The final part of Sally Mitchell’s interview with the AMR describes the experience witnessing the amalgamations of unions and the narrowing of trade union organising to recruitment through the Organising Works program, as well as the rich cultural activity of the Semaphore Workers Club. The period was during the Prices and Income accord and the development of a concept of Unions being amalgamated to provide “a more authoritative” union structure to carry out the collaboration of unions with Government through what was called the Tripartite involvement of the delivery of wage restraint coupled with the increase in what was deemed the “social wage” i.e., increased health benefits and additional family supplements.
AMR: What was the amalgamation process of merging the many small unions like? What do you think the effects and consequences of this process?
Sally M: Yeah, amalgamations were upon us at that point in time with the change in nature, industrial relations, you know, as a result of the accord and the move towards the workplace bargaining. It was inevitable that we were going down that path and that it clearly was with the decline of manufacturing. So, amalgamations were being pushed. Bigger unions to survive with smaller resources and smaller memberships were the argument. Bigger unions, less democracy, less opportunities for positions, is what I see being the outcome.
I think amalgamations were not necessarily positive in the opportunities for people. I think it’s declined the number of opportunities, and I think the number of number of people wanting the leadership roles doubled. So, you might have one secretary and two assistant secretary positions in the leadership of a union while the number of people wanting these positions has doubled. It’s like a fight to the death in many cases, and in the Metal Workers (AMWU) it definitely became a fight to the death.
In terms of our organisation, the food preservers – we’re a small union in the industry. We had a good membership, but we were, like all unions, facing negative impact on our membership. First years being secretary I negotiated half my members redundancies. That was the time Interest rates have gone to 17% it was that period of time in, in our economy. We were seeing factories closed left, right and centre and so you did need to go and find somewhere.
I do know that some other unions approached Tom, our national secretary, to have that discussion at that level to ask him about, you know, come and amalgamate with us. One of them put to him “what do you want, Tom?” you know, to make the amalgamation happen. Tom said, ‘it’s not about me.’ We never touched that lot with a 10-foot bargepole, you know? He said ‘we’re not going with that union. It’s not about us; it’s about our members and what’s our members’ best interest.
The confectionaries union was like us, a small union, here in South Australia they were a right- wing union, but they were in Victoria on the left. We ended up amalgamating with them, and that was a good small logical amalgamation. Here it was problematic because they took the membership from that Union and put it into another Union. They gave me a shell with no assets and no members. We did have members, but they would not tell me where they were. I got thrown out of factories and stuff like that through that period of time. We ended up with those workers and they spoiled my taste with cheap chocolate because I got to eat the good stuff with my members.
From there it was again, in the face of economic times, the need to look at the next amalgamation point. Our choices were the AWU, the Storeman and Packers as they were called at the time at the time, or United Voice. We were manufacturing as far as I’m concerned and so we went to the Metal Workers. It’s a political decision too. The Metal Workers were, in my mind, out of all of those choices, the best option for us. Yeah. And nationally, that was where we went, and I still believe that a good option for us; for the members. It was always about what was in the best interest of the members.
AMR: You mentioned before having to negotiate redundancies and before this interview explained it to us in terms of the context of the dismantling of the industrial system in Australia?
Sally M: When I was with the Miscellaneous Workers Union, so I had gone around with an official for a period of starting there. My first job I went to by myself was an industrial laundry. We visited this factory, so I’d been there before. I went out there and I get there and I’m getting told that the factory is shutting that day. I looked at him and said, ‘you know I’m new, I need to make a phone call’ (Laughter). I had no idea what to do, so I rang back to the office and a senior official came out, you know? So that was my first hitting kind of ‘Shit, now what do I do!?’ ‘How do you deal with this?’ When I got into the Food Preservers Union; we’ve got all these little factories all over with those workers working these jobs making fruit juice and all those sorts of things. Next thing and it’s ‘high interest rate or that’, the next thing we got factory closure, and factory closure after factory closure.
