This article explores the 1973 strike at Ford’s plant in Broadmeadows, Victoria, the longest and most expensive car strike in Australian history. Despite this, it has been largely overlooked by scholars, with more attention focused on Holden. The article uses interviews with former workers, managers and union officials to unlock the history of the strike. Also drawing on archives and newspaper accounts, we explore why workers struck and the legacy of their stand, both at Ford and more widely. We argue that the strike was representative of a broader “war” between Ford and its majority-migrant workforce that dated to the plant’s opening in 1960. The key issues were high line speeds and poor plant conditions, including shopfloor racism. Managers, largely from Anglo-Australian backgrounds, were unresponsive to workers’ repeated complaints, as were most union officials. Helped by the strike, however, labour relations at Ford shifted into a “peace” phase that lasted until the plant’s closure in 2016. The strike – which occurred as the long-standing White Australia policy was being dismantled – also produced more recognition of migrant workers’ rights, especially by the labour movement. These changes symbolised wider shifts, as Australia edged towards multiculturalism.
In the period 1900 – 10 the labour movements in Australia and Britain were confronted by the consequences and opportunities of profound changes sweeping the globe at the fin de siècle. Increasingly conflicting aims and outlook between the British and Australian labour movements manifested in strong divergences over the fundamental issues of race, trade, wages policy and defence. The anxieties of an insular, imagined white settler community drove the Australian labour movement’s project that championed racial exclusion, tariff protection and support for compulsory military training. Conversely, British Labour stood against racial discrimination, militarism and protectionist trade policy. The visits of leading British labour movement figures Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie to Australia in 1906 − 07 drew tensions over issues of policy to the surface, and challenged assumptions that Australia represented a social and political laboratory whose policy innovations might be admired and replicated. The publication of MacDonald’s Labour and the Empire in 1907 highlighted the divide between British and Australian labour and the complex relationship between the respective labour movements at the fin de siècle.
Sex work is decriminalised in four Australian states and territories, transforming the once-marginal idea of “sex work as real work” into a mainstream political reality. Despite this shift in law and public discourse, there remains a notable gap in academic research on the sex workers who have actively pursued recognition of their labour rights, including through industrial organising, during a time when their work was criminalised. This article addresses that gap by compiling and analysing public records and oral histories of key moments in sex worker industrial organising across Australian jurisdictions. Drawing on mainstream media, archival materials, interview transcripts and social media, the authors highlight the experiences and strategies of sex workers pursuing formal enforcement of labour rights. Such findings reveal a vocal and active history of sex worker labour organising that has been largely overlooked in academic analysis. Importantly, oral histories enrich this narrative by providing nuanced insights and contextualised challenges that are often absent from mainstream documentation.
