Naomi Segal | Anti-Union or Pro-Property? Worker Surveillance and Gold Theft in Western Australian Gold Mines, 1899–1920 | Labour History, 97

Anti-Union or Pro-Property? Worker Surveillance and Gold Theft in Western Australian Gold Mines, 1899–1920

Naomi Segal^*

Historically, both in Australia and elsewhere, employers often used blacklists to exclude unionists from their workforce. In Western Australia, workers in the first decades of the gold mining industry feared such an 'organised system of victimisation' as early as 1903. This paper is a first step in examining whether the umbrella body, the Chamber of Mines of Western Australia, in developing and operating a system for surveilling workers to prevent gold stealing, extended the surveillance also to workers it considered undesirable for political or industrial reasons, as workers feared. The paper investigates the emergence of the system of blacklisting 'undesirable employees' on the mines and the nature, the extent and intent of intelligence collecting and sharing by mine employers. However, as it was possible to access only a small fraction of the records pertaining to the surveillance operation (the remainder are still restricted), the paper's conclusion are only tentative.

In the struggle over the distribution of power in the workplace, the practice of blacklisting workers can be a powerful anti-labour and anti-union weapon. Blacklisting in the context of the workplace is a method of disciplining labour available to management which has been most commonly understood as 'recording the names of known trade union activists by employers, employment agencies and business organizations in order to allow vetting of job applications and [exclusion of] union militants from employment'.¹ While historically employers have compiled blacklists to eliminate criminal or 'deviant' workers, blacklisting activities which were intended to eliminate unions from the workplace have been of greatest interest to historians. Anti-union blacklisting often involved labour espionage: paid agents introduced into the workplace to inform on union or other dissident worker activity.

Blacklisting has been reported to have been a significant weapon in the anti-labour and anti-union arsenal of employers in many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, and Australia.² There exists a rich historical literature concerned with labour espionage and union suppression, especially in the United States, but detailed analyses of the role and function of historical blacklists, in and of themselves, are less common. This is a somewhat surprising observation to have to make about United States historiography since labour spying in the United States 'was backed up by a massive blacklisting apparatus in many industries'.³ That detailed analysis of blacklisting systems has the potential to lead to revisions of received historical wisdom is apparent from such studies as are available. For example, P.V. Black found that blacklisting on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad from 1860 to 1900, which amounted essentially to departments exchanging discharge lists, worked to control and discipline not only workers, but also 'lower management' ('local superintendents, master mechanics, trainmasters, roadmaters and foremen'⁴). It did so by allowing upper management (President, general manager, superintendents of the company) to monitor the quality of 'lower management's' decision-making when discharging employees. Similarly, Hyde, who examined early twentieth century reports by labour spies to the Quincy Mining Company, a copper mine in Michigan, observed that the spies' success in naming 'troublemakers' was unimpressive, that they were often ineffective because they failed to keep a permanent job at the mine, were exposed as spies, or suffered work injuries themselves. Their lack of language skills when monitoring a multicultural workforce also reduced their effectiveness as did the noisy and compartmentalised work environment. Instead of providing substantial information on labour agitators or pending industrial trouble, the spies constantly reminded the company of unsafe working conditions underground. Hyde concludes that the spies were more valuable to management in 'identifying dishonest, abusive, or incompetent company officials than in spotting labor agitators',⁵ and more effective in highlighting poor safety conditions than in collating information on dissenting workers.⁶

In Australia, blacklisting has been reported in the steel, coal, wharf and pastoral industries and, most notoriously, against members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).⁷ Again, however, there are no detailed analyses of the system of blacklisting, its operation and effect.

The potency of blacklisting grows when administered by employers collectively and efficiently within and across industries, in single industry locations, and in remote locations with limited employment opportunities. Several of these conditions applied to the often remote, single industry centres of Western Australia's goldfields at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Workers in the gold mining industry complained about an 'organised system of victimisation'⁸ as early as 1903. Among reported incidents of discrimination were the sackings of union office bearers or organisers by mine managers at the Fraser Mine in Southern Cross,⁹ at the Princess Royal Mine at Norseman (Dundas district),¹⁰ at Mt Sir Samuel,¹¹ and at Boulder.¹² The labour newspaper, the Westralian Worker, also reported that at Kurrawang, where the Amalgamated Workers Association (AWA) attempted to organise the woodline workers supplying wood to the mines, 'prominent [Kurrawang] union officials were sacked with such regularity that none could be found to fill those offices'.¹³ (It is important to appreciate, however, that employers on the wood lines were quite separate from employers on the mines). Some mines apparently also 'changed hands', that is sacked their entire workforce, so as to weed out union rank and file.¹⁴ Prominent Union official T.G. Heitmann was forced to remove himself and his family to Perth, when no mine managers would employ him because of his trade union connections.¹⁵ Much later, in 1923, the militant Alf (Bull) Callanan, a member of the IWW and of a 'most respectable family', (his uncle had been underground manager of the Golden Horseshoe Gold Mine, his father a 'Boss', that is, in a managerial position, in charge of miners, on that same mine, while his brother, George, was an Australian Workers Union official) claimed that his recourse to armed robbery of the Great Boulder Pty Gold Mine Ltd was a political protest against his victimisation. More specifically, he stated that he had always expected to be caught and that his action was

a protest against the prosecution of [himself] and other labour men, prominent in industrial conflicts of the past at the hands of the Employers' Federation of this State and particularly this branch of it – the Chamber of Mines.¹⁶

However, Callanan's claim that his robbery was an instance of IWW-style 'propaganda of deed' should be treated with considerable scepticism, notwithstanding that it appears to have been accepted at face value by some historians.¹⁷ It is muddied by Callanan's previous conviction for possessing a large quantity of stolen gelignite he intended to use in prospecting on his lease, which provided him with an income of £5 a week according to his own testimony in 1922.¹⁸ Claims that he always intended to be caught during the robbery are undermined by his own statement prior to his trial that he would have gotten away with the money he stole from the Great Boulder Mine – a staggering £520 – had he not been tackled before getting to a get-away bicycle.

