Review:
The Significance of the 1912 Waihi Strike
Martin Gregory
International Socialist
Organisation, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-473-22214-7
$5
Reviewed
by Andrew Cooper
On Monday a force of thugs
and scabs attacked the union hall
under the gaze of the police with a hail of missiles. A plug of gelignite was
thrown, exploding just outside the hall
entrance. The windows were smashed. The attackers broke in to besiege a group
of unionists in the committee room. After a while the police called the
violence off and the unionists made their escape, only one being caught and
beaten up. On Black
Tuesday… the police and scabs
attacked. The unionists were not able to bolt the door in time. There were gun
shots as thugs and police broke in and the unionists fled through the back way.
The scabs and a notorious thug fell upon the stricken union man (pp. 33-4).
These events didn’t
happen in some far-off country but in the small town of Waihi one hundred years ago. The
victim was Frederick
Evans. His death
was the first of a New Zealand worker on the picket line (and the only one
until Christine
Clarke was killed in 1999).
In this lively pamphlet,
Martin Gregory provides not only a fascinating description of this pivotal
event in NZ radical history, but crucially draws out its key political lesson:
The defeat of the goldfield
strike initiated a turning point of such immense political significance that
its effects echoed for decades after. The lessons to be drawn from the strike
are profound and are still vitally relevant to the working class movement today…
Setbacks are an unavoidable part of the working class’s experience, and there
is no escaping the fact that Waihi was a crushing defeat. The significance of
the Waihi Strike lies in the conclusions that were drawn from the intervention
of the state. They were to greatly affect the future course of working class
organisation and the history of New Zealand. The strike marks a real turning
point (pp. 4, 35).
In 1894 the Liberal
Party Government had passed the Arbitration
Act, giving registered unions official recognition but also binding them to
the Arbitration Court’s decisions as well as forcing workers to fight employers
in the courts where the employers and state were at their strongest. Strikes
were outlawed.
Arbitration
was initially popular with workers as it led to improvements in pay and
conditions, but inevitably over the long term it favoured employers. The first
serious challenge to Arbitration came with the successful Blackball miners‘ strike in
1908, leading to the formation of the Federation of Mineworkers, the forerunner
of the “Red” Federation of Labour or FOL.
The Waihi miners worked
under a competitive contract system that set miner against fellow miner. It was
said that a miner had a useful working life of about fifteen years - but it was
a hugely profitable life for the mine owners.
In early 1911, the powerful Waihi Workers’ Union (WWU) achieved
the absolute majority it needed to escape Compulsory Arbitration by cancelling
its registration under the system. As a direct result the miners’ working conditions
greatly improved - but these gains could all be lost if a rival union was
registered under the Arbitration system: If just fifteen members could be found
it would become the officially recognised union - and the Arbitration Court’s
decisions would be binding on all 1,200 Waihi miners. On May 11, 1912, the
mining companies succeeded in doing just that. The following day the WWU
executive made the momentous decision to send an ultimatum to the mining companies
demanding that they disband the new union.
Many of the miners’ leaders
were influenced by “syndicalist“
ideas, particularly those
of the American Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or “Wobblies”).
Syndicalism
emphasised the key role of the strike and a “whole class” outlook as opposed to
that of the narrower craft unions.
The FOL was closely linked
to the supposedly revolutionary NZ Socialist
Party. As Martin correctly points out in his pamphlet, understanding the
politics of this organisation is key to understanding the politics and tactics
of the strike itself - and its outcome.
The party was split into
several political currents, expressing a range of both revolutionary and
reformist positions - though in practice it was the parliamentary arena to which
the Socialist Party’s leaders devoted most attention. This factionalism led to
increasing dissatisfaction within the party, with some leaving to join the
Wobblies. Although the Socialist Party’s leaders espoused revolutionary
socialist positions, in practice they
avoided strikes where possible, seeing them as a threat to the party’s growth.
During 1912 the party was unable to offer revolutionary leadership and its
members would instead look to the IWW for leadership and ideas.
Along with the NZ Socialist
Party there was also the United
Labour Party, constituting the formally more moderate wing of the labour movement
at the time.
Meanwhile the Federation of
Labour leadership equivocated in its support for the Waihi miners. After they
failed in negotiations with the mining companies, pressure from members led to a
new constitution modelled on the IWW’s being adopted: “including the rhetorical
gesture that was the splendid revolutionary syndicalist IWW preamble“
(p. 23).
With the militants’ call
for a general strike defeated and the leadership majority’s position
essentially one of inaction, the Federation merely agreed to a 10% weekly levy
on members’ wages to support the strikers:
Both the majority position
of inaction and the IWW fetishist demand for an immediate general strike were
faulty. The working class is not a stage army. A general strike cannot be
conjured up without a broad-based head of steam for action. The call for an
immediate general strike from the Federation conference was unrealistic even
for Federation unions, let alone the unaffiliated (p. 24).
The Federation had missed
an opportunity to broaden the strike beginning with other mine workers, and
while the mining companies had no intention of letting legal niceties get in the
way of defeating the
miners, there was uneven support for the mine workers, with the “moderate” ULP
actively opposing the strike and even helping to organise scab labour. As
Socialist Party member and future Labour leader Harry Holland
put it: “Thus the Federation of Labour was fighting directly the Gold-mine Owners’
Association and the Employers’ Federation, and secondly the scabs, the press,
ruling class law and its Massey Government, and the United Labour Party” (p. 27).
