The Waihi strike

From 1894 the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act gave legal recognition to unions that registered under it, but outlawed strikes by those unions. By 1905 many workers had become disillusioned with compulsory arbitration, and after the Blackball miners' strike of 1908 a number of unions deregistered so that they could negotiate directly with employers and strike. In 1910 the miners' federation took in other unions and became the New Zealand Federation of Labour, popularly known as the 'Red Feds'. Employers answered in 1912 by encouraging workers to set up arbitration unions at workplaces where Red Fed unions were established. At Waihī, home of the country's largest gold mine, the Red Fed union was the Waihi Trade Union of Workers, led by the Australian-born miner Bill Parry and implacably opposed to the Waihi Gold-Mining Company.

In 1912 a small group of engine drivers, who operated the machines that raised and lowered miners in the shafts, formed their own union with the company's encouragement. Te Ara dates this to March; NZHistory and the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography say April, and that the new union was registered under the arbitration system in June. The miners demanded that these men be dismissed, and when the company refused they went on strike on 13 May. Te Ara puts the union's membership at 1,000. William Massey's Reform government took office in July 1912 and, backed by the Police Commissioner John Cullen, sent extra police with horses, batons and firearms in September. Eventually about 80 police, a tenth of the national force, were stationed in the town. More than 60 strikers were jailed, Parry for four months in Mount Eden prison. On 2 October the mine reopened with strike-breakers, who were taken to work under police escort and showered with stones and taunts by strikers and their wives.

After a day of wild clashes on the Monday, Cullen told the union he could no longer guarantee strikers' safety, and it agreed to withdraw its pickets. That evening only three or four men remained at the miners' hall. Early on 12 November, 'Black Tuesday', the striker Fred Evans went to the hall to relieve one of them. Strike-breakers marched on the hall with police in attendance and stormed it. In a struggle at the door the strike-breaker Thomas Johnston was shot in the knee, and as the unionists fled, Constable Gerald Wade was shot in the stomach but felled Evans with a baton blow to the head. Evans went down under a hail of boots and blows. His biographer Philip Rainer concludes that Evans 'certainly shot Johnston, and in all probability Wade'; NZHistory says what happened 'is still disputed'. Evans was left in a police cell for an hour and a half before being taken to hospital, and died on 13 November without regaining consciousness. Strikers and their families were hunted through the streets, and hundreds fled Waihī.

The strike collapsed and the Waihi Trade Union of Workers was destroyed. The Federation of Labour gave Evans a large political funeral in Auckland, where thousands lined the streets, and he was buried at Waikaraka cemetery on 17 November 1912. The inquiry into his death found that Wade had been 'fully justified in striking deceased down'. Unionists raised £1,100 for his widow, May, and their children. Moderate unions that had refused to support the strike were shocked at the force the government had used, and at two Unity Conferences in Wellington in January and July 1913 moderate and militant unions formed the United Federation of Labour. In late 1913 it was drawn into a nationwide watersiders' and miners' strike (see The Great Strike).

Te Ara's history of the Labour Party says the failure of the Waihī strike and the 1913 strikes led advocates of industrial militancy to accept the need for political action, and the party was founded in Wellington in July 1916. Parry was among those at the founding meeting. He became MP for Auckland Central in 1919 and minister of internal affairs when Labour won power in 1935 (see The first Labour government). The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography describes Evans as the first person killed in the course of an industrial dispute in New Zealand. NZHistory counts him as one of only two, the other being Christine Clark, who died after being run over on a picket line at the Port of Lyttelton in 1999. Each year a commemorative service is held at Evans's grave, and the F. G. Evans Memorial Library in Auckland's Trade Union Centre is named after him.