Green Bans, Red Union: The Saving of a City

GREEN BANS

RED UNION

HON DR MEREDITH BURGMANN was President of the Legislative Council of NSW (Labor). She was previously a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Macquarie University and first woman President of the Academics’ Union in NSW (now NTEU). She was actively involved in the green ban movement and was arrested defending the Victoria Street ban. She has written extensively on industrial relations and women’s issues and published books on misogyny and ASIO.

DR VERITY BURGMANN is Adjunct Professor of Political Science in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University and Director of the Roger Coates Labour History Project at www.reasoninrevolt.net.au. She is the author of numerous studies of labour and social movements, including ‘In Our Time’ (1985), Power and Protest (1993), Revolutionary Industrial Unionism (1995), Power, Profit and Protest (2003), Climate Politics and the Climate Movement (2012) and Globalization and Labour in the Twenty-First Century (2016).

GREEN BANS

RED UNION

THE SAVING OF A CITY

MEREDITH BURGMANN & VERITY BURGMANN

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann 2017

First edition published 1998. Second edition published 2017.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Burgmann, Meredith, 1947– author.

Title: Green bans, red union: The saving of a city / Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann.

Edition: 2nd edition.

ISBN: 9781742235400 (paperback)

9781742242644 (ebook)

9781742248103 (epdf)

Subjects: Green Bans – History. Builders Labourers’ Federation – NSW Branch – History. Building workers – Trade unions – New South Wales – History. Environmental activism – New South Wales – Resident action.

Other Creators/Contributors: Burgmann, Verity, author.

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover images BLF Green Ban demonstration, Sydney 1973; Sydney skyline at dusk. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

Abbreviations

Preface and acknowledgments to the 1998 edition

Introduction to the new edition

PART 1: PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS

The world’s first green bans

The preconditions for radical unionism

The greening of the union

PART 2: A NEW CONCEPT OF UNIONISM

Organisational principles and practices

Industrial relations strategies

Civilising the industry

Pioneering social movement unionism

Feminism and machismo: women as builders labourers

PART 3: PREVENTING THE PLUNDER

Defending the open spaces

Preserving the built environment

Saving the national estate

Breaking the bans, breaking the union

Green bans forever?

Endnotes

Sources

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NSWBLF and residents blockade Playfair Street, The Rocks 6

Builders labourers marching, October 1973 8

Mick McNamara with Arthur Calwell, 1966 28

NSWBLF Officials and organisers outside Sydney’s Central Court in 1974 32

The Green Ban float, May Day 1975 39

Protest outside Gallagher’s office, November 1973 47

ABLF Federal Executive, 1970 69

Margins strike march, 1970 83

The Siege of Shirley Street, May 1970 85

Vigilantes during 1970 margins strike 92

Voting to remain on strike during accident pay dispute, May 1971 112

Hogan’s shower, Newcastle, during amenities campaign, October 1972 118

Tom Hogan at anti-conscription rally, July 1972 129

Bob Pringle and Johnny Phillips fined for anti-Springbok activity, August 1972 132 Workplace meeting in support of Gurindji land rights claim, 1967 135 Advertising the 1972 black moratorium from a crane 137

International Women’s Day march, 1974 153

A protest in support of Dr Ros Harrison, June 1974 155

Janne Reed and Brian Rix during crane occupation, 1974 159

Battlers for Kelly’s Bush secretariat 170

Green Bans activists demonstrating in support of the Mundey/Owens/Pringle leadership 171

Residents inspect plans for Woolloomooloo 202

Gough Whitlam announcing funds to save Woolloomooloo, June 1975 206 Protesters at Mick Fowler’s house, January 1974 213

