Labor’s Titan, Gilbert Giles Roper
Source: Book, Warrnambool Institute Press, 1983, edited by Allan and Wendy Scarfe. Copyright Allan and Wendy Scarfe. This digital edition for Marxists
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Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
“If the honourable member had carried his swag outback he would know the benefit of even one decent feed.”
Percy Brookfield was born in Liverpool, England, in 1878. His family circumstances were such as to impel him to go to sea at a very early age. He sailed in British ships mostly in Latin American waters, and it is known that he made several journeys round Cape Horn to Chile. Voyages on such ships were not always hard, but they were usually hungry, and it they went round the Horn they were exceptionally dangerous. On at least one of these trips Brookfield was associated with the well-known internationalist Paul Freeman.
Argentina at one stage provided a temporary home for Brookfield and although it is difficult at this length of time to ascertain details of his sojourn in that country there is certainly no reason to doubt, as rumour has it, that while there he led an adventurous life.
Some details of Brookfield’s early life were recorded in a letter of a boyhood friend, R.J. Storey, who wrote a tribute to the Barrier Daily Truth in Broken Hill at the time of Brookfield’s death:[1]
Sir, Could you find room for a few words concerning Jack Brookfield and my own schooldays? In those old days at Liverpool where (bootless) Jack and I were boys together, we went to the same school, and were playmates for some years.
Jack, as a boy, was always a very quiet sort of chap. He always thought before he spoke and took action. He never rushed at anything. I was the first that went to sea out of we two. I sailed out of Langford dock. I was a little older than Jack, but when I came home I found that he had gone. Well, my father was a master rigger, and he apprenticed me to a ship called the Peterborough, of Crecirach. Some years afterwards I sailed to Iquique [in Chile], and there I ran into Jack Brookfield again. Paul Freeman was on a Welsh ship called the Amsephere in the same port at that time. I was on a Bethel ship. I did not believe in the kind of religion they peddled, neither did Jack or Paul. While our boats were hung up in the port we were frequent visitors to each other.
The next time I met Jack was in Chile. I was then second mate on a ship called the Orelalla, from Liverpool. After that I never ran across him again until I met him in Broken Hill, after his election to parliament.
Yes, he was one of the bravest-hearted men in the world, and now he is gone — gone forever — I cannot forget our old boyhood days. I thought more of him than anyone else I knew in the world, because of his open-heartedness and his principle. I end with the deepest regret for the best friend I ever had.
Yours, etc, R.J. Storey
After returning to England Brookfield embarked for Australia. Engaging in prospecting and mining, he carried his swag over hundreds of miles in the outback regions of Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland. In the middle 1890s he was fossicking in Victoria. About 1903 he found a tin lode while prospecting through the wild cattle country near Mount Pilot, one of the main peaks of the Dividing Range, some twenty miles south-west of Mount Kosciusko. He spoke once about a visit to the Hargreaves field, “noted for its great output of alluvial gold”, and claimed that “there is scarcely a place where a pennyweight of gold had been obtained where I have not prospected to a greater or lesser extent”. In 1907 he was in the north of Queensland.
Those years of wandering and mining throughout eastern Australia were full of the excitement of new experiences for him. He was an avid nature-lover, and in those days the bushlands were lull of the quaint creatures and plants for which Australia was famous. He drew on these experiences to later deliver a feeling speech to the New South Wales parliament about the bird life of the outback:
There is no doubt about the necessity of protecting our bird life. Any man who has travelled in the back country will have noticed the vast difference in the numbers of wild birds compared with what they were a few years ago … Many people denounce the crow as one of the cruellest and most vicious of birds. It is, however, only a matter of surrounding conditions. In the north of Queensland, where the tick pest is prevalent, the crow … is an assistance to the cattle-raiser. I have many times seen a beast covered with ticks lie down and allow the crows to alight upon him and pick the ticks off … When the parasites were cleared off from one side, the beast would rise up and lie on the other side and allow the crows to clean that side … No man believes in the wholesale slaughter of ducks by shooting parties who go out with a gun arranged like a miniature cannon in the bow of a boat so as to blow the birds off the face of the water in hundreds. The thing seems so brutal. It would not be so bad if every duck shot was killed, but hundreds of the poor things get away injured, and are then of no good to themselves or to any person. I should like to see a definite regulation against the use of small shot for duck-shooting.[2]
On his expeditions he learned the hardships of the bushworkers; participated in their fight against such terrors as floods, droughts, and bushfires; struggled with them against poverty and hunger; and absorbed their militant traditions. He listened to the bitter controversy that raged over the hanging of Ned Kelly, who had seemed to many of the rural poor to be the very incarnation of their struggle against the rich squatters. He was told how shearers on the Darling burned the river paddle-steamer Rodney, which had been used to carry scabs. Also he heard the fierce radical condemnation of the “farm burning” incidents and the “take no prisoners” policy employed in the Boer War, the second imperalist conflict in which Australians had provided soldiers to assist in the suppression of colonial insurgents.
