Insisting that labour rights transcend national rights is hardly a stretch for unionists. What to actually do about non-national workers inside national labour markets is a different matter. This paper uses the examples of the Australian and Israeli labour movements to argue that nation building and national identity formation are historically central labour movement projects. Because the labour movement has sought to use the state to achieve its goals, it has needed to defend the state's boundaries. Thus 'labour citizenship' has been tightly wound into national citizenship. In a world of increasingly transnational labour markets however, unions need to break out from their 'nation-centrism' and look for opportunities to develop a transnational perspective on labour citizenship.

     The Israeli and Australian examples are not offered up to bewail about how much better history could have been 'if only' they had adopted a less nationalist version of labour citizenship. Both movements have considerable achievements to their credit that have indisputably benefited their members. Nevertheless they demonstrate that nationalism is hard wired into the union idea once you decide that solidarity for practical reasons has its limits.

     In a recent article for the Southern California Law Review, Jennifer Gordon links the forms of nation state citizenship with the 'labour citizenship' workers gain from being union members:

From the perspective of workers, labor citizenship refers to the status of membership in a workers organisation, and to the act of participation in the decision making processes of that organisation with the goal of improving wages, working conditions, and the dignity of work. As these three things come together, they may forge a fourth component, identity, as participants come to identify with their organisation and their fellow 'labor citizens,' and stand in solidarity with them.^[1]

There are striking parallels in the status gained through both labour citizenship in a union, and nation-state citizenship.

You gain the status of labor citizenship if you become part of a union, just as you gain national citizenship by being admitted to membership in a country. In the union setting, that status entitles members to a package of rights exclusively available to insiders and binds them to a set of responsibilities that outsiders do not bear, as nation-state citizenship does.^[2]

Like nations, unions are concerned with establishing boundaries. Gordon's article is a response to the experience of the US labour movement in trying to reconcile the labour rights of illegal workers with the labour standards of their existing members. Her concept can also be applied to historical examples of labour movements as nationalist movements. Both Israel and Australia are distinct among (geographically non-specific) Western nations because of the significance of trade union movements in the creation of their nation states and national identities.

     The classic nationalist movements of Europe had been led by nation building elites keen to break down old feudal, monarchical and ecclesiastical hierarchies (e.g. the Italian unification movement championed by Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860-1). They usually pre-dated the 'trade union' organisational form as we might recognise it today. Nevertheless theories of nationalism connect to theories of labourism through their emphasis on identity and solidarity. Tom Nairn proposed that the nation is a defence against capitalist social atomisation by an inter-class community, a defence that seeks an independent road to capitalist modernity.^[3] Benedict Anderson described nations as imagined communities: 'Imagined' because, while most nationals never meet each other, they still have an image of their own communion; 'communities' because, regardless of internal inequalities and exploitation, the nation is always conceived of as a deep horizontal comradeship. ^[4] Nationalism through a labour movement is solidarity expressed through a concrete source of identity: work.

     There would be few nations as apparently dissimilar as Israel and Australia. The former is regularly a centre of world crisis, and the latter is barely noticed north of its home continent. One has had to struggle for survival; the other has had no real military threats since World War II. Closer examination reveals similarities: both are 'European' nations in Asia – Israel in the Middle East, Australia in the South East. Both are settler societies – with foundation myths of heroic pioneers battling against the odds to build the nation. Both faced 'odds' which included indigenous populations forcibly evicted to make way for the settlers. Both can claim a formal link to the British Empire. Israel, situated in the territory of the former British mandate of Palestine, is eligible to join Australia in the once British Commonwealth of Nations. Both draw their conceptions of nations and nationalism from nineteenth century Europe.

