This is a remarkable, and remarkably useful, book. It is the outcome of an exhaustive project – over 30 years of excavating the history of workers’ struggles, exactly the kind of work that the neoliberal university has no time for. From those decades of systematic and comprehensive trawling through the colonial press and an enormous variety of official and personal records, Michael Quinlan has created an updateable data base (the empirical material on which the book is based) from which the earliest history of class struggle in this country can be fully appreciated.1
Using both qualitative and quantitative material, Quinlan brings to light formal and informal working class mobilisation. Strikes, court appearances, demonstrations, on-the-job action, mutual insurance schemes, trade union organisation, sabotage, mass absconding, petitions, political meetings and general rebelliousness all make an appearance. Prior to 1851 he has documented 5,047 instances of organisation by convict workers and 1,379 by free workers. Organisation by free workers is evident from 1790 but only grew strongly from the late 1820s and by 1841-50 had outstripped organisation among convicts. From these 6,426 instances of worker mobilisation there is evidence of 135 formal organisations/unions, including at least one union peak body, and over 20 instances where workers mobilised politically. The 6,426 figure represents, in Quinlan’s estimation, around 60-70 percent of worker organisation for which written evidence survives.
The book is awash with fascinating information from which political conclusions can be drawn, whether it is the critical role of urban centres for formal union organisation, or the way in which employment-related court cases (there were at least 330,000 such cases between 1788 and 1850, in colonies that only reached a population of 405,000 in 1850) reflect class conflict.
Class organisation was not just a product of the second half of the nineteenth century, as much of the previously available historical research has tended to imply, but a living, breathing part of colonial society from the original invasion. These early struggles were frequently small-scale, and often ephemeral. But residues were left and those who came later were not starting anew.
The Origins of Worker Mobilisation fills a notable gap in the historical record. For example, peak union organisation in Australia is commonly seen to originate in the 1850s with the eight-hour day movements and the Melbourne Trades Hall Council. There is evidence of organisation 15 years prior to this. Quinlan’s own summary indicates the breadth of his achievement:
The book considered a wide array of worker organisation, formal and informal, involving unfree and free workers, men and women, European and non-European, all industries and occupations, industrial and political. It also considered a wide array of forms of collective action… Confining analysis to formal organisation, or failing to examine the relationship between formal and informal organisation, arguably provides a misleadingly narrow picture of worker mobilisation. The trajectory of mobilisation is more complex and previously neglected groups or industries assume more significance.2
The book is far more than just the empirical recording of facts which would put it in the “worthy but dull” category. It is alive with the humanity of those involved. Resistance is given not just voice but names, identities and personalities. It is not accidental that The Origins of Worker Mobilisation calls to mind the work of E.P. Thompson. Quinlan makes little reference to Marx, but he explicitly shares the passion and theoretical framework of the Marxist historians around Thompson who insisted that in making history the working class also make themselves. Like Thompson’s, Quinlan’s book makes clear that the working class is made not just by patterns of capital accumulation and market competition (about which there is plenty in chapters 5 to 10), but also by the struggles of workers striving to influence the conditions of their lives.
The book is also a contribution to a broader debate about labour history. Verity Burgmann’s intervention into this debate in 1999 summed up the problem as “a dismissive approach to Marxism, the significance of class and the emancipatory role or even potential of workers’ movements…has become the new dogma of much academic debate”.
Quinlan makes explicit reference to the way in which, mirroring the global decline in union density, a class struggle analysis in historical writing has given way to “a wider social history perspective and more recently identity analysis influenced by post-modernism and the rise of neoliberalism and the individualised discourse it promotes”.
In response, he argues (and the book illustrates) that “though no longer so fashionable, class remains an elemental characteristic of capitalist society”. At a time when unions in countries like Australia are at a very low ebb of both membership and industrial action, Quinlan is concerned to defend the importance of strikes and union organisation. He points out that the results of his research suggest that formal organisation and strikes significantly improved outcomes for workers, further encouraging those who could to form unions:
The transition to unions was rapid once there were barely enough free workers belonging to a trade and there were relatively few informal disputes once unions were established in a town. The relatively rapid shift to unions in the trades was not surprising given centuries-old experience and their generally stronger bargaining power.
Far from having had their day, “[u]nions are a pivotal response to inequality at work under the capitalist mode of production. With all their limitations, unions were and remain the clearest and most undiluted expression of worker organisation that enhances class identity. This helps explain why after 700 years the role and influence of unions remains deeply contested even in countries where they have legal recognition.”
Finally, as this argument about the importance of union organisation and strikes indicates, Quinlan’s historical analysis is never simply about the past. He explicitly relates contemporary examples of the class struggle to the early mobilisations that his book brings to light. Now as then, what workers get is always contested, never merely given.
The class struggle – sometimes open, sometimes hidden
One of the great strengths of The Origins of Worker Mobilisation is the way in which it gives a sense of the working class “making itself”. E.P. Thompson observed that the poor largely come to notice in historical records when they collide with the law.
In chapter 2, “The Law, the Courts and Inequality at Work”, Quinlan points out that “The pre-goldrush Australian colonies were replete with such collisions, hundreds of thousands of them, documented in convict conduct records, government gazettes, court bench-books and colonial newspapers. They provide a wealth of evidence on struggles over the inequality inherent in capitalist work arrangements”. Such court appearances capture a tiny fragment of workers’ lives, yet despite involving workers as individuals, they form part of the development of a collective, class identity as workers generalise from their own experience of exploitation and oppression.
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