5[Fitzpatrick, Brian and Cahill, Rohan J., 1981, The Seamen's Union of Australia 1872-1972: A History, Seaman's Union of Australia, Sydney, Chapter 5]
5
Arbitration Succeeds Collective Bargaining
The Higgins Award 1911
Compulsory industrial arbitration was applied to the seamen in 1911 after the Union's refusal to renew the agreement with the Steamship Owners' Association on its expiry date of 1910, and its decision not to work the ships from New Year's Day 1911.
At this time the Union membership was around 7,000, being 98 per cent of seamen employed on insterstate vessels. One of the Union demands on the owners as a condition of renewal of the 1909 agreement was the concession of preference to unionists in employment. The owners' obduracy about this and other matters in dispute, with an equally determined attitude on the part of the Union, resulted in the breaking up without agreement of a conference between representatives of each organisation in December 1910. Expectations had been strong in the seamen that they would gain an improvement in the amount as well as in the mode of payment of wages. They wanted an increase of 50 per cent in overtime rates, and the 8-hour day at sea, for the deck, to be worked on a basis of 4 hours on and 8 hours off.
After the breakdown of a conference between the parties, on December 10, the President of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, Mr Justice Higgins, intervened on the threat of the men to strike, and called compulsory conference of the parties on December 31. In a provisional agreement the owners gave certain concessions, including preference to unionists; the strike was called off before it had begun, and employers and Union agreed to submit matters in dispute to arbitration. The case of the Federated Seamen's Union of Australia v. Commonwealth Steamship Owners' Association came before the Court, on a detailed claim by the Seamen's Union, in October 1911.
The Federal Court system of industrial arbitration had then a history of half a dozen years. Two Commonwealth ministries had fallen over the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 which at length gave power to set up a Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration: the Liberal Alfred Deakin's first ministry, and the first Labor ministry, that of J. C. Watson. During its first twenty years, of course including the period of the Higgins Award for seamen, Justices of the High Court of Australia were seconded to the Arbitration jurisdiction as President. R. E. O'Connor was first, H. B. Higgins succeeded him on November 14, 1907.
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When the seamen's first log of claims came up, the second Labor ministry of Fisher was well established, with a majority in both Houses of the Commonwealth Parliament. Soon after his appointment to the presidency of the Arbitration Court in 1907, H. B. Higgins had set the world the example in Australia of a minimum wage based on "the normal needs of an average employee regarded as a human being living in a civilised community". And when the seamen's claims came to arbitration the Senate, though not yet the House of Representatives, had passed a Navigation Bill.
The Seamen's Union, at deadlock with the owners and proposing to strike - until the intervention of the Arbitration Court in December 1910 - could well afford to experiment with the machinery of the new industrial order.
In Higgins they found a sympathetic arbiter. He said in his judgment:
"There is no doubt that in the matter of wages, as well as in the other matters, the seaman has had the fag-end of things. Owing, I presume, to the difficulty of meeting, of combining, of acting in concert, scattered as they are across the face of the globe, in a roving life and with scanty leisure, seamen have never been able properly to assert their collective interests."
He began with not of the recent finding of the Navigation Commission on the standstill of seamen's working conditions at a low level, and he granted both the the Union claim for an 8-hour day and its wages claim . . . [details given]
Regarding the 1909 provision for monthly payment of wages only by grace as "a survival of the old unfair and harmful system under which a sailor's wages did not accrue due until the end of his term even if the term were for three years", he made an order for payment of wages on the 1st of the month as of right, with provision for payment of up to 75 per cent of wages to the seaman's family on his written order.
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