Trade Union Committee on Aboriginal Rights

The Trade Union Committee on Aboriginal Rights (TUCAR) was formally set up in a 1977 meeting attended by Tranby staff Kevin Cook and Rev. Alf Clint, along with South Coast Elders Jacko Campbell and Gubboo Ted Thomas, Marcia Langton from the Black Defence Group and supportive unionists Rod Pickette, Sergio Zorino, Meredith Burgmann, Hannah Middleton, and others. Along with the Maritime unions and the Building Unions, the new organisation gained rapid support from the Missos (the Miscellaneous Workers Union) and the unions in Education, Banking and Health. These and other unions affiliated with TUCAR to back Aboriginal campaigns and to get better conditions for Aboriginal workers.

The TUCAR committee met regularly first in the NSW Trades Hall and then later at the NSW Teachers Federation building in Surry Hills. With funding from unions and from employment grants, TUCAR was able to employ a full-time coordinator, with Lee Silva and others before Kevin Tory took up this role in 1987. TUCAR was also able to employ several Aboriginal employees, a number of whom were Tranby staff or graduates like Margaret Friel and Veronica Collett.

TUCAR gathered information for unions and their members about Aboriginal people’s campaigns for land and social justice. This was circulated through many TUCAR workers’ visits to union meetings, to job sites and through the TUCAR Newsletters. As well, TUCAR worked with affiliated unions to make the policies of the peak union organisations (the state Trades and Labour Councils and the federal ACTU) more active in defending Indigenous workers and their community’s interests.

At the same time, TUCAR called on unions for support in campaigns for First Nations peoples’ political rights. For example, 16 unions endorsed the TUCAR submission on Land Rights to the NSW government in 1979; the Railways Union and many others supported community campaigns to ban uranium mining on Aboriginal Land at Roxby Downs in South Australia and at Jabiru in the Northern Territory, while unions in Education and other industries called for conditions, better pay and better access to training for Indigenous people. In some cases, TUCAR organised unions to take industrial action to support Indigenous communities, like refusing to take part in developments which would damage Aboriginal land or sites.

Leadership

Kevin Cook, Phil Wiffen, Tony Amatto.

Murphy interviews Kevin Tory

November 2008, Peter Murphy interviews Kevin Tory:

The Trade Union Committee on Aboriginal Rights is one of the main links between the trade union movement and the Aboriginal communities. Kevin Cook, the CEO at Tranby College at the time, put a lot of energy into setting up TUCAR.

My job at TUCAR is to give an Aboriginal perspective in the trade union movement. I’m on the ACTU Committee, and the Indigenous Committee of Unions NSW and a number of others including the ANTaR Committee, the Stolen Wages campaign, the NSW Teachers Federation Anti-Racism Committee.

When TUCAR was set up 25 years ago it was mainly to get support for Land Rights. Then it moved into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. We got a Land Rights Act here in NSW, and a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

I was also on the Board of Tranby College for about 15 years with Kevin Cook. When we were at Tranby we also helped organise most of the national meetings of Indigenous people.

It is really important today to get young Aboriginal men and women to get involved in their unions, but to use that as a basis for going into local government and then into state and federal politics.

If we can get black faces into the parliaments, that will be a major achievement. My major role is to support and mentor those young Aboriginal men and women in their union all over the country.

The ACTU Indigenous Conference was held in the middle of the year and 70 Aboriginal people participated. It was inspiring. For the first time the ACTU has employed an Aboriginal person, Kara Touchie, to recruit people to unions. We’ve been trying to get that position for 20 years.

The ACTU was impressed by what our NSW Indigenous Committee did last year in the Your Rights At Work campaign. We developed all the flyers and posters and worked out strategies with Indigenous people all over Australia about how to involve Aboriginal people in defeating the racist Howard government.

The election of the Rudd government and his apology to the Stolen Generation was highly significant as an act of reconciliation. It is a case of ‘from little things, big things grow’.

Now we are looking for a younger person to work with Unions NSW who can eventually take over my job here at TUCAR. This job gives a person more flexibility. I can introduce this worker to my union and political contacts, but also to Tranby College and wider circles.