Cartoon by George Molnar 230

Builders labourers preventing scabs breaking The Rocks green ban, 1973 257

Jack Mundey arrested, October 1973 259

Joe Owens at ‘The Siege of Victoria Street’, January 1974 263

Mick Fowler at anti-Gallagher rally, October 1974 270

The Glebe Society opposes the Northwestern Expressway, 1972 289

Green Ban Supporters rally, March 1975 292

ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE 1998 EDITION

W hen federal BLF Intervention against its New South Wales branch abruptly ended the ‘green bans period’ of the NSWBLF in 1975, Meredith ended up with much of the union’s archival material in her sitting room, for the NSWBLF officials had had to vacate their Trades Hall office within 24 hours. She had been embroiled politically and socially with the union for five years and had cried along with the 2000 others at the final Town Hall meeting, which she tape-recorded. As an academic in the Politics Department at Macquarie University, Professor Don Aitkin persuaded her she was in a unique position to write a doctoral thesis on an exciting and important subject. Not only did she have in her possession most of the union’s archives, she had lived through the experience as one of their many frenetically active supporters. Thus much of this book is drawn from Meredith’s PhD thesis (completed in 1981), ‘A new concept of unionism: the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation 1970–1974’. This thesis should be consulted by any person interested in a more detailed organisational and industrial history of the union, for this book greatly condenses the thesis in order to provide a considerable amount of new material on the wider political activities of the union, especially the green bans.

Meredith began looking for the rest of the NSWBLF archives, some of which she found in extraordinary places. The Executive Minutes from 1963 to 1971, for example, were in the cellar of the Sussex Hotel with beer dribbling over them. Working with BLF documents was not easy, for the NSWBLF was distinguished by its imprecise attitude towards its organisational and administrative paper work. The union’s clear priority was active engagement in concrete struggles and campaigns, not the meticulous keeping of minutes and records – it could not even get its own name right. In 1967 the Industrial Registrar acknowledged receipt ‘of a document purporting to be the Annual Return of the Australian Builders Labourers’ Union’, but pointed out that: ‘as the name of the union registered under the Trade Union Act, 1881, as amended, is the Australian Builders’ Laborers’ Federation, NSW Branch, the said document is returned herewith’. Because the union itself most often used the form ‘Builders Labourers’ Federation’, this is the convention adopted here, except where quotations and names of documents demand otherwise. Even the journal, usually Builders’ Laborer, changed its spelling and exact title in cavalier fashion from issue to issue. The only point on which the union officials showed any strong preference was the elimination of the apostrophe following ‘builders’. They argued that ‘the Federation belongs to the labourers but the labourers don’t belong to the builders’.

The other primary sources used, such as posters, pamphlets, letters and other pieces of documentary evidence, were gathered by Meredith from a large number of places. Apart from her own gleanings, many were lent by helpful unionists and duly photocopied. She also collected the ephemeral material about the builders labourers produced by other unions and left groups, including those opposed to the union such as the federal BLF and the BWIU, and the hostile literature produced by the Master Builders’ Association. Thus Meredith had collected a valuable archival record of the union’s recent history, much of which has now been donated to the Noel Burlin Archives of Business and Labour at the Australian National University. In addition, she consulted all the Sydney daily newspapers for the period and, when appropriate, provincial or interstate papers. She perused the publications of the Communist Party of Australia, the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), the Socialist Party of Australia, the Master Builders’ Association and the federal body of the Australian Builders Labourers’ Federation. She examined court records where necessary and utilised relevant information from the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics.

These myriad sources were greatly augmented by the interviews, some more than four hours long, which Meredith conducted between 1975 and 1981 with 46 NSWBLF members, five NSWBLF office staff, nine officials from other unions, one federal BLF official, one employer representative (who wishes to remain anonymous), and 11 resident activists and other supporters. Of the 46 builders labourers, 26 had never worked as officials for the union. Of the 20 officials interviewed, many had only been officials for short periods because of the union’s policy favouring temporary organisers. As a result, Meredith discussed in depth with a considerable number of rank-and-file militants their own feelings and attitudes about what occurred. She also asked them how other labourers on their job-sites viewed certain acts – such as the green bans and women in the industry – to get some indication, even if second-hand, of the response of not so active members. Without leading, she tried hard to discover what the labourers felt were for them the most significant actions of the union. Several stressed that the interview had started them thinking, and often they would return some days later with more interesting stories or a forgotten leaflet. The experience of the rank-and-file unionists in struggle, as revealed in these interviews, is especially valuable, since ordinary union members do not write election pamphlets or set out policy in union documents, and only rarely do they write their memoirs.