Setting aside the wood lines that supplied wood to the mines' engines, where the evidence for concerted anti-union employer actions was overwhelming, many questions arise in relation to victimisations other than the IWWs reported from the mines. For example: Is there any evidence to suggest that victimisations were more than the actions of a few renegade employers, hostile to unions, whom Justice Burnside of the Arbitration Court in 1904 chided and threatened with penalties,¹⁹ while the majority of employers, albeit reluctantly, accepted their 'legal duty to recognise trade unions'?²⁰ Alternatively, can at least some of the incidents be considered a spontaneous employer response to the reputation of or workers' reports on prominent activists, those who employers called 'stormy petrels',²¹ and whom they excluded, whether or not they were union officials, and without recourse to surveillance or centrally maintained blacklists? If, on the other hand, the reported incidents were a collective response to the growth of unionism, and not merely the actions of a small number of renegade employers, did the collective response also involve labour espionage and blacklisting to underpin the victimisation? And, if a system of espionage and blacklisting existed, what were its origins, how did it evolve and what was the basis for its operation?

It is these narrow questions that this article explores, rather than the full gamut of organised mining employers' attempts to affect the balance of power between them and mining unions.²² The paper attempts to answer these questions by examining the origin, evolution and the uses mine employers made of a centralised and secret system which operated in the mines to prevent gold stealing. It argues that the system, developed and mostly deployed to suppress gold stealing, was also occasionally used for industrial and political purposes. However, for reasons perhaps related, inter alia, to the compromises of arbitration, the political system which allowed labour to achieve periodic ascendancy, and the supplicant nature of the industry's relation with the state, the Western Australian system did not evolve into a labour espionage system such as existed in the United States where it was also rooted in a system to suppress theft: the spotting system used against conductors on streetcars or railroads.²³

Railway spotting, beginning in the 1850s, involved undercover agents called 'spotters', funded by the railway management, impersonating passengers on United States streetcars and railroads, primarily in order to observe theft of fares by conductors.²⁴ The spotting system evolved into labour spying for union suppression at the point at which railroad owners, already employing the Pinkerton National Detective Agency as spotters, asked Allan Pinkerton to investigate violence in their E. Pennsylvanian coal mines.²⁵ The detective given the task impersonated a coal miner and infiltrated the secret Molly Maguire organisation, leading to the prosecution and execution of ten of the Molly Maguires, some of whom were very likely innocent. The publicity associated with the success of the strategy led many American employers intent on suppressing unions to adopt similar methods.

How and what information relating to workers was collected and distributed in the Western Australian mines, for what purpose and by what methods would appear simple questions to answer. However, the secrecy still attaching to key documents relating to operations to suppress gold stealing makes this task more difficult than it at first appears. Among the key missing archival documents are the Chamber of Mines files entitled 'Mines security' which remain with the successor of the Chamber of Mines of WA, the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of WA, Inc. and are not available to historians. However, the Chamber of Mines of WA did permit the author to examine briefly a small portion of this series, those relating to the years 1914–20. These sources, together with other available records – other files of the Chamber of Mines, Police records and a selection of newspaper sources – allow some tentative conclusions to be drawn about whether surveillance of workers to eliminate or prevent gold stealing in early twentieth century Western Australian gold mines was also directed at unions or workers identified as activists.

The Emergence of the System and Early Activities

Collective employer action to identify and exclude 'undesirable' employees from the early Western Australian gold mines began with the decision in May 1899 by the then Kalgoorlie Chamber of Mines, to 'set up a fund for the purpose of rewarding informants reporting gold thieves'. Once a special committee had fleshed out the proposal further, however, the objective became more far reaching: to raise sufficient funds to enable a 'system of espionage [to] be inaugurated through one channel for the protection of the contributing mines'.²⁶ A centralised system (known as the Information Bureau) which collected information on gold stealing activities obviated individual mines employing their own staff of detectives, created economies of scale, covered the fields more comprehensively and therefore recommended itself as both efficient and economic.

Initially, the subscribing mines' contributions to this system were scaled to the mines' productivity. Within a few months, however, the Bureau Committee reduced the minimum rate of subscription to one shilling per day, hoping 'to encourage the smaller and non-producing mines to join the Bureau',²⁷ and thereby to increase the Bureau's inclusivity, reach and effectiveness. Further adjustments to subscription rates led the funding base of the organisation eventually to reflect the industry's structure: a thin base of mines with large gold reserves mostly co-located in Kalgoorlie contributed the bulk of the Trust's funds, while the remaining mines, mostly marginal or small producers, contributed token amounts. By 1919, these token amounts ranged from only £1 to £4 per month.

In May 1899, once mining companies' subscriptions had guaranteed it a daily income of £5 per day, the Chamber established what initially was termed the 'Information Bureau' and later, interchangeably and confusingly 'The Mines' Trust Account'. From the beginning, the Executive Committee of the Chamber decided to keep these subscriptions in a special account – the Mines Trust Account – separate from the Chamber's other funds. The Trust was managed by a small annually-elected committee which included members of the General Executive Committee of the Chamber who were managers of some of the large Kalgoorlie mines. This committee regularly consulted with the Chamber's Executive Committee. Though the Mines Trust Account was in this way organically linked to the Chamber of Mines, the separation of the Account from other Chamber funds, along with the secrecy attached to the Trust Account's activities and income, allowed the Chamber to argue that 'the Mines Trust was an organisation quite apart from the Chamber'.²⁸ The secrecy and the supposedly arm's length arrangement delivered the Chamber greater flexibility to deploy the funds of the Account. By 17 July 1899, the Secretary of the Chamber managed a staff of two full-time detectives, a budget of £28 per week and had at his disposal a dedicated newly installed telephone.