     Australian nationalism conceived of itself as a 'Young Tree Green' that could become a new Britannia in the Pacific – with a hardy population of white skinned pioneers. Actual Britannia, despite ruling the waves, was the 'Old Dead Tree' that needed reinvigoration. The 'missing' original verse of Advance Australia Fair makes the 'young and free' nation the direct heir to the time past 'when gallant Cook from Albion sailed'. The founders of Israel who were inspired by Theodor Herzl's political Zionist project believed that having a Jewish nation would 'normalise' the Jewish people. They would no longer be the soft, vulnerable city dwellers of Central Europe, confined by a legacy of discrimination, culture and economic trajectory to a narrow range of urban occupations. In the Land of Israel they would be the robust tillers of the soil. They would redeem, and be redeemed by, the land. According to Ze'ev Sternhell a loathing of the Diaspora was fundamental to Zionism, and the founders of Israel viewed its way of life with contempt.^[5] The Zionist project was not just as a way of finding a homeland for the oppressed Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. It was also a solution for Jews in the emancipated nations of Western Europe where (on the face of it) culturally assimilated Jewry seemed to do quite well. One of the great centres of such assimilation was Vienna, where the Hungarian born Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl observed the triumph of political anti-Semitism in municipal politics. Formerly a German nationalist, Herzl now concluded that assimilation would fail, concluding that only a restored state offered a solution to Jewish troubles.^[6]

     Both Australia and Israel acquired citizens in 1947 and 1948 under 'labour' governments. Israel made a grand 'declaration of independence'; Australia needed to fix an administrative anomaly created by Canada legislating to create citizens, while Australians remained British subjects. Who was or could become a citizen was restricted – Israel to Jews, Australia to persons of British and Irish heritage.^[7]

     At the 2006 Congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) announced a scheme called 'UnionsAustralia'. Concerned that confusion over which union to join was putting off people from joining any union at all in their workplaces, UnionsAustralia would be a one-stop-shop where someone could join a union through the ACTU directly. After six months the peak body would refer their membership to the correct union for their workplace or industry.^[8] The scheme is actually similar to the system the Israeli labour movement has operated for many decades. The General Federation of Labour, or Histadrut, is the peak body that was also the first Jewish labour organisation in Palestine. All wage earners are eligible to be Histadrut members, and the first step to joining a union is to join the Histadrut. It predates the state itself as a key institution in building up the Palestinian Yishuv (literally 'settlement' the pre-state name for Palestine's Jewish community), and is intimately bound up with the Zionist project.^[9]

     The rapid rise to prominence of the Australian labour movement, both industrially and politically, has been well documented. There were major early successes like the establishment of the eight-hour day principle, the survival of and recovery from epic confrontations with employers such as the Great Shearers Strike of the 1890s. The world's first 'labour' government was the Dawson Ministry of the Queensland Colonial Parliament, and by the second decade of Federation the Australian Labor Party had formed a national government. To accommodate (and tame) the demands of the labour movement within the new Commonwealth, White Australia would keep out cheap foreign workers, and tariff protection would bolster local employment. In 'a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation', the white working class would become a continental labour aristocracy. Australia was for many years one of the most highly unionised first world countries.^[10] In 1909 union leader and Labor politician William Guthrie Spence (1846-1926) described the labour movement as 'an almost dominant factor in the political life of the community'.^[11]

     Not as unionised, however, as Israel. In a speech to the Russian branch of the Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) party in 1917, the Zionist Marxist leader Ber Borochov (1881-1917) proclaimed that in the Yishuv the 'Jewish working class is not as yet large; it nevertheless plays prominent role.'^[12] The Histadrut (established 1920) as a key social institution not only predates the establishment of Israel; it also predates the formation of a capitalist economy in Palestine. In Europe capitalism had created the working class that formed trade unions. By contrast the Histadrut had brought a European style labour movement to the feudal economy of old Palestine – run by 'notables' and hereditary land owners, and thereby brought capitalism in the form of business enterprises and land purchases. Thus it functioned as an employer and as a proto-state pre-1947. The main political parties of early Israel were various shades of Socialist Zionism, and Israel's governments were all 'labour' until 1977. The Histadrut included from almost the beginning of its existence the majority of the (Jewish) workforce in its membership. The Histadrut, as a major owner of land and business within the Yishuv, was a supplier of work. A Histadrut membership card was worth having because you might not gain access to employment and social services without it.^[13]

     Australia's Labor Party has never been as politically successful as Israel's Labour parties. The Australian movement's peak body, the ACTU (established 1927), has also only gradually taken on a co-ordinating role within the movement acceptable to its constituent unions. The Histadrut, however, has been from the beginning a 'state within a state', operating provident funds, unemployment funds, banks, health services, construction companies, welfare funds, kibbutzim, theatres, schools, factories and pension funds exclusively for its members. Those members needed to be contributing to the advancement of the Jewish community in Palestine, an ideology labelled 'constructivism'.^[14]

