INTRODUCTION, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND THEORY

While the global labour history school has enriched and widened the scope of labour history, indigenous workers remain largely neglected within that tradition.Footnote ¹ This is despite Van der Linden noting that many ethnographic studies can be read as indigenous labour history.Footnote ² Perhaps this oversight is due to the widespread perception that colonization has corralled indigenous peoples into “communities of abject poverty, underdevelopment, dependence and isolation”.Footnote ³ In response to this endangered peoples narrative, scholarship about indigenous people and work has commonly emphasized their resilience and agency. Authors have documented how colonization has not necessarily induced cultural assimilation and the complete marginalization of indigenous peoples; instead, the workplace – among other locations – is perceived as a significant site of indigenous adaption. However, this anthropological literature mostly overlooks class and workplace antagonism.Footnote ⁴

Most publications about indigenous labour dissent are focused on Latin America. Scholars have highlighted the pivotal role that indigenous peoples have played in labour unrest and wider social struggles throughout Latin America, particularly against neoliberal globalization from the 1990s onwards.Footnote ⁵ Yet, in terms of strikes, most of these studies, with some exceptions, dwell on rural wage labourers’ disputes in haciendas and plantations, or the struggles of largely peasant farmers.Footnote ⁶ A paucity of scholarship specifically examines indigenous workers’ resistance in a largely urbanized, “white settler capitalist” or “settler colonialist” context, such as the US, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Of that literature, most of it either concentrates on rural workers’ disputes, especially in Australia, or it surveys earlier phases of colonization when, in certain regions such as British Columbia, the exploitation of indigenous labour was significant for the expansion of capital and the state.Footnote ⁷

Māori have only recently begun to be included in labour history in Aotearoa New Zealand. Yet, the growing literature about this topic possesses a largely institutional focus on Māori leadership and participation within trade union structures, rather than Māori involvement in stoppages and rank-and-file activity, and the interplay between class and indigeneity.Footnote ⁸ This article argues that Māori meatworkers' resistance sprang not only from their economic and political circumstances – including a severe recession – and from formal union organizations, but also from informal, flaxroots organization (meaning a Māori form of grassroots organization, as flax is commonly perceived to be more of a native species to Aotearoa New Zealand than grass).Footnote ⁹ Māori meatworkers often made their gruelling, monotonous jobs more sociable, fun, and less alienating by creating strong multi-ethnic workplace bonds based on whānaungatanga (kinship or camaraderie created by family-like relationships and connections). Melissa Williams, in her magisterial history of Māori urban migration, calls these informal work groups workplace-whānau, a term that denotes “a particular kind of connectedness amongst a group of people who work together” like an extended workplace family.Footnote ¹⁰ Such indigenous forms of togetherness are usually neglected in global studies of solidarity.Footnote ¹¹ Below it is argued that while workplace-whānau were a product of Māori cultural forms, they were also shaped by material conditions, union traditions of solidarity, and workplace conflict.

This article endeavours to begin to fill the research gaps identified above through a study of Māori participation in, and influences on, disputes in the meat processing industry during the “long 1970s”, which is loosely defined for the purposes of this article as the period from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. That industry makes an ideal case study of indigenous participation in workplace solidarity and resistance (including the broader strike wave of the long 1970s), and experiences of Fordist assembly-line work, during a tumultuous period. The long 1970s represented, compared to other periods of Aotearoa New Zealand history, the lengthiest and most widely supported period of sustained strike activity nationally. Māori were conspicuous in the largest and longest disputes, the biggest wildcat strikes, workplace occupations, and rank-and-file movements, and the most strike affected industries of the long 1970s. Meat processing itself was the most strike-prone industry nationally, responsible in the long 1970s for between fifty and sixty per cent of workers involved in strikes and working days not worked due to all industrial stoppages.Footnote ¹²

Among other influences from the history from below tradition, this article draws upon the “autonomist Marxist” school. Mario Tronti famously declared that orthodox Marxism “puts capitalist development first, and workers second”. Instead, Tronti and other autonomists reversed this polarity: “the beginning is the class struggle of the working class”.Footnote ¹³ Their “workers’ inquiries” aimed to study workers’ multifarious forms of shop floor resistance (both formal and informal), and their perceived self-organized autonomy (from capital, work, and unions). Importantly, even if autonomists’ historical periodization could be schematic, they developed an open-ended, historically contingent method – “class composition” analysis – to study the temporal transformations of class relations. Briefly, this framework suggests that as capital develops innovative productive processes, workers eventually respond by developing new forms of solidarity and resistance, and thus a new “class composition” is forged. In turn, capital then endeavours to co-opt and break up (“decompose”) these nodes of dissent and unity, and intensify divisions among workers, in order to increase capital accumulation and harness struggle to enable new innovations in production and consumption. Hence autonomists scrutinized carefully not only points of unity between workers, but also internal stratifications. After initially focusing their inquiries on male and white dominated assembly-line workers, they broadened their gaze to study migrant, women, unwaged, and indigenous workers.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, much autonomist analysis of indigenous people's resistance focuses on Latin American social movements during the neo-liberal era rather than the workplace.Footnote ¹⁵

Given this broad history from below framework, where possible the words of Māori themselves are given primacy, including interviews of Māori in various socialist and other publications, reports, theses, and documentaries. This research has been supplemented by interviews with former meatworkers undertaken by the author. Socialist Action, the paper of the Trotskyist Socialist Action League (SAL), is used as a valuable source because it was the only publication of the period that interviewed a wide variety of Māori meatworkers. While the SAL was quite marginal in influence, it was unique in the local context as it focused on rank-and-file organizing in the meat industry and was also sympathetic to Māori issues.Footnote ¹⁶ This article also draws upon a wide variety of complementary government, union, employer, and newspaper sources. Yet, as these latter sources possess only fleeting content specifically about rank-and-file Māori meatworkers, they are used less extensively than the aforementioned sources.

