Alex's review illuminates a bitter dispute

Ian writes: Readers with an interest in Australian history would find value in Alex's assessment of Walter Dill Scott's Increasing Efficiency in Business (posted May 19), and in Alex's references to Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management, published in 1911.

An attempt to introduce Taylor's methods triggered the New South Wales railway strike of 1917 – which I believe to be the most divisive industrial dispute in Australia's history.

In the background, Australian social cohesiveness was under stress from the growing war casualties in Europe, from the bitter class and religious differences displayed in the military conscription debate which saw "loyalist" advocates narrowly lose national plebiscites in 1916 and 1917, and from the assertiveness of a newly articulate working class.

In January 1916 James Fraser became acting Chief Commissioner of the NSW Government Railways, which then included the extensive street tramway systems. In Working Lives, a commissioned railway union history, Mark Hearn wrote:

Fraser was an engineer by training, a man with a methodical cast of mind. An official portrait portrays him as brooding on human inefficiency. He believed that the labour force could be made to work like the implacable machines of industry.

He was influenced by American ideas of scientific or systematic management. During 1916 Fraser attempted to introduce the management strategies of Frederick Taylor into Eveleigh Railway Workshops [in an inner suburb of Sydney].

Taylor's system involved the use of cards to measure an individual worker's performance. Fraser commented that “the object was not to 'Americanise' the system, but simply to get a proper, fair and right record of the work done and exact cost of every article”.

The unions differed. In July 1916 a Co-operator [railway union newspaper] editorial stated that “it may be said that so-called scientific management seeks to make the task of the worker more monotonous than it ever was, to take from his work the last vestige of individuality, and to make him a mere cog in the machinery of production”.

In Working Lives, Hearn said the war created the sense that events were no longer under control, that life and work were hurtling inevitably into chaos and confrontation.

This must have been especially disturbing to the controlled and well-ordered Fraser, who sought certainty in properly regulated, concentrated and systematic work. On 20 July 1917 Fraser introduced the card system into the Randwick tram workshops.

Hearn continued: Far from striking as soon as the cards were introduced the workers at Randwick in fact sought to negotiate with both the Commissioners and the Government . . . “they knew that they worked as fast there as was done anywhere else, and were not afraid of any inquiry into the question.”

The negotiations proved pointless. On 2 August the men walked off the job.

The strike quickly spread. At Randwick 1100 men walked out; on the same day 3000 downed tools at Eveleigh, and were joined by rail workers at Newcastle, the Clyde workshops and Goulburn. In turn their numbers were swelled by train drivers and workers outside the rail and tram industry – seamen, wharfies [stevedores], miners . . .

The strike lasted 82 days and involved about seventy thousand workers, 14 per cent of the total NSW workforce. However, 42 per cent of rail and tram employees did not strike, and more than three thousand volunteers helped keep trains and trams running. Non-union crews worked coastal shipping. More volunteers drove trolleys and wagons and manned wharves.

Workers who were starved or frightened back to work found themselves demoted; those who stayed out to the end found themselves marked never to be re-employed.

One of the sacked workers was locomotive driver Ben Chifley, a Irish Catholic blacksmith's son from the NSW country town of Bathurst. He did not regain his job until the election of a Labor government in 1920, which returned the sacked or demoted workers to their old positions.

The experience turned Chifley to politics, and he won a seat in the Australian Parliament. He became the nation's Treasurer during World War II, and, after the death of John Curtin in 1945, Prime Minister until the voters tipped his government out in 1949.

Here endeth the history lesson. I'll read Increasing Efficiency in Business as soon as I've time. Is Scientific Management also in the library? I must check, but I'd better search also for the next Globusz book to review.

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