Precarious Pasts and Postwork Futures

This article was first published in the November 2017 edition of the LHP Bulletin, which had precarious work as its theme. Other articles from that Bulletin will be available on the LHP website in 2018.

Precarious labour is nothing new. Insecure and irregular work has been the norm rather than the exception in the history of capitalism. “For most of human history, work has occurred under unstable conditions, with little legal regulation and little expectation of long-term continuity.” Precarious labour today is not so much a new phenomenon “but the return of precarious labour after a three-decade interruption during the Fordist era in some parts of the world.”1

But this is only half the picture. Women and racialised minorities have always had a precarious relation to waged labour.2 Even at the height of Fordism, ‘standard employment relations’—regular, full-time, and long-term work characterised by (mostly) male workers concentrated in a single workplace or industry—were premised on the precarious and often invisible labour of others. As Angela Mitropoulos notes, the stability of ‘standard’ work presupposed vast amounts of unpaid domestic labour by women and the colonisation of indigenous peoples.3 For Mitropoulos, “the recent rise of precarity is actually its discovery among those who had not expected it”; the orthodox union movement with its blindness to longstanding hierarchies within waged and unwaged labour.4

The return (or discovery) of precarious labour has mostly been viewed by traditional unions as a threat, not only to working conditions but to the continuing existence of unions themselves. As mediators of exploitation rather than advocates for its abolition, the answer to precarious labour for such unions is often government-regulated work, the promotion of ‘decent work’, and job creation—in a nutshell, more work—none of which address the root causes of precarity.

Yet there are other, more liberatory alternatives. The struggle against the wage relation and its gendered and racial divisions has been present in the best of Marx’s writing, certain anarchist and communist currents (such as the Industrial Workers of the World, IWW), and revolutionary feminist thought. The problem for this perspective today, notes Kathi Weeks, is that “the gospel of work and the work ethic have so colonized our lives that it is difficult to conceive a life not centered on and subordinated to work.”5

Using examples of precarious work from New Zealand’s past, I want to explore this antiwork tradition and the refusal of work as a potential strategy for both the abolition of precarious labour, and the very relations that call capital and the proletariat into being.6 A related question, and one of interest to the discipline of labour history, is how resistance to work might reshape the way labour militancy is defined and measured, and how the historical emergence and re-emergence of certain forms of struggle can situate the present in the history of capital.7

Precarious pasts

Stout despite his sixty years and clean-shaven except for a greying moustache, in 1918 Joseph Goss was an aging watersider and agricultural labourer living in Waitara, Taranaki. While he called Waitara home, his precarious working situation meant he often moved about for work. At sixty he was one of the many aging labourers on the edge of the cash economy, trying to pick up jobs where he could.8

Before arriving in Waitara in 1914, Joseph had laboured on the wharves in both Wellington and Whanganui. To earn a day’s shift Joseph had to stand on the dock to be selected like cattle at auction, only to work physically exhausting, dangerous jobs. Joseph had hoped to fare better in a smaller port like Waitara, but he was mistaken.

Joseph was a prolific letter writer, and the struggle for and against work is a recurring theme in his letters. Joseph wrote that since leaving Whanganui there had been no work for him “or any man of his type and principles”, and figured that for over four years he had not averaged more than 10/1 shillings per week. In 1918, that could buy around twenty-five loaves of bread or two large bags of flour. It was only “thanks to our frugal mode of living, coupled with simple wants, we have been able to carry on.”9 The reproduction—the survival—of Joseph and his wife Mary, relied as much on Mary’s unwaged work as the meager wages Joseph could earn.

Thanks to his age, or possibly his opposition to capitalism, Joseph could not hold down a permanent job, even with the labour shortage caused by the First World War. Irregular work was the norm. “Since I last wrote I have had a job for a fortnight in the cooling chamber, and a couple of days out at the Kersone Sheds. I have been able to square up with Room money, so I am alright for a short while.”10 The cash, however, did not last. “As for your financial position, I am pleased to know things are going so well with you. Wish I could say the same for myself”, Joseph wrote three months later. “Would have sent you papers oftener from this side, but could not afford the stamps.”11

His precarious working life, plus the militarism of the war, left Joseph despondent and bitter. “Life for me has lost all charm”, wrote Joseph, who vented his anger at the military, the ruling class, and his fellow workers.12 He wasn’t alone. Henry Aloysius Murphy was a gristly Australian labourer working on the Auckland wharves. Quoting Emerson, Henry believed that “Doomsday is every day for the workers”, and poured out his disgust at his co-worker’s desire for work. “I hate to talk about work it’s the most degrading thing that I know of” wrote Henry in May 1919. “Things have slackened up here on the wharves (but) seven home boats expected in next month, that ought to gladden the heart of bone headed bastards that’s all they want (plenty work). I would work them 2 death if I had my way!”13

It wasn’t long before these letters were stopped by the state. From the perspective of power, these were seditious ideas. Work was to be worshipped and the myth of the dignity of labour preserved. Echoing longstanding concerns over vagrants—those who failed or refused to internalise dominant middle-class values of work, industry and respectability—the state linked these letters to criminality and social threat.14

Henry was hauled before the court for failing to register as a reservist under the Military Service Act and was sentenced to fourteen days hard labour. On his release he was due to be deported, but agreed to leave New Zealand ‘voluntarily’ and returned to Australia. Joseph fared slightly better. His age saved him from prosecution, but his precarious existence continued. In 1919, Joseph had moved inland to find more work, and by 1923 he eked out a living as a gardener in Napier. It was here that Joseph Goss died on 26 March 1934. He was 76 years old.

Toil - travail - tripalium - torture

These letters suggest that Joseph and Henry viewed waged work as dead time rather than a source of dignity or the pillar of social value. Their precarious working experience also shows that for many in their position (like most precarious workers today), unions and their membership fees were mostly out of reach. Traditional unions were (and are) based on the world of paid work, something Joseph and Henry either struggled to find or ultimately abhorred. They were not alone. Stevan Eldred-Grigg found that many workers “saw their work as something actually distasteful, boring, depressing and tedious. The dislike they felt for their work was one of the most fundamental limitations of the union movement.”15 The mystical cult of work pushed by employers, teachers, the clergy, middle-class socialists and most union leaders was far from accepted. Some amongst New Zealand’s working-class were more likely to sympathise with Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy, with its defence of idleness, than the proud workers portrayed in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards.

This is hardly surprising. The French word travail, to toil, comes from the Latin tripalium or ‘instrument of torture’, and as the case of Henry Murphy suggests, there is a rich vein of working-class struggle against toil—those who believed in liberation from work rather than liberation through work. Yet resistance to work during the twentieth century has often been underestimated by labour historians. More often than not work has been viewed as creation rather than coercion, and workers as producers rather than resisters who must be constantly disciplined or seduced to accept work.16 Traditional yardsticks of working class militancy are therefore measured in organisational or ideological terms.

But something interesting happens if resistance to work rather than party or union membership is taken as a measure of class-consciousness. Not only does it widen the terrain of study, it gives working people like Joseph Goss and Henry Murphy agency in the making of their own history. It moves “the self-activity of the working class to centre stage” even if that activity was rooted in self-preservation.17

As Michael Steidman notes in his classic Workers Against Work, an investigation of workers’ resistance to work also links the histories of women, unemployed workers, and immigrants and makes those histories more visible:

Instead of viewing female workers as less militant because they were relatively uninterested in joining parties and unions, an investigation of their struggles over maternity leave, absenteeism, illnesses, and gossip demonstrates that women also participated in the class struggle… Women identified less with the workplace because of the temporary and unskilled character of their jobs, lower salaries, and familial responsibilities.18

If their avoidance of the workplace is taken as a measure of class-consciousness, “then many women’s minimal identification with their role as producer might lead to the conclusion that females were among the true vanguard or consciousness of the working class.”19

Postwork futures 

The examples of Joseph Goss and Henry Murphy, two precarious workers with a tenuous relationship to work and the union movement, helps us to take a longer view of insecure work and how to struggle against it. How the racialised sphere of unpaid or reproductive labour must be at the forefront of organising against capitalist precarity, for example, and that socialist programs of the past, with their affirmation of labour rather than the abolition of labour, are at best outdated, if not irrelevant and counterproductive. Work refusal and liberation from labour should be at the heart of our struggles. And the forms these struggles take need to recover the original sense of the word ‘proletariat’ as those without reserves, including those beyond the formal wage.20

Like Steidman’s challenge in Workers Against Work, this immediately poses questions around worker identity and class-consciousness. Most labour movements were built around an affirmable worker’s identity, one that claimed a universal class character but was actually of a very narrow make-up—the white male industrial worker or those who “conformed to a certain image of respectability, dignity, hard work, family, organisation, and sobriety.”21 This flaw has long been pointed out by Marxist feminists (and others), and their critique seems especially relevant in the present. Thanks to the breakdown of Fordist discipline and managerial techniques, and the return of precarious, flexible working conditions, employers need workers to identify with their work more than ever before. Does it make sense for those resisting precarity to affirm the very same identification with work? As the Endnotes collective argue, “the fundamental contradiction of our society (proletariat-capital) is only potentially deadly to capitalism if the worker confronts her work and therefore takes on not just the capitalist, but what capital makes of her, i.e. if she takes on what she does and is.”22

In this sense, writes Kathi Weeks,

the politics of and against work has the potential to expand the terrain of class struggle to include actors well beyond that classic figure of traditional class politics, the industrial proletariat… after all, work, including the dearth of it, is the way that capitalist valorization bears most directly and most intensively on more and more people’s lives.23

This call to refuse work is not a utopian denial of the terrible, anxiety-ridden experience of precarious labour and the constant struggle to make ends meet. Precarious workers have difficulty refusing work because they have only ever had a discontinuous, uncertain, and temporary relationship with it.24 Demands for better working conditions can and must be made. But as Weeks notes, it is the demand itself that can broaden the struggle, and with it, people’s horizons. Demands that go beyond those offered by traditional unions and the majority of the left—alternatives that seem to end at fair and equitable work—can win material improvements while pointing to postwork futures. They can be a means to a different end—a world where work does not dominate life—rather than an end in themselves.

