Fighting racism: a lesson from 1934
By Iggy Kim
"We said, well, rather than strike against the foreign-born workers, let's strike for something worthwhile! So we took a stand: £1 a shift and a 40-hour week."
This is how the late Bronc Finlay, in a 1988 interview, summed up the Communist Party of Australia's (CPA) intervention against the anti-migrant strike in the Western Australian goldfields in 1934.
In 1930, as the Great Depression began, the goldmines of Kalgoorlie, Boulder and Coolgardie boomed. World demand for gold had jumped as capitalists searched for a stable commodity to pin their hopes on. The gold price doubled, providing soaring profits for the mine owners.
Thousands of unemployed workers from around Australia came to the goldfields. "People poured into Kalgoorlie," Jack Coleman, one of Finlay's comrades recruited in Boulder during this period, recalled in a 1976 interview. "They jumped the rattler from South Australia. They jumped the rattler from Perth."
By 1934, the number of mine workers had trebled to 12,000. Those seeking work far exceeded the number of jobs and desperate workers fought each other for the chance of work.
The great frustration and anger about unemployment amongst Anglo-Celtic workers was directed at the many migrants from Italy and the Balkan countries who had been coming to the goldfields since the beginning of the century, including, after 1922, an especially large influx of Italian anti-fascist workers fleeing Mussolini's regime. The Labor Party and trade union bureaucracy's "white Australia policy" — white, that is, in the very narrow sense of "British" — had taught these workers to scapegoat the migrants, who were easily identified targets because of their different clothes, accents, languages and names.
In Kalgoorlie, Coleman said, "this race hatred business was, I'm sure, fostered by [the union] officialdom". This was despite the fact that when workers were asked to show their union tickets at the shaft heads, all the foreign-born workers were members, but not all the Australian-born were.
The bosses, with a formal policy favouring "British labour", fostered and took advantage of the divisions among workers. Previously, the Chamber of Mines had brought in migrant miners to undermine demands for better wages and conditions from the existing work force. From 1930, migrant workers could get jobs only if they worked for less than the other miners and made payments called "sling backs".
One event stuck in Coleman's mind as a pathetic testament to the conflict: "One of the speakers at the Town Hall meeting [during the strike] was already 'dusted', gasping through decaying lungs [from the fatal silicosis common among miners then], as he complained, 'Why can't my son get a job. He was born here. It's because of the bloody "dings" who've got all the jobs'."
The riots
Anti-migrant resentment exploded into a violent frenzy on January 29, 1934, after an Australia Day weekend full of drunken patriotic and imperial fervour. The night before a popular Anglo miner, Ted Jordan, was killed when an Italian bartender, Mattaboni, knocked Jordan to the ground while trying to remove Jordan from his bar. A post-mortem subsequently found that the miner had an abnormally thin skull.
Word got around that Jordan had been chased by 20 "foreigners" and deliberately murdered. Indeed, Coleman said, the circumstances of the death "got more gruesome as the story spread".
That night an angry crowd gathered in front of Mattaboni's bar and burned it down. The crowd then worked their way down Hannan Street, burning down any business with a "foreign" name or sign, before commandeering a train to nearby Boulder, where they did the same.
On the morning of January 30, spontaneous meetings of Anglo workers at the mine shafts decided to strike in opposition to working with migrant miners. Later, at a mass meeting in Boulder, the workers elected a strike committee.
A second mass meeting was held in Boulder the same night. Labor politicians and Australian Workers Union (AWU) officials gave their approval to the strike.
As the meeting got under way, another mob, more keen on violence than discussion, armed themselves with guns by breaking into hardware shops and set out to attack. A confrontation erupted as migrant workers tried to defend their homes with Molotov cocktails and mining explosives. One Slav worker, Joe Katich, died from a gunshot. The migrants were driven into the bush. Their homes were torched.
Communist intervention
Finlay, Coleman and four other members of the Kalgoorlie unit of the CPA met to plan their intervention soon after the outbreak of violence. They were aided by Ted Docker, a party central committee member from NSW who happened to be passing through the goldfields at the time.
At every opportunity, the Communists spoke out against the riots and the strike and continued to distribute the party's newspaper. While they were prevented from speaking at the mass meetings, they intervened in spontaneous gatherings and agitated on street corners.
After the workers decided to strike, the comrades produced a leaflet entitled: "A CALL FOR UNITY! The foreign-born worker is not our enemy. For a united front of all workers for struggle against our real enemy — the MINE OWNERS". This leaflet was widely distributed at the mass meeting on the night of January 30.
The CPA did not call for an end to the strike, but drew up an alternative log of claims to re-direct the action against the mine bosses. It demanded a wage increase (from 14 shillings to £1 per shift) and a massive increase in jobs by reducing the work week from 48 to 35 hours. This bold move related to the great discontent among both native-born and foreign-born workers and pointed out a practical step forward which could only be taken through their unity.
The day after the CPA distributed its leaflet, the Kalgoorlie Miner quoted Labor Premier Philip Collier: "I am advised that the outbreak of incendiarism and lawlessness had its genesis in the machinations of a few communists, who never lose an opportunity of disseminating lawlessness and initiating incendiarism or pillagism [sic] with a view to promoting their own ends." A large passage from the leaflet was quoted in the newspaper a few days later.
Three days into the strike, the CPA's demands began to win wider support. Finlay said, "'Let us strike for something worthwhile' was heard on all sides". As the strike began to mturn against the employers, Finlay said, they and the government were forced "to try and stop [it]. 'This wouldn't do', they said. 'We can't have that sort of thing'." Alarm bells rang all the way to the mines' London board of directors, which promptly sent a cable to Collier.
A mass meeting at the Boulder Town Hall on February 1 decided to resume work with those migrant workers who could pass English language tests. This proviso was pushed by the Laborites as a face-saving measure that did not bite into the mine owners' profits. The Communists were still not allowed to speak.
Aftermath
Afterwards, according to Coleman, "there was a tremendous amount of shamefacedness amongst the Australian, that is, the old Australian, not the migrant, workers. But it did have that effect, I think, of bringing home the futility of such divisions."
Amidst the madness, the Communists were the only clear-headed leaders with concrete solutions to offer.
The Communists' struggle did not end with the resumption of work. The CPA raised a new demand: government compensation for the vandalised migrant workers. This demand won the tacit approval of most of the Anglo workers. Within six months the government negotiated on the demand.
The enormous respect won by the CPA comrades was demonstrated in 1938 by the election of Finlay as secretary of the mining section of the WA AWU.
The WA goldfields experience has lessons for the struggle against racism today.
The bosses were never strict about immigration restrictions. They would "sneak in" workers from non-Anglo ethnic and racial groups, who would then be available for scapegoating when it assisted the mines' profitability. The racist restrictions allowed the bosses to hold the migrant workers to ransom, using the threat of expulsion from Australia to enforce inferior wages and conditions.
The bosses, in giving migrants (second-class) jobs, have neither the migrant workers' interests nor the native-born workers' interests in mind. If native-born workers see migrant workers as their enemy, they have found a false ally in the bosses.
Any policy based on defending versions of the "national interest", whether "white Australia" or today's pragmatic economic nationalism, will disadvantage the entire working class. As Finlay said: "While the workers are fighting each other, that suits [the bosses] down to the ground". This applies as much to workers competing across national borders as within.
The only way forward is class unity against each and every national capitalist class, including their "own". Without such internationalism in relation to "external" immigration policies and the "internal" relations between native-born and foreign-born workers, all working people will lose.