The Bureau focused initially on introducing surveillance to the rich Kalgoorlie mines and on overhauling regulations licensing gold dealers. The London boards, however, demanded as a matter of priority that the Chamber protect the mines from theft by establishing a uniform system of change houses (also called 'search houses') in which workers would undergo daily physical searches when coming off shift.²⁹ Industry critics claimed that the horrendous security measures that black convict workers underwent on Rhodesia's Kimberley diamond mines inspired the London boards' demands.³⁰ Such suspicions appear to have been vindicated by the apologetic explanation the President of the Western Australian Chamber delivered to the London boards on precisely this subject on a 1904 visit to London:

You are aware that it is rather a difficult matter to have legislation carried in Western Australia the same as you have in Kimberley as regards the stealing of diamonds. We cannot hope for anything so drastic. In Western Australia we have manhood suffrage, in Kimberley you have not and consequently you can have a more drastic law which would not have any hope of passing in Western Australia. When we tried to legislate so that we could obtain convictions for gold stealing and got an act or a draft amendment in, there was always a chance of its being thrown out on the plea that it was interfering with the liberty of the subject. That is where the whole trouble lies in.³¹

Notwithstanding these restrictions on the power of employers, the mining companies, guided by legal advice, incorporated a right to physically search workers into the general conditions of employment, required to be signed by all employees.³²

The procedure for physically searching workers in change houses was developed by the Mines Trust (or Bureau). Though not as oppressive as procedures on the Kimberley diamond mines, it was nevertheless humiliating and, according to some, reflected 'a general feeling of distrust and almost contempt for the workers of the fields'.³³ The process included workers being herded into the change room on the way to the surface, and required them

to change their clothes in one room, walk past a searcher over steps to another room, clothed only with underpants and singlet. Billycans [had] to be turned upside down and [placed] downwards on a peg.³⁴

Workers could expect that the clothes they left behind in the change room while on shift would be searched in their absence.

Change rooms continued to be the first line of defence against gold stealing throughout the study period, and the search procedure in the change houses a continuing source of friction, (though not to the extent that it was in other mining locations in the world, for example Cripple Creek, where unions staged walkouts in response to such searches).³⁵ Once union strength grew, however, unions raised important occupational health demands, including the need for showers and hot water, and a sufficient number of basins and sanitation in the change rooms. By 1909, the Mines Department had powers to prosecute mine owners who failed to provide these facilities, though many continued to neglect to do so. Notionally, at least, however, the facilities had evolved from facilities serving only employers in their attempt to secure the mines from gold thieves into services improving workers occupational health and comfort as well.³⁶

As early as 1903, the Chamber's surveillance of gold stealing activities expanded from the mines alone to include also all important railway stations. In addition to the intelligence collected by detectives employed directly by the Mines Trust, the Trust began receiving information from its subscribers in remoter parts of the goldfields about employees they considered undesirable or suspect.³⁷ The Bureau instituted a practice of vetting new employees taken on by mining companies and therefore required subscribers to the Mines Trust to submit fortnightly lists of names of men hired and discharged from each mine. (How many companies availed themselves of this service is not clear). Individual mines could also obtain information on particular workers in between such fortnightly submissions, presumably causing workers to be investigated if no information on them was, as yet, available.³⁸

Before long, the coverage of the Bureau extended beyond major mining centres to remoter districts, just as had been intended by those who conceived the system. Now, if they deemed it necessary, subscribing mines in remote regions could ask for on-site visits by the detectives of the Mines Trust.³⁹ The two private detectives, often jointly with police constables, shadowed suspects, monitored the comings and goings at railway stations, kept nightly watch over 'crook' gold dealers' homes or shops or suspect treatment plants, checked the identity of employees on the mines against descriptions of convicted or suspected criminals, even crept into miners' camps at dark to listen to their bedtime conversation (disappointingly, 'they was talking about football', reported one of the detectives on one occasion).⁴⁰ The detectives of the Chamber relied on a network of informants and on two occasions at least introduced to mines reputed to have a gold stealing problem with the agreement of the Mine Manager, undercover agents – former police constables – working as miners. This strategy yielded much information and, according to the detective concerned, when, on one occasion it was exposed, produced considerable anxiety among workers. Detectives also pursued associations among workers, observing with suspicion workers keeping the company of known or suspected criminals. One so observed in 1916, was Alf Callanan who, police noted was on friendly terms with individuals they suspected of having robbed mines.⁴¹

The Bureau's original goal had been to financially support informants on gold thieves whose identities for various reasons had to be publicly revealed. The Chamber attempted to find for such men paid positions in mines belonging to its members to protect them from retribution or ostracism by other workers. When workers at the new workplace almost invariably refused to work with them, the Chamber provided informants with an allowance or expense account partly in order to secure their ongoing services as witnesses in proceedings against the gold stealers – a process that could be quite protracted – and partly also so as to encourage others to come forward to supply information.

Workers considered informants on gold thieves equivalent to scabs. The practice of gold stealing was widely condoned on the goldfields, and measures to control it were unpopular, as Jack Scadden, then Minister for Mines in the Mitchell Government, told the Chamber of Mines, when they lobbied him for their draft of a Gold Buyers' Bill in 1921: 'he looked upon the Bill [that the Chamber proposed] as one of an unpopular character, that would not rebound to the political advantage of the Government that introduced it'.⁴² The contrast with the public's approach to other crimes was stark, as Inspector Walsh observed to the Chamber:

Usually the better class members of the public are only too willing to assist the police in the suppression of crime, but gold stealing is another matter and the prevailing custom is 'keep the tongue silent, tell the police nothing'. This is the kind of perverted popular sentiment on these fields at the present time.⁴³

The mining union denied that miners had any significant role in gold stealing because of the stringency of scrutiny in search houses and above ground, the scarcity of rich gold rich worth stealing and the precautions taken whenever rich ore was found.⁴⁴ Harry Glance, secretary of the Westralian Goldfields Federated Miners Union, appearing before the Royal Commission into the Alleged Prevalence of Gold Stealing of 1906, pointed the finger at mine officials as the major culprits if, as the Chamber of Mines and others claimed, large quantities of gold were indeed disappearing. The highly regarded Detective Sergeant Kavanagh, whose report on gold stealing had led to the Royal Commission, appeared to concur:

I do not regard the miner as the greatest sinner. In my opinion , and I base it on very good grounds, persons in much higher positions, where the facilities are greater, get away with much more, and both have to depend on the receiver for their reward.⁴⁵

Public attitudes on the goldfields being what they were, unions did not appear to feel compromised by workers' gold stealing activities, although they did not assist those brought to justice, nor defend gold thieves publicly. In negotiations with employers on one occasion, however, union officials condoned dishonesty openly and defended underground truckers and mullockers, workers who had deliberately reduced their output and had foiled improved employer monitoring by falsely reporting daily tallies. Such cheating was due to workers 'not getting a fair deal', doing work which was laborious and risky, poorly paid, unpleasant and, as was becoming widely known, offering 'almost the certainty of an untimely end'.⁴⁶ It is likely that they viewed gold stealing in the same light and that therefore, as at Cripple Creek, gold theft on the goldfields should be considered 'a form of low level resistance to the wage system'.⁴⁷ At the same time, alongside the opportunistic workers who collected lumps of ore whenever they could, there were some hardened criminals seeking work on the mines and men with a variety of roles in illegal operations, including operating illicit treatment plants and delivering gold to receivers.

