Review
Green Bans, Red Union, Environmental activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation
Meredith and Verity Burgmann
UNSW Press (1998)
ISBN 0 86840 760 7
Reviewed by Dave Bangs
The working class is at its most powerful in its role as producers, as creators of the products and services capitalism sells. Its power to withdraw or modify its labour - by strikes, occupations, work-ins and so on - can bring capitalism to a halt.
At present we are bottoming out of a period of severe defeat for our class in which strike action is at an all-time low, and workers have little confidence to fight for more than catch-up pay rises, or minor hours and conditions ameliorations, at best.
Most of the burden of confronting capitalism's onslaught on the environment has been borne by direct actionists organised on the basis of single issue campaigns or residential communities. It was local residents and militant defenders of nature who blocked the bulldozers at Twyford Down and Manchester Airport, not organised labour. And when push came to shove, construction workers, protected behind a screen of police, did the dirty work of destruction.
It is easy, therefore, to understand those Green Party - and even anarchist - activists who pick up the old tune of "the death of class" and look to other social elements as agents of green change - parts of the underclass, or the middle class, counter-culturalists, or small capital.
Easy to understand, maybe, but high time we challenged this dead-end nonsense. Imagine what it would have been like if construction workers themselves had blacked all work on Sizewell, the North Birmingham Relief Road and the M11!... and if these construction workers had then demanded that development resources should instead be put into hospitals, affordable housing and sustainable transport initiatives!
The Builders Labourers' Federation
But this is precisely what happened in New South Wales, Australia, at the beginning of the 1970s, when the Builders Labourers' Federation, one of Australia's oldest unions, used all its industrial muscle to halt the destruction of virgin bush, green spaces, historic districts and houses, and working class communities. It did this even though such action was against its own immediate economic interest, and in the face of a blizzard of class prejudice and opposition from aggrieved trade union bigwigs.
Acting on the basis of a core belief in "the social responsibility of labour", this trade union took up the cudgels for the environment in the middle of a spectacular development boom which saw parts of Sydney transformed by skyscrapers, expressways, plazas and luxury housing, where previously low-income working class communities lived. Millions of dollars of foreign investment flowed into this business friendly state, with its lax development control.
Labour's opportunity
But this boom put labourers' work at a premium and enabled an already strong union to massively muscle up. The union was fortunate, also, in having a leadership which had gone through a whole process of political differentiation (largely via the Communist Party of Australia), shedding its Stalinist heritage and embracing a politics of thoroughgoing openness, democracy and accountability.
Launching a militant onslaught on industry wage differentials, which it won, the leadership adopted an internal regime calculated to maximise rank and file power and union control. Labouring became a strict closed shop.
Limited tenure of office was introduced for all union officials, and job-site union autonomy encouraged. Officials' wages were tied to industry wages, and non-payment of officials during strikes was introduced.
Executive meetings were thrown open, and a culture of frequent stop-work meetings and open mass meetings was engendered. All organisational tasks were undertaken by labourers themselves, including all research and union publications.
This combination of militancy and democracy paid great dividends. Union membership rose by 136%, against 7% for other unions!! Wages and conditions improved steeply. Campaigns to "Civilise the Industry", attacking health and safety deficiencies, winning accident pay and major amenities improvements, were progressed.
The rank and file developed such militant tactics - including consistent sabotage of scab work, site occupations and work-ins, vetoes over dismissals and control over hiring and firing - that even the leadership had to race to adapt to these confident assertions of class authority.
Black Bans/Green Bans
It is in this context that the union embraced ever-widening political agendas, trampling over ever more class, sexual and political boundaries. It is fitting that their first Green Ban (a name aptly chosen to transcend the old industrial term of "Black Ban") was on a piece of bushland in a posh middle class area.
The "middle class matrons" who had organised to stop the development of this ancient and lovely site "discovered this union of manual labourers was more sensitive to the natural beauty of Kelly's Bush than conservative politicians and newspaper editors and they were radicalised permanently by their experience."
These "upper-middle class morning tea matrons" were only the first of many middle and even ruling class conservationists who - eagerly or reluctantly - embraced the offered solidarity of this militant class struggle union.
As one of the "Battlers for Kelly's Bush" said: "why shouldn't the construction site worker be able to question the ethics of his helping to knock down a historic building or bulldoze some bushland?"