While Verity has also carried out research on the green bans in particular, via newspapers and other sources, the richness of the material on which this book is based reveals primarily the unusual combination of advantages enjoyed by Meredith, as political scientist, participant and principal archivist. Meredith would like to thank her two PhD supervisors: Don Aitken, who persuaded her to write about the NSWBLF, despite her initial reservations that she was far too close to the subject matter; and Bob Connell, without whose encouragement and advice she would never have finished. She is grateful, too, for the helpful comments received at that time from her colleagues, notably Stewart Firth, Murray Goot, Winton Higgins, Tom Parsonage, Sabine Erika and Ted Wolfers. She wishes also to thank friends and family for their advice, assistance, support and endurance, particularly Glen Batchelor, Lorna and Victor Burgmann, Verity Burgmann, Beverley Firth, Pat Fiske, Heather Goodall, Helen Randerson, Ward Oliver, Pete Thomas, Paul Torzillo and Nadia Wheatley. She thanks all the men and women of the NSWBLF, especially those who allowed her to interview them and lent her papers, journals, pamphlets and other material.

Meredith’s election to the New South Wales Parliament prevented her from turning her thesis into a book. In 1995 Jack Mundey persuaded her to hand the job over to her little sister – a political scientist and labour historian. Verity’s role has been, firstly, to reduce Meredith’s wildly over-length thesis and change its original chronological structure to develop a thematically based narrative; secondly, to research and write considerably more about the green bans and the union’s other political and social activities, for the emphasis in Meredith’s thesis was on the union’s organisational development and industrial strategies; and, thirdly, to revise the conceptual framework within which we present this story, in the light of recent political trends and intellectual concerns. In this task, conducted over the past three years, Verity wishes to acknowledge gratefully the special assistance and advice of Stuart Macintyre, Andrew Milner, Jack Mundey and Joe Owens, and to thank John Dryzek, Ruth Fincher, Don Garden, George Hurchalla, Jane Jacobs, Bruce Scates and Graham Willett.

The team at UNSW Press and James Drown, the editor, have been great to work with. We are grateful for the institutional support given by the Political Science Department at Melbourne University and the assistance there of Rita De Amicis, David Lutz, Natalie Madaffari and Wendy Ruffles. We also appreciate the generosity of the University of Melbourne in assisting this project with a publications grant of $2000.

Finally, we offer this book in memory of Bob Pringle and the many other NSWBLF and green ban activists who are no longer with us.

Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

Twenty years ago when the first edition of Green Bans Red Union was published, we were uncertain whether its relevance would continue and its message grow. We need not have wondered. The green bans and the heroic workers who initiated and defended them have become iconic in the present-day struggle of communities to control the environment in which they live. Not just in Australia but internationally, the story of the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation (NSWBLF) and their world’s first environmental action struck a chord.

In recent times the problem of global warming has directed urgent attention to issues of environmental protection and emissions reduction. People around the world have waited impatiently for political leaders to tackle climate change but have been largely disappointed in their demands for meaningful action against the corporations who gain profit by polluting the planet.

Four decades ago the power of workers to prevent environmental damage – when politicians ducked the task – was forcibly demonstrated in the green bans movement of the NSWBLF, which refused to work on environmentally irresponsible projects and based this pioneering action on the concept of ‘the social responsibility of labour’. Workers’ organisations overseas are starting to contemplate green bans in the fight against global warming and are discovering the inspiring story of the NSWBLF.

The power of labour to protect the environment is commonly discounted in discussions of ecological problems, including climate change. For example, German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s classic 1992 book The Risk Society ignores the role that organised workers could play in confronting ecological irresponsibility. He writes about the importance of ‘public debate’, ‘dissent-ing voices’ and ‘alternative experts’ to prevent environmental hazards. Yet public outrage in the instance he discusses in his book – a lead crystal factory dropping flecks of lead and arsenic on the German town of Altenstadt – got nowhere. If you lived in Altenstadt, would you rather rely on the workers in the factory refusing to continue working until the emissions ceased or on ‘public debate’, ‘dissenting voices’ and ‘alternative experts’?

The residents of Sydney in the green bans period had already despaired of public debate and had found that dissenting voices and alternative experts were simply ignored, – until the builders labourers entered the scene and withdrew their labour. The power of these builders labourers at the point of production prevented the destruction and inappropriate development of large areas of environmental and cultural significance in the city.

As Sydney once again grapples with important community issues including the destruction of working class communities at Millers Point; the massive dislocation of inner city areas by the major freeway WestConnex; and the move towards privatisation of Sydney’s favourite Art Deco masterpiece The Bondi Pavilion, we realise that the issues are the same as those confronted by the builders labourers in the 1970s.