About 1909, Brookfield became a working miner along the line of lode in the great silver-lead field at Broken Hill, in the remote west of New South Wales, and he worked underground for seven years there. “The Hill” had become a centre of militant unionism, partly because of the penetration of radical ideas but principally owing to the avaricious nature of the mineowners, who had their financial base in the banking system of Adelaide, and who were aggressively anti-labour.
When the Gold Rush began in Victoria many of the shepherds left South Australia. The flocks and herds grazed unattended and were soon set upon by sheep-stealers and cattle-duffers. In this respect the history of South Australia differs from that of the eastern states, because there were many who rose to wealth and power in the central state from bare-faced robbery of the early settlers. This dark stain on the accumulation of capital in South Australia was behind the unscrupulous attitude of the mineowners in the early days in the Broken Hill mines, because, whilst Broken Hill belonged geographically to New South Wales, it was economically part of South Australia, where many of the colonial capitalists had characters hardened by the unsavoury methods by which their wealth had been acquired.
When trade was booming, the small population and geographic isolation of Australia evoked a spirit of militant independence in the working people. In the more prolonged periods of slump, the workers were compelled by the special national peculiarities to remain mostly in the cities and organise for collective self-preservation. Sheep-shearing, grain-harvesting, fruit-picking, and cane-cutting provided seasonal employment, but the bulk of the workers have always been compelled by the land tenure system and the harshness of the back country to remain compressed in to the narrow fertile areas around the south-east coast. There was only one place where the working man could "go west" in the American sense — Broken Hill.
At Broken Hill Brookfield met Harry Holland, Bob Ross, the Eureka veteran Monty Miller, Peter Simonoff, and many other radicals.
It is well established that the Australian Labor Party was formed as a result of a widespread appreciation of the limitations of pure and simple trade unionism, which was brought about by the defeat of the great strikes of the 1890s. Of course, it is also a fact that the idea of working-class parliamentary action had long been maturing in the minds of trade unionists. Unity Hall in Balmain was the actual birthplace of the Australian Labor Party, and Jacob Garrard, a worker at Morts Dock, became the first Labor parliamentarian.
The Australian Labor Party had early electoral successes and these attracted close attention overseas, with considerable impact. Within a decade of the founding of the Australian Labor Party, Keir Hardie and his colleagues had inspired Scottish mining lodges, trade unions, co-operatives, and socialist groups to unite their forces in constituting a similar mass Labour Party in Britain. As far away as Russia, in about 1905, Parvus[3] noted the Australian trend and developed a prognosis that suggested “instead of the transformation of the democratic into the socialist revolution, merely the establishment in Russia of a regime of workers’ democracy, more or less as in Australia, where the first Labor government, resting on a farmerist foundation, did not venture beyond the limits of the bourgeois regime”. Rejecting Parvus, the majority of the Russian Social-Democrats argued that Australian democracy, maturing organically on the virgin soil of a new continent, immediately assumed a conservative character and dominated the youthful yet rather privileged proletariat. Russian democracy, on the contrary, could only come about in consequence of a large-scale revolutionary insurrection, the dynamics of which would never permit a labour government to maintain itself within the framework of bourgeois democracy.
While the growth of the Australian Labor Party had its repercussions overseas, the workers of Australia had been correspondingly influenced by a variety of international theories of social emancipation. The leaders of the miners at Ballarat in the 1850s were republicans. About a decade after Eureka the International Workingmen’s Association (known as the First International) acquired an affiliation with Australia. Organised groups of socialists were active in several Australian cities from the 1880s onwards. Early in the twentieth century Tom Mann, on a visit from England, built a Socialist Party in Victoria that grew to almost mass dimensions and trained many future Labor celebrities who shone for a time in state politics, in both Victoria and South Australia. Anarchism as such has never gained more than modest support in Australia, but from 1908 the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of the Industrial Workers of the World began to infiltrate from the United States, and Industrial Workers of the World locals were organised in a network of centres, with far-reaching effects on the labour movement.
