THE WORLD'S FIRST GREEN BANS

Green bans', 'builders labourers' and 'Jack Mundey' were household terms for millions of Australians during the 1970s. Sydneysiders in particular were polarised on the questions surrounding green bans and those who imposed them. To many, the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation (NSWBLF) represented the hideous spectre of working-class power maliciously halting progress, and restraining the liberty of property owners to undertake development, from which the public would benefit. To many others the builders labourers (or BLs) articulated the general interest of all except the greediest developers in preserving the built and natural environment from wanton destruction.

The union's guiding principle, which aroused such strong emotions and which underpinned its environmental activism, was the concept of the social responsibility of labour: that workers had a right to insist that their labour not be used in harmful ways. Strongly associated with this principle was a conviction that the organised labour movement should concern itself with all manner of social and political issues, to contest exploitation and oppression in the wider society and not just in the workplace. The union did not merely impose green bans – refusing to work on environmentally injurious constructions – it also insisted upon the right of women to work in the industry on an equal basis with men, and frequently used its power to aid groups such as prisoners, homosexuals, Aborigines, students, the women's movement, and poorer home-buyers, even imposing a range of non-environmental bans in defence of these oppressed, marginalised or vulnerable people.

The NSWBLF was one of Australia's oldest unions. It was formed in the 1870s and registered under the New South Wales Trade Union Act of 1881 as the United Labourers. In 1912 it became the Builders Labourers' Union; and in 1926 it joined with labourers' unions in other states to form the Australian Builders' Labourers' Federation (ABLF). By the early 1970s the ABLF had a national membership of around 30,000 and covered all unskilled labourers and certain categories of skilled labourers employed on building sites: dogmen, riggers, scaffolders, powder monkeys, hoist drivers and steel fixers. Between 1970 and 1974 the New South Wales branch, with about 11,000 members, operated outside the traditional confines of the trade union movement, guided by many capable and committed officials but in particular by three outstanding union leaders: Jack Mundey, Joe Owens and Bob Pringle. Strongly influenced by New Left ideology (which emphasised equality, personal liberation, participatory democracy, environmentalism and direct action) the unskilled manual labourers of the NSWBLF used their industrial muscle to put their union's advanced policies into action.

Above all, the union is remembered for its most spectacular application of the concept of the social responsibility of labour: the green bans. By October 1973, these bans had halted projects worth 'easily $3000 million' (at mid-1970s prices) according to the Master Builders Association (MBA). By 1975 bans had halted $5000 million of development, saving New South Wales from much of the cultural and environmental destruction it would otherwise have suffered. The bans were a deliberate confrontation with the power of capital. In the absence of sufficiently sensitive planning and conservation regulations, the builders labourers took it upon themselves to dispute employers' rights to build what they liked where they liked, and they were prepared to defend their bans on picket lines and at demonstrations.

Their action was the first of its type in the world. The international Dictionary of the Environment entry on 'green bans' comments they were 'very effective in Australia, where they were first attempted' and the Australian National Dictionary notes that the use of the term, now international, was recorded earliest in Australia. The green bans were an entirely home-grown contribution to international environmental politics and radical practice, constituting 'one of the most exciting chapters in trade unionism world wide'. Indeed the NSWBLF in this period can be seen as a prototype for the 'social-movement unionism' of the 1990s, which is characterised internationally by militancy, internal democracy, an agenda for radical social and economic change, a determination to embrace the diversity of the working class in order to overcome its fragmentation, and a capacity to appeal beyond their memberships by using union power to 'lead the fight for everything that affects working people in their communities and the country'. Social-movement unionism constitutes, in short, a rehearsal for self-emancipation from below.

The union was extraordinarily outward-looking, even enduring negative consequences for themselves in the form of foregone employment over the imposition of bans: 'Green bans were altruistic' as Mackie noted. The Australian black movement was gratified by the degree of the union's commitment to Aboriginal rights. Homosexual liberationists found the stereotype of the homophobic building worker confounded by the union's practical support for their cause. Women who entered the building industry appreciated the genuine egalitarianism of many of their new work mates. However, the union did not engage in such actions for purely altruistic reasons: because its class consciousness and radical awareness were especially strong, it saw itself as expressing the real collective self-interest of most people in confronting all manner of oppressions and preventing environmental degradation. In doing so it impressed and inspired constituencies far beyond its membership and even beyond the working class. Many New Left academics decided, on the basis of their interaction with the union, that the proletariat might be the midwife of history after all. The 'middle-class matrons' of Hunters Hill discovered this union of manual labourers was more sensitive to the natural beauty of Kelly's Bush and more aware of the need for its preservation than conservative politicians and newspaper editors, and they were radicalised permanently by their experience. Justice Rodney Madgwick remarked at the time on their 'moral force'. While the union's many activities on the part of oppressed groups undoubtedly contributed to this force, the central moral question the union posed for the wider public was whether the pursuit of profit, invariably presented as 'progress', should override all...