We had had a factory here that was the state government food factory before my time. They had gone into difficulties and had been bought out by a local company that was called ‘Some Soft Foods’. Some Soft Foods was a great factory, good membership around the corner from the office and I spent a lot of there with them. People might recognise SPC (canned fruit). They did SPC before SPC was a sort of thing. One day I walked in, and they had the receivers in. What they had deliberately done, we didn’t know until after the receivers were there, they had shifted all the assets of the company out of the company to another company, and they shifted all the workers off to a different company, technically on the books. We didn’t know, none of us knew, and they had been deducting people’s entitlements now for the Union dues, for their health benefits, whatever they had deducted from their wages and not sending it. It wasn’t just the Union fees they withheld; they stole money from people. We had to work through this; It was ‘How do you get money from something that had no money?’ They’d left a shell and shut it down.
So that’s where I started to learn about this stuff, I had to work through how we got our members entitlements. We had this group of largely migrant workers, women workers at that. There was a bank foreclosure; when a company went into receivership the bank had instigated the move for their money. And so, what are we going to do? it’s coming up to Christmas time. So, we decide we’re going to occupy the bank (laughs). We went through this process for these poor workers.
Fortunately, I got a bit of money out of the receiver, and I was able to take that route and deliver cheques. That was my first experience with that.
But and then from that point on I began negotiating redundancies for people and trying to get whatever I could for them. I got angry and I just went. You know, I walk into redundancy negotiations with the attitude of ‘you’re taking away these jobs for the future; I’m going to make you pay as much as I can out of here, I’m going to penalise you with as much as I can’. The best time to negotiate it with the companies is when they need to do something. Yeah, they’ve got deadlines, they want to move their equipment out of the factory. I think that’s the best time to negotiate because they can’t get it out the door unless you let them. You can decide to occupy the factory, and we had done that in history, this one we occupied the bank.
We had these poor migrant workers, I had this industrial Officer they were a pain in the ass. He came and he started interfering. We come back to the office, we talked about what would be our next action and we’ve carefully planning this stuff to put the pressure on to try and get the money out. This guy stands up in the office with these workers telling them that tomorrow we’re going to occupy the bank, then the police are going to come and they’re going to arrest us all, you know. I mean these migrant worker’s husbands are in there with them hearing this talk about them all getting arrested. Shut up! We’ve not going to have anyone on picket line tomorrow if you keep this up. That was his lack of understanding of what he was doing. We knew we had to do this really carefully to hold these workers with us. To be able to get what they needed. They were prepared to fight, but don’t scare them about it.
We planned it out, we’re going do that, we’re going to have chains around the doors to the bank. We’re going say we’re doing all this stuff and have banners and demonstrate we have great massive support. Every night we would get media, we’re getting into the news, and they were with us and the police were with us. Everything we did was in conjunction to make sure we hit the right news bit and they were planning it with us. It was quite funny. We went who will be going there? Yeah, now we’re going to sit in the bank and then we’re going to refuse to leave. The Police would go ‘were going to come in and take you out.’ I told them ‘That’s OK, you’re going to take me.’ That’s basically what we’re doing. They would be opposite ourselves, this picket line with ‘we’re not letting anybody in the bank’ with chains on the doors. They said, ‘that’s alright we’re going to fix this after’. They were supportive they were workers too; they understood it. And so yeah they the police and me the official would be the one they would be seen in the media being taken out. Not my members, not somebody’s wife being arrested. And it was all for the media. It was all staged, it was all media staged. At the end of the day, I was able to get some money for those workers, not all of their entitlements, but some that was critical.
And so, every job I went on to negotiate redundancy for people at a time when redundancy would have ceilings and the amount people would get, or you know whatever I was getting 4 weeks per year of service ad infinitum and however many years you work there, you got it. I was getting a full payout of sick leave. I’d get full payout long service, or after seven years, three years, five years, whatever. I would just try and get any bit of money I could and put It into the workers hands. Very much from that perspective that these jobs will no longer be available for kids to the future, and I’m going make you regret every bit of that. It was a horrible time in that way. But it was also, I learned a hell of a lot through that process.