Autonomist Marxism is not adopted uncritically, however. One of its major flaws is that it can uncritically inflate the extent of workers’ agency, resistance, and solidarity, and correspondingly neglect how the wider intertwining structures of capitalism, sexism, racism, and colonialism mould labour.Footnote ¹⁷ As such, this article argues that while Māori meatworkers’ militancy and solidarity were relatively widespread during a major strike wave, they were ambiguous (as they were combined with cooperation with employers and workers’ pride in work) and uneven, both historically and geographically. Furthermore, Māori meatworkers’ resistance and solidarity were firmly situated inside wider and powerful structures of subjugation that, to some extent, shaped and constrained their agency. Indeed, structural transformations in the meat industry eventually had a debilitating effect on meatworkers’ solidarity and resistance in the 1980s.

This article first presents contextual material, briefly outlining Māori land loss, labour migration, and the nature of work and causes of disputes in the meat industry. Two broad historical phases of meatworkers’ strike activity are then analysed. The first occurred from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s when dissent, often led by Māori meatworkers, emerged after a long period of relative quietude. As this activity was frequently based on informal shop floor bonds, the nature of workplace-whānau will then be explored in terms of the unity and stratifications upon which they were founded. Finally, the second period of strike activity from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s will be explored, a phase when strike activity peaked during a recessionary period that marked the beginnings of comprehensive industry restructuring.

Except in passing, scrutinizing the complex links – and tensions – that developed between workplace dissent and the renaissance in Māori protest during the long 1970s is beyond the purview of this article. Further, this article does not explore how, by the early 1980s, many Māori attempted to re-shape union structures and aims to reflect Māori tikanga (customs) and causes. Instead, this article largely focuses on industrial conflict and self-organization.

CONTEXT, WORKING CONDITIONS, AND CAUSES OF DISSENT

Glen Coulthard has argued that the ongoing “structured dispossession” of indigenous peoples’ lands is central for the expansion of capital and the state in Canada, rather than the exploitation of indigenous labour. He contends that following waves of white settlement between 1860 and 1914, “native labor became increasingly (although by no means entirely) superfluous” to “development”.Footnote ¹⁸

While the enduring expropriation of Māori land is likewise paramount for capital accumulation in Aotearoa New Zealand, capital's exploitation of Māori labour has often been significant for “development” beyond the early phase of British colonization in the nineteenth century. This was particularly the case during the Keynesian era (which existed locally between about 1935 and 1984) when capital and the state increasingly used Māori as a largely cheap labour source for manual labour during that period of industrial expansion.Footnote ¹⁹

To examine briefly the extensive appropriation of Māori land, while the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) guaranteed Māori the “exclusive and undisturbed” possession of their land and other resources, by the 1970s almost ninety-five per cent of that land had been alienated.Footnote ²⁰ Ben Matthews – a prominent Māori meatworker and the secretary of the Wellington branch of Te Matakite, a prominent Māori land rights organization that was formed around the Māori land march or hīkoi of 1975 – argued that institutionalized racism intertwined with capitalism meant that Māori found themselves marginalized culturally, politically, and economically. Matthews implied that a major reason for this marginalization was the “systematic” and “ruthless” programme of land seizures and alienations after colonization, which broke up the “traditional communality of the Māori people” by individualizing their communal ownership of land.Footnote ²¹

Although the causes of urbanization are multifarious, these often brutal land enclosures were a significant underlying, long-term factor in causing the eventual mass Māori migration to urban areas from about the 1940s to the 1960s, although this migration was neither historically linear, nor geographically uniform.Footnote ²² By the 1960s, most Māori had become urbanized and, in 1976, seventy-six percent of Māori were dwelling in urban areas.Footnote ²³ Perhaps one important reason why Māori labour became increasingly significant during this era was simply because Māori represented an appreciably larger proportion of the population than indigenous peoples in other white settler capitalist colonies. For example, in 1981, Māori made up about twelve per cent of Aotearoa New Zealand's population and less than ten per cent of the total workforce. Yet, in Canada, First Nations peoples totalled two per cent of the population in 1981, and in the US, 0.6 per cent in 1980.Footnote ²⁴

Whereas most Māori workers occupied the bottom fractions of the working class, a large minority of Māori workers – particularly males – worked in key export industries in Aotearoa New Zealand's agro-export economy, an economy largely reliant on exporting pastoral products (meat, wool, and dairy produce).Footnote ²⁵ During the 1970s, Aotearoa New Zealand was the largest sheep meat exporter globally, and meat exports accounted for about forty per cent of export earnings, making it the most important export nationally.Footnote ²⁶ Meatworkers utilized these strategic positions during the strike wave.

By the 1960s, the food processing industry had become the primary employer of Māori men. Although no official records of the number of Māori in the meat processing industry were kept, meatworkers’ union officials estimated about forty to fifty per cent of the 30,000-strong meat processing workforce of the 1970s were Māori, and in many plants (Figure 1) – particularly those in the North Island – majority Māori.Footnote ²⁷ The workforce was overwhelmingly male-dominated; only 4.6 per cent of the workforce was female in 1972–1973, of whom many were Māori women.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 1.

Aotearoa New Zealand meat processing plants mentioned in the article.

