The rise of industrial action, organisation and militancy

Since the end of the 1951 waterfront lockout, industrial relations had been pretty subdued – until 1967, when the Arbitration Court, which set wage rates in the private sector, handed down a nil wage order. This marked the beginning of the end of the arbitration system and set the platform for the rise of industrial action, on-the-job organisation and militancy in the 1970s. Job delegate committees developed and became active on all the major industrial sites and other groups of workers also began to protest low wages and conditions.

Public sector employees began to take industrial action in the early 1970s, marking the beginning of white-collar militancy. As existing unions grew stronger, new unions and associations arose to represent previously unorganised workforces. As more and more workers joined trade unions to take action to gain better conditions, overtime bans and go-slows, pickets, sit-ins, street marches and stop-work meetings became more prevalent. The arbitration system for the private sector broke down and the state sector employers were increasingly unable to settle disputes with their employees. 

Increasingly, women became involved in unions and traditionally female workforces such as dental nurses, kindergarten and school teachers, clerical workers, retail workers and clothing workers became more active. This led to the establishment of a Federation of Labour (FOL) Women’s Advisory Committee, which developed a campaign to adopt the Working Women’s Charter. In 1980, the Charter was adopted at both the FOL Conference and the Labour Party Conference.

In the 1970s, employers began seeking common law injunctions against unions and workers involved in industrial action. From 1975, the National (Muldoon) Government also threatened to deregister unions – as had been done to the Waterside Workers Federation in the 1951 lockout. In 1976, it deregistered the Wellington Branch of the Boilermaker’s Union. It also restored the penalty clauses in industrial law that were applied to workers and unions involved in strikes and other industrial action.

In 1974, a court injunction was issued against the Seamen’s and Drivers’ Unions and their secretaries when they refused to lift a black ban on servicing the Auckland hydrofoil. The unions ignored the order, leading to the imprisonment of Bill Anderson, Northern Drivers’ Union Secretary. This led to mass walk-offs by workers across Auckland workplaces. The next day, following negotiations, Anderson was released and the controversial hydrofoil was taken out of service.

The breakdown of arbitration and increasing direct negotiations between employers and unions created issues for a government that wanted to control wage settlements. The Government used powers under the Remuneration Act to intervene in wage settlements and cut back what it considered to be excessive wage rises. Workers and their unions regularly protested these interventions at Parliament.

There were also numerous disputes about redundancy, the most notable being the Māngere Bridge strike, which lasted two and a half years. The dispute was finally settled by the FOL, which was often the case at the time, with a much-improved redundancy clause in the site agreement.

All this disputation, and in particular the reduction of the drivers’ settlement in 1979, led to the first and only 24-hour national strike called by the FOL Executive on 20 September 1979.