Principles Cost Money
I couldn’t help myself, not when I saw him standing alone at the fireplace. I had been introduced to him the night before, at the function, but had not had a chance to strike up a conversation. It was not really the right time, admiring the art being exhibited, to talk to someone about their life. The next morning when we had gathered at the artist’s house for coffee and brunch seemed a much better opportunity. There was so much I wanted to ask him, to know about him: I wanted to gain his perspective on so many matters, to pick his brains as it were.
So I wandered over to join him, just on spec, as he stood in front of the fire, slowly sipping his coffee, and I addressed him as follows:
“What about them wide combs huh?”, followed up with “What have you got against New Zealanders?”
You see, he had been a shearer his whole life, and the answer he directed, was a little unexpected, as I thought I knew a thing or two. I’ll recount the gist of it here as his story contains a lesson that more of us should know.
“I don’t understand why you blokes went on strike, I mean, you would’ve made more money with them wide combs”. I followed up my cheeky opener with the question that had been puzzling me for a while.
“It wasn’t about money, we would’ve made more money for sure, but with us being faster, other’s would have made less”.
Jack had grown tired of slickers like me pestering him about the good old days, but my question had sparked him up. He’d been enjoying the warmth of the fire like the old dog curled up at our feet, but with barely a change to his stance he’d turned to face me as he answered and I could see by the glint in his eyes that he was now very alert and awake.
“We weren’t threatened by it: it was about protecting others.”
What I learnt, is that to understand why the shearers struck against the wide combs in the 1980’s, I needed to know a little bit more about the industry, about how over time battles had been fought to create career pathways for the people who worked alongside the shearers in the shed, the wool pressers and wool classers for example. And who better to learn it from than someone who’d been in the thick of it from the time of the bitter strikes in the ‘50’s.
From that time on, the shearers had worked hard to maintain their definition of a ‘fair go’, not just for them, but for the workers who filled the other roles in the sheds: workers who didn’t have the same negotiating power as the shearers.
The impact of the wide combs meant that a sheep could be shorn faster than before. With shearers paid per sheep they sheared, the wide combs effectively increased their hourly rate of pay. The result of a faster clip was that the entire flock is shorn in fewer days. With many support staff paid by the day, the wide combs effectively decreased the hourly rate of pay for the support staff. This was the rub, and is one of the many factors that drove the shearers to strike back in the ‘80s, not the impact of the wide combs on themselves, but the impact to others.
There was no malice when he spoke, nor rancour, at the treatment they had received for attempting to help others, just calmness, and almost a quiet resignation at what had transpired during his time on the tools, when an industry had been built up, and then had been somewhat weakened and undermined by shifting attitudes.
When I have recounted this story to others, the reaction is generally the same as mine: amazement at our lack of understanding of the true reasons for the strike, and then annoyance at the way the media treated their actions. Almost universally the recollection is of a media that was completely biased against the shearers, due to their unwillingness to adopt the wider combs.
There are many elements and layers that made up the dispute over the wide combs, the battle between the emerging New Right and entrenched unionism, the battle by a union to maintain it’s hegemony over the sheds, the tension between woolgrowers and shearers over rates of pay, the tension between shearers themselves over the pay structure of shearers, but today was about hearing the story of one man and his perspective and the implications of his story that are relevant to our age: and that is the willingness of one group of people to sacrifice their own livelihood to support others who have less power than themselves.
Consider the impact of striking on Jack’s family: he was a single bread winner, back when this was the standard, and with four children. Imagine the day to day life for this family when there is simply no money coming in the door, not just for a few days, but for weeks, that turned into months. There is no network that can provide support – they’re out on strike as well. But there was a principle at stake, and what I learnt from Jack that day, is that principles cost money.
Much is made nowadays of people, typically men, who would ‘do anything for their family’. The toasts and eulogies in honour of such people often leave me feeling a little cold: it is only to be expected that someone helps their own family. It is the easiest thing in the world, helping someone known to you. Far more commendable are the people who take action that will assist people they do not know, and may never meet.
Obviously when strike action is taken by unionists it is to improve their own lot, as well as the lot of others: it is the unionists who most commonly benefit from their actions. That is not lost on me. But the people who oppose the collective action of labour are doing so very much for their own benefit – that too must not be lost.
What we forget is that there was a time, and maybe it still exists but is buried beneath the noise, when unionism was about more than just power, and the desire to sit at the big table with the bosses.
The stories that are rarely told are those of the quiet sacrifice that occur, and is required, to form a collective, a union, and to achieve outcomes for the many, not the few. When the old man talked to me about the battles he’d been involved in over the years, what I heard was a willingness to give something up to help others.
This is the part of the story that is relevant to our age, the idea that creating a community requires each of us to give something up for others in the community. A society is in a sense a collection of communities. It is the communities that we build that shape our society. It is the acts we do for people outside of our families that create communities.
I make no claims to being a better person than you, by suggesting that I too have sacrificed myself for others. All I do here is present an example for us both to consider. Nor do I suggest that the old man telling me his story had no imperfections: I knew enough about him to know he had his faults.
There is another theme within this story, that should be explored and exposed more fully, and that is not just the continuing tension between farmers and organised labour, but more than that, the willingness of the media, our artists – our image makers, to too often take the side of the farmer and not the side of the labourers organising themselves to achieve better outcomes. The archetypical image that Australians have cultivated for ourselves is of the outback, and the farmers, but apart from modern city states, all societies have farmers: the real story of Australia is the organisation of labour to achieve collective objectives.
While Australia is not unique in having unions, it is certainly an outlier, and what marks the story of unionism in Australia are the battles between organised labour and farmers, as much as with industrialists as occurs in many other countries. The two themes, of hardy remote farmers, and workers uniting, are rarely represented equally, to the extent that the one that is more truly Australian has virtually disappeared from any retelling of what ‘made’ Australia.
It is as though there are two teams in a footy comp, of whichever code, that regularly go ‘head to head’, where the tally is dead set even, but one team is nominated as the better, the truer representation of who we are, when in fact, we are all better off merely for the fact that the competition existed, and that neither side completely betters the other.
As the conversation wound down, I was reminded of the value of seeking out those with a few miles on their clock, and especially those who clocked up those miles on rougher roads than I have travelled. I saw too the benefit of knowing enough about the person and the time they lived to be able to ask the thoughtful questions that kept the conversation flowing, and knowing well enough to stay quiet and let the story flow.