Past examples of antiwork demands that expand the scope of struggle include the IWW’s campaign for a four hour day with eight hours pay, the Wages for Housework movement, and more recently, the demand for universal basic income.25 With the return of precarious labour, what form these demands take in the present is crucial. For example, in Riot. Strike. Riot, Joshua Clover charts the return of the riot as a form of struggle within the sphere of capitalist circulation. Mapping the food riots of the 18th century to the machine-breaking of Captain Swing and the Luddites to the riots of Watts, Detroit, Newark, Chicago, Los Angeles, Athens, Oakland, and Ferguson, Clover argues that the blockade of circulation, often in the form of rioting, is the modern-day equivalent of the Fordist strike, and the recourse of those “chronically outside the formal wage.”26

Circulation struggles that bring together those beyond the formal wage is just one example from the past with relevance for today. There are countless others—although we should be wary of grafting the past onto the present. Yet as I hope this paper shows, there are lessons from the past that a long view can uncover, just as historical narratives can shed light on examples of antiwork politics. The role of labour historians in the struggle against precarity is to make such examples visible; to provide alternatives that expand the horizon of such struggles; and to question the relationship between precarious and unwaged labour, labour history, and the affirmation of labour rather than its abolition.



1. Sarah Mosoetsa, Joel Stillerman, Chris Tilly, ‘Precarious Labor, South and North: An Introduction’, International Labor and Working-Class History 89 (2016).
2. Silvia Federici, ‘Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint’, accessed 11 September 2017 https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/
3. Angela Mitropoulos, ‘Precari-us?’, Mute (2005), accessed 4 September 2017 http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/mitropoulos/en
4. Mitropoulos, as cited by Steve Wright, ‘There and back again: mapping the pathways within autonomist Marxism’, accessed 4 September 2017 http://libcom.org/library/there-and-back-again-mapping-the-pathways-within-autonomist-marxism-steve-wright
5. Kathi Weeks, ‘Imagining non-work’, accessed 11 September 2017 http://libcom.org/library/imagining-non-work-kathi-weeks. For Weeks, the refusal of work is directed against the system of (re)production organized around, but not limited to, the wage system.
6. ‘What matters in reality are the social relations which determine human activity as labour—the point is thus the abolition of these relations and not the abolition of work.’ Théorie Communiste, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Endnotes 1 (2008), accessed 19 September 2017 https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/theorie-communiste-much-ado-about-nothing
7. Joshua Clover, ‘Final Remarks’, from ‘The Crisis and the Rift: A Symposium on Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike.Riot’, accessed 18 September 2017 https://www.viewpointmag.com/2016/09/29/final-remarks/
8. Steven Eldred-Grigg, New Zealand Working People (Dunmore: Palmerston North, 1990), 69.
9. Joseph Goss, 8 June 1918, AD10 Box 10/ 19/10, Archives New Zealand (ANZ).
10. Goss, 8 June 1918, AD10 Box 10/ 19/10, ANZ.
11. Goss, 8 June 1918, AD10 Box 10/ 19/10, ANZ.
12. Goss, 8 June 1918, AD10 Box 10/ 19/10, ANZ.
13. Henry Murphy, 2 May 1919, AD10 Box 19/ 23, ANZ.
14. David Bright, ‘Loafers are not going to subsist upon public credulence: Vagrancy and the Law in Calgary, 1900-1914’, Labour/Le Travail 36 (1995), 43.
15. Eldred-Grigg, New Zealand Working People, 130.
16. Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Front (University of California Press: Berkley) accessed 4 September 2017 https://libcom.org/library/workers-against-work-michael-seidman
17. Richard Price, as cited by Anna Green, ‘Spelling, Go-Slows, Gliding Away and Theft: Informal Control Over Work on the New Zealand Waterfront 1915-1951’, Labour History 63 (1992), 101.
18. Seidman, Workers Against Work. 19. Seidman, Workers Against Work.
20. Joshua Clover, ‘Final Remarks’, from ‘The Crisis and the Rift: A Symposium on Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike.Riot’, accessed 18 September 2017 https://www.viewpointmag.com/2016/09/29/final-remarks/
21. Endnotes Collective, ‘A History of Separation’, Endnotes 4 (2015), accessed 15 September 2017 https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-the-infrastructure-of-the-modern-world
22. Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic, ‘Love of Labour? Love of Labour Lost…’, Endnotes 1 (2008), accessed 15 September 2017 https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/gilles-dauve-karl-nesic-love-of-labour-love-of-labour-lost
23. Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics & Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press: Durham, 2011), 17-18.
24. Ann Curcio, ‘Social reproduction, neoliberal crisis, and the problem with work: a conversation with Kathi Weeks’, accessed 11 September 2017 http://libcom.org/library/social-reproduction-neoliberal-crisis-problem-work-conversation-kathi-weeks
25. However, if the demand for universal basic income is for a mere supplement to wages, it will entrench the wage relation and precarious labour rather than open up postwork horizons. See Weeks, The Problem With Work, 137-150.
26. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot (Verso: UK, 2016), as cited by Michael Robbins, accessed 12 September 2017 http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-riot-strike-riot-joshua-clover-20160505-story.html

Wobblies of the World: New Zealand Launch!

Join New Zealand contributors, Mark Derby and Peter Clayworth, plus special guests, for a presentation of this new history of the global nature of the radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World.

Both Mark and Peter are New Zealand historians, who have a strong association with labour and trade union history through the Labour History Project. Their chapters in the book focus on the New Zealand Wobblies Percy Short and Pat Hickey, respectively.

30 November at Auckland Trades Hall
5:30 - drinks and nibbles
6pm- presentation
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1957924197555337/

More on the book here: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745399591/wobblies-of-the-world/

Dissent during the First World War Conference, 31 Aug - 2 Sep 2017

Thomas Moynihan, conscientious objector, Wanganui Detention Barracks 1918. Archives New Zealand

Hosted by the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies and the Labour History Project, with support from The Ministry for Culture and Heritage, and The Archives and Records Association of NZ (ARANZ), this two day conference will cover a range of topics on dissent, and how the First World War divided New Zealand society in many ways. In the current commemorative climate little attention has been paid to the perceptions and actions of those who opposed the war. 

More information can be found on the Conference event page, and here is the Conference Programme (pdf).

I'll be speaking at the Conference on Friday morning, and chairing a session in the afternoon. Here's my abstract, which presents work from my forthcoming book:

A War of Words: Domestic Postal Censorship and Dissent
Most histories of the First World War recall the muddied horror of the Western Front. But there was also a war at home, complete with violence, hardship and bravery. It was a war of ideas, and a key weapon in the armoury of authority was censorship.

Between August 1914 and November 1920, over 1.2 million civilian letters were opened and examined by the New Zealand military. Some were stamped and sent on. Others made their way into the hands of Police Commissioners, leading to covert surveillance, dawn raids, arrests, and deportation.

Employing a microhistory approach to a secret collection of confiscated letters, this paper explores domestic postal censorship, state attitudes towards dissent, and the people whose letters were originally blocked by military command. It suggests that wartime censorship was rooted in a need for imposing class discipline and maintaining capitalist/statist relations during what was a potentially turbulent time. Like the phenomenon of disaster capitalism, this expanded and made permanent ways of monitoring dissent for years to come.

Lunchtime talk - a few pics

Thank you all who attended my lunchtime talk. Images by Llewelyn Jones, courtesy of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa.

The myth of New Zealand exceptionalism (1): a workers paradise

New Zealand. High Commission (Great Britain). New Zealand wants domestic servants; good homes, good wages. [ca 1912].. Information about New Zealand for domestic servants / issued by the High Commissioner for New Zealand...London, [ca 1912].. Ref: Eph-A-IMMIGRATION-1912-cover. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22908679

There is a perception held by many that New Zealand as a nation state is somehow exceptional. 'We did things differently here'; 'we are unique and unlike any other nation in the world'. From this stems a number of myths, from 'the best race relations in the world' myth to 'our liberal democratic traditions'. In this way, the feel-good, capitalist, settler narrative succeeds in its task: the reproduction of the capitalist settler state. 

One myth of New Zealand exceptionalism that I addressed in Sewing Freedom: Philip Josephs, Transnationalism & Early New Zealand Anarchism (AK Press, 2013) was the idea of nineteenth century New Zealand being a 'workers' paradise'. This was important to bring up, because this idea seemed to deny the need for (or the existence of) an anarchist movement in New Zealand. In this post I'm sharing parts from Chapter Three of Sewing Freedom.

Despite an upsurge of new unionism where workers “began to see themselves as representatives of a class rather than a craft or trade” (culminating in the national Maritime Strike of 1890), New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century has predominately been viewed as a ‘Workingman’s Paradise.’1 The arcadian imagery of New Zealand that was sold to its early immigrants—a ‘land of milk and honey’ where natural abundance and the innate moderation of its inhabitants would abolish the necessity for social organization and its by-products of wealth, power, and status—has lingered on, partly because the workers who packed up and left the Old World did not want to admit that their sacrifices had been in vain, and also because “powerful mechanisms prevented the formation of alternative and contrasting visualizations.”2

Historical narratives are one such mechanism. In Miles Fairburn’s The Ideal Society and its Enemies, casualized labour relationships and mobility between employment; the prevalence of the individualist, nomadic, and transient single male; and a minimal development of working class communities (or cohesive social organization in general), are upheld to illustrate that New Zealand society, at least before 1890, was relatively free of hierarchy and class divisions.3 One historian even goes so far as to ask whether New Zealanders “have or have had a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, and a struggle between the two.”4 Relatively progressive laws, coupled with perceived egalitarian attitudes of the population, led historians and contemporaries alike to promote the country as an equal society: a land without strikes.5 From 1894, when legislation was introduced that outlawed strike action and forced unions and employers into negotiated industrial awards governed by the Arbitration Court (known as the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, or ICA), until a strike by Auckland tramway workers in 1906, there were no recorded strikes in New Zealand.