Between the strike’s
beginning in May 1912 and August that year, attempts to alternately starve then
divide the workers had failed. In August the companies began recruiting
strikebreakers and the following month police stepped up confrontation with the
miners. Strikers were jailed, gaining more widespread working class support. A
scab union was formed with the intention of forcibly reopening the mine. The
editor of the United Labour Party’s newspaper went to Waihi to help organise
the scab union.
On the back foot, the
Federation of Labour called a general strike in October. It failed to win
support beyond the miners due to the FOL’s inept handling of earlier disputes.
By early November there were over a hundred strikebreakers working the Waihi
mines, and police violence against the strikers increased. The author gives a
vivid account of the events of Black Tuesday and their aftermath. Nine thousand
would attend Evans’ funeral
in Auckland.
Strike leaders were run out
of town. The strike was now effectively over, though not officially called off
until the end of November. By the end of the year the competitive contract
system was reinstated.
Violence against the
strikers and the government’s failure to hold an official inquiry caused
outrage amongst the working class. Much of the ULP membership shifted to the
left, repudiating strikebreaking. However the main lesson drawn by the
Federation of Labour’s executive was that the government had to be fought
politically (i.e. through elections) rather than by direct action.
The events of 1912 and the
following year’s Great
Strike would ruthlessly expose the IWW’s weaknesses too. Its “fetishisation”
of the general strike ignored the role of the capitalist state: the idea that
industrial action alone could force parliament to enact reforms ignored the
fact that the ruling class could also use force in the form of its army and
police forces:
The real tragedy of the
Waihi Strike is that a generation of revolutionary socialists rebounded from
the industrial defeat to retreat into reformism. The significance of the
eclipse of the Socialist Party is incalculable for what might have been. What
is certain is that reformist politics was strengthened immensely by the liquidation
of its revolutionary rival. Reformism gained a cohort of activists with
enormous authority within the working class and the standing of the leftist
leaders would grow. These and other former revolutionaries became leaders of
the Labour Party. Compared to today’s Labour careerists they were giants, but
they became shadows of their former revolutionary selves, Red Feds, once feared
by the capitalist
class (pp. 43-4).
The reformists’ fear of “scaring
off” supporters by being “too militant”, and their focus on parliamentary
elections rather than direct struggle will no doubt sound familiar to any
activist today. The negative lessons drawn by reformist union and political leaders
- that workers couldn’t win against the superior repressive powers of the state
and its police force, that militancy would scare away most workers and
supporters, and most of all that elections and parliament are the most
effective arenas to bring about change - had a disastrous impact on the
subsequent development of NZ radical politics.
What might have been had
subsequent struggles been led by a workers’ organisation with clear
revolutionary politics? What if the Stalinist
leadership of the CTU
(who gave up the struggle against the Employment Contracts Act
before it had begun) had been seriously challenged from below in 1991?
Or if the struggles
around university fees and the loans scheme during the 1990s had been led by
activists with revolutionary politics rather than career-minded reformist
student officials (who for most of that decade told us to put our faith in
university management and vote for an “education-friendly” government).
Much the same criticism
could be made about reformist leadership in dozens of other struggles over the
last century.
This pamphlet is precisely
what we need: more in-depth analyses of our hidden radical history, more
writing on current politics from the International Socialist perspective. As
well as producing work like this, we should be encouraging student members and
supporters to think about writing their theses on similar topics.
On the centenary of the
Waihi strike, this pamphlet ensures that our working class history is a little
less “hidden from history”. But unfortunately as so much of NZ’s radical past is hidden from history, readers lacking
a detailed knowledge of this period are likely to struggle a little with the plethora
of acronyms: IWW, NZSP, FOL,
ULP,
WWU, SDP,
UFL,
etc.
A helpful addition to this pamphlet might have been a glossary of these
acronyms along with a brief description of their respective organisations.
Martin provides a useful
list of further reading at the end of the pamphlet, and rightly singles out
Harry Holland’s The Tragic Story of the
Waihi Strike as the key early resource. First published in 1913, it is now
in the public domain and is available in several free electronic versions,
including PDF, epub and Kindle (here and here)
along with at least
two
new
print
editions.
How
to purchase
If you’d like to order this
pamphlet send a cheque for $5 per copy made out to “ISO Wellington” to:
PO Box 6157
Dunedin North
Dunedin 9059
Please make sure you
include your address.
Alternatively you can make
a direct credit payment to our BNZ bank account: 02-0536-0456903-00, then email
us: internationalsocialistsnz [at] gmail.com - to confirm payment and your address details.
Image Credits
Rogers, R fl 1912. Miners outside their union hall,
during the Waihi strike. Nash, Walter :Postcards associated with Walter Nash.
Ref: PAColl-5792-05. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22583647
Waihi Arts Centre and Museum. Striking Waihi miners
leaving the union hall after a mass meeting. Waihi Arts Centre : Photographs
and lantern slides of Waihi. Ref: 1/2-116691-F. Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22832745
