CONSPIRACY THEORIES

UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Dark days of waterfront dispute 50 years
behind us 

15.02.2001 The five-month waterfront dispute of 1951
shook the nation. MATHEW DEARNALEY recalls New
Zealand's most bitter industrial conflict. 

Fifty years ago today the iron port gates started clanging
shut on New Zealand's most unashamedly militant band
of industrial rebels, the Waterfront Workers' Union. 

February 15, 1951, marked the start of the longest and
costliest sustained industrial upheaval in our nation's
history. Draconian emergency regulations were imposed,
virtually unheard of in a democratic state. 

By the time the 8000 wharfies and their allies finally
acknowledged defeat, 151 grim days later on July 15, the
country is estimated to have lost anything from £42
million to £150 million from a dispute that began over a
3d (6c) an hour wage-bargaining gap. 

But the British shipowners who allegedly set up the
dispute ended 1951 with record profits, having unilaterally
imposed a surcharge on the country's freight rates while
leaving Sidney Holland's National Government and its
police and armed forces to clean up. 

The £42 million estimate was that of the Government
Statistician of the day, but lost wool sales alone
accounted for £31 million in the midst of the Korean
War-inspired export boom, and more than 20,000
workers were off the job at the height of the "big blue." 

Jock Barnes, the headstrong and undoubtedly belligerent
president of the wharfies' union - nicknamed "The Bull"
by his own members - was still assuring them a month
before ultimate defeat that they were closer to victory
than ever. 

By then, though, the Government had been able to
recruit enough members of new strike-breaking port
unions to stand down troops who had been called out to
unload food and other essential supplies from ships. 

Did the wharfies get much support?

An Auckland labour historian, the late Bert Roth, said the
wharfies and the few other unions which resisted
attempts by the Federation of Labour to break the
dispute "went out on a limb and were cut off." 

But in so doing, they went down "with all flags flying" and
nothing could diminish the pride of those who at the end
of 1951 received cards from Barnes certifying that
against tremendous odds they had "stood loyal right
through 151 days." 

Most never made it back to the waterfront, barred by
screening committees of the new unions, although the
Government later acknowledged it made a grievous error
in thus allowing them to spread the seeds of militancy to
a host of other industries. 

Barnes, who died last year aged 92, spent two months in
jail after the dispute for allegedly defaming a policeman.
He became a self-employed drainlayer on finding he was
on an employers' blacklist. 

He had earlier vowed that the Holland Government's
emergency regulations, which censored public debate
and theoretically even banned giving food to wharfies'
children, would be defeated "by the guts and character of
the New Zealand worker." But he had reckoned without
the FOL executive's support for the Government in calling
affiliated unions back to work. 

The FOL, under Fintan Patrick Walsh, wrote the wharf
union's death warrant in accusing its "misleaders" of
being part of a campaign by "communist imperialism to
weaken every free democratic nation." 

That damning statement was issued on the same day in
March that the waterfront union wrote to the Government
agreeing to submit its dispute to arbitration, only to be
rebuffed until it replaced its leadership and allowed open
access to wharf jobs. 

The language resembled the rhetoric used by the
Government to mobilise public opinion - already softened
up by years of tirades by newspaper editors and ridicule
by cartoonists - against the wharfies. 

For his part, Walsh saw Barnes as a deadly rival and
was smarting at the wharfies' role in 1950 in setting up a
breakaway Trade Union Congress. 

What was the Government's role?

Prime Minister Holland had returned from the United
States at the start of the dispute, thundering that anyone
obstructing Korean War defence preparations by limiting
the handling of goods was a traitor. 

Historian and former Labour minister Dr Michael Bassett,
for all his stinging criticism of Barnes as a "false hero"
who set back unionism at least a decade, described
Holland's contribution in his book Confrontation '51 as
distinctly unhelpful. 

To imply participation in a conspiracy against the free
world touched raw nerves after the adulatory declarations
made by Holland about American foreign policy. 

His Government had, under the acting leadership of Sir
Keith Holyoake the day before his return, been careful
not to comment on the fairness of a small pay rise offer
while giving the watersiders an ultimatum to lift an
overtime ban or face the consequences. Many wharfies
had fought in the war against fascism and did not take
kindly to being tarred as traitors. 

Waikato University senior lecturer Dr Anna Green, who
has written a new waterfront history to be launched at a
seminar in Wellington tomorrow, believes the Cold War
atmosphere was simply a convenient aid to the
shipowners' cause. 

She says the dispute was no more nor less than a battle
between the shipowners and union for control of the
wharves, after the establishment of a bureau hiring
system in the 1930s that replaced a highly suspect
auction block practice. 