Meatworkers were almost archetypal Fordist assembly-line workers who were at the forefront of industrial struggle, just as autoworkers were in other core capitalist countries during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ²⁹ However, meatworkers faced more obnoxious working conditions on the “dis-assembly line” as they progressively dismembered thousands of sheep and cattle every day. Although the causes of meatworkers’ unrest in the 1970s were intricate and multifaceted, the most pivotal factors were probably dissatisfaction with everyday working conditions combined with the unsettling effects of a deep recession after a long period of relative prosperity.Footnote ³⁰

A strong underlying discontentment with the monotonous, dirty, smelly, brutal, and “blood and guts” nature of meat processing work played a fundamental role in generating conflict throughout the 1970s.Footnote ³¹ Working conditions were highly regimented. After animals were killed, they were hung on a moving “chain” (Figure 2). Different specialized departments of workers then progressively disassembled those carcasses as they travelled past. Each worker performed the same cut or task on each carcass until almost every part of the animals had been processed and commodified. Matthews captured well the unrelenting pressure of butchers “slaving away”, repeatedly executing the same task every eight seconds:

Many, such as Shirley Tareha, found the work utterly mundane. She said, “labouring, to me, was that boring I used to just about go to sleep everyday”.Footnote ³³ It could also be exhausting and dangerous, as cuts and other accidents occurred frequently. The shed (the commonly used term for a slaughterhouse) floor could be slippery with water and blood, and in the freezing chambers it was often icy. Many workers acquired diseases from animals. Temperatures could vary between extremes of fifty-five degrees Celsius during summer and minus thirty in the freezers. Workers also lacked job security, as the work was seasonal; sometimes the killing season only lasted three or four months.

Figure 2.

Mac Te Houkamau (centre) and Billy Greening working on the dis-assembly line or ‘chain’ at Tōmoana, n.d., c.1980s, available at: https://numawaruwire.wordpress.com/tag/tomoana/#jp-carousel-248; last accessed 18 January 2019.

The end of the long boom, and the grave recession that followed, were also major triggers for meatworkers’ dissent. As Van der Velden notes, major strike waves often occur during a shift from economic upturn to downturn.Footnote ³⁴ As in many other countries, such a strike wave in Aotearoa New Zealand commenced in 1968. After a minor recession in the late 1960s, stoppages increased in size and frequency as the Keynesian class compromise that previously existed between capital, the state, and labour began to rupture. Yet, unlike many countries, the strike wave peaked between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s when the recession deepened, despite fluctuations in strike activity during those years.Footnote ³⁵

As high inflation and rising living costs often ate into wage increases, meatworkers commonly sought greater pay, especially through piecework payments. Such “bonuses” were often gained through localized shop floor strikes. Before the 1960s, companies commonly paid the most strategic workers near the front of the dis-assembly line – the butchers – piecework rates. Other meatworkers, paid at an hourly rate, increasingly took action in the 1960s and 1970s to gain incentive bonuses. Consequently, workers received at least 250 different payment rates across the industry.Footnote ³⁶ A further consequence of performance payments was to speed up production – what autonomists call the Keynesian “productivity deal”, meaning “the attempt to use working class struggle for higher income to promote [capital] accumulation by linking increased wages to increased productivity”.Footnote ³⁷ The accelerated pace of work caused increasing numbers of injuries and greater dissatisfaction with the nature of the work – and hence more dissent.

THE LATE 1960S TO THE MID-1970S: EMERGENCE

Some slaughterhouses, such as Longburn, Ocean Beach, and Petone, recruited many Māori during the labour shortage and relative industrial quietude of the 1950s and 1960s in the hope of importing a hard-working, compliant workforce.Footnote ³⁸ Ewin Kirk, the manager of Ocean Beach during that period, starkly alleged that Māori were unable to save money from their jobs, and thus hoped they could not afford to strike.Footnote ³⁹ As the long boom abated, meatworks such as Longburn and Ocean Beach, previously renowned for their sparse strike records and “industrial harmony”, became hotspots of industrial unrest during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This discontent was often driven from below and, in many plants, was seemingly organized by a new layer of young Māori rank-and-file leaders who became union delegates.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, some Māori union officials, such as Tony Taurima, the secretary of the Ocean Beach sub-branch of the New Zealand Meat Workers' Union (MWU), also seemed pivotal in causing increased workplace militancy. For Taurima, promoting industrial action was not just about securing better pay, but was also a riposte to harsh management practices, as in the late 1960s “people were dismissed, wholesale and frequently. In those days it was a master-servant relationship”.Footnote ⁴¹

A similar reaction to paternalistic, authoritarian management practices developed at the Longburn slaughterhouse that employed many Māori from neighbouring areas such as Foxton.Footnote ⁴² There, according to Sonny Rata, management ruled with an “iron hand”. Yet, from the late 1960s onwards:

This illustrated a broader tendency whereby workers developed innovative tactics in the “new war” with capital, such as occupying company headquarters.

Dissent during this phase was largely expressed through a plant-based or localized militancy aimed at securing better wages and working conditions.Footnote ⁴⁴ Under conditions of full employment and a labour shortage, stoppages were typically short, sharp, and successful. They were nicknamed “homers” (meaning to go home) and took two major forms: local agreement strikes and wildcat strikes, although both often merged into each other. The former were union-based plant or work department strikes characteristically centred on securing local agreements, especially over piecework incentives. Significant pay rises were gained during this phase through these “second tier” agreements, which were made over and above the national collective bargaining agreement.Footnote ⁴⁵

The second major form of stoppages were wildcats, which became commonplace in many plants. At Longburn, for instance, a government inquiry claimed that, between 1969 and 1974, a total of 362 unauthorized stoppages occurred, resulting in 250,000 hours not worked.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even if these figures were grossly inflated, they still represented a relatively vast sum; for example, in 1974 alone, the official national total for all industries of hours not worked due to strikes was 240,000 hours.Footnote ⁴⁷ Disputes at Longburn during this period centred on issues of temperature extremes, work speeds, pay (including piecework rates), and the selection and role of supervisors, among a multitude of other conflicts.Footnote ⁴⁸