One of the things about that dispute that nearly blew the whole thing out of the water strategically was this industrial officer who I worked with who didn’t, in my mind, understand what we were doing to some degree and got his own views about things. He decided one night without any discussion or consultation to ring the receiver at his home and implied threats. The next day I had the angriest receiver on the phone, basically could have blown everything up. Everything we’ve done would been destroyed and we get nothing because he was about ready to prosecute us for threatening. I had to talk him down. Him down and the Industrial Officer out the door. ‘Get away from this dispute. You’re not touching it. Don’t you say another word and how dare you do this! Cause it’s not about you. It’s about the members.’
AMR: This clearly demonstrates what ultra-left ‘radicalism’ actually gets you.
Sally M: Absolutely, yeah. Listen, and I’ve said it numerous times in the union movement with people who are, you know, they’re good people. They’re lefties. They’re really excited. They’re organisers, but they forget they’re not ‘it’. It’s not about them. Therefore, their actions overtake what the issue is and their personal behaviours detract from what the point is that you’re trying to make is and damaging the issue. Whether it been the stuff I’ve been involved with or others they can become so self-centred in their behaviours that they have no regard for the impact or consideration with the impact of their behaviour either on the workers or on their union.
I spent a lot of time realising that things have changed, that organisers didn’t know how to do a lot of that stuff and that the basics of how to organise on the job that we learn on the job and with good people around us had changed significantly. It wasn’t that they weren’t good people, but the job of organising had been narrowed down within the Union movement. I argue that ‘Organising Works’ has eroded and broken down the skill of organising. (Organising works was a new training scheme introduced by the ACTU).
AMR: Could you tell us a bit more about ‘Organising Works’?
Sally M: My experience of Organising Works was that at the very beginning of it. I had the opportunity to go and talk with groups of new people coming in through it. These were people that were engaged to recruit. They are recruiters. They get brought in keen and eager, they might have been just out of university, going to work with the unions. Incredibly exciting time for people. They put them through education on community organising using all those skills that people think they need and then they send them out there to the unions. Now the gaps in that were number one they taught them the theoretical approach to all but not the real politics of unions. The issues who has power and who decides things? Then secondly, they taught them to recruit, but they didn’t teach them how to do anything else with that. If they taught them how to do anything else, then the union wouldn’t let them do anything else. Those organisers hit lots of barriers.
I also say that the fundamental reason they were brought in was to recruit which was the hardest job ever, the hardest job in the union movement to recruit new members. Arguing with the bosses is the easy bit. Getting the members in the first place is the hardest. This is coming in at a point in time in our working history were all the jobs that could be organised had been organised. The ones left were the hardest, hardest ones, and we’ve gotten brand new kids there to do it. ‘So, here’s your toolkit. You go do it.’ Then putting the new organisers up is a union that would be maybe having some internal problems and was cautious about who was allowed to do what in terms of knowing things and having access to information or access to groups of members. I was with the foodies where we did an industry thing, and somebody tried to put out some bloke that I wouldn’t let anywhere near my members because we couldn’t politically trust him. We couldn’t trust him not try and do a job on us and so I just refused point blank. “If that’s going be it I’m out of here right now.” There’s a political thing and that’s what these young people collided with in many cases, the internal politics of the union. That can get interesting.
They can hit that frustration. I had one came into the metal workers, Tracy, I said ‘listen Tracy I got some factories here would you like to work with’, I just gave it to I said ‘do you do whatever you need to, there’s no restrictions here, if you get them in, you get them in.’ After a while she came back and she said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.’ I said, ‘thank god, it’s not just me’. Those factories I’ve gone to many times. You get a friendly reception, there’s no sense the boss was undermining you; there’s no sense of anti-union feeling, no sense they are being threatened if they join. They ring if they had a problem. I had some members just could not get the rest on the line. She did everything, everything new that she went off from the Organising Works training and couldn’t get any of them on the line either. I don’t know how you deal with that. I don’t. But still, to this day I have always found that recruitment is the hardest bit of union organising.