Pre-1907 records suggest that up to 1907, the focus of the work of the Bureau's private police force was in the main to prevent gold theft. However, the WA Chamber of Mines stepped over the line which divided suppression of gold stealing from anti-union activities when, in 1903, it drew on the Mines Trust Account in response to the request by the Victorian Employers Association to finance Martell v Victorian Coal Miners' Association and ORS and its appeal.⁴⁸ (J.S. Martell, a coal miner expelled from his union for blacklegging and subsequently blacklisted by the Union, sued union officials for interfering with his legal right to employment, an action he won on appeal). The tendency to treat the funds of the Mines' Trust Account as a war chest for anti-union purposes would again manifest itself ten or so years later when the Chamber drew on the fund to allow the Youanmi mine management to withstand a prolonged strike (see below). Clearly, the fund had a dual purpose. It is likely the WA Chamber also utilised the Bureau's system for industrial purposes rather than property protection when, in 1907, it distributed the names of striking filter press men on two mines near Leonora to its members.⁴⁹ Available records do not indicate that pre-1914 there were other instances of the use of the Bureau for industrial purposes.

The Role of the Mines Trust Account, 1907–1920

By 1906, the mines had spent collectively a total of £5,000 through the Mines Trust Account. A large part of the Chamber's expenses underwrote assistance to police in preparing cases for prosecution. The Chamber also paid a retaining fee to the solicitors preparing the cases: the firm Keenan and Randall – the Chamber's solicitors – headed by Norbert Keenan, a sometime Chamber Vice-President, a member of the Chamber's Executive, and soon to be the Attorney-General in the conservative Newton Moore State Ministry. Other expenses were assayer fees and witnesses expenses.⁵⁰ The close collaboration between police and the Chamber as well as the informal funding arrangements bred a tendency to confuse the state's interests with those of the gold mining industry, a tendency that would soon become even more pronounced and extend beyond matters relating to prevention and prosecution of gold theft.

Reorganising Surveillance

Sensational allegations, which appeared in the British Australasian in May 1906, to the effect that the mines, in spite of all their endeavours, were leaking annually some £1,000,000 into gold stealers' pockets, soon led to an overhaul of the measures to suppress gold stealing that the Chamber had succeeded in establishing. Detective-Sergeant Kavanagh, head of the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB), while disputing the alleged extent of the gold stealing problem, acknowledged the ineffectualness of police responses to it which, according to him, was equivalent to 'a child endeavouring to bail out a river with a spoon'. He identified as the worst offenders the elaborate network of receivers as well as 'persons in much higher positions'⁵¹ on the mines, meaning the mines' staff or officials, rather than miners. His proposed solutions were a tightening of legislation dealing with gold stealing and gold dealing, increased powers to Magistrates, reforms to record keeping procedures relating to gold traded, and a 'thorough system of surveillance'.⁵² To meet that last objective, it was necessary to appoint a staff of detectives who would be independent of the local police, and working 'under a practical man, to deal with gold stealing only'.⁵³ Kavanagh stipulated that this staff should be 'paid well, in order to give them an interest in their work and put them beyond temptation',⁵⁴ alluding to the two attempts to bribe even him since he arrived in Kalgoorlie. He also reported that the Chamber had already agreed to 'assist in finding funds for this purpose'. A Royal Commission which followed Kavanagh's report confirmed his analysis and adopted many of the solutions he proposed.

The police hierarchy did not immediately accept the remedy of a subsidy from the Chamber towards the pay of the dedicated gold stealing staff, with some arguing that the cost should be borne entirely by the mining companies. The opinion which prevailed, however, was that of the Police Commissioner, who preferred a 'staff of detectives entirely under police control but subsidised by the Chamber'.⁵⁵ This formula, ostensibly a balance between public and private power, was always likely to be subverted. It was unlikely that the Chamber, as the main benefactor of a gold stealing unit, would resist developing a special relationship with at least some of the detectives. It was also unlikely that the gold stealing detection staff, aware of the financial arrangements, and of the potential bonuses the size and distribution of which would be decided by the Chamber, would continue to be able to distinguish between the corporate interests and the public interest they were expected to serve.

In the wake of the Royal Commission into the Alleged Prevalence of Gold Stealing of 1906, a rather loose arrangement between the Government and the Chamber of Mines produced the Special Gold Stealing Detection Staff (SGSDS). Managed by the CIB, the staff of half a dozen detectives was two thirds funded by the Chamber, a third by Government, with the Chamber imposing a ceiling of £2,000 per annum on its contributions, which did not include an additional £500 pa expended on legal expenses associated with gold stealing prosecutions. Difficulties arose over this arrangement when the Auditor-General discovered some years later, first, that the limit of £2,000 imposed by the Chamber was not covered by Ministerial authority, that is, it had not been agreed to by government, and second, that the expenses of the SGSDS, including for salaries and incidental expenses, had long been significantly underreported.

The monitoring and intelligence gathering intensified once the SGSDS came into being. The detectives now conducted regular surveys of the various districts, during which they inspected pay sheets on the mines and gold dealers' books at local Banks, and actively collected intelligence from various informants about suspicious happenings, much, if not all of it, purchased. The Chamber also continued to be a point of contact for miscellaneous informants among whom was a wife informing on her husband,⁵⁶ an individual offering information for sale ('give me £50 and I will give you full particulars'),⁵⁷ the occasional anonymous tipster, or the mine manager passing on rumours appearing on the mine grapevine.