Yet such a view conveniently precludes the existence of class struggle outside of strike action. The notion that the colony was free of class and hierarchy also neglects the fact that New Zealand’s Pākehā culture was founded on the destruction, exploitation, and colonization of the local indigenous population and their resources. And while it is true that before 1904 explicitly anarchist activity is minimal, it hides the fact that from the arrival of its very first settlers in the early-nineteenth century, New Zealand has been a capitalist society—divided by class and informed by social relations of production and accumulation in both urban and rural New Zealand.

Hierarchy, gender division, the subordination of all aspects of life to work, and the constant reproduction of capital is intertwined with such relations, and whether those relationships were casualized, sporadic, or isolated does not negate their existence. Even if workers had managed to avoid the wage relation for a short time (and worked for themselves), wage relations dominated the wider society in which that labour was performed. “Capitalism is not just a social system that exploits people through work,” but does so through its ability “to turn all of life into work for its own reproduction.”6 In other words, individuals—directly or indirectly—were always dominated by capitalist relations. As one of the world’s youngest colonies, New Zealand was no exception.

It is clear that the global reproduction of capital was a driving factor in the colonization of New Zealand. Capitalist relations were “transplanted quite deliberately by the sponsors of the New Zealand Company,” an organization that competed with the British government in the quest to monopolize New Zealand pastures. In response to the American and Australian example, and in order to give capital the opportunity to accumulate in New Zealand, the director of the company, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, repeatedly argued that:

the ruling authority should put a high price on virgin land so that the labourer would have to work a considerable time before he could save enough to become a landowner… before he withdrew [from the labour market] he would have to work long enough to provide capital accumulation for the original landowning employers and to save a sum to provide a fund to bring out other wage workers to take his place.7

Accordingly, land prices were kept high to ensure a class of labourers, agricultural mechanics and domestic servants would be available for exploitation by landowners who remained home in England, helping to cement “not a subsistence but a capitalist economy.”8 This economy, geared to provide British capital with fruits from New Zealand’s “quarry of stored-up natural resources,” relied on the suppression of Māori and the labour power of the working class.9 As a result, New Zealand soon featured the evils many immigrants thought they had left at the docks: wage labour, want in a land of plenty, strikes, and unemployment. The withdrawal of labour as acts of protest broke out in 1821, 1840, and again in 1841, and as early as 1877, large meetings of the unemployed could be found on the street corners of the colony.10

One early example is telling. Problems with the Pākehā settlement of Nelson by the New Zealand Company caused many issues for workers. Class relations were deliberately transplanted to Nelson by the Company: in 1842 four ships carried 60 cabin passengers and nearly 800 labourers, while two-thirds of Nelson land-owners were absentee (remaining back in Britain). This led to under cultivation and unemployment, and for months workers and their families had to survive on meagre aid from the Company. As Bill Sutch notes, many lived on fern roots, native berries, and potatoes (when they were available).

On 14 January 1843 a petition by 'The Working Men of Nelson' was sent to Captain Arthur Wakefield, the brother of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Company's agent in Nelson. "You sir are well aware that we have been seduced from our fatherland our homes and friends by the flattering pretensions of the New Zealand Company," began the petition. Arguing they had come to New Zealand as "honourable and Industrious men wishing only to live by our own industry and to produce a comfortable maintenance for ourselves and our family's," they wanted Wakefield to look into their situation and improve the Company's rations. "If you refuse to stand by the working men of Nelson you sign its Death warrant & seal its doom as a colony."

The workers' predictions almost came true when the Company stopped paying relief in 1844. Facing starvation and the swearing in of special constables at the request of landowners, workers squatted on Company reserves, and in the end the Company allowed settlers to lease or buy small allotments of land from the absentee landowners.

Teething pains for the new colony? No. If class was solely based on income (which it is not), one could also point out that between 1903 and 1904, 0.5 percent of the New Zealand population owned 33 percent of its wealth.11 Stevan Eldred-Grigg in New Zealand Working People notes that many landowners earned £20,000 to £30,000 a year, often tax free, while the wages of a farm labourer were £41 per year. Female nursemaids working the same estate house sometimes earned as little as £13 annually. While an idle few pocketed huge fortunes, such as Sir George Clifford and his £512,000 worth of assets (over 30,000 times the average working wage), the majority worked, and worked hard—a simple commodity in the eyes of some employers. “I just look on them as I do on a bag of potatoes,” claimed one factory owner.12 Again, it was worse if you were female. When the Wellington Domestic Workers’ Union asked the Arbitration Court for the hours worked by maids to be reduced to sixty-eight a week, they were turned away.

There is no doubting the fact that early colonial New Zealand was a considerable improvement on the Old World for Pākehā, that individualism was the prevalent ideology, and that some immigrants did find relative freedom when compared with their past lives. “It is clear that there was a high degree of transience and that the working class was fragmented in New Zealand,” writes Melanie Nolan, “fragmented by sex and race into pockets, and by the smallest of workplaces and communities.”13

But this does not equal a society without class. Likewise, the colony may have been free of recorded strikes for a short period, but it was never without capitalist relations—locally or globally. No amount of state liberalism in the form of women’s suffrage, pensions or law-locked unions could ever abolish hierarchy, class and gender divisions. In reality, these reforms were the direct response of capital to the resistance of New Zealand workers in the late 1880s, and while they certainly improved some aspects of working life, they simply helped file down the rough edges of capitalism’s chains. As Edward Tregear, ex-Secretary of the Labour Department, wrote: “there had been a feeling (perhaps unconscious) that they [the Government] had to settle every [Parliamentary] Session with how few bones could be thrown to the growling Labour Dog to keep him from actually biting.”14


1. Herbert Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand: Past and Present, Reed Education, 1973, p. 10.
2. Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society 1850–1900, Auckland University Press, 1989, p. 22. 
3. Ibid. 
4. W.H. Oliver, “Rees, Sinclair and the Social Patern,” in Peter Munz, (ed.), The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, A.H. Reed, 1969, p. 163. 
5. Stuart Moriarty-Patten, “A World to Win, a Hell to Lose: The Industrial Workers of the World in Early Twentieth Century New Zealand,” Thesis, Massey University, 2012, p. 6; p. 117. 
6. Harry Cleaver, “An Interview with Harry Cleaver,” available online at http://libcom.org/library/interview-cleaver.  
7. W.B. Sutch, The Quest For Security in New Zealand 1840 to 1966, Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 8. 
8. Bert Roth & Jenny Hammond, Toil and Trouble: The Struggle For a Better Life in New Zealand, Methuen, 1981, p. 10; Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, Penguin, 2000 Edition, p. 158. 
9. Sutch, The Quest For Security in New Zealand, p. ix. 
10. Roth & Hammond, Toil and Trouble, p. 12–14; Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, p. 168. 
11. Moriarty-Patten, “A World to Win,” p. 6. 
12. Steven Eldred-Grigg, New Zealand Working People 1890–1990, Dunmore Press, 1990. 
13. Melanie Nolan, “Family and Culture: Jack and Maggie McCullough and the Christchurch Skilled Working Class, 1880s–1920s” in John Martin & Kerry Taylor, (eds.), Culture and the Labour Movement: essays in New Zealand Labour History, Dunmore Press, 1991, p. 165. 
14. Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, p. 209.

Wobbly driplines: strikes, stowaways & the SS Manuka

TSS Manuka berthed next to Princes Wharf, Auckland, c.1909. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 35-R35.

What do a Latvian anarchist, the Wobblies, ham and eggs, the Military Service Act, and The Australian Communist have in common? The TSS Manuka, a 4,505 tonne, twin screw passenger ship originally owned by the Union Steam Ship Company (USS Co.). Built in 1903 and wrecked off New Zealand’s southern coast in 1929, the Manuka was a floating fragment of class society—and of class warfare. It operated during a time of new ideas and a militant workers’ movement. It connected strikes across the Tasman, transported radicals and radicalism, and experienced its own on-board struggles. And like most things in 1914, was caught in the storm of war.

The Manuka and its crew
When the Manuka was built and delivered to the USS Co. in late 1903, it was the largest and fastest ship in their fleet. Made of mild steel and with a distinctively tall funnel, it was designed to add prestige to the aptly named ‘Red Funnel’ fleet. Although planned for the trans-Tasman route between New Zealand and Australia, the Manuka occasionally made the longer journey to Honolulu and Vancouver. It was also used as occasionally as a troopship during the First World War, making a number of passages to and from Egypt (although it was never given an official military troopship number).

Its civilian passengers travelled in style. ‘The [interior] framework is in waxed oak’ beamed the NZ Herald, ‘and decorated in ivory and gold. The ceiling is panelled to correspond; the upholstery is in sylvano velvet.’1 Passengers could dine, dance and smoke surrounded by red velvet and green buffalo hide, sleep on modern spring mattresses, and keep cool with the assistance of electric fans. The culinary department also impressed the Herald reporter. ‘Pantries are fitted with hot presses and steam boilers for water, coffee, milk, eggs etc’, and ‘fitted with all the modern conveniences.’2 Provisions were kept cool by large refrigerators, ready to feed nearly a hundred people at any one time.

If you were traveling first-class and full on fine dining, you slept in the middle of the vessel ‘where the motion and vibration are at a minimum.’ Second-class passengers bedded down in the less stable but still comfortable rear of the ship, where the officers and stewards also had their quarters.