In fact, the Sirius building at the Rocks, which was purpose-built as public housing as a result of NSWBLF bans, has just been emptied of public tenants and slated for possible demolition by the conservative state government. The WestConnex sounds very similar to the Western Distributor and North Western Distributor that were planned to trifurcate inner-city Glebe in the 1970s but which were stopped by a combination of BLF action and new Whitlam minister Tom Uren. The voice (and muscle) of organised labour is needed once more.

Looking at the green bans in an international context makes it is easy to forget their very practical local significance. Our beautiful Sydney is much more beautiful because of the BLF and their green bans. The bans saved our historic Rocks, Woolloomooloo, Victoria Street and the suburb of Glebe. They preserved parks and green space like Kelly’s Bush and Centennial Park. They saved heritage buildings such as Lyndhurst, the Pitt Street Church and most of Martin Place.

The legacy of their bold action endures. To avoid ongoing green bans, governments responded with better laws and regulations around environmental and heritage issues, in particular the 1978 New South Wales Heritage Act and the 1979 Environment Planning and Assessment Act.

The green bans movement was immensely significant, but has tended to overshadow the union’s other extraordinary achievements. The NSWBLF confounded the caricature of unions as organisations uninterested in issues beyond the workplace and unconcerned with forms of oppression other than class. It combined industrial militancy and a tendency to encroach seriously on managerial prerogatives with ultra-democratic organisational processes such as limited tenure of office and decision-making by general meetings. And it also retained its serious commitment to environmental protection and the rights of women, migrants, Aborigines and gay people.

The NSWBLF was a pioneer in the history of international trade unionism, a precursor of the ‘social-movement unionism’ that arose at the very end of the twentieth century. It meets the five characteristics of social-movement unionism outlined in Kim Moody’s study of this international phenomenon of the 1990s: militancy; internal democracy; an agenda for radical social and economic change; a determination to embrace the diversity of the working class in order to overcome its fragmentation; and a capacity to appeal beyond its membership by using union power to lead community struggles. As we rightly celebrate the NSWBLF’s momentous green bans, it is worth acknowledging that it was much more than this: the NSWBLF was, in all aspects, a union ahead of its time.

Finally, we would like to thank all those wonderful environmentalists and union activists in Australia and around the world who continually harassed us about republishing our book which had become impossible to buy, except online and for an exorbitant amount.

We also wish we could thank our self-appointed proofreader Gough Whitlam who, having agreed to launch our book in 1998, sent us a list of typos, which readers will be pleased to know we have corrected.

Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann

November 2016

PART 1

PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS

THE WORLD’S FIRST GREEN BANS

Green bans’, ‘builders labourers’ and ‘Jack Mundey’ were household terms for millions of Australians during the 1970s. Sydneysiders in particular were polarised on the questions surrounding green bans and those who imposed them. To many, the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation (NSWBLF) represented the hideous spectre of working-class power maliciously halting progress, and restraining the liberty of property owners to undertake development, from which the public would benefit. To many others the builders labourers (or BLs) articulated the general interest of all except the greediest developers in preserving the built and natural environment from wanton destruction.

The union’s guiding principle, which aroused such strong emotions and which underpinned its environmental activism, was the concept of the social responsibility of labour: that workers had a right to insist that their labour not be used in harmful ways. Strongly associated with this principle was a conviction that the organised labour movement should concern itself with all manner of social and political issues, to contest exploitation and oppression in the wider society and not just in the workplace. The union did not merely impose green bans – refusing to work on environmentally injurious constructions – it also insisted upon the right of women to work in the industry on an equal basis with men, and frequently used its power to aid groups such as prisoners, homosexuals, Aborigines, students, the women’s movement, and poorer home-buyers, even imposing a range of non-environmental bans in defence of these oppressed, marginalised or vulnerable people.

The NSWBLF was one of Australia’s oldest unions. It was formed in the 1870s and registered under the New South Wales Trade Union Act of 1881 as the United Labourers. In 1912 it became the Builders Labourers’ Union; and in 1926 it joined with labourers’ unions in other states to form the Australian Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (ABLF). By the early 1970s the ABLF had a national membership of around 30,000 and covered all unskilled labourers and certain categories of skilled labourers employed on building sites: dogmen, riggers, scaffolders, powder monkeys, hoist drivers and steel fixers. Between 1970 and 1974 the New South Wales branch, with about 11,000 members, operated outside the traditional confines of the trade union movement, guided by many capable and committed officials but in particular by three outstanding union leaders: Jack Mundey, Joe Owens and Bob Pringle. Strongly influenced by New Left ideology (which emphasised equality, personal liberation, participatory democracy, environmentalism and direct action) the unskilled manual labourers of the NSWBLF used their industrial muscle to put their union’s advanced policies into action.