By 1915, the black lists and associated records compiled by the Chamber from SGSDS reports contained around 400 names. Also on file were many descriptions provided by either the SGSDS or mine managers of suspects and convicted thieves including distinguishing marks, their habits and associates, sometimes their employment history⁵⁸ and 'the class of crime they are prone to commit'.⁵⁹ Such information was routinely circulated four times a year to subscribers to the Trust Account, but also conveyed as needed.

Detectives monitored the spending of some workers and passed on the information: an engine driver who purchased a second motor car, a young man who bought 50 shares in a profitable mine. Their brief included collecting information not only on gold thieves, but also on workers who trespassed, or who removed tools or wood from mines, suggesting that to some extent they had assumed the role of a private security force guarding the interests of the mines. It was sufficient to come under the suspicion of the squad for details on a worker to be compiled and the information circulated. Suspected gold thieves, even when acquitted, remained on file. Some information on listed workers was only conveyed verbally. Thus Richard Hamilton, the President of the Chamber, when querying the reason seven particular workers were on the list, received the answer by telephone.

The formal list of 'undesirable' employees which were circulated to subscribers to the Mines' Trust Account contained no names of dissidents as such, except inadvertently, when they included the names of rank and file IWW members convicted (see below) or suspected of gold stealing; however, without their membership of the IWW being known to police or Chamber.

The Chamber had tried without success to obtain a membership list of the IWW. In August 1915, the Chamber had requested the SGSDS to 'get the names of the Union, so that steps can be taken to counteract the influence of the IWW'.⁶⁰ The request followed the discovery by the manager of the Great Boulder Mine of IWW members among his workers (Gordon Vernon, Martin Lillis, Joe Bori, Pat Daley, Ted McLoughlin and Mick Sawtell)⁶¹. Their names were added to the Bureau files, along with descriptions where these were available.⁶² A year later, F.W. Lunn, S.J. Read, John Goller and J. Collins, all IWW members, received the same treatment. However, dozens of other workers working in the mines who were involved with the IWW, even if only briefly, continued to elude both mine management and detectives. Those whose association with the IWW was missed included three men who had been investigated or convicted for gold stealing (Braovich, Nait, Simunovich). This underscores the point that the effectiveness of the industrial surveillance, such as existed, was limited.⁶³

Much of the information collected on workers may have been false, reflecting the political prejudices of detectives or their interpretations of the Chamber's interests. This point can be illustrated by the case of David Kukrika. Kukrika was investigated by the SGSDS over allegations that he was a Bolshevik, which detectives equated with general lawlessness and criminality. Only intervention by his ex-employer saved Kukrika from being blacklisted.⁶⁴ The employer reported that 'Kukrika left of his own accord ... [that he was] quiet, inoffensive and industrious ... [a] most law abiding man and [that he, the employer] was sorry to lose him [and] ... would like him back'.⁶⁵ The case of Ernest Blythen illustrates how the personal anti-union and political prejudices of a manager combined with idle rumour could damage workers. Blythen, a shoveller, was sacked from a mine and his name referred by the manager for investigation to the SGSDS with the following observation:

We have had him under observation for a long time; he is a swivel-eyed coot, tall and clean shaved and was a prominent member of the local union with strong OLP [possibly Old Labor Party as opposed to the National Labor Party formed in 1917, hence meaning anti-constriptionist] tendencies and reputed to be a I Won't Worker.⁶⁶

The conclusion to draw from these examples is that information incriminating workers for political or industrial reasons appeared to have been incorporated into the Chamber's records relating to suspect employees as a matter of course, but also haphazardly; and that though the Chamber attempted to broaden the brief of the SGSDS to include intelligence about the IWW, this did not eventuate, and the coverage of its blacklisting operation of workers unacceptable for political or industrial reasons continued to be fortuitous rather than systematic. However, its blacklisting, haphazard though it was, consistently focused on the Left of the labour movement.

The Chamber had declared itself well satisfied with the work of the SGSDS by 1913, not only because of the 32 prosecutions and 23 convictions achieved annually, but also because of what it considered to be the deterrent effect of the 'continuous supervision' by the Special staff. To what extent this supervision prevented the hiring of workers considered suspect by the SGSDS or prevented some workers from applying for mine work and thereby affected the nature of the workforce on the mines is not possible to say without further research. It is clear, however, as already stated, that many IWW members failed to be identified by either managers or SGSDS, and that even those IWW members who had been blacklisted found work on mines outside the Chamber of Mines' sphere of influence.⁶⁷ In other words, the reach of the mine surveillance was curtailed either by lack of resources, the vast distances across which employers were scattered (essentially also a question of resources) and the incomplete organisation of the industry.

The Bonus System

To continue motivating the detectives of the SGSDS who faced considerable public hostility, the Chamber offered regular bonuses: £100 annually to be divided among the seven or so detectives at the coal face, and £50 paid to Inspector Walsh, even after he had ceased heading the SGSDS (from 1912 onwards, he was a subinspector in the CIB in Perth). In 1918, at Walsh's request, the Chamber also funded the cost of two motorcycles for the use of the SGSDS.

The bonus to Walsh appeared to be unofficial and if answers to Parliamentary questions⁶⁸ in early 1918 were truthful, they suggest that neither the Police Department nor the Government knew that it was being paid.⁶⁹ As soon as the issue of bonuses became politically sensitive, the Government suggested to the Chamber that, if such moneys were to be paid at all, they should be paid in the form of additions to the bimonthly salary of the respective detectives. It appears that at this point the Chamber ceased paying the bonuses, except to Walsh, at least one more time,⁷⁰ in the form of 'a gratuitous gift'. The records do not reveal the nature of this gift.

