Book Review: True Blue

TRUE BLUE

Maritime Men of the South Pacific: True-blue Internationals Navigating Labour Rights 1906-2006 by Diane Kirkby with Lee-Ann Monk and Dmytro Ostapenko

An Australian seafarer is abandoned in Bombay in the days of the Raj. He experiences firsthand the brutality of the British colonialists in India – the dark side of global shipping, racism and slavery. His name is Harry Bridges. So begins Maritime Men of the South Pacific: True Blue Internationals Navigating Labour Rights, by historian Diane Kirkby. The book, in the words of the writer, describes “the campaigns to establish and maintain fair labour standards, driven by that sense of connection with workers across the world and their belief that ‘capital knows no country”’.

Union internationalism was key to achieving rights for seafarers in what was the first global industry. But commitment to internationalism was challenged from the outset by racial differences and beliefs about white racial superiority.

True Blue does not shy away from racism rampant among workers and unions in Australia in the 19th

and early 20th centuries. Nor their support for the White Australia Policy. But it also highlights how socialism and solidarity, especially among wharfies and seafarers, helped overcome years of divide and rule under colonialism.

“Too few have explored the struggle of especially maritime workers to reach across these divides,” Kirkby writes, citing a contemporary US Journal:

seafarers establish their unions and get them released from prison after walking off ships over intolerable conditions.

seafarers establish their unions and get them released from prison after walking off ships over intolerable conditions.

Yet True Blue is far from a purely Anglo Centric perspective of labour history in the region. Kirkby writes of the rise of unionism in Asia as an independent development, not the outcome of western union missionaries.

She pays tribute to the early stand taken by Indian, Chinese and Japanese seafarers and dock workers fighting for their rights. Many of their strikes are recounted in detail.

Chinese and Japanese dockworkers reached across the Pacific to Australian and US unionists in common struggles. Indian delegates were later to become strong activists in the International Labor Organisation’s work to establish a seafarers’ bill of rights.

COLONIALISM

British imperialism was built on racism and exploitation. Kirkby notes how the very perpetrators of

the slave trade went on to become British ship owners in the merchant navy. This legacy continues with modern day slavery still endemic in shipping today.

Colonialism did not just enslave seafarers; it gave British ships monopoly to ‘rule the waves’.

In Bombay, the British decimated Indian shipping under their rule. Indian seafarers worked in slave-like conditions on British ships, as did the Chinese, once proud seafarers and a proud seafaring nation boasting fleets bigger than the Spanish Armada.

British shipping owned more than 1/3 of world shipping. This was central to Britain’s rise to worldwide supremacy as a maritime power, Kirkby writes.

In Australia, British shipping monopolised the trade between both countries well past Federation, stifling any attempts the new nation made to launch an Australian merchant fleet.

Only with war was this overcome. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 sent a seismic shock through Europe. The rising Asian empire was viewed a threat to Australia, which promptly reserved its coastal trade for Australian-owned ships ready to serve the nation.

Despite protests from shippers, governments deemed it worth paying higher freight costs for national security. Even the press of the day was on side. Kirkby cites passages for the Sydney Morning Herald calling for a national fleet and minimum wages to attract Australian seafarers in the national interest.

WWI gave even greater impetus to national shipping. PM Billy Hughes used government wartime powers to turn captured German ships into merchant vessels of the newly established Commonwealth Line (1916-1928). The line was abandoned by conservative governments post-war only to be revived in WW2 by a Curtin Labor Government under the Australian Shipping Board. After industry and union pressure the conservative Menzies government established the Australian National Line.

Mostly remembered as a Labor Rat for abandoning his party over conscription, Hughes was also the founder of the Waterside Workers Federation and its leader (1902- 1916) while simultaneously a politician. But never a waterside worker.

Robert Guthrie was another Labor politician who at the same time served as president of the Federated Seamen’s Union of Australasia. He helped rename and found the Seamen’s Union of Australia in 1906. Guthrie had worked as a seafarer on the Australian coast and had firsthand experience of exploitation and abuse.

Together with Hughes, Guthrie worked to establish Australia’s first Navigation Act, providing minimum wages for seafarers. Rather than embrace colour bars, the wages and conditions applied to all crew on the Australian coast, whether white Australians or foreign Asian seafarers – in those days exploited “coolies” or lascars.

So forward thinking was Guthrie’s policy that it has remained over a century.

“Few men have been more closely identified with Australian navigation matters or more intimately associated with Australian seamen” than Guthrie, the local press recorded.