     The closest the Australian labour movement has come to being a business owner has may have come from the Israeli example. The President of the ACTU in the 1970s, Bob Hawke, was and is a strong admirer of Israel – particularly for the centrality of the labour movement to its national life. His attempts to set up ACTU business partnership, such as the ACTU-TNT joint venture, specifically followed Histadrut advice. He also proposed that the ACTU do business with a Histadrut owned construction company.^[15]

     The strongest similarities between the Israeli and Australian examples derive from their contributions to nationalism and national identity. While both paid lip service to working class internationalism (though rejecting communism as an impractical and/or alien ideology) their practices both reflected exclusionist, if not outright chauvinistic outlooks. In recent years there have been attempts by writers such as Keith Windschuttle to argue that the White Australia Policy was not really racist. There has also been controversy over former US President Jimmy Carter's using the term 'apartheid' to describe Israeli policies.^[16] When examining the history of Australia and Israel's policies to promote and protect the interests of Hebrew Europeans and Anglo Celts it is reasonable to compare the practical effects of those policies. In the case of Australia and Israel the labour movement extended 'settler capitalism'. Not because they were 'bourgeoisified' or stricken with 'false consciousness', but because as collective movements they were an effective means of ensuring the benefits of settlement were shared as widely as possible among the settlers, and that out-groups were clearly excluded: Arabs, Asians etc. When discussing the concepts of religion, nation and race the usual cautions about unstable meanings should apply. Certainly for Jews there were debates about whether they constituted a 'race', while the notion of a white race was commonly accepted for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However in practice the exclusionary outcomes were similar. In both Israel and Australia unions exhorted employers to hire only Hebrew and White labour respectively.

     Borochov and Spence are two significant figures for the early Israeli and Australian labour movements whose views are interesting to compare. On the surface are quite dissimilar. Most obviously concerning how long they actually lived in their nations. Borochov spent most of his career in Russia, Europe and the USA, although his remains are interred in Kibbutz Kinneret in the Jordan Valley. Spence emigrated from Scotland to Victoria at age five. Borochov was a more politically radical figure than Spence: he founded the Russian Poale Zion as a revolutionary Marxist party with a Zionist minimum programme. Spence was a trade union organiser whom, while not afraid of 'direct action' had essentially modest political aims as reflected in the conservatism of his most lasting achievement: the Australian Workers Union (AWU). In Palestine the Poale Zion party leadership included the founder of the Histadrut and later the State of Israel itself, David Ben-Gurion. The Yishuv Poale Zion organisation split into a 'Right' party that became the mainstream Israeli Labour party Mapai, and a 'Left' party whose members founded the Israeli Communist party as well as Zionist Left parties like Meretz. Spence ended his Labor career in the split over conscription, joining Billy Hughes to become an MP for the Nationalist party. Borochov's last political pronouncements suggest (at least according to the Right Poale Zion) that he was starting to prioritise nationalism. Moshe Cohen quotes him as arguing '[w]hen we say "Jewish Nation" we know that it has existed even before the class division in modern society.'^[17]

     Spence was not a theoretician like Borochov, and Borochov was not a crude racist like Spence. Borochov denied that Zionism was guilty of 'the odious crime of wishing to oppress and expel the Arabs from Palestine', and predicted that '[n]ormal relations between the Jews and the Arabs will and must prevail.'^[18] Spence argued that the 'Anti-Socialist' ('invariably the most unpatriotic person to be found') desired coloured labour because he was 'a born tyrant, and as the white Australian will not stand his tyranny he must have a nigger to order about.'^[19] Nevertheless in his major theoretical work 'The National Question and the Class Struggle' (1905), Borochov referred to 'the policy of the Australian government as regards immigrants.' 'It is', he wrote, 'quite clear that these restrictions on immigration are not instituted in the interests of capital but rather in the interests of the workers.'^[20]

     Borochov described the significance of the national question for the Jewish proletariat's development of class-consciousness in materialist terms. The class struggle, he argued:

can only take place where the worker toils; in other words, where he has succeeded in occupying a definite workplace. The weaker his status at that position, the less ground he has for a systematic struggle.

As the class struggle could only occur in a workplace, that workplace needed a national territory.^[21] What would distinguish Jewish immigration to Palestine from previous 'wanderings' would be that formerly Jews 'had to adapt themselves to the needs of the native population; their primary function was to satisfy the native consumers' needs'.