The Mines' Trust Account as an Anti-union War Chest

The Chamber drew on the subscriptions accumulating in the Mines Trust Account to supplement others of its Accounts, whether by charging the Mines Trust Account rent and secretarial services – a fairly routine procedure within the Chamber – or borrowing from the Trust Account as needed. In the main, loans from the Mines Trust Account were small and repaid in due course. The most notable use the Chamber made of the fund was when it drew on it for a major anti-union initiative: the Chamber Executive voted a massive £800 from the Account to assist managers and directors of the Youanmi Mine to defeat a protracted strike in 1914 so as to deal a serious blow to the Amalgamated Workers Association (AWA), the most combative of the trade unions organising mine workers. Possibly deliberately provoked by local mine managers, the 1914 Youanmi dispute erupted against a background of ongoing local disputation in which the Union had been mostly successful, and a company merger, in which a company board, spearheaded by Herbert Hoover, exerted pressure on the Yuanmi company's local mine management to produce 'stipulated profits'. Further investment in the mines was to depend on achieving these profits. The ostensible cause of the 68-day strike was a written contract the Yuanmi company awarded to a 12 member contracting party, all of them unionists (contracting should be here understood as team piece work). The written contract challenged a Union resolution against contracting, though the union tolerated verbal contracting agreements which, it argued, were arrangements for bonus payments. Events developed in quick succession: after negotiations with mine management and contractors failed to satisfy the more militant faction of the local union and AWA head office also failed to achieve a compromise, the local union called a strike, denied the contractors supplies and drove them out of the district.

Almost as soon as these events had occurred, the Chamber and the company swung into action to 'work up a case' against the Union. The company board argued that as the threat to contracting was of interest to all the mines, the Chamber should share the cost of the strike. The Chamber readily agreed, and consequently bore the cost of the company's 'legal, arbitration and general expenses connected with the settlement of the strike'⁷¹ and, after further deliberation, also the maintenance costs of the mine, initially for one month only. The dispute was readily resolved once the Chamber grew reluctant to continue to carry the maintenance costs of the idle mine, and the mine's overseas board demanded the mine return to work. The mechanism to settle the dispute had been available from the first day – a clause in an earlier but current agreement that required prevailing conditions not to be altered during the currency of the agreement. The legal action by the contractors against the union and the various businesses which had refused to provide supplies or services to them, was funded and prepared by the Chamber, though its name was not to appear in proceedings. The action achieved the Chamber's aim of taxing 'the finances of the Union to a very large extent', thereby weakening it and providing 'a deterrent to further acts of a similar character'.⁷²

The Chamber's use of the Mines Trust Account as a war chest in its attempt to weaken or even break a recalcitrant union may be interpreted as mine managers failing to discriminate between protecting mine property from gold thieves and shielding profits from industrial demands. At the same time, and more simply, the Account may also have represented the only major source of ready funds the Chamber had available for major operations that were outside its normal range of activities.

By late 1920, shortage of 'localised' detectives and of detectives able to operate in the face of widespread opposition to catching and informing on gold thieves reduced the usefulness of the SGSDS to the Chamber. In addition, personality conflicts within the squad, described by a 1920 inquiry into the squad as 'lamentable feelings of petty jealousy, discord and distrust',⁷³ caused the unit to be administered inefficiently. In close consultation with Walsh, who by then headed the Perth CIB, the Chamber convinced the Government that the solution was to return Walsh to the Goldfields to head the SGSDS and to overhaul SGSDS operations. Walsh had grand ideas about defeating gold thieves by trapping the receivers of stolen gold. However, following extensive Government cuts to the SGSDS, he had not the resources to implement his ideas, nor the time to do so. In 1926, Walsh and Detective Sergeant Alex Pitman died at the hands of gold thieves they had tracked to an illegal gold treatment plant in the bush. Three local men – Evan Clarke, Phillip Treffene and William Coulter – were eventually arrested. Treffene and Coulter were convicted of murder and hanged.⁷⁴ Ironically, the SGSDS had failed to obtain a conviction against Treffene in 1916, wrily commenting in its report on this failure that 'Mr Treffene was a very lucky man'.⁷⁵ The records sighted do not list William Coulter as a suspect or object of attention by the SGSDS, though he may well have been in later volumes of these files. Without doubt, the police attempt to keep the mines free of criminals was a dangerous and frustrating undertaking, made more so by widespread Goldfields hostility to the project.

Conclusion

In what is only a first look at blacklisting on early Western Australian gold mines, this article has attempted to answer some elementary questions about the trajectory of this activity. The article has suggested that a system for collecting and distributing information on workers existed, that its primary purpose was to catch gold thieves and other dishonest workers, but that at times it also served industrial purposes. Though it did not appear to have been used in this way frequently, a system established to disseminate information on gold thieves also provided the organisation and structure to collect and circulate intelligence on filterpress men who went on strike and on members of the IWW and other workers perceived to be radical. Collective employer arrangements to increase security from gold thieves on the mines could also be transformed at a critical point into a major anti-union weapon, as happened when the Mines Trust Account turned into a war chest to fund an attempt to weaken if not break the troublesome AWA. The ease with which the Chamber's Executive collected and distributed industrial information via the Bureau or Mines Account Trust, opportunistic rather than systematic though this appeared to have been, suggests that few distinctions were made between industrial intelligence and intelligence concerned with criminal matters and, in the Youanmi case, between property protection and fending off perceived threats to profits from workers' industrial demands.

The limited sources internal to the Mines Trust that it was possible to consult for this article, as well as other Chamber records, do not reveal a clandestine and systematic central all-employer policy to eliminate unions by means of a surveillance system and policy to discharge workers. This suggests that mine employers who victimised and blacklisted unionists in the first decade of the twentieth century were acting as individuals, and that workers incorrectly perceived these instances as organised. (This is not to rule out organised victimisation of unionists on the wood lines). It also demonstrates the value of detailed studies of blacklisting systems and their operation. However, the full extent of the information that employers obtained from and through the system of worker surveillance for gold stealing activities will only become clear once all the historical files relating to the surveillance system in the mines are made public.

Naomi Segal lectures in employment relations in the UWA Business School. Her research interests are the history of arbitration, the IWW in Western Australia and social relations of production in twentieth century Western Australian mines.
<nsegal@biz.uwa.edu.au>

Endnotes

^*� The author thanks the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

^1.� 'Blacklisting' in Edmund Heery and Mike Noon, A Dictionary of Human Resource Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008; Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press .[http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t162.e88, sighted 14 January 2009].

