Dark days of waterfront dispute 50 years behind us

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 (2.5c) 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.