The rest of the Manuka’s crew, however, worked, ate and slept in what little space remained. Usually this was the fo’csle (or ‘glory hole’ as it was more commonly known)—the cramped, wet, dirty and constantly pitching space at the front of the ship. Because of poor ventilation, the fo’csle became ‘an evil-smelling damp hole’ of close living and discomfort.3

Even these conditions were hard won. In 1893, seamen fought to extend the 72 cubic feet of cabin space allowed for each crew member to 120 feet—the space legally required for passengers. Indeed, the year the Manuka was launched saw a ‘brief but bitter dispute’ between the USS Co. and the Seamen’s Union over the condition of crew quarters.4 Seamen finally gained 120 cubic feet in 1909, but only for ships yet to be built—existing vessels like the Manuka were exempt.5

As Neil Atkinson explains in Crew Culture, the social organisation of the merchant ship was determined by traditional concepts of gender, power and class. Like their passengers, the crew were divided by a social hierarchy—the separation of living quarters aboard the Manuka reflected the social distances between officers and those who worked below deck. ‘As steamships grew in size and complexity, their crews were divided into three distinct departments: deck; stokehold or engine-room; and “providore” or catering (cooks, stewards, and stewardesses).’6 Thanks to the increasingly bureaucratic and managerial nature of 20th century steam ships, these spatial and social gulfs remained stark. Divisions between workers continued below deck, where the ‘Black Gang’—firemen, stokers, greasers and trimmers—fought heat and grime under the watchful eyes of marine engineers, ‘who were themselves a new breed of professional-managerial employees at sea.’7

Firemen and trimmers on the TSS Manuka, c.1910. Owaka Museum Wahi Kahuika, CT79.1270b.

Solidarity Forever
Where you slept, ate or worked on the Manuka was literally determined by class. But class is not simply a measure of wealth or occupation; it is the result of a particular social relationship. The life of those on board was shaped by capital, in the form of their work; the state, in the form of the Arbitration Court and other legal sanctions; and the struggle against both, mostly (but not always) represented by the Seamen’s Union.

Crew were governed by legally enforceable articles (fixed-term contracts) that bound them to the service of the shipowner for a specified time, or for the duration of a voyage. ‘Seafarers faced prison sentences for refusing to work or leaving their place of work, the ship, without permission. Desertion—quitting the ship before the term of the contract expired—was punishable by up to three months imprisonment, with or without hard labour.’8 They also lost any clothes, personal belongings or wages owed to them.

Struggles against such measures took many forms, ranging from discreet, on-the-job acts like go-slows or spelling, to the formation of national and international organisations. The New Zealand Seamen’s Union was formed in 1880 although prototypes had come and gone before then. Rocked but not sunk by the 1890 Maritime Strike, the Union found protection in the 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. While still controlled by articles, the Act and its compulsory arbitration courts recognised unions, set general working conditions for seamen through periodic awards, and settled disputes. However in return, workers lost the right to strike, which became illegal.

During the Manuka’s lifetime, union membership was a core part of a seaman’s experience. Although hard to imagine now, the closed shop was normal at that time. The union card ensured a seaman got work, and pay changed with whatever award or levy was in place. Non-union members were either scabs or blacklegs, and not welcome.

While employment and awards were an important part of union organising, the safety of the crew was a crucial concern. ‘Rust-buckets’ whose hull plates ‘punctured in the course of painting by being tapped with the handle of a paint-brush’ were all too common, leading to one of the highest rates of wrecks and deaths in the world.9 A number of workers were killed on the Manuka, such as Albert Hayward, a watersider who in 1917 stepped on a defective hatchway and fell 40 feet into the hold.10 Crew had their fingers mangled, shoulders smashed, and as the reports of the Marine Department show, suffered countless other injuries.

However the union meeting was more than just a place to talk pay and conditions. Although no occupation can confidently be equated with militancy, seamen were also renowned for their radicalism and solidarity with causes wider than their own. Alongside miners and watersiders, seamen were at the forefront of the syndicalist upsurge from around 1905-06, and many were influenced by the revolutionary ideas of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

‘Wobblies were internationalists in practice as well as in spirit’ writes Mark Derby. ‘They belonged to transitory occupations, they crossed and re-crossed the Tasman, the Pacific and much further afield, were often in danger of deportation or on the run, and in general they regarded their nationality as an accident of birth and a supreme irrelevance.’11 Seamen and the IWW were a perfect fit, and seafaring Wobblies or those sympathetic to IWW ideas joined those who argued against the arbitration system. Even after the defeat of the 1913 Great Strike, the Wobbly spirit remained present within the Seamen’s Union well into 1920s and beyond. IWW literature, international seamen, local advocates of the ‘one big union’, and the use of direct action tactics all kept the ideas of the IWW alive.

Driplines12
The nature of their work meant seamen were also at the forefront of what is now called transnationalism. Webs of action and interaction criss-crossed between ports, and along these lines passed radicals, rituals, literature, and modes of struggle.

‘The maritime world has geographic and industrial features that have the effect of creating a unique working-class culture’ writes Paula de Angelis. ‘Its transnational economic structure and work force create conditions where the need for international co-operation amongst workers is easily perceived, and the difficulties of applying national controls and discourses to the labour force in the face of this perception have contributed to the persistence of radical philosophies such as syndicalism in the industry.’13

Anarchist historian Michael Schmidt notes that one of the IWW’s most successful branches, the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTWIU), ‘integrated Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington and Auckland into a global network of ports: Cape Town, Hong Kong, Canton (Guangzhou), Shanghai, Manila, Rangoon (Yangon), Yokohama and San Francisco among them. This had a direct impact on labour organising in all those cities.’14

Transnationalism was a multi-directional process. Those who brought ideas into port also left with them modified or clarified. For example, in 1916 the IWW launched a fishermen’s strike in Fiji, ‘probably under the influence of the Australian IWW or New Zealand IWW’ which, in turn, had been influenced by Canadian Wobblies such as JB King.’15 Tom Barker, a Britsh-born Wobbly who was radicalised in New Zealand, went on to organise for the IWW in Australia and the anarcho-syndicalist Federación Obrera Regional Argentina. He also wrote a seaman’s guide to syndicalism called The Story of the Sea: Marine Transport Workers Handbook, published in 1923 and no doubt read by Noel Lyons, instigator of the ‘Ham and Egg Revolution’.

The Ham and Egg Revolution
During its time in service, the Manuka was held up by a number of strikes, such as those triggered by watersiders refusing to work any ship in port, or due to larger withdrawals of labour during events such as the 1913 Great Strike. For example, newspapers reported the Manuka stuck at port due to major watersider strikes in 1908, 1910, 1913, 1921, 1922, and again in 1928. No doubt there were many more unreported cases.

Striking firemen are depicted as holding up the public and the USS Co. NZ Truth, 18 January 1919.

The Manuka was also held up by the militancy of its own crew, or by a particular section of the crew. Despite the legal might facing them, throughout 1915 ‘troublesome firemen’ of the Manuka’s Black Gang refused to work until they were paid the same as firemen picked up in Sydney. At one stage volunteers had to be called from the steerage passengers to make up the numbers!16 Further strikes during wartime agitated for better working conditions, while in 1917 the Manuka’s crew joined a ‘seditious strike’ that froze the Wellington wharves for a fortnight.17

Post-war discontent and on-the-job forms of control saw a flurry of strikes in January, May, June and July 1919 alone. Interestingly, the May dispute saw the Manuka's crew refuse to sail unless three of their fellow workers, sick with influenza and quarantined on Matiu Somes Island, were moved to more suitable quarters.18 This is one of many examples of seamen using their power for more than bread-and-butter issues.

Again, discreet acts of everyday resistance were bound to have gone unreported. However one case of job control—dramatic, at least, in the eyes of the capitalist press—did make the headlines. This was a series of actions in 1925 led by a Wobbly coal trimmer named Noel Lyons.

The quality of food served to seamen had always caused discontent, especially when compared to the fine dining lavished upon first class passengers. In May 1925 the situation came to a head on the Manuka, when the crew refused to leave Wellington until their food was improved. The press quickly dubbed the incident the ‘ham and egg revolution’, and mocked the crew for their ‘unreasonable’ demands.

However as the USS Co. made clear to reporters, the real issue was ‘the deliberate attempt to institute job control’ via the go-slow.19 Throughout the voyage Lyons and the crew had used the go-slow to good effect, hindering the running of the ship. Using the pretext that IWW literature and posters had been found on board, Lyons was read the 1919 Undesirable Immigrant Exclusion Act and given 28 days to leave New Zealand. Instead, he and the crew walked off their Sydney-bound vessel singing ‘Solidarity Forever,’ and convened a meeting at the Communist Hall.

Three hundred people packed into the Manners Street hall to hear Lyons speak about the strike. ‘I have been described as a paid agitator,’ he argued, ‘but it is a well known fact that all who take an active part in attempting to better the condition of the worker… develop whiskers overnight, and appear as a Bolshevik.’ Despite resolutions of protest from a range of influential unions, Lyons was imprisoned for two weeks before being shipped to Australia. However, this transnational radical was far from deterred. On his arrival Lyons made the most of what the NZ Truth called ‘the new spasm of [the] IWW,’ organising mass meetings and reviving the Sydney IWW.

Noel Lyons arrives in Sydney after being deported from New Zealand. http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/201155941

Yours for the OBU
Twenty years before Lyons and the crew of the Manuka flaunted the syndicalist tactic of the go-slow, another transnational figure who popularised such methods had walked the same decks. In March 1904, Latvian anarchist Philip Josephs steamed into Wellington aboard the Manuka. With him were his wife Sophia, four daughters, and the seeds of one of New Zealand’s first anarchist collectives, the Freedom Group, which he formed in 1913.

I’ve written about the influence of Josephs on New Zealand’s working-class counterculture in past issues of the LHP Bulletin, and elsewhere.20 His advocacy of syndicalism, his involvement in the New Zealand Socialist Party and the Wellington IWW, his tailor shop-cum-radical bookstore, his distribution network of radical literature, and his participation in public meetings and strikes, are just some examples. And while the Manuka may arguably have first brought organised anarchism to New Zealand (in the form of Josephs), he in turn influenced the anarchist movement abroad. His international mail network helped to form arguments against state socialism, and countered reports of New Zealand as a workingman’s paradise.