Given the repugnant, repetitive nature of meat processing, wildcats could result from “any minor incident”.Footnote ⁴⁹ For example, the Māori President of the highly strike-prone Westfield union branch of the Auckland and Tōmoana Freezing Workers’ Union (FWU), Bill Hillman, claimed that:

Similarly, Rata noted “when days got hot and weary, we hoped something would happen to give us a break” such as when the “gun man” in the “killing box” at the beginning of the dis-assembly line purposively released a live steer to halt production. Two-hundred workers gave chase, half-heartedly, in order to gain as much time off work as they could.Footnote ⁵¹

The major meatworkers' unions – the larger MWU and the smaller FWUFootnote ⁵² – often officially endorsed wildcat stoppages. They did this because they were militant, struggle-based unions (while not being avowedly radical or socialist) that possessed strong traditions of adhering to “one out, all out” – if one worker struck, all would follow. Crucially, many local branches of meatworkers’ unions, including the Longburn sub-branch of the MWU, were considered “super democracies within which the workers, rather than officials, have the power and exercise control”.Footnote ⁵³ However, much of this resistance was also enabled by strong informal shop floor bonds and patterns of informal mutual support between many workers, bonds that were often influenced by Māori meatworkers, as will be discussed in the section on workplace-whānau below.

Dissent also took the form of considerable informal resistance. Such everyday resistance typically included time appropriation (including chronic absenteeism and “spelling”, whereby workers took spells or breaks from work while others carried out their tasks for them), theft, sabotage, and “over-utilisation of accident compensation, neglect of quality, indiscipline, passive resistance to supervisors and tardiness at critical times”.Footnote ⁵⁴ While quotidian resistance was sometimes individualistic and easily accommodated by management, it could also hamper production and profit levels. Covert dissent was intermixed with, and fed into, substantial overt resistance, and relatively strong traditions of informal workers’ control over the work process overlapped with union control.Footnote ⁵⁵

Māori were not authentically rebellious workers, however. Crouch and Pizzorno have suggested that migrant workers, including internal rural-urban migrants, were at the vanguard of industrial conflict during the 1970s in Western Europe.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet, as Pizzolato observes about migrants from southern Italy in the late 1960s, the predominant image of rebellious southerners in Northern Italian factories has obscured a “multi-faceted working class” wherein “southerners belonged to both sides of the barricades: the strikers and scabs; the rebels and the policemen”.Footnote ⁵⁷ As with Italian southerners, Māori meatworkers were far from homogenous; many conservative and religious Māori, for example, were either reluctant to strike, or opposed to striking. While some meatworkers, including Māori, were “super militants”, others thought the company was always right, and yet others were apathetic.Footnote ⁵⁸ Importantly, Joe Tepania, who worked at Ocean Beach, said many families were content because “they weren't struggling” as they received “good money” from meat processing in comparison with other industries like transport.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some older Māori meatworkers with mortgages to pay or families to support seemed more reluctant to strike than younger Māori. Further, meatworkers’ dissent was usually intermingled (necessarily) with daily cooperation with management and was interfused with a strong identification with work. Many Māori meatworkers took considerable pride in their jobs.Footnote ⁶⁰ For example, Jean Te Huia remembers “generations of families worked there [Tōmoana meatworks] and were proud of their jobs and really put their heart and souls into it”.Footnote ⁶¹

Women were largely excluded from most occupations in the meat processing industry, let alone from participating (or not) in strikes. Some male meatworkers justified this occupational segregation on the grounds that women would allegedly be too obedient, and hence disinclined to strike. For instance, Frank Young, the offal delegate and “Maori activist” at Auckland's Westfield slaughterhouse, said:

Yet, over time Young altered his views. Women meatworkers were “good unionists. They're darn good battlers too”. He stated sexist attitudes gradually dissipated, culminating in a 1975 strike that successfully reinstated five female workers.Footnote ⁶³ Women meatworkers’ struggles to gain employment will be discussed more fully below, as they mostly occurred during the later phase.

While a rough correlation between slaughterhouses with disproportionately Māori workforces and high levels of labour unrest existed, the extent and frequency of strikes fluctuated between individual departments, plants, companies, and regions.Footnote ⁶⁴ For instance, several plants that possessed a disproportionately Māori workforce during the late 1960s and early 1970s – such as Kaiti, Tōmoana, Pātea, Petone, and Imlay – were among the least strike-prone sheds in the country. Nevertheless, the majority of slaughterhouses with large Māori workforces were among the plants with the highest levels of industrial unrest during this period, such as Moerewa, Southdown, Westfield, Shortland, Waitara, Whakatū, Waingawa, and Ocean Beach.Footnote ⁶⁵

The nature of management practices and attitudes, and union traditions, were important variables in explaining these geographical variations in strikes.Footnote ⁶⁶ As plant-based union branches possessed much autonomy from their national organizations, at different times various local branch officials – militant and non-militant, Māori and non-Māori, alike – attempted to discourage or prevent strikes, especially wildcats.Footnote ⁶⁷ Several union branches with a high proportion of Māori developed a strategy of cooperation with management, and only resorted to strike action as a last resort. For instance, Rangi Paenga – the President of the Kaiti sub-branch of the MWU, and later the national President of the MWU from 1976 to 1986 – said:

Consequently, Kaiti – where about two thirds of the workforce were Māori – traditionally experienced few stoppages.Footnote ⁶⁹

