Strength.

^85.� Hagan, The History of the ACTU; Chris Briggs, The Rise and Fall of the ACTU: Maturation, Hegemony and Decline, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1999. For the origins of the Accord, see especially: P. Ewer, W. Higgins and A. Stevens, Unions and the Future of Australian Manufacturing, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. 1987; P. Ewer, I. Hampson, C. Lloyd, J. Rainford, S. Rix, M. Smith, Politics and the Accord, Pluto Press, Leichhardt, 1991.

^86.� J.T. Paul, Humanism in Politics: New Zealand Labour Party Retrospect, NZ Worker Printing & Publishing Co. Ltd., Wellington, 1946; Bruce Brown, The Rise of New Zealand Labour: A History of the New Zealand Labour Party from 1916 to 1940, Price Milburn, Wellington, 1962; Barry Gustafson, Labour's Path to Political Independence: The Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party 1900–19, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1980.

^87.� Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labor 1908–1914, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1988.

^88.� Melanie Nolan (ed.), Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press in association with the Trade Union History Project, Christchurch, 2005.

^89.� Melanie Nolan '1913 in retrospect: a laboratory or a battleground of democracy' in Nolan, Revolution, pp 21–40.

^90.� James Thorn, Peter Fraser, New Zealand's Wartime Prime Minister, Oldhams Press, London, 1952, p. 49.

^91.� P.J. O'Farrell, Harry Holland, Militant Socialist, Australian National University, Canberra, 1964, pp. 196–200.

^92.� Erik Olssen, John A. Lee, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 1977, pp. 133–60.

^93.� R.S. Milne, Political Parties in New Zealand, Oxford University Press, London, 1966, pp. 101–14.

^94.� Dick Scott, 151 Days: The Great Waterfront Lockout and Supporting Strikes February 15-July 15 1951, Reed Books and Southern Cross Books, Auckland 2001; Michael Bassett, Confrontation '51: The 1951 Waterfront Dispute, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1972; Anna Green, British Capital, Antipodean Labour: Working the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2001; David Grant (ed.), The Big Blue: Snapshots of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, Canterbury University Press and Trade Union History Project, Christchurch, 2004.

^95.� Miles Fairburn and Stephen Haslett, 'The rise of the Left and working-class voting behavior in New Zealand: new methods', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 35, no. 4, Spring 2005, p. 529.

^96.� Louise Overacker, 'The New Zealand Labour Party', American Political Science Review, vol.49, no. 3, September 1955, pp. 708–32.

^97.� H. Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand, A H & A W Reed, Wellington, 1974, p. 83.

^98.� Monique Oomen, 'The Socialist Unity Party of New Zealand: a study of a small communist party', Political Science, vol. 34, no. 2, December 1982, pp. 143–169.

^99.� Pat Walsh, 'A family fight? industrial relations reform under the fourth Labour government' in Brian Easton (ed.), The Making of Rogernomics, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1989, pp. 149–70.

^100.� Ken Douglas, 'Voice for the workers in a global economy', Evening Post, 3 November 1999.

^101.� Simon Sheppard, Broken Circle: The Decline and Fall of the Fourth Labour Government, PDL Press, Wellington, 1999.

^102.� For an overview of states' legislation see Dennis Nolan (ed.), The Australasian Labour Law Reforms: Australia and New Zealand at the End of the Twentieth Century, The Federation Press, Annandale, 1998; see also Peetz, Unions in a Contrary World, pp. 100–03.

^103.� Rae Cooper, 'Deregulation of the labour market: the impact upon collective organisation', in Joe Isaac and Russell Lansbury (eds), Labour Market Deregulation: Rewriting the Rules, The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2006, pp. 93–106.

^104.� Bruce Hearn McKinnon, Behind WorkChoices: How One Company Changed Australia's Industrial Relations, Heidelberg Press, Heidelberg, 2007, esp. ch. 2.

^105.�New Zealand Official Yearbook 2000, Statistics New Zealand and David Bateman, Wellington, 2000, p. 343.

^106.� Paul Harris and Linda Twiname, First Knights: An Investigation of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, Howling At The Moon, Auckland, 1998.

^107.� New Zealand Employers Federation, Balance in Bargaining, Wellington, (c. 1980), p. 20.

^108.� Rae Cooper, 'Peak council organising at work: ACTU strategy 1994–2000', Labour & Industry, vol. 14, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–21.

^109.� Barbara Pocock, 'Institutional sclerosis: prospects for trade union transformation', Labour & Industry, vol. 9, no, 1, August, 1998, p. 17; Michael Crosby, Power at Work: Rebuilding the Australian Union Movement, The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2005.

^110.� Rae Cooper and Bradon Ellem, 'Union power: space, structure, strategy', in Mark Hearn and Grant Michelson (eds), Rethinking Work: Time, Space and Discourse, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, pp. 123–43; Rae Cooper, 'Getting organised? a white collar union responds to membership crisis', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 43, no. 4, December 2001, pp. 422–37; Bradon Ellem, Hard Ground: Unions in the Pilbara, Pilbara Mineworkers Union, Port Hedland, 2004; Al Rainnie and Gail Drummond, 'Place matters: organising in the new economy in an old industrial area', in J. Burgess and J. O'Connell (eds), Developments in the Call Centres Industry, Routledge, London, 2006; A. Tattersall, 'There is power in coalition: a framework for assessing how and when union-community coalitions are effective and enhance union power', Labour & Industry, vol. 16, no. 3, 2005.

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Trade Union Structure and Politics in Australia and New Zealand