Jack Mundey: trade union firebrand and pioneering environmentalist
By John Cunningham
Article originally published in Issue 3 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Jack Mundey, who died last May at the age of 90, was the best-known of a cohort of radical labour activists in Australia in 1960s and early 1970s. A committed socialist and environmentalist, and a defender of black, gay and women’s rights, he was a pioneer of the ‘green bans’, as he named them, enforced by the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) in New South Wales. By withdrawing unionised workers from environmentally damaging projects, the bans preserved much of Sydney’s architectural and open space heritage and attracted attention internationally. It is widely believed indeed, that the characterisation of environmental movements as ‘green’ originated with these militant actions in Sydney. At the time of his death, Mundey was a legendary Australian – indicated by the respectful obituaries in the leading newspapers that had vilified him in his heyday. For its part, the BLF during the period of his influence has been extensively studied, most authoritatively in Green Bans, Red Union: The Saving of a City (1998, 2017) by Meredith and Verity Burgmann, academic writers on social movement unionism, and veterans themselves of causes upheld by Mundey and the BLF
In a speech in 2011, Mundey placed his union’s concern in the context of the social responsibility of labour:
The BLF argued that we should also be concerned about the sort of buildings we were making. What’s the point of higher wages and conditions if we live in cities devoid of trees, with too much high-rise development and too few workers’ homes? … So we raised the issues of socially useful production and consumption. Of course, workers have got to fight for wages and conditions — but they should have a wider vision of what they are making and how it is used.
Background
Mundey came from a small farming Catholic background in northern Queensland. He did not have it easy growing up – losing his mother when he was six; separated from his siblings when the bank took the family farm – but he always connected his appreciation of nature with his childhood. In his late teenage years, he abandoned a plumbing apprenticeship to play Rugby League professionally in Sydney. Without a trade at the end of his rugby career, he worked as a labourer, and was drawn to a rank-and-file movement in the BLF, which arose in opposition to the ultra-conciliationist leadership of that union. In the mid-1950s, he joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) which was strong in the BLF. He later explained:
So I guess it was my natural militancy … I joined it because of that militancy, because I saw the most impressive people in the trade union movement were either left wing Labor or members of the Communist Party. And I didn't have a theoretical knowledge of Marxism at that time … I guess I joined the Communist Party as a militant worker… At the time I did not have a knowledge of the more sinister aspects of Stalinism…
He joined just as the party was entering an extended period of turmoil, sparked in 1956 by Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and reignited in 1968 by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. There were splits – an exodus to the (Maoist) CPA Marxist-Leninist in 1964, and another to the (irridentist Stalinist) Socialist Party of Australia in 1971. Mundey remained in the CPA until its dissolution in 1991, but through the 1960s was influenced by ‘new left’ ideology and practice which opened the party to feminism and environmentalism, and to a recognition of the importance of participatory structures and procedures. Not all took that path, and the splintering of the communist movement would reverberate in the BLF.
Building boom
Circumstances favoured the BLF in the 1960s. A building boom created demand for labour, while high-rise development and pre-cast materials gave a greater role to workers without a background in the traditional skilled trades. In an expanding sector, most workers were young, and many were immigrants. Just as in Ireland in the 1960s, rising living standards, near full-employment, and the temper of the times created a militant mood among workers, while experience of strikes deepened their loyalty to their union and their suspicion of employers and the state. From the early 1960s, a Rank-and-File Committee was influential in the affairs of the BLF in New South Wales, reflected in a transformed executive and in the election of Mundey as an organiser in 1962. It should be pointed out that while the BLF was organised on a federal (Australia-wide) basis there was considerable local autonomy. Various left-wing currents had influence in different states, with Maoists holding sway in the Melbourne-based federal leadership.
By 1968, Mundey was secretary of the New South Wales BLF and allies like Bob Pringle and Joe Owens were taking important positions. Union democratisation and the recruitment of practically all eligible workers were integral to their rise to leadership.
Civilising the industry
Such was the union’s reach in New South Wales by the late 1960s, that no significant project could commence if it objected. BLF wage militancy had pushed up labourers’ pay, breaching relativities and irritating the craft unions. It then set about ‘civilising the industry’, demanding proper canteens and showers, but paying particular attention to health and safety. Employers resisted – safety often cost more than wage concessions – but campaigns surrounding safety raised the labourers’ sense of dignity and, in the view of the Burgmanns, hastened the radicalisation of the union membership.
In the spirit of the demands that had propelled them into office, the BLF leaders promoted democratic procedures, ensuring that members were consulted at regular mass meetings. Officials were elected, paid at the labourers’ rate, and routinely went ‘back to the tools’ at the end of their terms. Photographs show full-timers dressed and groomed like the members, eschewing the suits and ties characteristic of officialdom. Accessibility and responsiveness, together with achievements on wages and conditions, inculcated trust in the Mundey-era leaders, so that labourers were prepared to follow their advice in relation to broader social struggles.
Green bans
The green bans – so named to distinguish them from the ‘black bans’ imposed to address workplace grievances – were a particularly powerful expression of the BLF’s commitment to the ‘social responsibility of labour’. The first green ban, in mid-1971, concerned Kelly’s Bush, natural parkland long-established as a public amenity in Sydney. Those lobbying against its rezoning met with little success until they noticed a BLF statement that building workers ‘had the right to express an opinion on social questions relating to the building industry’. Challenged by the middle-class women involved, Mundey brought the issue before the union’s New South Wales executive. While some queried whether labourers should act to preserve an area where they could not afford to live, it was agreed to bring it to the membership.