WORKPLACE-WHĀNAU: UNITY AND DIVISIONS

The generally relatively high pattern of informal and formal labour unrest was sustained by generally strong informal and formal bonds that developed over time under conditions of full employment. Workplace-whānau were prominent in many, but not all, slaughterhouses with significant Māori workforces.Footnote ⁷⁰ Williams contends that workplace-whānau were established in workplaces where Māori had “critical mass” to “effect cultural change”.Footnote ⁷¹ Whānau, normally defined to mean an extended family, are considered to be one of the most fundamental traditional units of Māori society. However, whānau can also mean expressing solidarity on specific occasions with people who share a common purpose.Footnote ⁷² A workplace-whānau conveys both these meanings: comradeship and treating everyone as a member of an extended family (with the strong reciprocal obligations this generally entails in Māori society). By uniting with workers from other ethnicities, their aim was to transform “often physically demanding, monotonous and impersonal workplaces into bearable, sometimes fun and culturally familiar spaces of community engagement”.Footnote ⁷³ These informal bonds overlapped with, and were reinforced by, strong union traditions of solidarity. Both forms of camaraderie were vital for sustaining solidarity and for underpinning informal and formal resistance.

A striking feature of meatworkers was their “impressive solidarity”.Footnote ⁷⁴ For example, Henare O'Keefe remarked about the Tōmoana slaughterhouse where he worked:

Whakawhānaungatanga may be translated as the practice of relating well to others. Similarly, another Māori meatworker recalled:

At Pātea, where seventy per cent of the workforce were Māori, Syd Kershaw also remembered the “everyone together” camaraderie, as working there was also like being amongst “one big family”.Footnote ⁷⁷ Widespread intergenerational employment among Māori in the industry amplified these connections. At Auckland's Southdown plant, for example, many people arranged jobs for their relatives in a plant that developed a majority Māori workforce. Hence strong kin networks and even an extended “Southdown family” developed at the plant, a family that included partners and children outside the factory.Footnote ⁷⁸ “It was like a second home”, said one Māori worker.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, others were more cautious about the extent of meatworkers’ solidarity. Steve Ruru said at Whakatū friendships developed between the majority of workers rather than all workers.Footnote ⁸⁰

Workplace-whānau were created and maintained on an everyday basis on the killing floor through numerous means: socializing and mutual support inside and outside the workplace; industrial struggle; initiation rituals; humour and practical jokes; and using sanctions against those who transgressed informal rules.Footnote ⁸¹ Meatworkers remembered that, to a degree, they went to work for this camaraderie, rather than for the tedious work itself. Hape Huata explained at Whakatū “it was a way of life. We all looked forward to going to work because it was whanau”.Footnote ⁸² Tatane Te Kahu remarked it was a soul-destroying job, so people frequently attempted to make it fun at Burnside meatworks.Footnote ⁸³ Water hose fights, throwing fat, blood, excrement, glands, and meat at each other (and supervisors), and singing and dancing were reportedly commonplace across the industry in the 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁴

Workplace-whānau involved not just Māori, but also other Polynesians, such as Tongan and Samoan migrants, as well as Pākehā (whites). Charles Pomana, who worked at Whakatū, said, “away from our homes, we were like at home. It was a great big melting pot with many different ethnic groups, different sorts of people, perhaps predominantly Māori, but there was a camaraderie there”.Footnote ⁸⁵ Workplace-whānau also generally represented a working-class oppositional solidarity to employers. In many plants, a strict “us and them” adversarial separation existed between workers and management (including supervisors), who were nicknamed “red hats”. Yet, in some factories management attempted to include themselves in the family, or to foster divisions between workers, by, for example, employers organizing a whare (house) system based on occupational departments at Southdown.Footnote ⁸⁶

Workplace-whānau were not just a product of agency and culture. They were also shaped, to some extent, by the nature of the labour process – namely the interdependent nature of working in the meat industry, which required cooperation between workers both within and between occupational departments. Frank McNulty asserted solidarity “easily developed” between meatworkers as they worked in groups, carried out tasks collectively, and assembly-line work made their “identity of interests the same”.Footnote ⁸⁷ Workplace-whānau were also moulded, to some degree, by the Keynesian class compromise. As work was largely plentiful until about the late 1970s, and became largely stable, particularly through union-controlled re-hiring of workers on the basis of seniority every new killing season, it enabled workers – including Māori – to gradually build up lasting flaxroots connections over time. For example, Syd Taukamo, the Vice-President of the Whakatū sub-branch of the MWU, said:

Furthermore, analogous workplace cultures to workplace-whānau do exist, and have existed, in several other industries with similarly collective, dangerous, and interdependent work in Aotearoa New Zealand, including Pākehā-dominated (i.e. non-Māori) industries. Indeed, Ken Findlay, the Secretary of the West Coast branch of the MWU and of the Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāpuhi iwi (tribes), said meatworkers’ culture resembled the masculine “crew culture” that existed amongst miners, seafarers, port workers, construction riggers, and others.Footnote ⁸⁹ Additionally, similar filial atmospheres have existed in a multitude of worksites and industries globally in far different cultural contexts.Footnote ⁹⁰ In contrast to the multi-ethnic nature of workplace-whānau, white miners in South Africa utilized their crew culture as a basis to “implement racially and ethnically exclusionary labour practices”, thus supporting the transnational praxis of “White Labourism”.Footnote ⁹¹

These examples indicate that certain material and historical conditions often foster, or are necessary but not sufficient conditions for, sustained camaraderie. Nevertheless, the specific forms this solidarity – racist or anti-racist – takes varies according to different conditions and cultures. This is evident in workplace-whānau. Māori created them to self-manage, to a degree, work rhythms according to their cultural norms, thus making workplaces less culturally alienating and racist, and to gain limited autonomy from the pressures of work. In the process, they often became foundation stones for dissent.