Above all, the union is remembered for its most spectacular application of the concept of the social responsibility of labour: the green bans. By October 1973, these bans had halted projects worth ‘easily $3000 million’ (at mid-1970s prices) according to the Master Builders Association (MBA). By 1975 bans had halted $5000 million of development, saving New South Wales from much of the cultural and environmental destruction it would otherwise have suffered.¹ The bans were a deliberate confrontation with the power of capital. In the absence of sufficiently sensitive planning and conservation regulations, the builders labourers took it upon themselves to dispute employers’ rights to build what they liked where they liked, and they were prepared to defend their bans on picket lines and at demonstrations.

Their action was the first of its type in the world. The international Dictionary of the Environment entry on ‘green bans’ comments they were ‘very effective in Australia, where they were first attempted’ and the Australian National Dictionary notes that the use of the term, now international, was recorded earliest in Australia.² The green bans were an entirely home-grown contribution to international environmental politics and radical practice, constituting ‘one of the most exciting chapters in trade unionism world wide’.³ Indeed the NSWBLF in this period can be seen as a prototype for the ‘social-movement unionism’ of the 1990s, which is characterised internationally by militancy, internal democracy, an agenda for radical social and economic change, a determination to embrace the diversity of the working class in order to overcome its fragmentation, and a capacity to appeal beyond their memberships by using union power to ‘lead the fight for everything that affects working people in their communities and the country’. Social-movement unionism constitutes, in short, a rehearsal for self-emancipation from below.⁴

The union was extraordinarily outward-looking, even enduring negative consequences for themselves in the form of foregone employment over the imposition of bans: ‘Green bans were altruistic’ as Mackie noted.⁵ The Australian black movement was gratified by the degree of the union’s commitment to Aboriginal rights. Homosexual liberationists found the stereotype of the homophobic building worker confounded by the union’s practical support for their cause. Women who entered the building industry appreciated the genuine egalitarianism of many of their new work mates. However, the union did not engage in such actions for purely altruistic reasons: because its class consciousness and radical awareness were especially strong, it saw itself as expressing the real collective self-interest of most people in confronting all manner of oppressions and preventing environmental degradation. In doing so it impressed and inspired constituencies far beyond its membership and even beyond the working class. Many New Left academics decided, on the basis of their interaction with the union, that the proletariat might be the midwife of history after all. The ‘middle-class matrons’ of Hunters Hill discovered this union of manual labourers was more sensitive to the natural beauty of Kelly’s Bush and more aware of the need for its preservation than conservative politicians and newspaper editors, and they were radicalised permanently by their experience. Justice Rodney Madgwick remarked at the time on their ‘moral force’. While the union’s many activities on the part of oppressed groups undoubtedly contributed to this force, the central moral question the union posed for the wider public was whether the pursuit of profit, invariably presented as ‘progress’, should override all other claims.

Jurgen Habermas’s account of the development of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ considers the way in which the rhetoric of economic ‘privacy’ protects some interests from public challenge. Thus issues seen as private ownership prerogatives are shielded from broader debate.⁶ It was precisely such private ownership prerogatives that the green ban movement most notably contested, and herein lay the glorious temerity of the NSWBLF. In challenging employers’ prerogatives, and successfully showing these traditional rights to be harmful to others and detrimental to the environment, the union confronted the very basis of the power and class relations that the public sphere habitually protects.

NSWBLF and residents blockade Playfair Street, The Rocks, 24 October 1973. Jack Mundey and the author Meredith Burgmann in the foreground. In the background are Nellie Leonard, John Clare, John Cox and Peter Wright. (Courtesy Fairfax)

In denying and thereby contesting employers’ longstanding perceived right to employ others to build whatever and wherever the profit motive dictated, the NSWBLF and its thousands of active members and supporters formed an alternative public sphere, or what Nancy Fraser has described as a ‘subaltern counterpublic’: an arena ‘where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’. Subaltern counterpublics have a dual function in stratified societies: as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; and as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed towards the wider public. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions, she writes, that their emancipatory potential resides, for this dialectic enables subaltern counterpublics to offset the advantages enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies.⁷