In the course of discussions, conditions were agreed which would also be applied to subsequent green bans: that only requests from a representative meeting of the community centrally concerned would be considered, and that any action be agreed by the union rank-and-file. Both were forthcoming in this case, so a BLF ban was declared on work in Kelly’s Bush. Victory was quick and decisive, when arrangements to introduce non-union labour were thwarted by the union’s threat to shut down all of the developer’s sites.
Another early ban – a much more protracted one – concerned a threat to The Rocks, a historic urban working class community in central Sydney. Following its established procedure, the union supported the Rocks Residents Action Group, with Mundey indicating that the union’s concerns were wider than simple rehousing: ‘Everyone should be interested when Sydney’s history and beauty is to be torn down, and when people in the way of this so-called progress are regarded as minor inconveniences.’ Defying the government and an industrial tribunal (Mundey being a critic of ‘arbitration mindedness’ in union leaders), the BLF maintained this ban for three years. Meanwhile, other historic Sydney working class communities, threatened by cavalier freeway development, were preserved by union bans. Between 1971 and 1974, more than fifty green bans were implemented in New South Wales, in the face of vigorous opposition from the state, developers, criminal elements and, frequently, the federal leadership of the BLF. Much of the historic fabric of Sydney was preserved in the process – buildings, parkland, and more than a dozen working class communities. Bans were also taken up by workers in other cities, including Melbourne.
Other social struggles
In joining a variety of social struggles in the 1970s, the BLF confounded the caricaturists who cast builders’ labourers as racist, misogynistic and homophobic.
If there was some justification for the caricatures, this certainly changed in the mid-1960s when Mundey and fellow activists challenged the exclusion of women from the BLF. Women were commonly employed as cleaners in construction – stereotypically ‘women’s work’ – on lesser pay than men. Strikes in 1971 and 1972 extended union hire (closed shop) agreements to include women and secured equal pay. Soon, women were seeking work in traditionally male roles. In a 1974 dispute, for example, prompted by the refusal of a contractor to employ a female safety officer, women’s movement activists joined BLF pickets.
Also ground-breaking was the union’s defence of gay rights on a construction site at Macquarie University in 1973, when a gay student in its Anglican residential college was expelled for refusing to give a commitment to give up his ‘perversion’. The Students’ Council defended the student and approached the BLF for support. Labourers on the site voted unanimously to impose a ‘pink ban’ on the ‘principle of the thing’, to the surprise of Mundey who was aware of widespread prejudice against homosexuality among the membership.
There were actions by the BLF against apartheid and against Australian involvement in the Vietnam war, and significantly also in support of the rights of the First Nations or Aboriginal peoples, many of whom worked as builders’ labourers. The 1966 Gurindji strike of stockmen demanding the restoration of historic land rights received financial and moral support. Later, a BLF organiser was seconded to assist with Aboriginal causes, and bans were declared to protect Aboriginal housing.
Employers’ counter-attack
Employers could just about tolerate the BLF’s position on equality issues, but green bans were costing thousands of millions and changing the balance of power in the industry. From 1972-73, accordingly, a co-ordinated assault was launched on the BLF by employers and their Liberal government ally. The media joined in, highlighting accusations of violence and, in the case of the Sydney Morning Herald, mocking the pretensions of uneducated labourers ‘setting themselves as arbiters of taste and protectors of our national heritage’. Employers were provocative – suspending overtime, declaring lockouts, and introducing scab labour into developments under green bans. The consequent pickets were roughly handled by the police, with many arrests, and growing hysteria about union violence.
Using legal measures, and citing union-organised violence, the employers were able to secure the de-registration of the BLF in mid-1974. They did so with the acquiescence of the Maoist federal leadership of the union, which took the opportunity to suspend the rule-book and to remove Mundey and his comrades, while disparaging their consideration towards feminists, conservationists and homosexuals. With the exclusion of the ‘troublemakers’ and the lifting of most green bans, the employers permitted the reversal of deregistration, though this would prove to be temporary.
Throughout, there was considerable rank-and-file and community support for beleaguered leaders but, according to Mundey, little solidarity from union officialdom, including CPA comrades and other ostensible leftists, who generally disapproved of the democratic organisational structures promoted by him and his comrades.
Legacy
Though ending in defeat, the Mundey-era BLF left a significant legacy in central Sydney, protecting the city’s heritage during the vital years preceding the enactment of environmental legislation. The mobilisations discussed here, moreover, showed that the open and democratic approach of these union leaders inspired young workers in their thousands to take principled stands on environmental and equality issues, and to build alliances with community organisations across a major city.
Excluded from his union and from construction, Jack Mundey nonetheless remained prominent, speaking out on environmental issues, publishing his account of the green bans in 1981, addressing United Nations conferences, receiving honorary degrees, and serving as national president of the CPA (1979-82). While a Sydney councillor (1984-87), he was elected chair of the Planning Committee though his term was cut short when the government dissolved the council. In 2003, he joined the Green Party because of its opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
A remark from his BLF comrade Joe Owens might serve as Jack Mundey’s epitaph: ‘we made plenty of wrong decisions but we never made an unprincipled one.’
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John Cunningham is a lecturer in History at NUI Galway and a former editor of Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History.
Sources:
Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: The Saving of a City, New South, 2017 (2nd edn).
James Colman, The House that Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero, New South, 2016.
Jack Mundey, Speech at Melbourne University, 2011, Jacobin, May 2020. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/jack-mundey-green-bans-sydney-australia-blf, accessed 10 January 2020
Australian Biography, Jack Mundey interview, 2000. https://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/mundey/index.html, accessed 10 January 2021