Labor electoral leagues were the organisational expression of an epoch of challenge and ferment in town and country, when workers were imbibing the communitarian philosophy of Billy Lane, reciting the rebel verse of Henry Lawson, and reading the utopian socialist novels of Edward Bellamy — Looking Backward and Equality. This hotbed of political theory then, was the milieu into which the immigrant Percy Brookfield was projected.
There was an assortment of rebel literature to occupy the spare-time reading of those living in the isolation of “The Hill”. Popular radical publications of the day included Might is Right by “Ragnar Redbeard”, The Iron Heel and many other books by Jack London, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, and The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue. In Brookfield’s time the United States was the source of a tremendous amount of radical literature and the bloom of the American Revolution and the Civil War against slavery were still very much in evidence. Jack London, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, Daniel DeLeon, Joe Hill and many other Americans were the heroes of Australian radicals. The works of Karl Marx and other European socialists were printed at the publishing house of Charles H. Kerr & Company in Chicago.
Paul Lafargue was a son-in-law of Karl Marx, and a biographer has suggested that the relationship was not the happiest. Lafargue seemed to be having a crack at Marx when he referred to people “drying up their brains with political economy”. Lafargue’s booklet The Right to be Lazy was a best-seller at radical meetings, particularly those of the International Workers of the World. It was written as an answer to a French advocate of “the right to work”. Lafargue said the right to work was a very dubious right, and workers should fight rather for the right to be lazy. In the golden days of feudalism, according to Lafargue, who was something of an historian, the workers enjoyed much more leisure than under capitalism, and had more than 150 feast days and holy days in addition to Sundays, and on such days no work was done. Lafargue’s opposition to the gospel of work was undoubtedly the theoretical basis for the struggle for reduced hours of work and although his devastating pamphlet has been forgotten, his ideas persist to this day.
The Industrial Workers of the World rented a large hall in Sussex Street, Sydney (where the Police club now stands). It was only nominally their headquarters because, like Marshal Ney, they rode to the sound of the guns, and moved quickly to any trouble spot on the industrial front, “agitating, educating, and organising”. Adelaide thus became a focal point for the Industrial Workers of the World, as it had a direct rail link with the industrial cockpit at Broken Hill.
Membership of the Industrial Workers of the World was strictly limited to genuine industrial workers, whether regular or seasonal. The Industrial Workers of the World was “nonpolitical” and did not contest parliamentary elections. Australian Labor Party parliamentarians and “craft” union officials were viewed with critical suspicion, and many of them were denounced as “fakers”, recreant to the needs of the workers and interested only in feathering their own nests. When the Communist Party came on the scene, very much later, it was ridiculed by the Industrial Workers of the World as the “Comical Party”.
Prior to 1916, despite all the radical influences upon him, Brookfield was not consistently active in the labour movement. The irregularities of his occupation for a long time precluded any sustained effort in the workers’ organisations, but even when first employed in the mines at Broken Hill he attended union meetings only occasionally. Possibly his employment along the line of lode was only intermittent; it is known, for instance, that at one period during the “Great” War he was prospecting for gold at Mount Brown.
Along the line of lode the mine-workers knew Brookfield by the nickname of Jack. Characteristically he coupled that name with his own, so that his name later appeared on the electoral ballot papers and in Hansard as Percival John Brookfield. The working conditions aroused him to a lifelong resentment. The mine managers and inspectors, in his view, had no respect for human life. Their only interest was profit and to get it they operated double shifts, a contract system that sweated men and encouraged them to take risks and did not pay compensation to the injured. When he was no longer a miner he continued to attack the injustice of Broken Hill’s “subterranean sweatshops” and its “red toll”. He declared to the New South Wales parliament:
It is the greatest man-killing industry in Australia. One in four men is hurt annually, and twenty are killed … Many a time have I pulled my mates from under falls of earth — done to death because of the damnable meanness of the companies in refusing to spend a few pounds on timbering for the mines.[4]
He waged a stubborn battle to end double shifts and the contract system and to win adequate compensation payments for killed and injured mineworkers and he won the deep affection of those for whom he campaigned.
