Comrades and Cossacks Redux

Strikers and 'police specials' (Cossacks) lined up facing each other in Queen Street, Auckland, 1913

This is not the first time that the history of the 1913 Strike in NZ/Aotearoa has caused controversy. Today, the fuss is about an artwork that features the silhouette of a baton wielding 'Cossack' used to suppress the striking workers on the Auckland wharves in 1913. Ten years ago, the police and some unions collaborated in an academic project that sought to present the 1913 strike as no more than an example of police 'methods'. That is, to be seen as an historical event that is isolated from the class struggle today. In both cases what we have is an attempt to legitimise the role and 'methods' of paramilitary state forces used to smash strikes, outlaw unions, and impose the will of the ruling class upon the fate of the working class. We say NO!

Mike Lee the City Councillor who blew the gaff on the baton wielding thug posturing today on Queens Wharf in Auckland had a grandfather on the blunt end of those batons in 1913. He is right. Putting up a memorial to the 'Cossacks' (farmers recruited as police specials) who broke the strike of the Auckland wharfies and helped set up a scab union in 1913 is a provocation to today’s workers and the Labour Party which evolved out of the Federation of Labour formed in 1909.

That FOL (called the ‘Red Fed’ because of its socialist principles) broke from the Arbitration Court because it refused to increase wages in 1908. The Miners Federation became the FOL and other unions like the wharfies, flaxworkers and shearers joined. Acting as free unions registered under the 1878 Trade Union Act. There was no prohibition on strikes and these workers gained better wages and conditions than under the Arbitration Court.

Also formed in 1909 was the Reform Party led by Bill Massey a small farmer. Small farmers newly settled on land broken up by the Liberal Government in the 1890s and assisted by state loans became a new force for private property opposed to the more progressive wing of the Liberals who favoured state leaseholds over freehold. The prize of capital gain was the main route for the landless out of the working class.

From 1910 the freeholders and business class behind Massey organised to force the FOL back into the Arbitration Court. Reform became the Government in 1912 and the first major fight was at the Waihi gold mines in 1912. The Waihi Miners Union joined the FOL in 1911 and won better wages and conditions. The mine owners used the Arbitration law to form a scab union imposing a wage cut on the FOL miners who where locked out until they agreed.

For six months the miners held out supported by the FOL and overseas unions. Police, scabs and armed thugs attacked the locked out workers. George Evans was killed. 68 of the miners including all of their leaders were jailed for attempting to keep the scab union out of the mine.

This dispute was a dress rehearsal for the 1913 strike which again began as a lockout this time of the Wellington Watersiders by the British shipowners who refused to employ men not in an arbitration union. Now the bosses were emboldened to smash the whole Red Fed and the newly formed Social Democratic party and force all workers into the Arbitration Court. Strikes in support of the locked out Watersiders spread around the country and were faced by police, armed scabs, the Cossacks, and even the army and navy (the latter with permission of the British crown).

According to WB Sutch in ‘Poverty and Progress in NZ” p. 165:

“Young farmers, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, rode into the main ports as ‘specials’ to intimidate the strikers and the public, to form arbitration unions and take the place of watersiders and seamen…When police and specials took over the Auckland waterfront so that scab labour could work the ships, many other unions (including craft unions) struck in protest. There was almost a general strike in Auckland. Strike leaders were put in jail (there were 169 convictions); at the ports the Employers’ Federation formed new arbitration unions, often based on the young farmers were there partly for this purpose; the ports were worked by these people and other scabs; and the Supreme Court decided that arbitration unions could not contribute strike funds to another union. The arbitration unions formed by the employers were registered, and the watersiders told that if they wanted to work again on the wharves they must join these unions. By 20 December 1913 the strike was over, and Massey was able to give Waikato farmers medals for strike breaking.”

In case anybody thinks that that episode can never be repeated it most certainly was in the 1951 lockout, and will inevitably again when organised labour stands up for its rights against the class that owns the means of production and controls the state to enforce its class rule.

Whose side are you on?

The Pike River Mine Disaster

This was not a national disaster but a disaster for the 29 workers who died in the mine explosion on November 19, 2010, and their families. PM Key’s class of banksters and profiteers are facing a financial hit but hardly a disaster. They are using the same approach to the failure of this mine as the failure of South Canterbury Finance. Inside traders get paid in full by the state for investing in a state bailout. The banksters get away with murder while posing as national leaders in national disasters. There is only one national disaster and that’s the NACT frontier capitalist neo-colonial lackey regime that serves the interests of Australian, US and Chinese imperialism!