Another syndicalist to cross the Tasman on the Manuka was John B. Williams. His 1920 visit was two-fold: to fundraise on behalf of Broken Hill miners embroiled in a bitter strike, and to set up locals of the One Big Union. (The OBU had continued the syndicalism of the Wobblies after the Australian IWW was declared illegal during the First World War). After a brief visit back to Sydney, he returned to New Zealand in 1921 as an organiser for the New Zealand Workers’ Union (NZWU), where he agitated amongst North Island public works labourers.

The Special Branch of the New Zealand Police—set up in 1920 to spy on ‘extremist labour agitators’ like Williams—closely monitored his return. After attending a meeting in Christchurch, Detective Sergeant Gibson reported that Williams had told the audience ‘he was in New Zealand to form the “One Big Union” and behind the movement were the IWW men who had been recently liberated in New South Wales.’21 These were the Sydney Twelve—Wobblies that had been charged with treason, arson, sedition and forgery in 1916. Alarmed that Williams had formed a branch in Auckland, detectives pondered whether they could use the Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Act to prohibit further IWW and OBU speakers into the country.

Their fear of an IWW resurgence in New Zealand never eventuated, for the Twelve did not arrive, and the OBU movement was overshadowed by the Alliance of Labour. Yet Williams remained a prominent organiser for the NZWU well into the 1930s, and in 1927 he led a strike at the Arapuni Power Station, the first government-built hydroelectric station on the Waikato River.

Appropriate swag
Who knows how many other radicals arrived aboard the Manuka during this period? However, the ship did more than transport radicals. Seamen were especially prolific in smuggling mail, penny pamphlets, and revolutionary newspapers in and out of New Zealand, especially during the First World War and the red scare that followed.

Vessels laden with IWW literature helped to fan the flames of discontent wherever they docked. ‘All boats from America were met by one or more of us wearing our IWW badge in case there should be a Wobbly on board with the appropriate swag,’ recalled Alec Holdsworth of the Auckland IWW.22 The effect of such ‘swag’ was not lost on the authorities. In 1915, the government banned the entire output of the IWW from New Zealand, and in 1920 extended War Regulations to cover communist material and other revolutionary works.

One radical who was caught in the net of censorship was William Blair, a communist watersider based in Wellington. In June 1921 Blair sold The Australian Communist to an undercover detective, who then charged him under the 1915 War Regulations for selling seditious literature. Rather than go to court, Blair took an assumed name and boarded the Manuka with a one-way ticket to Sydney. Unlucky for a second time, he was stopped by police and jailed for two months. (He later wrote a scathing report on prison conditions and ‘the tortures of the ‘dummy’ or solitary confinement’ for NZ Truth).23

Stowaways
Blair was not the only one to try and escape New Zealand aboard the Manuka. During the First World War, a section of its crew acted as agents of freedom for those trying to avoid military conscription.

New Zealand Expeditionary Force Recruitment poster, WE Smith Ltd, Sydney. Archives New Zealand, AD1 9/169/2/1.

The 1916 Military Service Act forcibly pressed all non-Maori men aged between 20 and 46 into military service, summoning them through a ballot of the national register. Resistance to the ‘body-snatchers’ included newspapers, flyers, mass rallies, seditious strikes, ‘going bush’, or skipping the country. The Seamen’s Union issued a number of anti-conscription circulars, and stood in solidarity with strikers deemed unpatriotic for fighting wartime profiteering. Some seamen also formed the final link in an ‘underground railway’ of working-class conscripts leaving New Zealand.24

On 21 August 1918, six labourers—Jeremiah Courtney, Bernard Bradley, Michael O’Conner, Thomas Prendergast, William Collins and Patrick Toohey—were arrested by Sydney police after a three hour search of the Manuka. Five of them were caught while leaving the ship posing as firemen, while the sixth was found hiding in a lavatory. As a number of them were wanted for desertion from Trentham military camp, they were bundled back to New Zealand and jailed for three months on the charge of leaving the country without a permit. ‘A sturdy-looking crowd of men like you might have been expected to do something better than funk it, as you did,’ remarked magistrate Frazer.25

If it had not been for a tip off from the New Zealand military, these anti-militarists may indeed have ‘funked it’. Before leaving New Zealand, every passenger ship was thoroughly searched for anyone leaving without a permit: one constable would guard the gangway as the second combed all areas of the ship, assisted by the Chief Deck Officer and the Engineer on watch. This was how Samuel Fitzgerald, another defaulter avoiding military service, was caught. Found boarding the Manuka, he was sentenced to a year’s hard labour for desertion in March 1917.

However, the six labourers had been buried deep in coal by sympathetic firemen and later hidden in the fo'csle. ‘I have no doubt that the six men... were actively assisted by firemen’ wrote Police Commissioner O’Donovan in his report to the minister. ‘It is of course possible that some of the engineers knew something of what was going on, but there is no evidence of it.’26 In fact, the Chief Engineer had found three military defaulters on an earlier trip and reported them to the authorities—highlighting the social divisions amongst the crew.

Conclusion
The Manuka and its crew was not the only USS Co. vessel with an eventful past. But a focus on this ship enables a micro-level entry into a larger and more complex story. This includes the working-class counterculture of seafarers, the transnational nature of seamen and syndicalism, on-the-job forms of class struggle, and resistance to First World War conscription.

Were these experiences and events relating to the Manuka typical of the period? It is hard to make any conclusions without comparative research of other USS Co. vessels. Yet in a way, the life of the Manuka reflected the journey of the syndicalist movement itself. Built and launched as syndicalism was expanding its influence, the Manuka—like syndicalism—was rocked by strikes, affected by agitators and printed agitation, pioneered new forms of on-the-job action, and was divided by war. After riding out the turbulent 20s, the Manuka was finally wrecked in December 1929, just as the depression was beginning to hit New Zealand’s shores. The 283 passengers and crew on that voyage survived, as would the ideas of the IWW in New Zealand. Wobbly driplines had nurtured its growth, which in turn, grew into a culture and ethos that persists in certain labour circles today.

Republished from LHP Bulletin 63, April 2015.


1. NZ Herald, September 1903
2. Ibid.
3. Neill Atkinson, Crew Culture: New Zealand Seafarers under Sail and Steam, Wellington: Te Papa Press,
2001, p. 30
4. Conrad Bollinger, Against the Wind: The Story of the New Zealand Seamen’s Union, Wellington: New Zealand Seamen’s Union, 1968, p. 49.
5. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p. 30
6. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p. 16
7. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p. 17
8. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p. 96
9. Bollinger, Against the Wind, p. 75-76
10. Thames Star, 25 May 1917
11. Mark Derby, ‘Towards a Transnational Study of New Zealand Links with the Wobblies’, available online at http://redruffians.tumblr.com/post/2616013507/towards-a-transnational-study-of-new-zealand-links
12. Driplines are the area directly located under the outer circumference of the tree branches. This is where the tiny rootlets are located that take up water for the tree.
13. Paula de Angelis, ‘Tom Barker and the Syndicalism of the Sea: The Underground Influence of the IWW’, Presentation, 2012, p. 7
14. Interview with Michael Schmidt, Imminent Rebellion 13, 2014, p. 60
15. Ibid.
16. Evening Post, 17 December 1915; ‘Te Anau (ship) and “Manuka” (ship) - Trouble caused by action of firemen’, M1 Box 1014/ 15/3/179, Archives New Zealand, Wellington Office.
17. Bollinger, Against the Wind, p. 126
18. NZ Herald, 15 May 1919
19. NZ Herald, 22 May 1925
20. LHP Bulletin 54, April 2012; Sewing Freedom: Philip Josephs, Transnationalism & Early New Zealand Anarchism, Oakland: AK Press, 2013.
21. Det. Serg. Gibson to Chief Detective, Christchurch, 21 April 1921, ‘CPNZ: Wellington District:
Sympathisers and Contacts, Vol.1’, Box 6/ 21/5/10, Archives New Zealand, Wellington Office. An earlier OBU Council in Auckland had been formed during 1920 by Wobblies active in the 1913 Great Strike, but it had a brief existence. See LHP Bulletin 56, December 2012.
22. Derby, ‘Towards a Transnational Study of New Zealand Links with the Wobblies’
23. NZ Truth, 5 November 1921
24. Bollinger, Against the Wind, p. 122.
25. Evening Post, 28 August 1918

Public talk: Aro Valley Seminar

View of the Aro Valley with Brooklyn hill behind. Original photographic prints and postcards from the file print collection, Box 16. Ref: PAColl-7344-16. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22832349

I'm excited to say that I'll be speaking at the Aro Valley Seminar My Country Right or Wrong a Contribution to the WW100 Commemorations. It is planned for the weekend of 9-10 May and it will be held in the Aro Valley Hall, 48 Aro Street. There's some great speakers lined up, so it should be a very good event.

Here's my abstract:

Philip Josephs: Aro Valley anarchist

Aro Valley has long had a reputation for radicalism & radicals. One such character was the Latvian anarchist & tailor-cum-bookseller, Philip Josephs. Between 1904-1908, Josephs used his home in Aro Street to spread the revolutionary ideas of anarchism & anti-militarism, building a vibrant a working-class counterculture. This paper looks at his time in Aro Valley, his legacy, & some of his colourful cohorts.

1913: still relevant after all these years? A talk by Jim McAloon, Melanie Nolan, MUNZ & RMTU

19 November 2013: 5.30pm at the Museum of Wellington City & Sea, Queen’s Wharf 

Dr Jim McAloon will introduce three speakers, discussing the relevance of the 1913 strike to workers a century later.

1913: still relevant after all these years?
The Great Strike was about local and particular labour issues which are canvassed well in the collection, Revolution, The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand (Canterbury University Press in association with the Trade Union History Project, 2005), edited by Melanie Nolan. But the 1913 Great Strike was a battleground of democracy. Workers and others battled over the shape of New Zealand society and the role of unions in it. Professor Melanie Nolan will further explore how these issues are relevant today.