^2.� For example, H.N. Wheeler, 'Mountaineer mine wars: an analysis of the West Virginia mine wars of 1912 -1913 and 1920–1921', Business History Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 1976, pp. 69–91; R.P. Weiss, 'Private detective agencies and labour discipline in the United States, 1855–1946', The Historical Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, 1986, pp. 87–107; W. Churchill, 'From the Pinkertons to the Patriot Act: the trajectory of political policing in the United States, 1870 to the present, CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–72; Arthur McIvor, '"A crusade for capitalism": the Economic League, 1919–39, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 23, no. 4, 1988, pp. 631–655, J. Bortz, 'The revolution, the labour regime and conditions of work in the cotton textile industry in Mexico, 1910–1927', Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, 2000, pp. 671–703, S.L. Maram, 'Labor and the Left in Brazil, 1890–1921: a movement aborted', The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 57, no. 2, 1977, pp. 254–272, R.P. Colistete, 'Productivity, wages, and Labor politics in Brazil, 1945–1962', The Journal of Economic History, vol. 67, no. 1, 2007, pp. 93–127, C. Wright, The Management of Labour: a History of Australian Employers, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, R. Cooper and G. Patmore, 'Trade union organising and labour history' , Labour History. vol. 83, 2002, pp. 3–18.

^3.� The quote is by C. Johnson, 'Taking care of labor: the police in American politics', Theory and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 1976, p. 97. For the massive scale of labor spying in the US see, of course, Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket, Modern Age Books, New York. 1937, S.H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-century America, UNC Press, Chapel Hill (NC), 2002, p. 3., 5 et passim; R.M. Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2003.

^4.� Black, 'Experiment in bureaucratic centralization: employee blacklisting on the Burlington Railroad, 1877–1892', Business History Review, vol. 51, 1977, p. 456.

^5.� C.K. Hyde, 'Undercover and underground: labor spies and mine management in the early twentieth century', Business History Review, vol. 60, issue 1, 1986, p. 26.

^6.�Ibid., p. 27.

^7.� C. Wright, The Management of Labour, pp. 20, 32, Cooper and Patmore, 'Trade union organising', p. 12; Verity Burgmann, 'The IWW in International perspective: comparing the North American and Australasian wobblies' in Labour Traditions: Proceedings of the 10^th National Labour History Conference, University of Melbourne, Melbourne [Branch] Australian Society for the Study of labour History, Melbourne, 2007, p. 41; Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 65, 172, 174.

^8.�Westralian Worker (hereafter WW), 25 September 1903.

^9.�WW, 3 July 1903, 9 June 1905.

^10.�WW, 24 July 1903.

^11.�WW, 17 March 1905.

^12.�WW, 26 August 1904.

^13.�WW, 14 October 1904; see also 11 March 1903, 4 March 1904.

^14.� The accusation that this was the reason for layoffs on the Murchison in 1904 is unambiguous in the Westralian Worker of 4 March 1904. It is less definite in relation to the lay-offs at the Potosi in mid-1905 (WW, 12 May 1905).

^15.�WW, 18 November 1904.

^16.� In the matter of the King against A.C. Callanan, Case 5290, Cons. 3473, item 533 (State Records Office of Western Australia, hereafter SROWA).

^17.� See, for example, B. Oliver, Unity is Strength: A History of the Australian Labor Party and the Trades and Labor Council in Western Australia, Australian Public Intellectual Network, Perth, 2003, pp. 91–92.

^18.�A.C. Callanan and Cornelius Kenneally, Applts & A. Pitman, PC, 21 January 1922, Cons 3665, item no. 145, Box 3 (SROWA).

^19.� See, for example, Western Australian Arbitration Reports (WAAR), III, 1904.

^20.� Wright, The Management of Labour, p. 32.

^21.� Item 328, Acc 1095, SROWA (Gardiner's opening address). He was referring to the officers of the South Yilgarn Union, among them E. (Ted) McLoughlin, (probably the same Ted McLoughlin who later gained fame as one of the prosecuted IWW in Western Australia), J.C. Morrison, T. McMillan, W. Abbott, Porter, Moloney, Thomas, Gardiner, Quinn, Ballantyne, Coward, Cusack, and A. McKenzie.

^22.� For a discussion of these wider issues see N. Segal, '"War conducted under certain rules, but nonetheless war": arbitration, capital and labour in the Western Australian gold mining industry, 1901–14' Labour History, vol. 93, 2007, pp. 109–126.

^23.� Jennifer Luff, 'Surrogate supervisors: railway spotters and the origins of workplace surveillance', Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, vol. 5, no. 1, 2008, pp. 47–74.

^24.�Ibid., p. 47.

^25.�Ibid., p. 71.

^26.� Kalgoorlie Chamber of Mines, Minutes of Special committee appointed to consider the question of the better prevention of gold stealing held at Mr. Hamilton's residence 20/5/99 (Acc 6137A/409, Battye Library of Western Australian History, hereafter BL).

^27.�Ibid., 31 October 1899.

^28.� Chamber of Mines (hereafter COM) Executive Committee (hereafter EC) 20 August 1907 (Acc 6137/417, BL).

^29.�Kalgoorlie Miner 10 July 1900.

^30.� Kimberley '[c]onvicts were searched on entry to and exit from the station. They stripped in search houses and went naked to their cells where they assumed their blankets. When their term of imprisonment was over, they were held for five days, naked and with large leather gloves locked on their hands. This was to ensure that they had not swallowed any diamonds in the hope of selling them once they were free' (R. Turrell, 'Kimberley's model compounds', The Journal of African History, vol. 25, no. 1, 1984, pp. 59–75).

^31.� Report of the proceedings at meeting between Mr Richard Hamilton President of the Chamber of Mines of WA and the Council of WA Mine Owners, on Tuesday , 12 January 1904 at 7, Moorgate Street, London, EC, Local Committee Minutes, [filed out of sequence] (Acc 6137A/411).

^32.� COM, Book 4, EC, 2 October (Acc 6137A/414, BL), 20 December 1902 (Acc 6137A/415, BL).

^33.�Western Argus, 19 July 1900.

^34.�WW, 3 August 1906.

^35.� Elizabeth James, All that Glitters: Class, Conflict and Community in Cripple Creek, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1998, pp. 71–72, 76.