It’s easy to get a member of the Union when they got a problem, but the unions by that stage had adopted an attitude that said ‘Well, if you’re just walking in the door now and you’ve got a problem we’re going to charge you a year’s fees.’ Please, we didn’t do that. If we did that we wouldn’t have a member. I used to. I used that stuff a lot to educate people about unions, you know, because we’re, I guess I had maybe more flexibility in that one. I’d often have at many times over the years done something for a non-member on the basis that it would show them what unions do; demonstrate it.
AMR: You also mentioned the Semaphore Workers Club and how you have been involved in it, and that is a really fascinating story. Could you tell us about the Semaphore Workers Club and how it came to be?
Sally M: I have the proud privilege on top of everything else to be President of the Semaphore Workers Club. The Semaphore Workers Club goes back in this state as a building, as a club dates back to the early 1900s, when originally it was a cruising yacht squadron. When that moved out of the premises because their view got blocked, you know that was an elite sort of establishment. That was Commodores and the Governor sitting there watching the regattas. It went then to be just the Semaphore Club and that was an upper-class sort of thing. It wasn’t a worker’s club by any means. I believe it was where the bosses went and played like cards and billiards and things like that.
Around the late 70s, early 80s, you know, some comrades in the party, Benny Carslike and others become aware of the place, not sure who was the 1st through the door is always bragging rights on that one. The club membership had been declining. It was getting to the point of being not enough to run it. The very first time we went in there with no beers on tap or anything like that. It was a long-neck beer opened up around the bar. You know the place was really not being utilised. We joined so we just started to join the club. I actually became the first, another first, full female member of the club because the rules at that point of time only allowed associate membership to women and I challenged that and just said ‘oh, it’s illegal to do that’. I’m glad they didn’t take us down because there’s been a couple of clubs that went down on challenging that under the EO laws. But I verbally said it and they caved, and I became a full member. In effect we over time gained control of the club politically and it became the some of the Workers Club and that’s what it has been known as ever since, that and the ‘Commo’ club. Everybody has always known that it is, since it’s in its you know format since that time early 80s, as the Commo Club.
When we started doing bands down there and things like that, opening up place more and trying to get more income, I was running the Sunday bar sessions and that there. It became the commo club, and it’s carried on being an entertainment venue for all those years. We’re still only open a couple of days a week. We still run largely with a large portion of voluntary work though we pay the bar staff and the planners first before anybody else, probably cleaners first, then us. People coming back the next day for cleaning the novelty that wears off really quickly.
To be involved in the club is to respect the club and understand the politics, what the club and where we see ourselves as having a place within the Community. Not everybody walks in the door as a member of the party or may not even vote that way. I don’t care, if they’ll come and spend their money as we’ll take it, you know, we’ll educate them a bit along the way. You can always tell first comes to the club as their jaws will just drop when they walk in. They look at everything around the walls and we have trade union stuff, we have political stuff, and we have great murals, and then we have the bust of Lenin. Somebody asked who the black fellow was in the corner because it’s painted black, very heavy it got stolen once for a number of years and then returned, you know some funny stuff like that.
Since that time within all of the communities around Adelaide, there were small community clubs, around in the suburbs and they’re all closing up as trading hours and hotels went longer, people died off. They were in my mind the men sheds of their days where blokes went and congregate, play pool, darts and the rest of it but of home after the pubs are closed at 6:00 PM. That that whole lifestyle was the Workingmen’s Club has declined in our society, and they are largely gone. There was a Queenstown Workers club. That was, I think, sold and the money was used to renovate the toilet block of the Workers Club. Then we became part of the Royal Park Doghouse club and same thing. It’s a great little club rooms and community, serving a purpose for many, many years that declining now and there’s still some original members of the club. That came under the umbrella of the Port Adelaide United Workers Clubs. It gives the club two premises to be able to have activities in and work with both the party and with other community groups, so it’s a great way of propagating the party out there within community in that positive way. I’ve hosted wakes for people outside of our party and the broader left. They’ve come to us because of the venue, because they appreciate that. We’re about the last party left in the left with any structure around it that can be utilised in a progressive way.