In an electioneering speech at a later time he continued to berate the rich industralists for their greed:
Every mining town the size of Broken Hill should possess a hospital maintained out of the profits of the mines, and when a man is diseased or injured in the mines the companies should keep him and his family by providing them with the same money the breadwinner brought home when in full health. I favour miners selecting from their ranks inspectors to be paid by the government, and the putting into effect of the recommendations of the Royal Commission into the mining industry … They also need a sanatorium kept out of the mine dividends for the benefit of the derelicts of the industry.[5]
By late 1915 rising prices and declining faith in the war began to lead to dissatisfaction and unrest and Broken Hill miners were increasingly resentful at having to work all day Saturday, especially when they saw the mineowners by their labour “profiteering” from the war. Although their union leaders had a reputation for militancy they were not in the mood for confrontation, for anti-union laws in New South Wales were savage and twenty-eight of the union leaders, including Tom Mann and Harry Holland, had gone to jail in 1909 for leading the strike then for better conditions. Besides, the lock-out in 1909 had lasted from January to May, causing cruel poverty and distress to unionists’ families.
With their 4½-year contract due to end in June, in March 1915 the miners began to seek better conditions in a new contract, but the mineowners would not make any new offers, claiming it was not the time to increase wages, and the status quo should be maintained until six months after the war ended. So a mass meeting of the underground miners of Broken Hill on Sunday, September 28, resolved to refuse to turn up for the Saturday afternoon shift. This intensified the year-long struggle to achieve a forty-four hour week.
The union leaders tried to win a new deal from the Arbitration Court in Melbourne to avoid a strike because under the penalty clauses of the Arbitration Act the union could be fined up to £1000 a day while a strike continued.
The mineowners were angered by the men’s absenteeism and threatened to close the mines if it continued. The surface workers then abandoned their underground mates. The underground workers, including Brookfield, determined to carry on the fight alone: the men at each mine organised their campaign and a committee was set up, with J.J. O’Reilly as secretary, to co-ordinate the individual efforts. In the Eight Hour Day procession, thousands who wanted the shift abolished announced their intention by flaunting badges inscribed with the words: “If you want a 44-hour week, take it”.
By November mineowners were threatening to close the mines and Judge Higgins of the Arbitration Court threatened to deprive the miners of the “bob a day” (conceded by the mineowners from early September) if they did not work the Saturday afternoon shift. However, after weeks of fighting alone the underground miners won the support of the Barrier Labor Federation and the Barrier Daily Truth, and would not budge. Judge Higgins called two compulsory conferences of mineowners, union executives and underground workers’ committee leaders at which he undertook to deal with the forty-four hour week demand in February if the miners returned to the Saturday afternoon shift. The men still refused to work. On December 10, having failed to cajole or bounce the underground men, Judge Higgins relieved the companies of their undertaking to pay the extra “bob a day” and left them free to proceed under the penal clauses of the act if they chose to do so.
On December 16 the companies posted a notice at each mine, at once threatening and bribing:
On and after Monday, December 20, the usual working hours of 48 hours per week will be strictly enforced; any employee not working the full 48 hours will be considered to have broken his contract and will be dismissed: the rates of wages will be those ruling prior to September 12 last; but every employee or contractor adhering to the rules and terms of contract, who shall have worked 48 hours in any week, will have 11 shillings extra per day or shift, added to his earnings for that week by way of a bonus; boys pro rata.[6]
The underground workers, including Brookfield, met on Saturday, December 16, and responded unanimously that: “ … we continue to miss the Saturday afternoon shift”.
The Amalgamated Miners Association tried to persuade the men to go to the Saturday shift while it secured a court hearing in February of the forty-four week claim, but the underground men refused. As the threat of company sackings grew closer the underground men unanimously decided on December 29 and again after the New Year holiday on January 8, 1916, “in the event of any worker or a whole shift of workers being dismissed for missing the Saturday afternoon shift, all workers on all three shifts return home”. The latter meeting also decided to picket all mines that afternoon. On Monday, January 10, all those who had missed the Saturday afternoon shift were sacked, and the strike was on.
Next day, Tuesday, January 11, a mass meeting of the Amalgamated Miners Association adopted the underground men’s recommendations and set up a strike committee of fifteen, to which unions having members working on the mines were invited to send delegates. Percy Brookfield’s courage, determination and forthright speech so impressed the men at the mass meeting that he was elected chairman of this strike committee. It was his first major role as a workingman’s advocate.