NZ Oil and Gas would have been happy to pay their $500,000 conscience money, recover the bodies and after a decent interval reopen the mine. Even if they were found responsible for the disaster they could hide behind a cowboy government into strip mining and a greedy petty bourgeois class wanting its share of the spoils. As soon as the explosion died down there was already a campaign underway to blame the disaster on the difficulties of ‘surgical mining’ forced on the company by the ban on opencast mining on Conservation land. Even though the company pointed out this was technically impossible this hasn’t shut the cowboys up.

But as it played out, the company, the NACT regime and big business, closed ranks and played the disaster for sympathy to create a smokescreen over any company or Govt negligence. And now the mine is closed and the bodies are unrecovered, the Official Inquiry will have to speculate on what went wrong and why.

Well we won’t allow this frontier boss rule politics to shift the blame from the operation and management of the mine onto the miners, the contractors, the Greens or some freak accident. After all it was Coasters that started coming out with ‘blame’ comments right after Friday, November 19. Former mine workers commented on safety defects in the mine. Then the MSM got into the act. They had their reasons (keeping the disaster movie interesting) but they did hit some pay dirt. Investigate Magazine summarised most of this information in its January, 2011 Issue. As was immediately evident at the time of the explosion, and with plenty of warning signs, the mine exploded because it was a ‘gassy’ mine without an adequate ventilation system.

Investigate Magazine puts a lot of emphasis on reports that contractors tampered with the methane sensors so that they would not lose pay in the event of gas leaks causing a shut down. But the possible failure of gas sensors, sabotaged or not, is not the main cause. Even if it was the immediate cause, it reflects company policy to use casualised contractors rather than company employees who would be paid for down time. Moreover, it’s damning of both the company and the union that what was reported as a common practice was not acted on and stopped. However you read the safety problems the mine faced, it is the history of deregulation of health and safety requirements and inspections over the last 20 years allowing the mine to operate without sufficient margins of safety that is to blame for the explosion. And clearly for that both National and Labour Governments must be held accountable. 

Similar mines in the US now have failsafe ventilation systems since if the ventilation system fails in ‘gassy’ mines explosions are almost inevitable. Disasters in the US today are due to owners’ negligence. So it’s no use talking about Pike River as the ‘latest’ or 'most advanced' of such mines. Peter Whittall, the mine manager, while developing Pike River, himself reported that the Mining regulations needed updating and there was a shortage of mine inspectors. What he failed to mention, however, was that only in NZ was a ventilator fan installed inside the mine where it could not be reached in an explosion, rather than at the top of the ventilator shaft where it could be protected from the blast.

Both the Labour Party and the EPMU which covers most of the miners knew about a report critical of lack of inspection made in 2008 but they did not act on it. Pike River even had a dangerous build-up a few days before the explosion and workers were out for the 20 hours it took to clear the gas. At that point the EPMU should have stepped in and insisted that the cause of the build-up be investigated and better ventilation put in place.

Of course we won’t know the full facts even when the Official Inquiry is completed. The mine is closed, and important evidence is lacking. So if the Inquiry was always going to whitewash the Company and Govt this is now certain. Meanwhile our solidarity should be for the workers families and not for the parasites that turned this disaster for the miners and their families into a face-saving exercise for the ruling class and their NACT regime.

The west coast miners have a proud tradition of unionism that led the way in the fight to win improved conditions not only in the mines but in all workplaces in NZ. The west coast miners stood firm with the wharfies in 1951 until the navy was sent to scab on the miners. Today it is a scandal that the miners’ union, the EPMU, should be included along with the company and the Government as contributing to the conditions that led to the Pike River mine disaster. Workers in this country should make it their duty to revive the west coast unions along with the rest of NZ union movement in the tradition of the militant unionism of the Red Fed and take charge of health and safety monitoring so that such a disaster never happens again! 

From Class Struggle 92, November 2010-January 2011

Zimbabwe: Bolivian Workers Central (COB) condemns IST use of bourgeois courts.

The Central Obrera Boliviana COB (Bolivian Workers Central) has been informed of the criminal charges against 3 members of ISO from Zimbabwe, comrades Adonia Mulero (National Coordinator), Fortune Rera (Treasurer) and Lovemore Manjonjo (Youth Coordinator).

From the Central Obrera Boliviana we call on Mr Munyaradzi Gwisai, leader of the International Socialist Organization in Zimbabwe (member of the International Socialist Tendency), to withdraw the charges of forced entry into the office of the branch, made against the comrades that are been taken to the jails of the government of the regime of ZANU –PF- MDC; we repudiate this method within our workers organizations. And we endorse the call of the comrades to set up an International Moral Tribune to put this informer in the defendant’s seat so all that this never happens again in the workers movements.

Long liVE workers democracy!!!

Out WiTH informerS FROM workers ORGANISATIONS!!!

DEATH TO fascistS, paramilitaries and informers!!!

La Paz, November 18^th 2009

ON BEHALF OF COB Executive Committee