Nothing but rebels union sisters at the Sydney Rubber Works 191842

'Nothing but rebels': union sisters at the Sydney Rubber Works, 1918-42. It is time that these women strikers appreciated that they owe something to the community ... [which] will not tolerate this sort of  defiance. Justice Drake-Brockman 1   In April 1939, 500 workers at the Sydney Rubber Works in Drummoyne  went on strike against the effects of the Bedaux system, which was  forcing them to work at inhuman speeds and eroding their wages during a  period of mounting inflation. Most of the strikers were women and they were led ably by women shop stewards. They achieved brief fame or notoriety, depending on one's point of view, but are now forgotten. Out 'on the grass' for seven weeks, they defied the Arbitration Court, the employers, the press and politicians--and in the  end their own male union officials--and only agreed to return to work  when their employer, Dunlop-Perdriau, applied to have The Federated  Rubber and Allied Workers Union of Australia FRAW deregistered. 2 The FRAW was an industrial union registered under the Commonwealth  Arbitration Act as a federated body in 1911. While the women did not win all of their demands, they blocked the worst effects of the sweated  labour system at a time when many other workers had been forced to  accept it. In January 1942 they again downed tools, this time in support of their union's claim for equal pay for women transferred to  'men's' work during wartime. Their claim for equal pay was rejected by the Federal Arbitration Court but the strike was a  landmark in the long struggle of working women for equality and deserves  to be rescued from the obscurity into which it has fallen. For some decades, the women had defied stereotypical expectations of women as  meekly obedient creatures and behaved as exemplary trade unionists. Very little has been written about the Australian rubber industry despite its crucial importance to the national economy. A general history of the FRAW remains to be written. The only book-length published study of the Australian rubber industry is Geoffrey  Blarney's Jumping Over the Wheel. 3 This business history of Dunlop Pacific tells us virtually nothing about the lives of the Dunlop  workers although it does provide useful background information on the  industry. A number of general secondary sources were also useful to the present writer for situating the women rubber workers' battles  within the overall context of Australian working women's struggles  for equality and wage justice. 4 However, none of these deal with the struggles of women rubber workers in any depth. This article, therefore, relies almost exclusively on hitherto unexploited primary sources. More broadly, the place of women workers as a whole in labour history has  been neglected, or even distorted. As Danielle Thornton has written in her study of tailoresses in nineteenth century Melbourne, 'the  popular stereotype of the Australian "factory girl" was of a  feckless adolescent' and she was patronised by friend and foe  alike. Even sympathisers believed that these 'helpless girls' needed the masculine strength of male trade unionists to help them  achieve wage justice. 5 Similarly, Louise Raw argues that the famous London 'matchgirls' who went on strike in 1888 have,  paradoxically, rarely been taken seriously by labour historians: both at  the time and since, they have been patronised on account of their status  as 'unskilled' workers, their gender seen either as tarts or  helpless females, and their Irish birth or extraction. The establishment claimed that they were led astray by socialist  'pests'; the middle-class Fabian Annie Besant in particular. Yet as Raw demonstrates, the 'matchwomen' made their own decision to strike without consultation with Besant, who preferred  Fabian methods of persuasion of employers and politicians to autonomous  workers' action. Moreover, Raw argues, their strike triggered the New Union upsurge of the following year. 6   Likewise, the Drummoyne women did not comply with sexist  stereotypes. Although they were doubly oppressed as 'unskilled' workers and as 'girls' in a patriarchal  society, they refused to accept their lot as victims. It was a hard battle. As female employees they were seen as working for 'pin money', not as 'breadwinners', and paid accordingly. This was explicit in the 1907 Harvester judgment, which set women's  wages at 54 percent of those of males, even for doing exactly the same  work. This caused tensions as early as 1924 at Drummoyne when management transferred women to tyre-building jobs. In general, however, until women were again placed in 'male' occupations during World War  II, a strict division of labour existed in the factory, where  occupations were segregated along gender lines. Most of the women were employed in the Shoe Room on tasks such as cutting, gluing and stitching  rubber footwear. This work was both undervalued and underpaid and in this the Sydney Rubber Works was typical of indu  Find out more on  pay day