This position also thrust Brookfield into a public declaration of his antiwar views, for the strike issue was complicated by the hysterical atmosphere of war fervour, which was turned against any workers trying to get better conditions.
Two delegates went from this meeting to enlist the support of the Port Pirie workers, but the smelters there were well supplied with ore and the workers there and at Iron Knob had succumbed to the wave of patriotic enthusiasm. They refused to help their underground mates at the Hill, telling them they should “support the boys in the trenches”. As Port Pirie miners constituted a branch of the Amalgamated Miners Association they were declared black by the association and all men who went on working at Port Pirie were expelled as scabs from the association. The Port Pirie secretary brought the association books back to the Hill, alleging that the bosses had tried to bribe him to be anti-strike.
Nearer at hand, further patriotic pressure was exerted on Brookfield’s strike committee and the underground miners by the presence of a small munitions factory at Broken Hill. This factory was the focus of the pro-war side of the dispute.
Owned by the mining companies, only recently set up, and situated near the Central, South and South Blocks mines, it was dependent on the mine powerhouses for electricity, steam and compressed air. So bringing the mines to a standstill would also close the munitions works. However, keeping the munitions factory working meant keeping the mine pumps and cages going and breaking the strike.
The companies in their newspaper, the Barrier Miner, hammered up whatever public feeling they could against the strikers who were “helping Germany”.
The engine drivers and firemen supplying the power for the mines and the munitions factory patriotically refused the request of Brookfield’s strike committee to join the strike, and continued working. Brookfield then had his committee tighten the picket lines around the Central, South and South Blocks mines. The picketers were instructed to refuse to let any of the engine drivers or firemen through unless they held permits from the strike committee. The Federated Engine Drivers and Firemens Association refused to apply to Brookfield for permits. Consequently there were bitterly angry clashes at the picket lines. Nevertheless the striking miners had the numbers and they stopped work going on at the mines and, of course, the munitions factory. The breach between the unions that this fighting caused was long in healing and hecklers threw it at Brookfield for months to come that he had “sacrificed the boys at Gallipoli”.
That the boys in the trenches were killed in consequence of Brookfield’s forty-four hour week strike was a pro-war lie which Brookfield in his later speeches and George Dale in his Industrial History of Broken Hill dismissed scathingly:
The Broken Hill Munitions Factory never produced one single shell previous to the strike, and having served the masters’ purpose in creating an opinion hostile to the strikers in union circles throughout the country, it was abandoned, no further attempts being made to ‘manufacture munitions’. True, the ‘factory’ did, previous to the strike, turn out a few imitation shells, but they were the wrong shape or the wrong pattern, or wrong size, or the material used was not up to standard; anyway, whatever was wrong the ‘munitions’ were all condemned and scrapped, and the building finally pulled down.[7]
Company over-reaction to Brookfield’s picket lines brought the forty-four hour week conflict to the notice of Prime Minister Hughes. According to George Dale’s account:
About 11pm on January 16 one of the big mine “Pinkertons” who had come to town and was returning to his quarters under police escort was passed through the picket line at the Sulphide Street entrance to the BHP leases; as soon as the sergeant and constables had passed him over the boundary he drew a revolver and, addressing the pickets, said. “Now come on, you bloody bastards, and see how you get on.” One of the pickets jumped towards him, when he fired point-blank. It was not known for the moment whether the unionist had been wounded or not, as he had gone back into the crowd, but when a demand was made for the arrest of the Pinkerton, Sergeant Griggor refused to act, but was diligently searching for the picket who had been fired at, while the Pinkerton was allowed to return to the mine.
Two days later Prime Minister Hughes wired Mr Barnett, asking if any lives were being endangered by armed men employed by private companies, and if so he be informed at once. Subsequent events showed that Hughes’s anxiety for the men’s safety was but an attempt at pretended sympathy as one of the means of cajoling them back to work, as shortly afterwards he telegraphed:
“I hope that counsels of reason and patriotism will prevail and that the advice of those German sympathisers who are insidiously active in fomenting disturbances will be disregarded. I ask the men to return to work at once, and submit their dispute to the Arbitration Court. I will do everything in my power to secure an early hearing; if this is not possible, I will on my return from England next May create a tribunal to hear and determine the case without delay and to make the award retrospective, providing the resumption is immediate: and I ask that a secret ballot be taken on my proposal.”