It suited the shipowners, who knew their paltry pay offer
would be rebuffed at the height of the export season, to
let the Government and public opinion do their work for
them, "when it was just a plain old struggle over
industrial control." 

Although cartoonists portrayed watersiders as fat,
work-shy thugs, Dr Green says one of the main reasons
for a slow turnaround of ships was the reluctance of
employers to invest in new equipment on wharves where
barrows were still used. 

How did the dispute start?

Industry was governed tightly by a system in which pay
rates were negotiated before conciliators or, failing any
agreement, determined by an arbitration body. 

Most pay agreements came under the Arbitration Court
but a Waterfront Industry Authority was in charge of
wharf pay. 

The Waterside Workers' Union fell out with the authority
in a dispute in 1950 over handling noxious cargoes, so
decided to deal directly with shipping employers, using
the first national strike since 1913 to gain even larger
allowances than they had hoped for. 

They were sadly mistaken in expecting any further
generosity. 

With prices rising in an export boom, and the
Government removing wartime food subsidies, even a 15
per cent general pay order by the Arbitration Court was
decried as paltry by the FOL. 

But the shipping employers offered the wharfies a 9 per
cent rise of just 4 1/2d an hour to 4s 7 1/2d, saying a 3d
increase awarded by the waterfront authority the previous
July should be taken into account. 

The watersiders believed they were being victimised, but
realising that a full strike would invite heavy-handed
action, imposed a ban on overtime instead. 

Despite popular misconceptions, their basic pay was
below the national average wage, but overtime from 11- or
12-hour working days put them ahead of the game. 

From February 15, the employers threatened to suspend
those who refused overtime for two days at a time. This
was extended to an indefinite lockout four days later
when the Government weighed in. 

Strike or lockout? 

The easy answer is that it was both. 

The Government declared it a strike in emergency
regulations imposed on February 26. It could also be
argued that the initial collective refusal to work overtime
was a strike in breach of an industrial document that
gave workers the right to refuse after-hours work only as
individuals. 

Signs that greeted them at the waterfront on Monday,
February 19, offering work only if they agreed to resume
overtime, appeared to remove even that right. 

Fuelled by the imposition of emergency regulations,
about 12,000 workers went out on strike in support of the
wharfies - notably freezing workers, miners,
hydro-electricity workers and drivers. 

What were the emergency regulations? Was it
really an offence to feed a wharfie's child?

Police veterans say they would have been very reluctant
to go to those lengths, but Huntly miners complained
that their children were stopped from buying in local
shops, and that police put up a cordon preventing relief
supplies from wharfies in Auckland from reaching them. 

The regulations also made it an offence to print or publish
statements likely to encourage or abet a declared strike,
and gave police powers to break up meetings, search
houses without warrants, and open mail. 

Auckland author and former waterside union newspaper
editor Dick Scott listed them in his book 151 Days as a
fascist blueprint in which the whole of New Zealand was
brought "under the iron heel of the police state." 

Jock Barnes condemned the regulations as giving greater
and more arbitrary powers to police than ever before seen
"in a British country except during the Black and Tan
terror in Ireland." 

And veteran Auckland unionist Bill Andersen, a former
member of the deregistered waterfront union, questions
why they should have been imposed for so long, given
that the armed forces had succeeded in ensuring that
enough goods were moved to guarantee the necessities
of life. 

The Government also used the regulations to prevent
comment on the regulations themselves, he says. 

"If you make a law and then say people can't even
discuss it, that's heavy stuff." 

Could such regulations be imposed now?

The 1951 regulations came under the Public Safety
Conservation Act, which was introduced during riots by
unemployed workers in 1932 and stayed on the statute
books until the 1980s. 

The Government could still call a state of emergency
today, under more specialist legislation dealing with
disasters or terrorism, but it is unlikely that public
opinion would allow anything in the 1951 mould. 

What was the role of the press in 1951? 

Newspapers were powerful enemies of the waterside
workers, highlighting slack work practices and whipping
up public scorn. The few radio bulletins on air came
under the control of the Prime Minister's Department. 

Veteran wharfies remain aggrieved over caricatures of
them by former Herald cartoonist the late Sir Gordon
Minhinnick, and over a call by the Auckland Star to arm
police and shoot demonstrators. 

Publisher Gordon Dryden, then a junior reporter on
Labour-owned newspapers, recalls a night visit by a
police sergeant to the Southern Cross newspaper to
ensure that content for the next day's issue would not
breach the emergency regulations. 

Dryden was later threatened with jail by a military
commander if he published a story in the Grey River
Argus about a naval rating who refused to keep loading a
coal ship and who was being held in a brig while on a
hunger strike.