General strike in Brisbane

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Police camp during the general strike in Brisbane

The general strike in Brisbane was a five-week strike in 1912 in the Australian Brisbane in Queensland . The reason for the general strike was the wearing of badges of the tram workers' union, the Australian Tramway Employees Association , while on duty. This was prohibited by the management of the tram company on January 18, 1912. Union workers stopped working and marched to Trades Hall in Brisbane for a rally. 10,000 people took part in the protest in Market Square , now King George Square .

The Brisbane tram company was operated by the General Electric Company , an English company, and led by the American Joseph Stillman Badger. When the latter refused to speak or negotiate with the Queensland Council of Unions , later renamed the Australian Labor Federation , 43 union organizations formed a strike committee that called a general strike in Brisbane on January 30, 1912, which lasted until June 6, 1912 March 1912 lasted.

General strike

During the Brisbane general strike, no economic activity could be carried out without the permission of the strike committee, and strike coupons were issued for permission to work. 500 union supervisors kept order among the strikers and even set up an ambulance brigade. Red ribbons were worn as a sign of solidarity, and daily processions and demonstrations took place. On the second day of the strike, more than 25,000 workers marched to Brisbane Trades Hall . The march was led by MPs from the Australian Labor Party and accompanied by 600 women. The Brisbane strike spread to numerous regional centers in Queensland. The Brisbane Strike Committee issued an official strike bulletin with the aim of countering anti-union coverage in the press.

The Queensland government initially did not respond to the strike. It was only when it spread to the railroad that it banned marches, hired police, Commonwealth soldiers and volunteers, and issued bayonets to the police.

Black Friday

A motion by the strike committee on February 2, 1912 for a march in Brisbane was denied by Commissioner William Geoffrey Cahill . Around 15,000 strikers demonstrated in Market Square against the rejection. The rejection led to so-called Black Friday , known for the ruthless use of police clubs and riders against the trade unionists and their supporters. The police on horseback, led by Cahill, rode into the demonstrators and used clubs against the rally participants. Emma Miller , a committed 73-year-old trade unionist and suffragette , led a group of women and girls to the Parliament building. There was William Geoffrey Cahill, the senior Queensland police officer, on horseback. She took her hatpin and stabbed Cahill's horse with it, which threw the police inspector off, whereupon he injured himself, resulting in a later walking disability.

Riding down and bludgeoning peaceful people, many of them older women and children, was condemned not only in union newspapers such as the Worker , but also in other newspapers such as the Conservative Trust . Friday was first referred to as Baton Friday and later Black Friday .

The Conservative Prime Minister Digby Denham Queenslands saw the strike committee as an alternative government, banned all demonstrations and said that there should be no alternative government. When he tried to convince the federal government of Australia to use the military, it was rejected by Prime Minister Andrew Fisher , a member of the Labor Party and a member of the Queensland Parliament for Gympie . Fisher was also called by the strike committee for military aid, but he chose to support the strike by handing over a sum of money.

Denham considered with the Governor William MacGregor , to land troops with a German warship on the coast of Queensland, in order to enforce his ideas of law and order .

Review

When the judge H. B. Higgins of the Federal Arbitration Court of Australia was approached for a court ruling, the court ruled that the event had been more of a lockout than a strike and that the wearing of the union badges by the men on the tram was illegal and inappropriate. However, Higgins could not force a return to work. When the Employers Federation decided on March 6th that no measures would be taken against the strikers, the strike ended.

The brutal use of clubs by the Queensland police and government officials on Black Friday generated bitterness and hatred of the police. The strike, on the other hand, increased the solidarity of the Queensland labor movement. The Conservative Denham government won the elections that followed shortly afterwards with slogans of "law and order" and enacted the Industrial Peace Act of 1912 , which provided for compulsory arbitration before strikes were called in services of importance to the public.

Denham had the full support of MacGregor, the governor, and he called an election after the strike. His party lost seats in Brisbane but gained votes in rural areas and he returned to office. Three years later, the Australian Labor Party in Queensland was elected by a majority. She formed the new government with Thomas Joseph Ryan , a trade unionist and Labor Party politician. It was the first government to be led by a Labor Party in Australia.

The tram company workers who had been on strike were fired and the tram company refused to reinstate them after the strike. It was not until the trams were taken over by the state of Queensland in 1922 that laid-off tram workers were reinstated.

Interestingly, the wearing of union badges on uniforms continued to be banned even after the trams, and later buses, were administered by the government and then by Brisbane City Council . It was banned until 1980.

literature

  • Joe Harris (1970): The bitter fight; a pictorial history of the Australian labor movement. Publisher: St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press. ISBN 9780702206139

Individual evidence

  1. Pam Young, The Hatpin - A Weapon: Women and the 1912 Brisbane General Strike , published in Hecate , (1988)
  2. Pam Young, Proud to be a Rebel - The Life and Times of Emma Miller , University of Queensland Press, 1991. ISBN 0702223743
  3. DJ Murphy: Digby Frank Denham (1859-1944) on adb.online.anu.edu.au , accessed on Mar 15, 2010
  4. D, J. Murphy The Tramway and General Strike, 1912 in The Big Strikes: Queensland 1889-1965 , University of Queensland Press, 1983 ISBN 0702217212