Billy has often been termed a Modern Napoleon; evidently he is also Joshua, and would undertake to make time stand Still, as the strike was for a reduction of hours, and he would make the award retrospective![8]
The underground men stayed out on strike for a month. By the second week they were facing the workers’ downfall in nearly every strike — starvation. Desperate for money, Brookfield’s committee dispatched union representatives to the main Australian cities appealing for help. Despite the past generosity of the Amalgamated Miners Association to other unions, the support Brookfield received was meagre, many unionists reproaching the strikers: “You are assisting Germany; you have stopped the Broken Hill Munitions Factory; the boys in the trenches will all be killed in consequence.”
Towards the end of January however, the mining companies began to weaken in their resolve. Profits were falling and the ore supplies for the Port Pirie smelting works began to dwindle. Company owners urged Judge Higgins to make an award to settle the dispute. Feeling that time was on their side the strikers determined to hang on and Brookfield’s committee redoubled its efforts to scrape up money for the hungry families.
Finally, in an attempt to break the deadlock the federal Labor government intervened. Senator Pearce, the acting prime minister while Hughes was in London, put a proposal that evidently had been suggested to him by the Melbourne Trades Hall Council. Pearce sent Brookfield a telegram proposing that if the miners returned to work four days per week the government would “make application to Arbitration Court to place the case on the top of the list, and the Court (would) open on February 14; glad to have an early reply”.
Distrustful of anything but their own direct action, Brookfield and his committee members decided to urge the underground men to reject Pearce’s proposal, for it failed to guarantee them what they had sacrificed so much to obtain. On the following day Brookfield called a mass meeting and put his committee’s motion. The mass meeting agreed with the committee and decided: “That we take no action until we get a guarantee that the court will sit on February 14 and grant us the forty-four hour week.”
Taken aback, the Melbourne Trades Hall Council hastily assured Brookfield’s strike committee that Pearce’s offer was genuine and had their support. Senator Pearce displayed his bona fides by trying to obtain an assurance from the court that the forty-four hour case would be dealt with promptly and impartially. Eventually on February 9, under pressure from those they trusted in the labour movement. Brookfield’s committee called another mass meeting to hear telegrams and four speakers from Melbourne who wanted to urge support of the Pearce offer. The men were convinced that the suggestion of the acting prime minister to the Arbitration Court was as good as a command and agreed to give up their strike. They decided: “That we accept the proposals of Senator Pearce, providing there is no victimisation.”
The men returned to work. The Arbitration Court met on February 14. The court took evidence, demanded the miners promise to produce as much profit for the shareholders in forty-four hours as they had done in forty-eight, increased wages and granted the shorter hours. The struggle was won. The underground miners held Brookfield in great respect and affection. The non-striking surface men’s request to the court for a forty-four hour week was refused.
After years of bitter struggle and defeat the Broken Hill miners were jubilant. They put their success down to “Brookie’s” inspired tactics. However, although satisfied with winning shorter hours, Brookfield felt that the circumstances of the dispute had been fraught with injustices and he maintained his attack on these. It was his most notable characteristic that he never backed off from an injustice but manoeuvred year after year for a remedy irrespective of the opposition, antagonism or abuse of those whose vested interests he was challenging. At the time he told his union friends of his dissatisfactions, and he later forcibly repeated them to the New South Wales parliament. He resented the abuse that was heaped on the miners for striking in wartime:
The mine inspectors and managers know that these mines are worked for the purpose of profit and with no regard for human life. When the Broken Hill miners have the courage to say, ‘We want better conditions underground at Broken Hill,’ every member of the National Party says that they are Germans.[9]
He considered it unjust that the miners should be driven so hard to benefit aboveground shareholders:
Before leaving the war question, there is one phase I would like to put before honourable members, and it is that a great deal of the present war fervour is due to the fact that huge profits are being made … Take, for instance, the South Silver Mining Company of Broken Hill. Its profits this year are four times as great as they were in 1914 … but at the same time the great interests which have raised the price of lead from £19 to £30 per ton, owing to the dire necessities of the Empire, have termed the Broken Hill miners Germans and traitors for asking for a forty-four hour week … In this great national crisis money should be given freely, just as freely as the lives of men. But we are told, ‘Oh, you will interfere with the whole banking system’. It will be much better to interfere with the banking system than to interfere with a man’s inside with a bayonet.[10]
There had been several aspects of the Miners’ Union presentation of its case for a forty-four hour week to the Arbitration Court that had dissatisfied Brookfield, because he believed in collective bargaining. The successful subsequent operation of collective bargaining al Broken Hill owed much to his teaching. But he had no time for what he aptly termed “aristocratic” unions. He advocated industrial unionism (organisation of workers according to industry instead of according to craft} and campaigned with some success for One Big Union of Mineworkers. This idea of industrial unionism had spread to Australia from the American socialist Daniel DeLeon, and manifested itself in the One Big Union movement of the Industrial Workers of the World, greatly improving the structure of many Australian trade unions. Brookfield said:
I do not believe in an arbitration system under which we have courts presided over by £60 a week judges, before whom workingmen have to appear and take their wives with them and produce evidence to show how much it costs them to live, whilst no question is raised as to the profit the employer makes. The workers have to fight out their cases before men whose environment is such that they cannot be sympathetic towards the workers.[11]
To him, arbitration was “only a farce“ through which the largest, most militant unions got the best awards. Arbitration did not win better working conditions: only the class struggle did this, in which through their organised industrial might, the workers fought and won victories.