Although workplace-whānau could impressively transcend stratifications between workers, multiple tensions persisted. These included divisions within Māori – such as tribal and hapū (sub-tribal) divisions – between different ethnicities, between workers of different ages and seniority levels, between workers of different sexualities, social status, and sometimes political beliefs, and especially between different occupational groups of meatworkers and genders. For example, conflict sometimes erupted between butchers and other occupational groups.Footnote ⁹² Butchers, who frequently included many Māori males, were often the best-paid and most militant workers due to their strategic position near the start of the dis-assembly line. The extent of these separations varied temporally and spatially, within and across meatworks.

Further research is needed to discern if tribal and sub-tribal based divisions between Māori were overcome in meatworks. The limited evidence available suggests they generally were. In many plants, Māori from different iwi (tribes) and hapū (sub-tribes) worked together, particularly in the urban ones. Yet, most reports suggest considerable solidarity existed between different iwi in these metropolitan plants, including Petone and Ocean Beach. At the Pātea meatworks several iwi – all with long-standing historical enmities – worked side by side, hence the local union branch attempted to circumvent potential conflicts by traditionally electing a white union president.Footnote ⁹³ At other provincial plants, such as Tōmoana, Māori were seemingly primarily drawn from the local iwi.

Webb contends that two competing accounts exist from Māori themselves about Māori/non-Māori (Pākehā) relations in meatworks.Footnote ⁹⁴ Some Māori thought non-Māori adopted Māori customs, rather than vice-versa. For example, Te Huia recalled that “Pākehā adopted their [Māori] ways, adopted their language, adopted their humour and everyone got on and they were all kind of the same”.Footnote ⁹⁵ This adoption was sometimes reinforced by intermarriage between Māori and Pākehā meatworkers.

Yet, other Māori stressed class and occupational bonds transcended cultural differences. O'Keefe asserted ethnic differences “didn't exist” in meatworks: “you were Pākehā, I'm Māori […] You were my workmate […] You didn't see colour. You just saw your mate”. When racism flared in meatworks, George Rarere claimed that “the union wouldn't tolerate that sort of thing […] Or if the union didn't control it […] families would control it and deal to it”.Footnote ⁹⁶ For example, a wildcat occurred at the Whakatū meatworks after a foreman called a Māori worker a “black bastard”.Footnote ⁹⁷ When James Robb, a former Tōmoana meatworker, sought jobs elsewhere in the early 1980s, he found racism far more prevalent in smaller workplaces without a strong Māori presence – in, for example, glue and fish processing factories.Footnote ⁹⁸ However, in general, while meatworkers’ unions endorsed anti-racist policies, ostensibly they did not place prime importance on opposing racism. For example, in contrast to the United Packinghouse Workers of America, they did not organize anti-discrimination campaigns.Footnote ⁹⁹ This subject of the extent and shape of racism on the shop floor, and within unions, and how it was resisted or incorporated (or both) into the meat industry, is beyond this article's scope, and requires further research.

Meatworkers’ dissent and workplace-whānau were often based on masculinity. John Leckie claims typical male meatworkers were perceived as being physically and mentally tough, and viewed industrial relations “as a constant tug-of-war” between themselves and bosses, a tug-of-war that required all the attributes of male strength.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ “Māori working-class masculinity”, as Webb calls it, had a large impact on many plants.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The seemingly predominant “hard men” masculine culture in the meat industry – for both Māori and non-Māori – revolved around valuing rugged physicality, manual skills, and “mateship” or mutual comradeship and loyalty.Footnote ¹⁰² Such solidarity was not only developed through working together, but also by socializing and playing sport together outside work. For Henry Williams, a Māori meatworker at Ocean Beach, entertainment after work with fellow meatworkers came through rugby, alcohol, and gambling, “probably in that order”.Footnote ¹⁰³ Subsequently, female partners and children could sometimes be neglected.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Such masculinity was enabled, to some extent, by the strong gendered division of labour that existed in meat plants. Women, including Māori women, were confined to the dirtiest, smelliest, and lowest paid occupations, such as in the manure, offal, and gut/casings departments. Yet, as the influence of the women's liberation movement grew, and the impacts of the recession began to bite, women increasingly began to seek jobs in the industry during the 1970s, only to find that employers, unions, and male workers alike often opposed their entry. Initially, some Māori male meatworkers saw women entering the meatworks “as a breach of camaraderie”.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Some were especially opposed to women gaining the higher paid, more skilled jobs, such as butchering. In 1978, the Ocean Beach union branch voted to ban women from becoming butchers. Taurima believed that the butchers’ working environment was “in blood and guts”, so “it is undignified for women to work on the chain” and further alleged women could not perform the physically demanding job.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At Kaiti, Paenga said “I was opposed to two pays coming into the one house while there were other people who required the money more.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Despite this sexism, women became employed as butchers for the first time across the industry during 1978, and the percentage of women working in the industry increased to eight per cent by 1979 (Figure 3).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It appears that many women eventually became enmeshed within the bonds of shop floor solidarity; however, evidence suggests they often did so by “becoming one of the boys”.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Figure 3.

From left to right: Mere Chong, Mahina Barlow, Helen Barlow, and Katy O'Keefe in the Tōmoana meatworks, n.d., c.1980s, available at: https://numawaruwire.wordpress.com/tag/tomoana/#jp-carousel-638; last accessed 22 January 2019.