Melanie Nolan is Professor of History, Director of the National Centre of Biography and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography in the School of History at the Australian National University (ANU). As general editor she has published the Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 18 (2012) and a history of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, The ADB’s Story (2013).

The New Zealand Waterfront in 2013: Back to the future?
The 1913 general strike was fought on and around the waterfront in Wellington and other ports. In the century since, maritime workers have remained a central part of New Zealand’s social and industrial history and class struggle, through key events such as the 1951 lockout and more recent struggles against casualization and insecure jobs.

After a sustained attack on workers rights for the last generation, have we come full circle and are maritime workers fighting the same battles today? Joe Fleetwood, National Secretary, Maritime Union of New Zealand will explore how have things changed and how have they stayed the same.

Joe Fleetwood was elected National Secretary of the Maritime Union of New Zealand in 2009. Joe has been a seafarer and a member of the New Zealand Seafarers Union and now the Maritime Union for over thirty two years. He previously served a term as National Vice President of the Maritime Union, and served as Secretary of the Wellington Seafarers Branch MUNZ. Previous to this Joe served as job delegate for around 25 years. Joe is a fifth generation seafarer and dock worker.

Solidarity on the waterfront since 1913
The Rail and Maritime Transport Union will discuss the development of solidarity on the waterfront since 1913.

Reds & Wobblies: working-class radicalism & the state

NOTE: An updated and expanded version of this talk, Fighting War, is available here: http://garagecollective.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/fighting-war-anarchists-wobblies-and.html

In July this year, political commentator Bryce Edwards led a NZ Herald article with the following quote: “Multiple spying scandals and sagas show that New Zealand is suffering from a democratic deficit.” He was, of course, talking about the Kim Dotcom, GCSB and Defence Force surveillance sagas.

That Edwards wrote of democracy in financial terms is both ironic and apt, considering that the protagonists of my talk tonight believed parliament was ruled by economic interests! So in keeping with this language; if democracy is to be judged on its use of surveillance, numerous records in the archives suggest that democracy in New Zealand has often been in the red. In fact, ‘seeing red’ has been a constant factor through New Zealand’s history, especially in times of social and industrial unrest. Working-class radicals who promoted an alternative to capitalism were particularly targeted by those in power. Arguably, those who were most targeted in the early part of the twentieth century were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (known as Wobblies).

During and immediately after the First World War, the actions of Wobblies were heavily scrutinised by the governments of the day, leading to sedition charges, jail time, or deportation from the country.

My talk tonight hopes to look at some of this working class radicalism, and the reaction to it by the state. Much of this activity was centred on the distribution of radical literature–‘mental dynamite’ in the form of penny pamphlets, newspapers, and other ephemera. Ports and postboxes became the battleground for an intense cultural struggle—a struggle that questioned the war, the nature of work, and authority itself. This battle for minds had material results. Intense state surveillance and a raft of legislation not only determined who could read what, but who would be considered a legitimate resident of the so-called ‘workers paradise’ that was New Zealand.

Wobblies 101



The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in the United States in 1905, by a conglomerate of socialists, Marxists and anarchists. Its founders were disenchanted by the craft nature of the American Federation of Labour and its exclusive membership criteria. Instead, the IWW sought to organise all workers, especially the so-called ‘unskilled’ neglected by the AFL. As well as being open to workers of any gender or colour, the IWW promoted the ‘One Big Union,’ a fighting union that—through the solidarity of workers organized along class lines instead of trade, and the tactical use of the strike weapon—would abolish the wage system.

Its widely quoted preamble stated:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, and abolish the wage system [1908 Version]

Although the IWW initially promoted both industrial and political action, it split in 1908 over the rejection parliamentary politics. For the Chicago IWW, the political arena was controlled by capital and therefore the place to make change in society was the workplace. As one New Zealand wobbly argued, “Parliament is a mirror reflecting conditions outside. When your face is dirty, do you wash the mirror?”

The IWW advocated building a new world in the shell of the old, which meant how the union and its struggles was conducted were just as important as the outcome. As a result, direct democracy and the curbing of power in the hands of a few was core to the organisation. “The IWW considered a reliance on leadership as fostering dependence amongst the working class,” notes Stuart Moriarty-Patten, whose forthcoming book on the IWW in New Zealand is being published by Rebel Press. New Zealand Wobblies decried the local labour movement as “cursed and hampered by leaders.” Instead, “active, intelligent workers [should] determine to do their own thinking… to fight on all occasions for complete control by the rank and file and against sheep-like following of leaders.”

As a result the IWW was much more than a simple union movement. As well as fighting for better conditions and shorter hours, the IWW fostered education, internationalism, and a radical working class counter-culture through the influential use of song and graphics. Although not without its faults, the appeal of the IWW made it social and cultural movement on an international scale.

The IWW in New Zealand



New Zealand’s first IWW local was formed in Wellington in December 1907, and other locals were formed in Christchurch and Auckland – both of which received official charters from the IWW headquarters in Chicago. Informal groups sprung up in industrial towns such as Huntly, Waihi, and Denniston, and the cultural norms and tactics championed by the Wobblies—such as the general strike, sabotage, and the go-slow—soon spiced the local discourse. The rally-cry of ‘a fair day’s wage’ was dropped for ‘abolish the wage system;’ ‘fellow-worker’ replaced ‘comrade’; and for a period, the New Zealand Federation Of Labor adopted the IWW’s revolutionary preamble.

Bert Roth Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

Pamphlets and newspapers of the IWW had a wide circulation in New Zealand. According to the Secretary of the Waihi branch of the Socialist Party, imported IWW anti-militarist pamphlets were “finding a ready sale” in 1911. Chunks of IWWism and Industrial Unionism, two locally produced pamphlets, sold in quantities of 3,000 and 1,000 copies each, while the Industrial Unionist, newspaper of the New Zealand IWW, reached a circulation of 4,000. These figures do not indicate their true readership however, as workers shared their copies or would read the columns out loud in groups.

As Mark Derby has pointed out, the distribution of cheap printed propaganda was vital to the spread of IWW ideas and tactics. “New Zealand Wobblies relied on the impact of IWW literature such as the Little Red Songbook,” moving from town to town “sowing the seed of rebellion.” This constant agitation bore fruit, and the IWW played a visible part in the strikes that formed the upsurge of militant labour before the First World War.

Wartime activity

However, on the outbreak of war in August 1914, the IWW was fragmented and weakened by the defeat of the 1913 Great Strike. Many of their leading members had fled New Zealand to escape prosecution, but there were still IWW locals in Auckland, Wellington, Denniston and Christchurch. Wobblies continued to soapbox on street corners across the country and were active in the workplace, especially on the waterfront.

Members of the National Ministry of New Zealand. S P Andrew Ltd :Portrait negatives. Ref: 1/1-013626-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/23134795

Yet times were tough for those openly against militarism and capitalism. The IWW found itself up against a wartime government itching to prove its loyalty to the British Empire. The National Coalition of William Massey and Joseph Ward took measures to clamp down on any non-conformist activity it deemed seditious, using the pretence of war conditions to muzzle dissent—whether it was opposition to conscription (in the form of the 1916 Military Service Act), or highlighting economic conditions at home. Numerous War Regulations empowered the executive branch of the Coalition government to regulate without reference to Parliament.

Richard Hill notes that these regulations, initially used for military purposes, “gradually increased in severity and in political rather than military significance.” For example, war regulations were soon unleashed on socialist speakers and strikes in industries deemed essential to the war effort. Rather tellingly, those convicted of publishing information deemed valuable to the enemy were fined a maximum of £10, while anyone who publicly criticised the actions of the New Zealand government was fined £100 or received twelve months imprisonment with hard labour.

Not surprisingly, Wobblies were targeted due to their advocacy of direct action in the workplace, the fostering of an oppositional working class counter-culture, and their radical critique of militarism. New Zealand’s Crown Prosecutor “repeatedly stressed the distinction between sincere objectors… and ‘parasites’, ‘anarchists’, and other IWW types.” As a result, a number of Wobblies were arrested and given maximum jail time during the war.

Wobblies had been scapegoats for all kinds of scrupulous activity before 1914, but in wartime the press found new ways to discredit the IWW. Hysterical headlines were quick to dub Wobblies as ‘Hirelings of the Huns’ or ‘German-born children of the devil,” and any union radicalism was tarred with the IWW brush.

In one bizarre article, ‘The Critic’ responded to an auctioneer’s listing of ‘famous IWW hens’ in the Manawatu Evening Standard with: “‘IWW hens?’ If these belong to the order of ‘I Wont Work’ they will probably get it where the Square Deal would like to give it to their human prototypes—in the neck!” When the shipping vessel Port Kembla struck a German mine off the coast of Farewell Spit in 1917, one writer in the Ashburton Guardian put it down to pro-German sabotage, stating: “this Dominion is not by any means free of the noxious IWW element… this type of human being should be put out of existence on the first evidence of abnormality.”

Censorship of IWW propaganda

Ironically, scaremongering by the press publicised IWW methods such as the go slow far more than Wobblies could ever have done on their own. The go-slow used by watersiders, miners, drivers, and tramway was a major concern to employers and government, and abhorred as a significant threat to the established economic order. “It is the most serious problem that we face at the present time” wrote Defence Minister James Allen to Massey in January 1917. “[Alexander] Herdman has been taking evidence on behalf of the Police about going-slow… as far as Defence is concerned, if any man is proved to be going slow’ [before a military Service Board] we shall cancel his exemption… we cannot possibly allow this fatal practice to get hold in New Zealand or else the nation is doomed.” Not only did these tactics threaten war profits or the government’s lucrative trading deals with Britain; the go slow questioned the work ethic central to the wage system itself. As a result, the War Regulations of 16 February 1917 included going slow in the category of seditious strikes.