Under the best conditions, the greatest benefits that have been derived from the Arbitration Court system were only obtained when a body of militant men in some particular union raised the standard of living by direct action. Having achieved that by their own industrial strength then the less powerful unions were able to go to the Arbitration Court and the judge was of necessity compelled to raise the standard of living for those people very nearly up to the standard won as the result of direct action by stronger organisations.[12]
The arrogance of the upper class most rankled with Brookfield, particularly their tender regard for social institutions that caused suffering to people he knew, and he remembered for a long lime the let-them-eat-dripping attitude of the employers’ legal representative who argued against the court awarding the miners their forty-four hour week:
The Arbitration Court today is a fattening paddock for many of the legal fraternity. Generally speaking, these lawyers and doctors who talk of the workers have never been in a poor paddock in their lives. They do not know what it is to work for a few shillings a day; they reckon their salaries in guineas. But they talk about the unfortunate workers who have to go to the Arbitration Court and beg and pray for what they want, and expose all their household affairs … to show what they can live on; and when the judge finds out the lowest possible amount on which a worker can live, that is made the basic wage … In Melbourne, Mr Lewis, a barrister, acting for the mineowners in the Arbitration Court, condemned the strikers, and concluded by saying that the conditions under which men live need not compel them to strike. He said the increase in the cost of foodstuffs does not mean an increase in the cost of the workers’ living because where they were using butter they could use margarine or dripping; and where they were using one class of meat they could buy inferior meal or rabbits. Those who produce the wealth are to live on the scraps, and those who do nothing are to have all the fine pickings. How can one expect arbitration to be a success when men discuss things of moment to the workers in such a flippant and silly manner? Arbitration, even in its most favourable light, unless you limit the price of foodstuffs, is no good. What is the good of raising the workers’ wages one shilling a day, when food immediately goes up to cut that shilling down? That is what had made the Arbitration Court such a farce in the past: there has been no limit to the depredations of those who handle the food markets.[13]
1. Barrier Daily Truth. April 1, 1921.
2. NSW Parliamentary Debates (NSWPD), Vol I XXI 877
3. Parvus was the pseudonym of a Russo-German socialist leader, Alexander Israel Helphand. Once important, the now all-but forgotten Helphand was an enigmatic and intriguing character — a rich Jew and Marxist intellectual eventually scorned by both Communist and Nazi. His biographers assess him thus. “Before the First World War, Helphand had been an original thinker, an influential socialist and revolutionary, but when he sold out after August 1914 he became a traitor to the working class, a German chauvinist, a corrupt war profiteer.” (Z.A.B. Zeman and W.B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) 1867-1924. Oxford University Press, 1965. 1-2).
4.Ibid Vol LXIX, 2281
5. Electoral Meeting, Railway Town, January 1917.
6. George Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill, Fraser & Jenkinson, 1918, 192
7. Ibid, 202
8. Ibid, 199
9. NSWPD, Vol LXIX, 2752
10. Ibid, Vol LXVII, 105-7
11. Ibid, Vol LXIX, 2437
12. Ibid, Vol LXIX, 2752
13. Ibid, Vol LXVII 108. This extract is taken from Brookfield’s maiden speech in Parliament, July 18, 1917