With the migration into Palestine the situation will change radically. The welfare and functions of Jewish immigrants in Palestine will depend not on the native population but on the foreign market.

The Jewish proletariat in Palestine would avoid the usual 'one-sided dependence of the Jews on the native population' which led to 'national oppression and persecutions'. It would now be able to wage a class struggle against a national bourgeoisie – the inevitable and necessary step towards socialism.^[22]

     The White Australia agenda also had a 'positive' aspect – building a nation for the white working man to prove that he could master the harsh environment of Australia. Spence believed the exclusion of non-whites offered 'a chance for the development of the Australian continent of a great nation of the white race.'^[23]

The [Labor] party stands for racial purity and racial efficiency – industrially, mentally, morally and intellectually. It asks the people to set up a high ideal of national character, and hence it stands strongly against any admixture with the white race. True patriotism should be racial. True self-government means the government of Self – the preservation of Self from trespassing on the rights of others. No class-ruled people can ever be a self-governing people.^[24]

Starting from different directions, Borochov and Spence reached similar conclusions. Workers needed an ethnically specific national space within which to pursue their ultimate aspirations. This could not occur while dwelling in a nation that did not 'belong' to them, i.e. while other peoples inhabited and worked in those lands. In such a situation there was a constant danger from dependency on the labour of others, and vulnerability to class rule that could not be properly resisted.

     The Histadrut was clear from early on that it was primarily concerned with the Jewish working class – both creating it and sustaining it. Palestinian rural workers suffered when the feudal landlords sold land to Jews and Jewish workers replaced them as a matter of policy. The Histadrut believed the welfare of Jewish workers was inextricably bound up with the creation of a Jewish state. Australian labour self-identity was also bound up with the need to protect the white working class from competition with, but also contamination from, foreign labour that was Chinese or South Sea Islander. Aboriginal people barely seemed part of the same economy as white workers (despite being a vital labour force for the cattle industry). Except for radical fringes like the communists, the Australian labour movement was uninterested in their plight – and reinforced it by advocating a White Australia policy that required internal enforcement of reserve living and tolerated the non-payment of wages.^[25]

     Racist sentiments could co-exist in the Australian labour press with a strident anti-Imperialism that condemned Britain's exploitation of India and war against the Boers in South Africa. A capitalist Britain could not be trusted not to sell out its white brothers. Australia's dependency on the British Empire was resented, and yet the resentment often stemmed from Britain being insufficiently committed to Australia, such as when the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was signed in 1902 to Australian consternation.^[26] Labour Zionism, considering itself part of the international socialist movement, was also committed to an anti-Imperialist outlook that supported the independence of India. The Labour Zionists made great efforts to gain the support of Gandhi for the Jewish National Home. Strategically, however, Ben-Gurion and other leaders recognised that the Yishuv depended on the British mandate for its survival, and the main resentment of the British derived from their insufficient commitment to carrying out the Balfour Declaration.^[27] For the White Australia the 'old tree' and the imperialist were the same: Britain. For the Yishuv the 'old tree' was the Diaspora, and the imperialist was Britain. Nationalism in both Australia and Israel may have emphasised self-reliance, but that self-reliance needed the space created by great and powerful allies. Both the Australian and Israeli movements bluntly and directly pushed for great powers, first Britain, then the USA, to protect their states. In both cases these approaches recognised of the real situation for settler societies precariously placed among enemies.

