The year after his mother died, Tom Tunaley joined a Trade Union.
Tom was 25 years old and had been a carpenter and joiner for 11 years, having been apprenticed at the age of 14. These details were entered into the membership records of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners when Tom was admitted to the Manchester 2nd Branch on 9th March 1907.
Tom may have been the first person in his family to join a Trade Union. Many among the Manchester Tunaleys were carpenters and joiners, including Tom’s father, John Charles, but Tom is the only Tunaley in the online records of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners in the UK. There are several William Smiths in the union registers for Manchester, but it’s impossible to know if one of them Bill Smith, the cousin who emigrated with Tom to Australia.
In 1907, the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters’ and Joiners was among the oldest and biggest trade unions in Great Britain. Formed in 1860, the union expanded from an initial 618 members to 65,000 members by 1900. It was involved in major industrial actions during the Victorian era, such as the Manchester Joiners’ Strike of 1877 and the eight-hour day movement. When Tom Tunaley signed up in 1907, the union was campaigning for unemployment relief.
Branches of the union were established in British colonies and in the United States of America. So when Tom emigrated to Australia, after four years in the Manchester Branch, his membership was transferred to Melbourne. This is recorded as taking effect on 6th July 1911, the day Tom departed England for Australia.
When he arrived in Melbourne, 29 year-old Tom Tunaley went straight to the Melbourne Trades Hall (pictured below, circa 1889).
At the Trades Hall, Tom was duly admitted to the Victorian District of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. A striking banner commissioned for the union is now held by Museum Victoria (pictured).
A few years later in 1915, Tom transferred from the Melbourne Branch to the Camberwell Branch of the union (coinciding with the family’s move from Yarraville to Hawthorn). Then in 1919, Tom transferred back to Melbourne 1st Branch, presumably because he intended to move the family to Collingwood.
Tom’s union membership gave him an entree to the Victorian Trades Hall Council, a hub of the Labour Movement that held considerable influence within the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Every fortnight on a Thursday evening, delegates from affiliated unions crammed into the Melbourne Trades Hall in Carlton to exercise their union's voting rights. Union powerbrokers held considerable sway over ALP pre-selections, many delegates were aspiring politicians. Most Labor Prime Ministers have been former trade unionists. In the first half of the 20th Century, ALP Prime Ministers Andrew Fisher, James Scullin and John Curtin were all former trade unionists. Both Scullin and Curtin passed through the Melbourne Trades Hall during Tom's time there.
In the winter of 1913, a young John Curtin, then Secretary of the Woodworkers Union, was among the delegates at the fortnightly meeting when Tom Tunaley, representing the Carpenters’ union proposed a motion.
The purpose of Tom’s motion was to oppose – and seek to undermine – the assisted emigration scheme that had subsidised his family's passage to Australia two years earlier.
The Australian Union Movement always opposed assisted emigration programs in the fear that an influx of migrant workers would undermine their hard-fought wages and conditions. Yet such schemes had long been used to boost the population of the Australian colonies.
Assisted emigration schemes became even more necessary after the racist "White Australia Policy" (one of the key arguments driving federation), came into force. With a highly restrictive immigration policy now in place nationally, the pace of emigration to Australia slowed dramatically after federation in 1901. During the first decade of the 20th Century, state governments redoubled their efforts to persuade British and European people of working age to emigrate.
State governments sent their own Agents-General to London to promote emigration, usually through offering subsidised boat fares. By 1909, even the Victorian government, which had benefited from a population boom during the 1850s gold rush, could no longer ignore its shrinking population share relative to other states. By chartering passenger steamships to carry emigrants on subsidised fares, the Victorian government persuaded British citizens to emigrate in record numbers between 1910 and 1914 (including the Tunaley family in 1911).
From the outset, Melbourne's Trades Hall Council thundered its disapproval of the Victorian government's assisted emigration policies, claiming they were unnecessary.
“This Council protests against the introduction of assisted immigrants into Australia while so many of our own people are unemployed”
(Victorian Trades Hall Council, March 1909).
As opposing the government's assisted emigration scheme at home, the Trades Hall Council took steps to undermine it by discouraging potential emigrants from applying. The Trades Hall Council fed stories to the the Australian and British press of the “Emigration Fraud” being perpetrated on victims of assisted emigration schemes who were being "misled" about the nature of the job market in Australia. These messages were also circulated to British unions, with the intention of countering the efforts of the Victorian Agent-General who was offering potential emigrants to accept subsidised boat fares along with the promise of cheap farmland and plentiful jobs,.
In this vein, at the Trades Hall Council Meeting of 25th June 1913, delegate Tom Tunaley moved, "That the council send fraternal greetings to the trades' unions congress to be opened at Manchester in September, and that a letter be sent to the congress giving a detailed account of the state of the labor market in Victoria, and the effect immigration had on it." (reported in Bendigo Advertiser Friday 27 June 1913, page 4).
Tom's motion was carried.
***
Acknowledgments:
Banner for Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, Victorian branch, 1914 (pictured)
Artist: W.D. Dunstan
Source: Museums Victoria
Public Domain (Licensed as Public Domain Mark)