C1 Box 161 36/959/101-120. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

Authorities were also dismayed at the volume of IWW ephemera still finding its way around the country. Bearing such lines as “Fast workers die young” or “Go Slow! Do Not Waste your Life,” IWW stickers peeked out from walls and lampposts across New Zealand. In a cheeky swipe at conscription, one sticker was stuck in the middle of a National Registration poster. As late as 1927, Wellington customs found 125 of these stickers in the baggage of a SS Maheno seaman named Evans.

Thomas Barker. Ref: 1/2-019136-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/23067556

Another ‘silent agitator’ that caused uproar was a satirical poster by ex-New Zealand Wobbly Tom Barker. ‘To Arms!’ called on “Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians, Landlords, Newspaper Editors and other Stay-At-Home Patriots” to replace the workers in the trenches. Four copies were “smuggled across the Tasman... and pasted up outside the Supreme Court in Wellington,” causing the judge to suspend the court until the offending posters were removed.

AD1 Box 995 51/3. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

Anti-war pamphlets were also making their rounds. “War and the Workers” was a pocket-sized booklet printed by the Auckland IWW that implored workers not to become “hired murderers.” Sold from their Swanson Street office, the booklet insisted, “Those who own the country [should] do the fighting! Let the workers remain home and enjoy what they produce.” After being distributed at the Buckle Street Drill Hall in Wellington, the booklet was forwarded to Solicitor-General John Salmond. Salmond urged for war regulations to be extended so that immediate powers would be available to punish those responsible for such “mischievous publications.”

MP John Hornsby also raised concerns about IWW ephemera in Parliament, decrying the “circulation in this country of pamphlets of a particularly obnoxious and deplorable nature, emanating from an organization known as the Independent World’s Workers [sic]—commonly referred to as the IWW.” Hornsby asked whether immediate steps would be taken “to prevent the circulation through the post of the harmful publications in connection with the propaganda of this anarchial [sic] society—a society which openly preached sabotage, which meant in plain English, assassination and destruction of property?” The resulting Order in Council of 20 September 1915 specifically prohibited “the importation into New Zealand of the newspapers called Direct Action and Solidarity, and all other printed matter published by or on behalf of the society known as ‘The Industrial Workers of the World.’”

Reason and Revolt, http://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/

Direct Action was a lively newspaper published by the Australian IWW that found its way to New Zealand via seamen crossing the Tasman, or by mail. Two months after the Order of Council was in place, the Post and Telegraph Department reported the withholding of “14 single copies [of] Direct Action; 2 bundles [of] Direct Action;” as well as “6 bundles [of] Solidarity.” A number of these copies were then used by Police to chase up New Zealand subscribers listed in its columns. In December 1915 detectives in Auckland, Napier and Wellington hunted for a subscriber listed as Erickson. At first they thought he was a Wellington socialist named Frederickson, but soon concluded he was in fact Carl Erickson, a casual labourer and friend of Wellington anarchist Philip Josephs (who was also a Direct Action subscriber). The Police report noted that both men had donated to the Barker Defence Fund, set up after Tom Barker was convicted for publishing an anti-war cartoon in Direct Action.

The military also used a 1915 edition of Direct Action to investigate the Workers’ University Direct Action Group, a ‘workers university’ that had been set up by Auckland Wobblies. According to Direct Action, lessons dealt with “economics, biology, physiology, Social Democrat fallacies, State Ownership ie State Capitalism fakes, Law and Authority Bluff, the anarchist doctrines of ‘Total Abstention’” and “scientific sabotage, the most potent weapon of the intelligent militant minority.” They also had IWW literature on hand for the ‘worker students’. After their Queen Street landlord forced the workers’ university to disband, its members were lucky to escape imprisonment (if they did at all).

P12. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

One radical who was not let off the hook was prominent 1913 striker Charles Johnson. When Johnson was arrested in 1917 and found to have “an enormous amount of IWW literature” in his possession, including three copies of Direct Action, the Chief Detective said “with the greatest confidence” that “this man is a danger to the community.” Johnson asked to be let off with a fine; the magistrate replied, “Oh, I can’t let you off with a fine in these conditions.” He was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour.

Censorship of correspondence

As well as the suppression of IWW publications, war regulations also made it illegal to “incite, encourage, advice or advocate violence, lawlessness and disorder, or express any seditious intention.” What exactly constituted a “seditious intention” was interpreted broadly by the state, and included the contents of private correspondence.
Both Customs and the Post and Telegraph Department had a number of censors working within their ranks, the latter including the Deputy Chief Censor, William Tanner. But it was the military that managed censorship during the War. Tanner and other censors located across the country answered directly to Colonel Charles Gibbon, who was both Chief Censor and Chief of the General Staff of the New Zealand Military Forces. Postal censors were mostly officers of the Post Office and worked in the same building “as a matter of convenience”, but censors acted “under the instructions of the Military censor. As a result, the Defence Department’s earlier interest in the monitoring of agitators carried over to agitation of the handwritten kind.

PM9 Box 3 10. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

“During the course of the late war,” wrote Tanner:

it was considered necessary to examine secretly the correspondence of certain persons who were supposed to be disaffected, and who were working to defeat the efforts of the New Zealand Government in meeting its obligations regarding the war by advocating [the] ‘go slow’ or inciting to resist the Military Service Act.

Instructed to “suppress whatever was of a seditious or treasonable nature,” Tanner believed his work “gave the Police the necessary opening… to break up the organizations whilst still in the act of formation.”

(Image) Caroline Josephs. (Letters) AD10 Box 10 19/16. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

One of those under Tanner’s watchful gaze was the Wellington anarchist Philip Josephs. After letters to US anarchist Emma Goldman were spotted in October 1915, Josephs was arrested and “detained all day in the ‘cooler’ until 4 o’clock in the afternoon,” when he was released without being charged. While Josephs was in police custody, two detectives searched his shop in Cuba Street and took possession of all books and papers on anarchism found on the premises. They then repeated their search at his Khandallah home.

As well as holding a considerable stash of anarchist literature, it appears Josephs’ shop had been the Wellington Local of the IWW. Police found “a number of unused official membership books, rubber stamps, and other gear used in connection with that constitution,” as well as IWW correspondence, pamphlets and papers.

One such correspondent was the Christchurch Wobbly, Syd Kingsford. Two Police reports show that he was put under surveillance, while the chief military censor, Colonel Gibbon, made sure his correspondence was also censored.

AD10 Box 10 19/16. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

Another was J Sweeny, a Blenheim-based labourer who was writing to Josephs to order anarchist newspapers. In a letter that never reached its destination, Sweeny asked Josephs to “remember me to the Direct Action Rebels in Wellington,” indicating there were still Wobblies active in the capital at that time. With typical Wobbly flair, Sweeney signed his letter: “Yours for Direct Action. No Political Dope.”

Other censored letters written by an Auckland Wobbly, William Bell, give a sense of the level of surveillance put in place by the state. “The Johns and military pimps are on the look out for the correspondence of men known in our movement,” wrote Bell, who was trying to secure a dummy address “for the purposes of ordering leaflets without an imprint for secret distribution at this end of New Zealand.” Also mentioned in Bell’s letter was “a private meeting of picked trusted militants” due to take place at his bach, confirming that Auckland Wobblies were still active in mid-1917, albeit discreetly. Obviously Bell was not discreet enough. He was arrested and sentenced to eleven months imprisonment.

(During his hearing, Bell provoked laughter in the courtroom. When the magistrate, referring to a comment in Bell’s letter, asked him what a ‘snide-sneak’ was, Bell replied: “A man who plays both ways. We have plenty in the Labor movement, unfortunately”).

Seditious soapboxing

P12. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

The war regulations used against those in possession of seditious correspondence also targeted the spoken word. ‘Rabid Orator’ and past Committee member of the Wellington IWW, Joseph Herbert Jones, was imprisoned for sedition in January 1917 after soapboxing to 500 people in Dixon Street, Wellington. “I want the working class to say to the masters,” said Jones, “we don’t want war. We won’t go to the war.” During his court appearance Jones read a long and ‘inflammatory’ poem that received applause from onlookers in the court. The judge was not impressed, nor did he share Jones’ view that all he had done was defend the interests of his fellow-workers. He was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour.

P12. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

 Another radical to be jailed for 12 months was William Parker, a watersider who told a Wellington crowd in 1917 that the only way to stop conscription was with a general strike. In 1919 Parker was in court again, having distributed locally produced flyers promoting the go slow, the lockout of the oppressors, and building a new society in the shell of the old. After amusing the large crowd of watersiders in the back of the court by “verbally annihilating His Worship”, Parker was sentenced to 12 months for ‘IWWism’ (sedition).

For a few in power, the jailing of Wobblies was not enough. In 1917 MP Vernon Reed asked in Parliament whether Prime Minister Massey had considered the provisions of the Unlawful Associations Amendment Bill introduced in Australia, “aiming at the destruction of the IWW and kindred institutions, and providing for the deportation of undesirables; and whether he will introduce into Parliament a measure having similar objects?” In reply, Massey stated that such a law was under consideration. The eventual result was the 1919 Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Act, of which more below.

AD10 Box 4 11/5. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

 Wobblies not already in jail were kept under close surveillance during the later years of the war. In October 1918 the Defence Department had their eyes on Nita aka Lila Freeman, a female wobbly active in Wellington. Correspondence of “an anti-conscriptionist and seditious nature” between Nita and a fellow wobbly named ‘Don’ was discovered by the military censor, which sparked further surveillance. ‘Don’ had been giving classes on political economy and socialism in Blackball, and it was hoped ascertaining their identities would lead to arrests: “in all probability the woman will be arrested on some charge at an early date,” noted the file.

Although it appears Nita Freeman was never arrested, by the war’s end 287 people had been charged with sedition or disloyalty—208 were convicted and 71 sent to prison. That many Wobblies were among those arrested is hardly surprising, considering their radical opposition to militarism and direct action tactics.