THE MID-1970S TO THE MID-1980S: RESTRUCTURING, RESISTANCE, AND RETREAT

This later phase was shaped by the onset of a protracted recession in 1973, as the oil shock and the UK joining the European Economic Community – and the consequent loss of the guaranteed British market for Aotearoa New Zealand pastoral exports (including meat) – had dramatic and lasting effects. Belich has over-optimistically argued that Māori experienced a “golden age” in terms of increased income and access to jobs between the late 1930s and the early 1970s. When this economic upswing crashed in the mid-1970s, it created a “fertile ground” for activism, including a major surge in Māori protest, especially against ongoing land alienation (highlighted by the pivotal 1975 national land march).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Yet, Belich overlooks how struggle over both Māori and workplace issues peaked at roughly the same time, and sometimes both movements loosely influenced each other. In workplaces, Māori workers’ bargaining and associational power (through developing strong unions and workplace-whānau) had risen under conditions of full employment and the long boom. This generated rising expectations and a greater capacity to confront capital and the state through stoppages when these conditions halted.

From about the mid-1970s, strike action generally became more widespread in response to declining real wages, high inflation, increasing government intervention in bargaining to limit wage increases, and especially the beginnings of the downsizing of manufacturing that marked the end of full employment.Footnote ¹¹¹ While wildcats and local bargaining strikes continued – indeed, a major national confrontation occurred at Ocean Beach in 1978 when the government charged 192 Ocean Beach meatworkers for striking illegally, but backed down under pressure from the MWU – they generally became less successful and prominent. Instead stoppages during this phase typically became more defensive, lengthy, and bitter.

Māori meatworkers played a more prominent role in disputes during this phase than the earlier one. Indeed, some explicit links between Māori culture and workplace activity materialized. At Petone, Ben Matthews had organized “the stroppier Maori slaughtermen [butchers] into a fighting force […] Maori butchers became the spearhead of the union”.Footnote ¹¹² Matthews unequivocally linked land alienation with strikes by Māori, deeming them a direct form of compensation from the capitalist class:

Keith Locke, who worked at Petone and later became a politician, also noted the concurrent influence of Māori culture on the union: plant-wide union “meetings became very open, democratic affairs, taking on almost a marae character. They continued until everyone had their say […] I remember one going all day”.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Marae are communal meeting complexes of Māori sub-tribes (hapū).

Pātea was another majority Māori and formerly conservative plant like Petone that developed an intense level of everyday and overt industrial conflict during the late 1970s and early 1980s. An extraordinary level of absenteeism arose because hundreds of Māori frequently needed to attend tangihanga (funeral ceremonies) that often lasted three or more days at local marae.Footnote ¹¹⁵ According to Tony Raimona, Secretary of the Pātea sub-branch of the MWU, a factor in causing these conflicts was that Pātea Māori felt they were in a “bonded relationship” with Vesteys – the British corporation that owned the plant – presumably because of the scarcity of other local employment opportunities in a virtual company town. Hostility to the company intensified after it was discovered in the local library that Vesteys treated Australian Aboriginal workers in an allegedly brutal fashion.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Industrial action explicitly in support of Māori causes was only rarely undertaken, such as when Petone meatworkers struck for a day in 1978 to protest the government's eviction of a seminal Māori land occupation at Takaparawhā (Bastion Point) in Auckland during 1978.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In contrast to the United Packinghouse Workers of America in the US, both major meatworkers’ unions were not adherents of “social unionism”, and thus did not seek coalitions with community-based social movements, such as the Māori protest movement.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Most strikes involving Māori ostensibly centred on economic issues. For example, the aforementioned strikes at Pātea were part of a wider series of struggles from the late 1970s to the early 1990s against capital's comprehensive restructuring of the meat industry. Older slaughterhouses, such as Petone, were threatened from the late 1970s onwards with closure unless considerable layoffs and pay cuts, and transformed working conditions, were accepted. Further, the government's deregulation of the industry in 1981 helped to further fuel the “new mood of belligerence and arrogance” among employers (Figure 4).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Subsequently, disputes generally escalated, as a pattern of localized strikes against downsizing emerged. For instance, Petone meatworkers were locked out for several months during 1979 and 1981 after they rejected severe pay cuts of twenty per cent and major job losses in order to circumvent shutting the plant down (Figure 5).Footnote ¹²⁰ Their action, while unable to avert restructuring and ultimately the closure of the slaughterhouse, significantly reduced the extent of proposed wage and job cuts.

Figure 4.

Cartoon by Tom Scott in Roger Middlemass, 4 for 5: The Workers’ Response to Mechanisation and Automation in the Freezing Industry (Wellington, 1981), p. 1.

Figure 5.

Locked out Petone meatworkers with their children during the sixth week of the 1981 lockout. Left to right: Thomas Meihana with Selina, Glen Rainford with Hemi, and Malcolm McAllister with Kimiora. Evening Post, 6 April 1981, EP/1981/1406/30A-F, Alexander Turnbull Library.