AMR: What do you think is some of the work that the party could do to improve its work in the community?
Sally M: I think it is being seen, actually being seen. One of the criticisms we’ve had down the workers club over time was that we’re just those faceless old people behind the scenes calling the shots, they think that of the party. So, one of the things I’ve been saying to the newer people that we bring into the leadership group at the club and it’s one of the things I knew to be involved with the club is to protect it for the party and to make sure that it doesn’t get lost to us. We have an obligation to be part of our community. We are there every week talking to people. We’re there now on the question of the referendum (Voice Referendum) and getting information out there. We always have party information. Then we have our parties’ banners there.
Somebody questioned something one day, I said “listen we’re not afraid of our politics. We have no shame in our politics. I go and we can at the moment point out that right next door is a major million-dollar development going down, and we’re sitting here watching the sunset, drinking workers rates beer behind the bar listening to some of the best music in Adelaide, the reality is if it wasn’t for the politics at this club that’s what it would be. It would not be this. They understand that and they understand what that means to this Community. It’s well respected in that regard. They don’t all like us, but they respect us.
AMR: How do you think being a member of the Communist Party has changed overtime in terms of the experience?
Sally M: Not a lot. That was still very disciplined, we are the most disciplined party in my mind. No other organisation I’ve been in that works in the way we work, and I understand there can be issues in the way we work at time, that is what it means to be party member, working together in a disciplined way. Sometimes I still wonder how we engage broadly, if we can be dogmatic in our ideology, how do you be so dogmatic in your ideology and worry about where you’re at, and work broadly.
Sometimes it can be quite a difficult thing to balance, you know, because you can go too far. You can end up a nice new situation where your broad left ACU (Association of Communist Unity an organisation formed after the split on the accord) situation where you end up expelled from the party because you’ve gone outside the framework.
I see no contradiction whatsoever in myself in what I do, you know. Although I do recognise the need to ensure that everything is being looked after. You can’t do everything. You have to develop people. You have to have succession plans. You have to give people the opportunity to get experience and not tie them down too much. I think the party in the past has had the risk of bringing the excitement of new members in and then dampening it as quickly as we can in trying to teach them how to be a party member and the discipline of being a party member. So, when you’re coming in all enthused, you might have come out one of the other groups were you were allowed to do whatever you like and then you hit the party. Like a brick wall. You can’t just go off and do your own thing. That’s what you learn in the party. That’s our discipline. That’s why we still are here and why we still have very clear direction on where we’re going.
AMR: What are some of the most important lessons from your experience as an activist and as a communist that you think should be imparted on future generations or lessons that we should learn for the future?
Sally M: First I swear, learning to work collectively. You must learn to not take on more than you can deliver. The hardest thing of all for comrades to learn is to say ‘no, I can’t do that’ when you know things need to be done. I think we’re we’ve a party that has less members than it has had in past days yet we still in our mindset think we’re that big. We can take on all those things that we’ve always done and if you’re not careful, you burn people out. That’s a lesson from my working life.
You have to at the same time bring through people. I’m looking at our young cadre in this branch and going wow, they’re talented people, they’re really good value. And I’m trying to do 2 things. One is to make sure they don’t burn out and give them this what they need but equally let them do what they need to do, because the party, the party to the future, is what they make of it. Not what I make of it. It’s what they make of it. I can tell them about the past. They’re the ones going to tell me about the future. That’s the way I look at it. We’re going to have to be prepared to sit back a little bit more maybe than what we do.
I know the struggle continues, always just remind you, it’s a lifelong struggle. Doesn’t matter if we achieved a change in system tomorrow, it doesn’t stop the struggle, to maintain it. This is not a short-term commitment; this is a life-long commitment.