Later, the union was to fight on more convivial territory, opposing the trashing of working class districts by developers and the eviction of tenants. Some of these struggles - like the long and bloody fight to save Victoria Street from the predations of a vicious thug developer - reached epic proportions. Builders, labourers, residents and community squatters faced armed thugs beating up folk and trashing their property - kidnapping one activist and holding him blindfold in a car boot for days.
One well known activist was actually murdered, in a crime that has never been solved. The labourers' steadfastness won out, though, and brought this Van Hoogstraten-like developer to his knees.
How many people who see the Sydney Opera House on postcards and stamps know of the union's successful fight to preserve part of its setting from a massive car park?
The union's Green Ban on the car park under the Botanic Gardens, which would have "interfered with the root system of splendid and ancient Moreton Bay Fig Trees and caused the loss of at least 3" threatened the official opening of the Opera House by the Queen!
Their strong nerve in holding to their ban - an expression of the "union's opposition in principle to any proposals for car parks that encroached on water, gardens or parkland" - resulted, in the end, in a rational solution being found to the problem.
Altruism
From 1971 to 1975 the union's Green Bans halted projects worth $5,000 million, taking a major dent out of capital's madcap mayhem in the state. High rise developments were banned, expressways were blocked, forest land and island nature reserves were defended, parks were saved from huge sports and leisure complexes, and individual historic buildings were saved.
Yet this altruism cost the builders' labourers in their purses - a price they were prepared to pay. By 1975, 3 out of 4 strike days in Australia were in New South Wales and nearly half of those were in the building industry! "In the short run the workers were denying themselves work. In the long run the workers were denying themselves work. In the long run, the workers could see that (Green Bans were) in the interests of the entire community".
And these bans were no top-down imposition. Jack Mundey, the union's charismatic leader, "estimated that about half the union's members were actively interested in conservation and preservation".
Widening agenda
But these bans were only the best known part of the 11,000 strong union's ever widening agenda. They vigorously campaigned on behalf of women entrants to the industry, breaking a century-old opposition to women working in the building industry. Many of these women entrants later became leading union activists.
The union banned work at Macquarie University in support of a student expelled for his homosexuality. They later banned work again in support of students opposing the segregation of staff/student bar facilities.
They supported aboriginal land rights, aboriginal squatter communities and tenants, and aboriginal union activists. So vigorous was their solidarity that 38 aboriginal organisations supported the union in its later struggles against deregistration.
In 1971 union leaders were arrested for attempting to hacksaw down the aluminium goal posts during the Springbok Rugby Union tour from apartheid South Africa.
The union called for defiance of call-up to Vietnam and helped students build barricades to defend a draft sanctuary.
And - in a move that serves to frame even better our own jailer Jack Straw's inhumanity - the union banned all work on a $1 million maximum security prison block, where prisoners would have been unable to see daylight, confined for 18 hours per day, with toilet bowls doubling for washing bowls. Their ban was betrayed by other unions, but their humanity was later vindicated, for the prison was closed down after a few years.
Defeat
It was not the employers who finally defeated the union, in 1974-5, but the union's own Federal leadership, which conspired with the employers to impose Federal Union control over the State Union, expel the leading militants (and thus bar them also from finding work as builders' labourers), end the bans and end the union's encroachment on employer prerogatives.
These union breakers were themselves "Maoists" or "Communists", speaking a rhetoric of workers' power, but repeating the wearisome tradition of bureaucratic betrayal and tyranny.
Lessons
But this story should not end with some small lessons about the dirty dealings of union bureaucracies. This story is much bigger than that. What the NSW Builders Labourers' Federation proved was that the class power of the producers is our best weapon against the onslaught of capital on our environment, our quality of life, and on nature.
And they proved that this power could only be expressed through the deepest, most thoroughgoing democracy in our class organisations. Once realised, this democratic power acted as a dissolvent of all gender, ethnic, sectoral and class barriers. No bans were ever placed without the support of the workers or the communities affected.
The struggle to save our environment is linked tight to the struggle for democracy and control, and the struggle against capitalism. If we break these links, we break the possibilities of our own success.
All socialists and greens should read this book. It'll stir you from head to toe.