The union and its supporters clearly constituted such an alternative public sphere, attracting the support of disparate elements such as union activists, inner-city pensioners, Marxist academics, hippies, housewives, and acclaimed writers and intellectuals. Kay Anderson and Jane Jacobs note in their criticism of narratives about the green bans (which privilege a tale of class-based resistance led by male unionists) that the green ban movement had a scope extending well beyond a narrowly defined class struggle. They also stress the degree to which the movement not only transcended class boundaries, but gendered constructions of urban space that provide spatial expressions of the way women are consigned to the private sphere of the home and men to the public sphere of paid work. With women so prominent amongst the resident action groups, whose requests for assistance were the rationale for most green bans, Anderson and Jacobs argue that the green bans constituted a repositioning of ‘the flexible terrain upon which geographies of publicity and privacy are negotiated’, because such urban activism took these ‘community mothers’ beyond domestic concerns into ‘a framework of broader citizenry in which the orbits of publicity and privacy are under constant negotiation’.⁸

The green ban movement, by transcending class and gender divisions in a most dramatic way, yet being based on the power wielded by those engaged in productive labour, can be seen to function as a space of withdrawal and regroupment, and as a base for agitation directed towards the general public. However, while Anderson and Jacobs understandably take issue with the depiction of the builders labourers’ involvement with the resident activists as ‘a kind of heroic, rescue operation’ (whereby the women are ‘escorted into the public sphere of politics’ by the builders labourers)⁹ there would have been no green bans without the NSWBLF.

This is the crucial difference between an alternative public sphere and social-movement unionism. Social-movement unionism often includes the formation of a subaltern counterpublic (because its constituencies are wider than its membership) but it directs this agitated and agitating public towards specific goals through actions undertaken primarily by a union. It was because the green ban movement constituted a subaltern counterpublic mobilised by social-movement unionism that it was not merely challenging and popular but also – through the power of that union to withdraw its labour – extremely effective.

Builders labourers marched from First Fleet Park to Premier Askin’s Office, in October 1973 (left to right: Seamus Gill, unknown, Joe Owens, Bob Pringle, Duncan Williams).

A new phrase was needed for such a significant new action. Precisely because these bans were not imposed in any direct sense in the interests of the workers concerned, who were even denying themselves work in the process, the usual terminology of ‘black ban’ seemed inappropriate. Indeed, the altruistic and ecologically aware nature of the action demanded a completely new nomenclature. In February 1973, more than eighteen months after the movement had started, Mundey coined the term ‘green ban’ to distinguish it from the traditional union black ban imposed by workers ‘to push their own issues’. He argued that the term was ‘more applicable as they are in defence of the environment’. A greater sensitivity about racist language had also made use of ‘black’ less attractive. One of the Battlers for Kelly’s Bush refers to Mundey’s ‘brilliance’ in coining the term, reckoning it ‘a turning point in public support’, removing as it did the ‘ugly connotation’ of black ban. Mundey realised the imposition of a green ban had ‘much more positive social and political implications’ than those associated in the public mind with black bans. Affirmative rather than negative, the neologism helped the message behind the action to be heard. Green bans, unlike black bans, contained both an environmental element and a social element: they expressed the union’s determination to save open space or valued buildings and to ensure that people in any community had some say in what affected their lives.¹⁰

By mid-1973 ‘green ban’ was being used regularly to describe the union’s actions. The Canberra News was possibly the first to use the term when it reported on 23 May 1973: ‘Mr Mundey said today that the green ban on Black Mountain had the backing of most Canberra people’. The Adelaide News commented on the new term on 20 August 1973. By this stage the eastern states’ media were playing with a range of colours to describe the activities of the NSWBLF: on 28 October 1973 the Sunday Mirror claimed ‘Jack (Green Ban) Mundey’ was threatening to place an ‘amber ban’ on a city hotel; and the NSWBLF’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade Tasmanian unionists to ban the damming of Lake Pedder was touted as a ‘blue ban’. At this time, press use of the term ‘greenies’ designated supporters of the NSWBLF green bans,¹¹ from which point it later broadened to embrace environmentally concerned people in general.

