On the Waterfront
A year after the death of trade union lion, Jock Barnes, a new documentary looks at 1951, the year that made Barnes the most hated man in the country.
He’d made me a cuppa, brought out the bikkies, recited a Robbie Burns poem by heart, then clucked his way through the hundred or so 6x4 family snaps stuck to the wall of his tiny one-roomed Ellerslie flat. It was sometime in 1997. Then the frail old man with the badly mended broken legs opened a cupboard, pulled out a 400-page manuscript with the working title Never a White Flag, and thumped it down on the kitchen table. “Read it,” Jock Barnes commanded. “The bastards won’t publish it, but that’s what happened. That’s the truth. That’s our story.”
As it happens, the bastards did publish his memoirs, just before the former President of the Waterside Workers’ Union died in 2000. And while you can be certain that Barnes would’ve found some bits “bullshit”, I think he would’ve mostly enjoyed this week’s Documentary New Zealand: 1951, John Bates’s outstanding film about the great waterfront dispute of that year.
It was a different world then. You sense in the old newsreels a certain fascination in the relationship between man and machine. Massive praying mantis cranes lifted pallets and containers from the bowels of great ships while swarms of workers heaved, pushed, shunted crates, bales of wool, wagons of coal. It was hard, often dangerous work — each year scores of watersiders, coalminers or railway workers were killed in accidents. When your life literally depended on the person beside you, when they covered for you when you couldn’t keep up, did a whip round if you were sick, then you stuck up for them when they needed you.
These were unacceptably communistic sentiments for the United States and its special envoy John Foster Dulles. A famous photograph captures him seated beside Prime Minister Sid Holland during a National Government cabinet meeting. “Tell me what else I can do,” asked a craven Holland, “and I will do it.”
Dulles gave Holland his orders — stop communism, break worker solidarity, particularly on the docks. Engineer a confrontation. But the real story of 1951 was not the contrived lock-out, the McCarthyite propaganda, the malevolent intervention of corrupt FOL President Fintan Patrick Walsh, nor the fact that 15,000 other workers went out with the watersiders. It was about how readily the National Government resorted to fascism to protect “freedom”. With unseemly haste, it implemented the Emergency Regulations — making it a crime to give food or clothing to a watersider or their family. While the Auckland Star editorialised that watersiders should be shot, it was illegal to publish any material sympathetic to the watersider’s cause. As Bill Andersen wryly noted, the regulations made it illegal to discuss the regulations.
Then there was the Labour Party, born of the trade unions, whose leader, Walter Nash, said he was “neither for, nor against” the watersiders.
“Labour!” Jock Barnes spat when I saw him. “If ever a word has been so foully abused, it’s Labour.” The watery blue eyes flashed with anger. “They have the guts of a filleted whitebait and the morals of a marauding tomcat.”
Barnes called them the “spongers”. The do-nothing, paper-shuffling, parasitical bludgers who take whole afternoons for lunch, racked up on the company’s account of course, and then have the audacity to lecture workers about productivity and efficiency.
The watersiders went back to work after 151 days. Two thousand wharfies lost their jobs; Barnes was sentenced to two months hard labour; National called a snap election and won handily.
What, then, were the lessons of ’51? The strike had cost New Zealand £150 million, but it was also the end of militant trade unionism. The forestry workers, road builders, concrete cutters of 50 years ago, working together on a chain or line, are now courier drivers competing against each other, telemarketers trying to sell more than the woman beside them, casuals who’ll slag off their mates so they can get more shifts, only to be dispensed with when the boss no longer needs them. This is the new working class, one that shrinks from the term.
And allies itself to what Barnes called the “spongers”. Do-nothing, paper-shuffling, parasitical bludgers who take whole afternoons for lunch, racked up on the company’s account of course, and then have the audacity to lecture workers about productivity and efficiency.
Barnes despised these people. Even so, it was never really about lining capitalists up against walls — though Barnes wouldn’t have minded much if that happened — but, instead, almost a utopian vision of true community.
The last time I saw him, perhaps nine months before he died, he talked sentimentally about his old union. “What a union we were!” he said proudly. “The bloody best.” They had their own brass band, league teams, family picnics and barbies. It was, Barnes says, “All for one, and one for all — a real bloody community.” A model for what New Zealand could be.
It didn’t happen. Barnes’s principal fault was to presume others were as indomitable as he was. Watch the old footage and see how he strides at the front of the march, a bull of a man then, ready to take on the world.
He almost won. But his defeat was the result of the average New Zealander’s innate conservatism — a failure of nerve and imagination. Not the watersiders, but those who thought the wharfies’ fight was not their own, that it was better to keep your head down, do your job and bury your principles for a quiet life.
A better politician than Barnes might have been able to win them over. But Barnes was not a politican — he was a trade unionist.
A TV column, first published in the New Zealand Listener, 21 July 2001
