Terry Irving

Industrial Democracy and Labour History

THE TITLES of some books are misleading because they make the reader expect something not contained between the covers. Rarely, however, does a title simultaneously mislead and provide a clue to explain why. Professor Derber’s title misleads: his book is not about &dquo;the American&dquo; idea of industrial democracy, but about one view of industrial government which became predominant in America in a certain period. It is a simple fact, as even a cursory glance at this book reveals, that in American history there are different and sometimes conflicting schemes of industrial government, most of which are boosted by their proponents as &dquo;democratic&dquo;: syndicalism, collective bargaining, corporate paternalism, etc. The dates in Derber’s title suggest that his book sets out to explain how and why one of these schemes should be called democratic and American by scholars. Not so; when Derber says he has engaged in historical analysis (p. 4), he means that he has presented his material chronologically, or, as they say in the behavioural sciences, he has taken a developmental approach to his subject. In the book which Derber ought to have written, it might have been possible to disentangle the different meanings given to industrial democracy and to assess them in the light of the history of the period. In the book as it stands, that definite article in the title alerts us to the tautological and ideological elements of Derber’s assessment: collective bargaining gets the prize because it conforms to &dquo;American experience and American thought&dquo; (p. 20). No methodological problems arise for those who adopt a &dquo;developmental&dquo; approach: they face only the cataloguing tasks of any descriptive technique. It is sufficient to say, then, that Derber divides his survey into five chronological periods, in the second of which (1898-1920) collective bargaining emerged as the strongest form of industrial government. In the ’twenties it held its position, despite the corporations’ counter-attack of &dquo;welfare capitalism&dquo; (employee representation schemes, scientific management, etc.). With the New Deal collective bargaining grew stronger and acquired a special status which it has retained into the present period of government regulation (and of liberal fears that a restless and indifferent working class may undermine this &dquo;American&dquo; institution). The development of this quite orthodox theme of American labour economics and history accounts for 464 pages out of 537. The remaining 70 or so are interpretative, made up of half a dozen pages on each of the five periods,

Socialist Champion: Portrait of the Gentleman as Crusader

A portrait of a man who prided himself on being both a gentleman and a socialist. An upper-class Indian Army officer who was converted to socialism in 1882, Henry Hyde Champion (1859-1929) was one of the most talented and controversial figures in the early British labour movement.

Politics, Patronage and Public Works: The Administration of New South Wales, Volume 1, 1842-1900

Review(s) of: Politics, Patronage and Public Works: The Administration of New South Wales, Volume 1, 1842-1900 by Hilary Golder, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2005. pp. xii + 268.

Book Reviews : THE REDS: THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF AUSTRALIA FROM ORIGINS TO ILLEGALITY By Stuart Macintyre. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1998, xii + 482 pp.,

59.95 cloth.

49.95 (hardback)

current working relations with others in order to reveal how she really feels about people and policy just to sell more books. Do we see a hint of journalistic integrity here? A better biography might have resulted ifNorington had waited until George had retired from public life. Overall, the biography is a disappointing exploration of the experiences of a great woman and leader. Jennie George is a role model to us all. She has successfully challenged the masculinity of the trade union movement and continues to make it more relevant to a broader spectrum of the population. Yet Norington would have us believe that George was merely in the right place at the right time. He suggests that her career path was determined for her by the men of the union movement, who decided when it was time for a woman to take on a new position. George just happened to be handy every time they wanted to promote one. I do not believe that Jennie George would be happy with this biography, and we should not be, either.

The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists@@@Challenges to Labour History

HISTORY is a discipline that straddles both the humanities and the social sciences. History’s credentials as a science derive from three of its objectives: first, it aims to record the truth about what happened in the past; second, it aims to build a body of knowledge about the past; third, it aims to study the past through a disciplined methodology, using techniques and sources that are accessible to others in the field. The claim that history is a science is a highly contested issue, which calls for justification rather than mere assertion, and so later sections of this chapter discuss the scientific status of the methodologies employed by historians. To start, however, let us focus on the issues of truth and knowledge. The study of history is essentially a search for the truth. Without a claim to be pursuing truth, writing history would be indistinguishable in principle from writing a novel about the past. A work that does not aim at truth may be many things but not a work of history. Historical knowledge can either be discovered, by finding evidence that provides new revelations, or can be synthesised, by ordering what is already known in a way that provides a new perspective on events of the past. Either way, historians long believed they were engaged in an enterprise that had some claim to be adding to the knowledge produced by others, by making new discoveries, and by seeing things from different angles, even in the act of criticising and overturning other claims. No historian ever started on a topic completely from scratch. Until recently, all acknowledged they relied to some extent on those who had gone before them and all assumed they were, in [begin page 186] turn, contributing to an accumulating body of knowledge that would be drawn upon by others.

Book Reviews : The Foundation of Labor: Edited by Michael Easson. Pluto Press, in association with the Lloyd Ross Forum of the Labor Council of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990, x + 82 pp.,

a troubling amount of unemployment ’without any formal unemployment compensation system’, and insufficient interest has been displayed concerning the conditions of work and living of migrant workers. While there are, however, highly developed social security systems, including maternity leave, the provision of child-care facilities, disability benefits and compensation for work-related injuries, these benefits are limited to national workers. Oil has also affected unionization and industrial action. The first trade union in the Middle East was a printers’ union which was organized in Iran in 1906, but with the discovery of oil ’no unions were permitted in the oilfields’. For the Australian reader, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the labour laws in the Middle East is that all countries in the region provide for some form of conciliation or arbitration of collective industrial disputes by one