     On an ideological level as, it can readily be seen that both labour movements had 'masculinist' pre-occupations, to accompany the emphasis on self-reliance. Luke Trainor describes the nationalism of this period as deeply 'masculinist', and Zionist writers such as Max Nordau exhorted Jews to 'revive an old tradition', leaving the ghettos to 'once again become deep-chested, taut-limbed, steely eyed men.'^[28] Russell Ward's The Australian Legend famously described the 'typical Australian' as 'a practical man, rough and ready in his manners.'^[29] Australia was the place where the British race could more readily prove its mettle that in Britain itself. Ward quotes Samuel Sidney as observing '[t]he timber of Australia is so different from that of Europe that English workmen are very helpless, until instructed by bush hands.'^[30] White Australia was proof that the White race, contrary to certain commonly held perceptions, was not 'unsuited' to certain parts of the world. Australia demonstrated that the white race had a distinct frontier role, not just a cosseted place in the metropole. Zionist thinkers (and pioneers settlers) like Aaron David Gordon believed something even more fundamental was wrong with Diaspora Jewish existence. Even without anti-Semitism, the overwhelmingly urban and bourgeois existence of European Jews, according to Gordon and others, was unnatural. Because their labour was not tilling the soil and producing goods and services, they were spiritually impoverished compared to other peoples. Jews were concentrated in the abstracted occupations of modern, rationalist society. They acquired a true homeland – a space which they could cultivate and redeem as their own, and thus redeem themselves from a spiritually deadening, cosmopolitan deracination. Only concrete, physical labour to build a Jewish state would do it. Thus 'Labour Zionism' had a double meaning. The labour movement of workers in the land of Israel was about venerating the act of labour as redemptive and transformative in its own right. The Jewish working class would redeem the nation. The binary contrasts of these ideas were: rugged against soft; tough against yielding. The nation would acquire 'manly' virtues that had been lost in lives of domesticated urban softness.^[31]

     Both movements' social and political aims were in practice limited, emphasising the practical, concrete and pragmatic in their socialisms. In Israel Mapai under Ben-Gurion's leadership became an anti-Marxist, centrist party despite its Borochovian roots. Its policies prioritised establishing and defending the Jewish state. Despite rhetorical flourishes (Golda Meir's promise of 'socialism in our time' during her premiership in the 1970s) and sponsorship of the Kibbutz movement (which only ever embraced a small minority of Israelis) no plan to break with the capitalist economic system was ever proposed. In Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century, Alfred Metin called the governing ideology of Australia 'socialism without doctrine', and radical journalist William Lane described socialism as about 'being mates'. This was not to say that there were no places for political and intellectual contestation in the movements: Socialist Zionism still included Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist currents within Palestine; and Australian unionists debated reform and revolution. However it was the pragmatic nationalists who led the way.

     Theoretically people can imagine a community bound by work and rights, that holds differences in national status to be less important. In practice, it is very easy for unions to step into restrictionist nationalism: 'our jobs for our people' is a sentiment underlying many a campaign against foreign workers. The Australian and Israeli movements at times were simply unable to see the outside groups as workers at all. Their examples demonstrate how unions are often trapped within a nation state framework because they demand regulation from the nation state. Therefore they become defacto enforcers of boundaries against other workers. Such international labour organisations that exist are 'peak' bodies rather than grassroots ones.

     Transnational labour citizenship is advocated by Jennifer Gordon as an approach for the US labour movement to cope with the contradictions of a 'undocumented' non-citizen workforce that it is increasingly unrealistic to keep out. In the first instance transnational labour citizenship would be a new immigration status, which would entitle a holder to work in more than one country. Such an arrangement would require an agreement between governments, while its day to day operation would require non-government transnational labour organisations, unions not bound to one nation state, but present in both the sending and receiving ends of the transnational labour market. It would operate as a public/private collaboration aimed at fostering genuine labour citizenship not only among migrants as a group, but among all workers in the area across the boundaries of nationality, race and immigration status.^[32]

     The Farm Labor Organising Committee (FLOC), based in both the US Midwest and Monterrey Mexico has already operated such a bi-national organising strategy since 2004. Contact is maintained with guest workers on both sides of the border. Not only are they involved in collective bargaining where the guest workers are employed; when the workers return home to Mexico they hold house meetings to discuss their concerns and union strategies. They also arrange regional gatherings for members to get to know each other across villages, receive training on contract enforcement, and to elect local representatives.^[33]

     Proposals such as Gordon's directly challenge the boundary setting and exclusionary approaches of Australian and Israeli unions. Both labour movements, for understandable historical reasons, are tied to their nation states even when they are politically at odds with their governments. Neither movement however, will be able to rely on keeping out the non-citizen as a means of maintaining and defending labour standards. Israel's Histadrut needs to deal with Palestinian workers whether it wants to or not, and Australian unions will find that the 'guest worker' issue will not go away with changes in visa legislation. Labour movements will not have a future that defends the privileges of 'insiders' against 'outsiders'. What they can do, says Gordon, is 'reject the idea that labor citizenship is a fortress, and see it instead as a pool of water fed by a spring, defined and indeed kept alive by a constant flow of new workers.'^[34]