The power of the term was acknowledged by those against whom the bans were directed. During the 1973 New South Wales state election campaign, when the green bans were a hotly contested issue, both employer and state government authorities attempted, with little effect, to rename them ‘red bans’ to stress the dangerously radical orientation of the union and the revolutionary implications of the bans.¹² The union’s other main opponent, the federal organisation of its own union – whose employer-sponsored Intervention against its New South Wales branch late in 1974 was to bring this remarkable period to a close – declined to use the term ‘green bans’ precisely because it was associated with the New South Wales branch and emblematic of its wide cross-class support. The federal BLF insisted on the long-winded ‘environmental bans’ or persisted with the negative designation of ‘black bans’.

The modern European green movement has its origins, at least etymologically, in the activities of the NSWBLF. Speaking in the Senate on 21 March 1997, Senator Bob Brown of the Australian Greens recalled:

Petra Kelly the feisty, intelligent, indefatigable German Green came to Australia in the mid-l970s. She saw the green bans which the unions, not least Jack Mundey, were then imposing on untoward developments in Sydney at the behest of a whole range of citizens who were being ignored by parliaments. Thank glory that, because of their action in the mid-1970s, such places as the Rocks, one of the most attractive parts of Sydney, still exist. She took back with her to Germany this idea of Greens’ bans, or the terminology. As best we can track it down, that is where the word ‘green’ as applied to the emerging Greens in Europe came from.

Bob Brown and Peter Singer claim the significance of the green bans movement was more than etymological, that Kelly did not merely import vocabulary into Germany: but was so inspired by the green ban movement that it was mainly responsible for her launching the German Green Party; that she would often speak about the impact that the green bans had upon her and her philosophy; and that she was especially impressed with the linkage achieved between environmentalists and a progressive trade union movement.

Similarly, when Paul Ehrlich visited Australia during the green bans period, he considered the phenomenon of workers uniting with resident action groups and conservationists in direct action to protect the environment ‘the most exciting ecological happening, not only in Australia, but overseas as well’.¹³ In the light of the failure of green politics in the past two decades to achieve similar spectacular alliances between trade unionists and, in Mundey’s words, ‘enlightened middle-class people’,¹⁴ the success of the green bans has continuing implications for green political practice today and in the future.

Because the union’s activism was concerned not merely with the environment, but a wide range of social issues, the subject matter of this book raises many currently fashionable concerns about the rights of women, indigenous Australians and homosexuals, while confounding many of the paradigms within which these concerns are expressed. New social movement theory has tended to view these matters as lying beyond the parameters of trade union action and has effectively discounted the role of the labour movement in achieving broader social changes. The NSWBLF’s achievements in precisely the areas dear to new social movement activists contradict the assertions of many theorists who dispute the efficacy or even possibility of organised working-class action in pursuit of such aims. Only a certain sort of union could initiate, develop and maintain green bans. The NSWBLF sponsored the green bans, not simply because the environmental consciousness of its leading ideologues was especially high, but because it was a dramatically different kind of union. The NSWBLF’s philosophy and practice challenged not just developers but employers, governments and traditional trade union structures. To comprehend the green bans, the union that produced them must be understood: a union that developed what Mundey described as a ‘new concept of unionism’.¹⁵ The publicity accorded the green bans has obscured the other ways in which this union was remarkably different from other unions, even those generally regarded as being left-wing. If the circumstances that prompted the bans had not arisen, the innovative organisational forms and the peculiarly militant strategies pursued by the union would still deserve their place in history for the very real challenge they represented to customary labour movement and industrial relations practices.

For instance, rank-and-file control of union affairs and limited tenure of office for union officials were as threatening to the established trade union bureaucracy as the green bans were to the developers. The unionists’ contempt for arbitration procedures and enthusiasm for direct action, industrial sabotage and workers’ control of jobsites, not only created considerable unease among the union bureaucracy but provoked immediate retribution from enraged employers and their allies in government. Such opposition was quite apart from the angry reactions in these same circles to the green bans. The hostility the union aroused in public and the antagonism it encountered from within the ranks of the labour movement were due at least as much to these more generally challenging aspects of the union as to the green bans. The ultimate demise of the NSWBLF was not a victory merely for those who opposed its green bans, but for all who feared its new concept of unionism. Similarly the support and enthusiasm for the NSWBLF was engendered not simply by its green bans, but also by these features that were as essential to it as the principle of the social responsibility of labour.