Other Australian maritime leaders Kirkby brings to life in the history include SUA General Secretary Tom Walsh and his then socialist and feminist wife Adela Pankhurst (youngest daughter of British suffragette Emily Pankhurst and SUA journal writer, who later swung to the right).

Percy Coleman was a seafarer who rose to federal parliament in 1922 and went on to be Australia’s representative at the ILO. EV Elliot, Jim Healy, Charlie Fitzgibbon, Tas Bull, John Coombs and Paddy Crumlin all loom large in Australian maritime labour history.

Kirkby not only fleshes out the Australian maritime leaders at the forefront of building internationalism, but also those in India, the US and Japan. They included Aftab Ali, president of the Indian Seamen’s Union; India’s Leo Barnes, the first Asian seafarer member of the ILOs Joint Maritime Commission; and Japanese union leader Tomitaro Kaneda.

Early attempts at regional cooperation amongst Asia Pacific dock unions first came about under Australia’s Jim Healy, Japan’s Tomitaro Kaneda and Harry Bridges, who after surviving abandonment in India and shipwrecks went on to form the International Longshore Workers’ Union and retain close ties with the Asia Pacific.

The book highlights the powerful trio of Bridges, Healy and Kaneda embracing solidarity across the Pacific Ocean. These union networks filled the void left when the International Transport Workers’ Federation’s early attempts to go beyond its Eurocentric roots failed.

Rising nationalism in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and Japan paralleled regional union cooperation in tandem with the shift of world trade. Kirkby notes that between 1950-1970 global tonnage in the Asian region increased sixfold.

It was India’s PM Nehru who in the 1930s inspired the head of the ITF Edo Fimmen to reach out into Asia in 1940.

True Blue traces the formation of the ITF after the 1889 London dock strike and its ‘Napoleon of Labour’ leader Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, who led the Federation. Mann later helped found the UK Communist Party. The ITF however swung right during the Cold War.

While fleshing out individual leaders in the book Kirkby uncovers the rhyme of history.

She highlights broad trends: while socialism overcame racism within the union movement it was political pragmatism that overcame political divisions.

COLD WAR

The international socialist moment of the 20th century helped cement solidarity across race and region. True Blue notes how the work of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) of the 1920s, followed by the communist leadership of Australia’s Tom Walsh, EV Elliot, Jim Healy and, allegedly, Harry Bridges radicalised and supported maritime struggles of all colours.

But the Cold War set back labour internationalism, dividing workers with walls of iron and splitting global union confederations along political lines.

Kirkby outlines the unique role the ILO played operating above ideological alignments and conflicts during the Cold War. While the world union confederations were split between political camps, the ILO alone kept representation across the whole political spectrum including the USSR and the US. The ILO brought together the global working-class community, formulating and promoting internationally recognised labour rights and the first seafarer conventions, she writes.

Unions shackled by splits and divisions, were unable to reach out across political divides during this time. It was pragmatic union teamwork responding to the containerisation decimating dock workers worldwide that began to heal the rifts.

WWF leader Charlie Fitzgibbon, a Labor man, pursued a less political and more industrial agenda, learning from European and US unions, as waterside workers saw technology slash jobs from 27,000 to 5,000 over 20 years.

The Flag of Convenience Campaign also crossed the political divide. Whereas the SUA cleaved to the Soviet Union-led bloc the WFTU, the ITF and the WWF moved to the Western union alliance of the ICFTU. But Australian maritime unions on both sides of the fence took part in the ITF Flag of Convenience shipping campaign under Fitzgibbon.

Australian union leaders’ elevation to the ITF executive began with Fitzgibbon. The baton passed to Tas Bull followed by John Coombs, who used the union’s position on the ITF executive and its reputation for supporting workers in the Asia Pacific to garner international support during the 1998 Patrick Dispute. Without global union action, the pickets may not have held and the eventual court victory would have been a hollow one.

This radical tradition of global unionism reached its pinnacle with the election of MUA National Secretary Paddy Crumlin – a key player in negotiations for a Maritime Labor Convention (2006) governing the world’s seafarers – to ITF President in 2010.

The MLC or Seafarers’ Bill of Rights is hailed as a watershed moment in the ILO’s long history and a model for other globalising industries.

“True-Blue Internationals has successfully pulled off a mammoth task....will take its place as a major contribution to global labor history – connecting labor, legal, race, and history of capitalism themes—even as (maritime labour internationalism) took off from its Australian base,” a US colleague writes. “We simply have no other text that so effectively covers the Indo-Pacific maritime region with such care and complexity.” •