While most stoppages against restructuring were localized, several significant national strikes in which Māori were also prominent were undertaken, such as in 1980 when the FWU, unsupported by the MWU, took national strike action that helped to re-open the closed Southdown plant. However, this gesture was temporary; Southdown then closed for good in 1981. The most significant nationwide attempt to halt restructuring – the 1986 national strike, when the MWU struck for six weeks and the FWU held out for eight, which represented the largest dispute nationally in terms of working days not worked since 1951 – was similarly unable to stem the neo-liberal tide.Footnote ¹²¹

Nevertheless, workplace-whānau were crucial for sustaining the lengthy stoppages that occurred against restructuring, and in enabling the considerable creative rank-and-file organization that developed in many of these disputes. For instance, Petone meatworkers in the late 1970s and early 1980s employed tactics such as sit-ins of company headquarters, pickets of Gear retail butcher shops, and industrial “guerrilla warfare” tactics. In both lockouts at Petone – as with many other major strikes during the same period – various elected rank-and-file committees were formed to support strikes. Relief centres, often run by female partners of meatworkers, were established during lockouts.Footnote ¹²²

Workplace-whānau often went beyond the workplace and into the home and community.Footnote ¹²³ Solidarity inside workplaces was supplemented by solidarity outside it. The widespread, but not universal, support meatworkers received from local communities generally reflected the strong neighbourhood bonds that Māori often created over time in nearby suburbs or towns that relied on meatworks for employment. For example, in Petone – then a predominantly Māori industrial suburb of Wellington – a close-knit community developed. One author romantically described Petone as “one big family” with everyone caring for each other.Footnote ¹²⁴ Many locals readily supported Petone meatworkers because they had either worked in the Petone slaughterhouse themselves, or knew relatives or friends working there, or had worked alongside Petone meatworkers during their off-season employment.Footnote ¹²⁵

As in the earlier phase, strike activity still varied widely between companies, regions, plants, and occupational departments. While the general trend was that of a heightened level of overt antagonism when compared with the late 1960s and early 1970s, several slaughterhouses with large Māori workforces, such as Shortland, shifted from being conflict-prone to conflict-averse after adopting strategies of cooperation with management in response to management overtures in the late 1970s before the onset of restructuring.Footnote ¹²⁶ Likewise, in response to the tumultuous 1978 conflict at Ocean Beach, the company and union developed local conciliation policies, and so that meatworks experienced a largely stoppage-free 1979–1980 season. Yet, major disputes re-emerged after a new company acquired the plant in 1981 and began to cut jobs and slash pay by thirty per cent.Footnote ¹²⁷ Some conservative union officials, such as Paenga, argued that greater collaboration with employers, rather than struggle against them, was necessary in response to retrenchment, and thus largely avoided undertaking strikes. However, this strategy also failed to halt job losses and wage cuts. Further, meatworkers remained internally divided over supporting strikes. As Ngahiwi Tomoana noted at Whakatū “if the decision was passed by vote to go on strike for a day […] heads would shake sadly, while others would whoop and rush for the door”.Footnote ¹²⁸

As disputes became more prolonged during this phase, many Māori found they simply could not afford to stay out on strike. The lack of income frequently created tensions within homes. Male meatworkers frequently did not inform female partners about why strikes were occurring. Many meatworkers’ partners also resented disputes due to the suffering they caused, especially the inability to feed children.Footnote ¹²⁹ On a few occasions, they protested against meatworkers’ strikes, including, for example, fifty women at Pātea in 1979.Footnote ¹³⁰ In response, the West Coast branch of the MWU included meatworkers’ partners – at Pātea, Petone, and elsewhere – in union meetings, and this soon became an accepted practice elsewhere, inside and outside the industry. Additionally, meatworkers’ partners became increasingly involved in strike support.

As increasing numbers of Māori women became employed as meatworkers, some professed an initial scepticism of strikes because many had previously worked in generally strike averse industries.Footnote ¹³¹ Yet, they played a leading role in stoppages of the late 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ¹³² For example, at a new highly automated model plant built in 1981 at Oringi, management hired a higher proportion of inexperienced and female meatworkers (about twenty per cent were women and many were Māori) in an endeavour to weed out potential “trouble-makers” and lessen militancy.Footnote ¹³³ Yet, this strategy backfired as female Oringi workers were at the forefront of defeating management's attempt to establish a company union, and then led a series of disputes during 1982–1983, including a six-week lockout in 1983. Heather Kopua, the vice president of Oringi sub-branch of the MWU noted, “women have played a vital part in this union” even if the majority still perform the “lesser jobs”.Footnote ¹³⁴

After this wave of disputes, management generally preferred to hire middle-aged married men because they perceived them to be more placid than women. Liz Ngawaka, an Oringi worker, asserted “they think these men are less likely to go on strike or be militant in the union, because they've got families and wives to support”. Yet, they also employed men for “chauvinistic reasons, like women get pregnant and have to leave”.Footnote ¹³⁵

Yet, between 1981 – when the meat industry was deregulated – and the late 1990s, forty-three new plants were opened and twenty-nine were closed. Employers closed older, “inefficient” larger plants, like Petone in 1981 and Pātea in 1982, and opened smaller, more automated plants, often located in traditionally non-militant rural locations, such as Oringi.Footnote ¹³⁶ Of the 800 who lost their jobs at Petone, 600 were estimated to be Māori.Footnote ¹³⁷ Closures became more widespread after generous government subsidies for farming ceased in the mid-1980s. Whakatū closed in 1986, Longburn ceased operating in 1989 after a three-year lockout, and Ocean Beach shut down in 1991.Footnote ¹³⁸ Strike activity was frequently blamed for closures.

As the workforce was almost halved in size from the 1970s to the 1990s, new working conditions were imposed – brutal work speeds, longer work hours (including shift work), and stricter management control over the work process. Consequently, the strong union and workplace bonds (including workplace-whānau) that formerly existed gradually frayed over time and by the 1990s strikes in the industry waned markedly.Footnote ¹³⁹ One company history asserted “the war zone that was the freezing industry has been comparatively quiet” since the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ De-industrialization had traumatic long-term economic, social, and cultural impacts. Māori often fell back on strong community and cultural bonds to help overcome tough times. For example, the Pātea Māori Club, largely composed of former Pātea meatworkers, scored a number one hit sung in Māori in 1984. The song raised money for unemployed ex-meatworkers after the Pātea meatworks closed.Footnote ¹⁴¹