Only a union that was growing in strength as a union, with a union leadership that enjoyed the support and welcomed the active participation of the membership, could countenance such a contentious form of union action as the green bans. Its successes in improving membership levels and participation rates, and its remarkable achievements in improving wages and conditions through militancy, clearly aided its wider radical political and social agenda. Such activity came more naturally and easily to a union that was also very committed to and successful in pursuing normal trade union aims, albeit by abnormally democratic and combative means. These two aspects of the NSWBLF – the politically radical and the militantly economistic – were interconnected outcomes of its remarkably new concept of unionism.

THE PRECONDITIONS FOR RADICAL UNIONISM

Imust be asked why the green bans movement emerged at this time, in this place, in this union. Andrew Jakubowicz has examined the eruption of the movement in the context of urban struggle and class politics. ¹ The emphasis of this study is on the union, and it investigates why the NSWBLF took the leap which dramatically extended the concept of unionism, while other left unions remained bound by traditional parameters, and why it was the NSWBLF and not other unions that physically confronted capital on the question of socially useful labour.

The media opinion of the time was that the militancy and political activity of the NSWBLF was simply a product of the building industry boom. However, this does not explain why other building industry unions, notably the Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU), failed to respond to the same stimulus. If the cause was the strategic position builders labourers held within the industry, it does not account for the fact that the BLF in the other states remained unaffected and were even hostile to such radical gestures. If the influence of a de-Stalinised Communist Party within a generally radicalised political climate was the answer, why did most other Communist unions remain unchanged?

A peculiar conjuncture of factors explain the phenomenon: the general economic and industrial relations conditions; the building boom and technological and structural changes within the industry; the radical ideological influences on the membership and leadership of the union; the recent history of the union, that made it especially responsive to these conditions; and the way in which the occupation of being a builders labourer inclined them to unconventional activity.

THE ECONOMY

Just as unionists in many other industrialised countries experienced militancy in this period, Australian workers were making significant progress in improving their real wages and conditions through industrial action. Working days lost annually per employee in industrial disputes in Australia had averaged around 0.2 during the 1950s and early 1960s, but rose dramatically to 0.46 in 1969 and to a high of 1.29 in 1974. This successful strike activity demonstrated to many for the first time the efficacy of collective action and induced many unions to seek over-award payments by negotiating outside the system. This tendency was encouraged by low unemployment, and the fact that people entering the workforce during the late 1960s had no memory of the depression or war years, and therefore had higher expectations than previous generations of workers. The high inflation rates of the period also encouraged militant wage demands in both the blue- and white-collar sectors: a pattern replicated internationally. Significant wage rises were being demanded, and more often, usually with success precisely because the inflationary times allowed employers to pass the cost increases on to customers.²

The militancy, consequent upon a high degree of job security in a booming and inflationary economy, was encouraged further by the effective removal after 1969 of any threat that industrial courts would use their penal powers against militant unions. This was the significance of the unions’ triumph in the 1969 general strike which contested the gaoling of Melbourne tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea for his union’s refusal to pay fines levied by an industrial court. Jack Mundey announced in August 1970:

I think tactics in strikes, particularly since 1949, have been so tailored as to give a high priority to the penal powers threat, and thus the need to ‘get them back to work’ to avoid fines.... With the removal of some of the teeth from the penal powers in May 1969, longer strikes including general strikes are likely to become the order of the day.

Moreover, the penal powers had increasingly chained union activity to the grind of the arbitration system. Mundey believed unionists, including the left, had fallen victim to ‘arbitration-mindedness under the influence of the penal powers’, and that the 1969 general strike was ‘decisive in cracking the sense of frustration which was becoming universal among workers’. The Clarrie O’Shea case and the subsequent defeat of the penal sanctions cleared the way for militant action and the chance for unions to be ‘on the offensive’.³

CHANGES IN THE BUILDING INDUSTRY

The conditions for offensive action by workers were particularly propitious in the building industry. The industry was relatively unaffected by the slight recession of 1971–72, and had experienced unprecedented boom conditions and full employment from the late 1960s until 1974. The builders labourers rediscovered the truth of the old maxim that militancy thrives in a favourable economic climate. ‘Militancy worked differently to what I’d always thought,’ Dean Barber discovered. ‘When there’s plenty of money around, the fridges are full and there’s no worries about getting a job, that’s when blokes become militant.’

The building boom facilitated militant activity and easier union organisation. More specifically, the developers’ need for speedy completion of speculative projects, financed by venture capital loans at high interest rates, gave a tactical advantage to the building industry unions, which