^36.� In 1909, for example, change rooms still did not exist on either the Lancefield Mine, the Augusta Gold Mine, or in other outback centres where the mines were 'dry or comparatively so' (Cullingworth report, Complaints in Legislative Assembly re inspection of mines, Acc 964, item 278, 1909, SROWA). Though instructed by the Mining Inspector in mid-1909 to provide a change house, the Lancefield had still not done so by mid-1910 (ibid., Colbran's report).

^37.� See for example, COM, Book 5, EC, 20 May 1903 (Acc 6137A/415, BL).

^38.� This practice was in place in the early years of the Trust, but lapsed until re-established in 1919. Mines managed by Bewick and Moreing, however, appeared to have used this service of the Bureau consistently since its inception.

^39.� COM, Book 8, EC, 17 March 1908 (Acc 6137A/418, BL).

^40.� Bureau (Kalgoorlie) Daily Record and Detective Occurrence Book (Acc 6605A, BL).

^41.� Mines Security (hereafter MS), notes in author's possession transcribed from files private to the Chamber of Mines, now the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of WA), p. 78.

^42.� COM, Minute books, Book 12, EC, 21 June 1921 (the quote is as reported to the Executive Committee of the Chamber by its delegation to the Minister (Acc 6137A/422, BL).

^43.� MS, notes in author's possession, pp, 137 (Walsh's draft report to Inspector Duncan, forwarded to J.W. Anderton, Secretary of the COM, [probably 1920].

^44.� Acc 964 item 3856 1908, Secretary for Mines Papers dealing with Gold Stealing Commission, p. 31 (Evidence); SROWA.

^45.�Ibid., pp. 158–159.

^46.� Item 565, Acc 1095, p. 29, SROWA. For a more comprehensive descriptions of the conditions in the mines see N. Segal 'Danger and health hazards: early decades of Western Australian gold mining', Journal of Australasian Mining History, vol. 4, September 2006, pp. 68–92.

^47.� James, All that Glitters, p. 72.

^48.� Victorian Law Reports (VLR), vol. 29, pp. 475–524; Argus Law Reports, vol. IX, Sept. 8, 1903, p. 174; Dec.1 1903, pp. 231–245.

^49.� COM, EC, 23 April 1907, Acc 6137/417 BL. However, it is not entirely certain that it used the mechanism of the Mines Trust to distribute the names.

^50.� COM, Book 14, EC, 13 July 1926 (Acc 6137A/424 BL).

^51.� Secretary for Mines Papers dealing with Gold Stealing Commission (Acc 964, item 3856, 1908, SROWA).

^52.�Ibid.

^53.�Ibid.

^54.�Ibid.

^55.� COM, Book 14, EC, 13 July 1926 (Acc 6137A/424 BL).

^56.� MS, Notes in author's possession, p. 64.

^57.�Ibid., p 73.

^58.� For example, it seemed to be relevant that a former jockey had been disqualified.

^59.� MS, Notes in author's possession, p. 85.

^60.� MS, Notes in author's possession, p. 58 (5 August 1915).

^61.� Olaf (Michael) Sawtell, of middle-class background, was a strong advocate for Aboriginal causes within the labour movement, and instrumental in establishing the IWW in Western Australia. Sawtell was one of 11 wobblies arrested on seditious conspiracy charges in 1916 and put on trial in Perth. He was to only one of the men to receive a prison sentence because of his threat to burn down the farm of Senator Paddy Lynch. He served further terms in prison in 1917 in eastern Australia because of his IWW activities and when returning to Western Australia found he was subject to 'a systematic boycott' (Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, p. 222). An organiser for the One Big Union in 1919, Sawtell eventually settled in Sydney where he ran a small health food store, engaged in various campaigns and died in 1971 (Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, pp. 212, 213, 222, et passim; J. Roe, 'Sawtell, Olaf (Michael) (1883–1971), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary volume, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2005, pp. 353–354.

^62.� MS, 12 August 1915.

^63.� The author relies on a membership list for the IWW in WA which she compiled from the files in the series Attorney-Generals, Correspondence Files 'W' series 1914–1927. Rex v Sawtell, Miller, Auwart, Horrocks, Johnstone, Lunn, Goller, Hanscombe and Parkinson. Seditious Conspiracy (Australian Archives). This list was compared, especially as far as the more active members of the IWW were concerned, with the information seen in employers' files.

^64.� MS, Notes in author's possession, p. 108.

^65.� MS, Notes in author's possession, p. 108.

^66.� MS, Notes in author's possession, p. 98 (post war?)

^67.� See , for example, the congregation of IWWs at the Corinthian Mine, Attorney-Generals, Correspondence Files 'W' series 1914–1927, Rex v Sawtell, Miller, Auwart, Horrocks, Johnstone, Lunn, Goller, Hanscombe and Parkinson. Seditious Conspiracy, Exhibit 99, Daly to Lunn, 11 October 1915.

^68.� MS, Notes in author's possession, pp. 89–90; 91, Kalgoorlie Miner 15 February 1918; 28 February 1918.

^69.� MS, Notes in author's possession, pp. 89–90; 91, Kalgoorlie Miner 15 February 1918; 28 February 1918.

^70.� See MS, Notes in author's possession, p. 125, request not to pay bonuses 22 December 1919; second request 20 February 1920.

^71.� Bolton to Bramall 29 June 1914, COM (Acc 6137A/290, BL).

^72.� Anderton to Maughan, 8 September 1915, COM (Acc 6137A/315 BL). A more extensive account of this important dispute is available in N. Segal, Capital, Gold Mining and Labour: Collective Action in the Western Australian Gold Mining Industry, 1896–1914, PhD thesis, UWA Business School, 2006.

^73.� MS, 23 August 1920, Copy of Board of Inquiry finding.

^74.� Mollie Bentley, 'Walsh, John Joseph (1862–1926), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 12, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1990, p. 372. The story of these tragic deaths and the capture of the perpetrators has been told elsewhere, for example in Brian Purdue, The Gold Stealers: The Murders of Inspector John Walsh and Sergeant Alexander Pitman, near Kalgoorlie in April 1926, Hesperian Press, Carlisle (WA), 2001.

^75.� MS, 27 May 1916. He was, however, again charged in 1921.

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