The Great Strike

After the defeat at Waihī in 1912 (see The Waihi strike), moderate unions were shocked at the force the government had used, and militant and moderate unions met at two Unity Conferences in Wellington, in January and July 1913. At the July conference they formed the United Federation of Labour (UFL), which brought together the militant 'Red Fed' unions and some moderate ones. Most of the unions that struck later that year belonged to it, and had withdrawn from the arbitration system in favour of direct negotiations with employers, during which they had the right to strike. The New Zealand Employers' Federation and the Farmers' Union were determined to destroy the new federation. NZHistory describes the strike that followed as a power struggle of militant unionists against organised employers and farmers, with Prime Minister William Massey's Reform government giving full state backing to defeating the strikers.

The strike grew out of two small disputes. On 6 October 1913 the Taupiri Coal Mines Company at Huntly dismissed 16 miners, including three union officials, and the Huntly miners walked off the job on 19 October. In Wellington, shipwrights in dispute with the Union Steamship Company over travelling time, wages and conditions struck on 18 October. On 22 October the Wellington watersiders held a stop-work meeting about the shipwrights' dispute and came back to find their jobs given to other workers. The shipowners cancelled the watersiders' agreement and offered to re-employ them only if the union registered under the arbitration act or paid a bond against striking. Within a week watersiders around the country had struck in sympathy. Coal miners also went out, and pits from Hikurangi, north of Whangārei, to Nightcaps in Southland closed. NZHistory puts the number on strike at between 14,000 and 16,000, out of a population of just over one million; Te Ara says about 16,000 by November.

On the suggestion of Colonel Edward Heard, acting commandant of the army, Territorial Force officers in rural districts recruited farmers and farm labourers as mounted special constables. They were issued with batons and sometimes revolvers, and the strikers called them 'Massey's Cossacks'. The morning after the first specials reached Wellington on 29 October, about 1000 strike supporters drove them out of their camp on the waterfront. The specials were moved to Mount Cook, where rioting residents besieged Buckle Street on 3 and 4 November and shots were fired on both sides, though no one was killed. On 5 November about 800 specials, after repeated mounted charges in Featherston Street, took control of the Wellington wharves and brought in non-union 'free labourers'. In Auckland, specials took the wharves without a struggle early on 8 November, and NZHistory dates a general strike there from 8 to 22 November, involving at least 6000 workers. At Lyttelton, about 800 specials crossed the Port Hills early on 25 November and took the strikers by surprise.

When the UFL called for a general strike in the main centres on 10 November, few unions outside Auckland responded. NZHistory records that on 11 and 12 November many strike leaders were arrested, among them Harry Holland, Peter Fraser and Bob Semple for using inflammatory language, and Tom Young of the UFL and Tom Barker of the Industrial Workers of the World for sedition; Te Ara places the arrests of the main leaders 'after six weeks'. On 4 December the Ngāti Tuwharetoa ariki (paramount chief) Tukino Te Heuheu and the Rangitāne leader Tuiti MacDonald told a strikers' meeting in Wellington that they would discourage Māori from acting as specials or strike-breakers, as some already had. The next day the 'free labourers' on the Wellington wharves were registered in an arbitration union. A Supreme Court ruling in early December that arbitration unions could not give money to strikers in other industries was a further blow. The seamen went back to work on 17 December and the watersiders on 22 December, but most miners' unions stayed out until mid-January 1914. The unions agreed to return to work under the arbitration system.

Massey's biographer Barry Gustafson writes that the specials earned Massey 'the undying hatred of many urban workers, an enmity passed on to their children', while more conservative voters, especially farmers, saw his stand as firm and decisive. NZHistory argues that the strike was not a complete defeat for the unions: the UFL survived, later becoming the Alliance of Labour and then the Federation of Labour. In its view the strike, by showing the power of the state to crush industrial action, convinced many unionists to seek power through elections. In December 1913 James McCombs of the Social Democratic Party won the Lyttelton by-election, and in 1916 that party joined the United Labour Party to form the New Zealand Labour Party. Strike leaders Bob Semple, Peter Fraser, Paddy Webb, Bill Parry, Dan Sullivan and Michael Joseph Savage all became ministers in the 1935 Labour government (see The first Labour government).