Australian General Strike of 1917

Usually referred to as the "New South Wales General Strike", but referred to by contemporaries as "the Great Strike", it was in fact neither general nor confined to NSW. The strike was however a mass strike, involving around 100,000 workers, mostly in NSW and Victoria. It began in the Australian state of New South Wales and spread to other states over six weeks from 2 August to 8 September 1917 when the official leadership declared the strike over. It took two weeks for all the railway strikers to return, however, as rank and file meetings initially rejected the official capitulation. Outside the railways, significant groups such as the waterside workers in Sydney and Melbourne, and the Hunter Valley coal mines remained out until November (or December in the case of the Melbourne waterfront) as in their case the use of strikebreakers had turned the strike into a lockout.

The trigger for the strike was the introduction of a new labour costing system introduced by the New South Wales Department of Railways and Tramways. The system, a time and motion study, used cards to record the tasks each worker was assigned and the time it took them to complete those tasks. Concern existed over the right to view or modify their card, and the potential use of the card system to identify (and presumably dismiss) "slow" or "inefficient" workers. The strike began at the Randwick Workshops and Eveleigh Carriage Shops with workers walking off the job in protest. Their cause was taken up throughout the New South Wales railway system, and eventually spread to other industries and states.

Class tensions had been building during the war, however, and it is necessary to look outside the railways to explain the extraordinary spread of the dispute. The Piddington Royal Commission reported in 1920 that real wages in Australia fell by approximately 30% between 1914 and 1919. The response to this was a strike wave that began in early 1916. This, combined with anger at the attempt to introduce conscription and the disaffection of Irish-Australians (a considerable portion of the Australian population, concentrated mostly in the working class), provided the atmosphere of class tension in which the strike exploded.

With the exception of the railways, which were officially called out on 6 August, the strikes all began with rank and file walkouts and were only afterwards made official. Even on the railways, significant sections had walked out before 6 August. The strike then spread to the coal mines in NSW, the waterfront and the seamen. Groups of workers would continue to join the strike right up until September on the principle of refusing to work with a delivery of coal or of goods from the waterfront. When the Melbourne waterfront joined the strike on 11 August a similar spread occurred throughout Melbourne. Other significant additions to the ranks of strikers were the Broken Hill mines, the Wonthaggi coal mine in Victoria, sugar refineries, timber workers, meat workers and gas workers in Sydney. When waterside workers in Port Pirie refused to unload a delivery of NSW coal, this threatened the operation of the refinery which provided the majority of the lead used for munitions on the Western Front. The Prime Minister, W.M. Hughes, declared Port Pirie a military zone to ensure its continued operation.

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