Post-war surveillance

Despite the cease of hostilities in Europe, surveillance of the IWW did not end with the First World War. Industrial unrest and social revolution immediately after the war’s end was a deeply entrenched concern for the New Zealand Government. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, coupled with unrest around the globe in 1918-1919, was seen as potential source of increased revolutionary activity in New Zealand. Bolshevism would now compete with the IWW for the state’s attention, and for the title of New Zealand’s favourite scapegoat.

As well as international upheavals such as mutinous soldiers, police strikes and the downfall of various regimes, the cost of living and dissatisfied returned servicemen were also seen as catalysts to major unrest. The government passed a range of anti-firearms laws, and watched closely the rhetoric of political parties like the New Zealand Labour Party and the Communist Party of New Zealand.

The state also kept tabs on the second wave of syndicalist organizations, such as the Alliance of Labour and the One Big Union Council. Formed in 1919 to promote class solidarity between watersiders, seamen, miners and railway workers, the Alliance of Labour was decried by the Reform government as nothing less than the IWW in disguise. Indeed, their promotion of direct action and rejection of parliamentary politics saw them align with the IWW, causing the Employers Federation to lament the “lawless tendency on the part of Extreme labour.” In the end however, the Alliance failed to live up to its revolutionary rhetoric.

In Auckland, Wobblies like Bill Murdoch, George Phillips and Leo Woods helped to form the One Big Union Council. Leo Woods had sat on the Thames strike committee during the 1913 Great Strike, and in 1917 was thrown into what he called “one of Massey’s concentration camps, Kiangaroa Prison Camp,” for 18 months. After his release, Woods became the literary secretary of the One Big Union Council and was delegated to smuggle banned literature from Sydney. He would go on to co-found the Communist Party in 1921. The secretary of the Council was former wartime-secretary of the Auckland IWW, George Phillips, who, like Woods, had been jailed for refusing to be conscripted.

For those in power monitoring these developments, the possibility of a general strike seemed imminent. Recorded industrial disputes had risen from 8 in 1915 to 75 in 1921. As a result, Prime Minister Massey urged his party faithful to “secure good men to stem the tide of Anarchy and Bolshevism.” This radical tide, complained Massey, “is worse than folly… the matter must be taken in hand and stopped.”

Massey’s red baiting had significant support from a number of high profile allies. The Protestant Political Association, led by the vehement Reverend Howard Elliot, vowed to oppose “Bolshevism and ‘IWWism’ in every shape and form.” Also active was the New Zealand Welfare League, formed in July 1919 for the express purpose of curbing the activities of revolutionary labour, IWW doctrines, and Bolshevism. The League’s active press campaign featured newspaper articles on the IWW and their “criminal” attitudes towards work, property rights, and state authority.

The red scare whipped up by conservative interests allowed the state to extend its wartime grip into peacetime. Tanner was kept on as censor in July 1919 by Defence Minister Allen, who wrote to Massey that, “a good deal of valuable information comes to the government through the medium of the censor, and it was thought wise not to lose this information.” The war regulations that created Tanner’s job were also extended under the War Regulations Continuance Act of 1920 (which was not repealed until 1947).

Other forms of surveillance continued apace. In his history of the New Zealand Police Force, Graham Dunstall notes that in January 1919, Police Commissioner John O’Donovan sent a confidential memo to officers across New Zealand:

“In the view that considerable industrial and other unrest is reported from other countries and may extend to this Dominion it is necessary that special precautions be taken to keep in touch with the movements and actions of persons of revolutionary tendencies who are already here, or who may arrive” 

Meetings of radicals continued to be attended by police and fortnightly reports were sent to Police Headquarters. Detectives in each district systemised this work by compiling an index of individuals who had “extreme revolutionary socialistic or IWW ideas.”

P12. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

One Wobbly to be caught in this post-war net was Henry Murphy, an Australian labourer based in Auckland. In April 1919 Murphy wrote to a fellow worker in Australia that military deserters were being picked up every day; detectives “run the rule” over passengers arriving by ship; and that two Wobblies, “Nugget and Scrotty,” had been “turned back”. The letter was intercepted by a censor and handed to police. “Murphy appears to be a dangerous character of the IWW type,” noted the censor. “He is an admirer of the Bolsheviks and is gradually drifting towards anarchy, revolution and outrage… his hatred of work is one of the traits of the IWW character.” Murphy was hauled before the court for failing to register as a reservist under the Military Service Act, where he declared, “anti-militarists have done more for democracy than all the soldiers who went to Europe.” He was sentenced to 14 days hard labour and was due to be deported under the war regulations, but instead he agreed to leave New Zealand voluntarily.

Deporting ‘undesirables’

Murphy’s ‘voluntary’ deportation foreshadowed a law change designed to further extend the state’s reach over radicalism. In November of that year, the Undesirable Immigrant Exclusion Act was passed into law. This Act gave the Attorney-General power to single-handedly deport anyone whom he deemed "disaffected or disloyal, or of such a character that his presence would be injurious to the peace, order, and good Government" of New Zealand. He could also prevent anyone landing in the country, which meant Customs and Police further cemented their wartime responsibilities of monitoring the harbours.

However the Defence Department was kept in the loop by having copies of every alien identity certificate sent to them. The military would then match these certificates up to their own black list of “revolutionary agents and undesirables.”

According to Massey, the Undesirable Immigrant Exclusion Act would be used against those who “favour Bolshevism and IWWism.” It was soon put to good effect. Two Wobblies named Nolan and McIntyre were prevented from landing in New Zealand and promptly sent on their way to Sydney – their fares paid by the government. But one Wobbly who wouldn’t go quietly was the Australian seaman and returned serviceman, Noel Lyons.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/184714486

In May 1925 seamen on board the SS Manuka refused to leave Wellington until their food was improved. However as the Union Steamship Company made clear to reporters, the real issue was “the deliberate attempt to institute job control” via the go slow. Using the pretext of IWW literature and posters found on board the ship, Lyons was read the Undesirable Immigrant Exclusion Act and given 28 days to leave New Zealand. Instead, Lyons and the crew walked off their Sydney-bound vessel singing ‘Solidarity Forever,’ and convened a meeting at the Communist Hall.

300 people packed into the Manners Street Hall to hear Lyons speak about the ‘ham and egg’ strike. “I have been described as a paid agitator,” argued Lyons, “but it is a well known fact that all who take an active part in attempting to better the condition of the worker… develop whiskers overnight, and appear as a Bolshevik.” Despite resolutions of protest from numerous unions, Lyons was imprisoned for two weeks before being shipped to Australia. On his arrival Lyons made the most of what the NZ Truth called ‘the new spasm of [the] IWW,” organising mass meetings and reviving the Sydney IWW.

The deportation of Lyons highlights how the authorities would pick and choose when someone was to be considered a New Zealander, a British subject, or foreign immigrant. The Reform government’s loyalty to Empire and their making of the world ‘safe for democracy’ did not seem to contradict the deportation of British subjects. “New Zealand is more conservative than England,” noted Lyons on his arrival in Sydney. “They regarded me as a foreigner… It is too funny for words. When I was on my to France as an Australian solider, they did not say I was an undesirable… But now, when I put up a bit of a fight for humanity, they turn me out of the country.”

Conclusion

Noel Lyons was not the only radical to be deported in the post-war years, nor was he the first. But his case is indicative of the systematic surveillance put in place after the First World War, and the attitude of the New Zealand government towards the IWW. Although this treatment pales in comparison to the violence and mass deportations inflicted on the American IWW, the National Coalition and Reform governments clearly felt threatened. Class struggle and revolution from below; the flouting of law; the go-slow and the disregard shown to the work ethic; such tactics called into question the social relationships needed for capitalism and the state to function. As a result, the Defence, Police, and Customs Departments, as well as scores of legislation, was used to ensure the IWW never regained its pre-war strength.

Obviously the IWW formed but a tiny part of the working-class radicalism of the day, and the IWW label was thrown about rather hysterically. This makes the identification of Wobblies during the war even harder. However the actions of the IWW during 1915-1925, and the reaction to them by the state, indicates a discernible legacy of IWW radicalism in New Zealand—one that reached well beyond the Great Strike of 1913. While it is hard to measure their precise influence on the local labour movement, I hope the examples above help to question what Kerry Taylor has called the “premature obituary” of the IWW and revolutionary syndicalism in New Zealand.


SOURCES
 Records at Archives New Zealand - Army Department, Customs Department, Post and Telegraph Department, Department of Internal Affairs, Police Gazettes, Old Police Records, Sir James Allen Papers, Prime Ministers' Department
Records at the Alexander Turnbull Library - Bert Roth Collection, Papers Past
New Zealand Parliamentary Debates
New Zealand Gazette
New Zealand Official Yearbooks
Burgmann, Verity, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism – the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Melbourne, 1995
Davidson, Jared, Remains to Be Seen: Tracing Joe Hill's Ashes in New Zealand, Rebel Press, 2011
Davidson, Jared, Sewing Freedom: Philip Josephs, Transnationalism & Early New Zealand Anarchism, AK Press, 2013
Derby, Mark, 'Towards a Transnational Study of New Zealand Links with the Wobblies'
Dunstall, Graeme, Policeman's Paradise? Policing a Stable Society, 1917-1945, Dunmore Press, 1999
Eldred-Grigg, Stevan, The Great Wrong War: New Zealand Society in WW1, Random House New Zealand, 2010
Gustafson, Barry, Labour's Path to Political Independence: Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party, 1900-19, Auckland University Press, 1980
Hill, Richard, The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove: The modernisation of policing in New Zealand 1886-1917, Dunmore Press, 1996
Moriarty-Patten, Stuart, “A World to Win, a Hell to Lose: The Industrial Workers of the World in Early Twentieth Century New Zealand,” Thesis, Massey University, 2012
Olssen, Erik, The Red Feds – revolutionary industrial unionism and the NZ Federation of Labour 1908-1913, Auckland 1988
Roth, Herbert, Trade Unions in New Zealand: Past and Present, A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1973