I’m very happy with the role of Unions NSW under John Robertson in supporting TUCAR and Indigenous people in the union movement. Adam Kerslake is now third in charge at Unions NSW.

Working with Charline Emzin-Boyd, I have an input on all the major policies in the NSW Teachers Federation and the ACTU about Aboriginal Affairs. Over 100 people took part in this year’s Teachers Federation Aboriginal Conference, and I was part of that process.

In particular unions there are great people who have come into the movement – Adam and Charline, Mal Cochrane from the PSA, Diat Callope in the Independent Education Union, Rowan Tobler from the CFMEU, Darcel Russell who is now Assistant Secretary of the Australian Education Union. The Mining & Energy Division of the CFMEU in Queensland has put on Lara Watson, an Aboriginal worker, to help create jobs for Aboriginal people in coal mines. Paddy Crumlin of the Maritime Union is now planning an Aboriginal leadership team in that union, and TUCAR will be involved in that process.

I’m also happy to be involved with the SEARCH Foundation in mentoring young activists.

If young Aboriginal people come into the Teachers Federation as interns, they can be daunted by what looks like a huge bureaucracy. I help them to understand it and get the most out of their time here.

With the defeat of Howard and the election of the Rudd Labor government, I think the work for TUCAR has only just begun. Workers Australia-wide have to spread the message that unions are important and relevant in today’s challenging and changing society.

We can’t rest on our laurels, we came together to defeat the Howard government, but we have to do a lot more to consolidate our position. If you took the union movement out of Australian society, what would it look like? That’s what worries me.

A lot of Aboriginal people might say, well, how could it get any worse? But it could get worse!

Some Aboriginal Land Councils now control vast tracts of land and that could be important in the policies on global warming, and there may be income streams to our communities for generations from that opportunity. I’m very interested in what the Garnaut Report proposes and what the Rudd government does on global warming.

I may help in evolving the proposed new national representative Indigenous body, but I’d like to see younger men and women step forward, and older people like me step back and give them support. We should hold important national meetings on this, once the review of the NT Intervention is completed.

The SEARCH Foundation contributes to the TUCAR budget.^[1]

International ties

As well as backing Indigenous campaigns in Australia, TUCAR was committed to the international network of unions across the world. TUCAR representatives appeared at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1985 to take part in the ILO discussion on changes to Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. In 1987, the TUCAR Newsletter carried a strong condemnation of the attacks on Fiji unions by the military in the two coups in that year in Fiji. TUCAR supported unions which opposed workplace racism and colonialism as shown in the Newsletter carrying news about the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific campaign, including a visit by TUCAR coordinator, Kevin Tory, to the Philippines in 1989. TUCAR also kept Unions in Australia informed about Aboriginal campaigns being brought to the floor of the United Nations, such as Helen Corbett’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1989.

TUCAR played a major role in building widespread support among unions for the protests at the Bicentennial in 1988. The Bicentennial events and debates during 1988 deepened union awareness about Aboriginal issues even further, building on the work of TUCAR and Indigenous activists all over Australia about land rights, discrimination in education, Aboriginal deaths in custody and racism in the workplace. While each of the Unions in the TUCAR network pushed ahead to combat racism in the workplace, they did it in different ways.

The NSW Teachers Federation had already, in 1986, created an Indigenous Education Officer position and had built it into the Federation’s structure. Soon after the Bicentennial, later in 1988, the national Australian Education Union (the AEU) created an Aboriginal Education Officer position. The Maritime Union of Australia, formed from the Seamen’s Union and the Waterside Workers Federation, continued to be prominently advised by their Indigenous members like Joe McGinness and Terry O'Shane. The Bank Employees Union maintained its strong support for Indigenous staff after amalgamation in 1991, when it became part of the Financial Services Union (FSU), by ensuring that the new FSU took up affiliation with TUCAR (even before it affiliated with the ALP) and by organising frequent TUCAR deputations, led by Kevin Tory, to speak to unionists. By 1989, the peak national trade union body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was meeting regularly with the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations. In 2001, the ACTU formed a First Nations Committee to advise it and then established an Indigenous Officer position in 2006.

TUCAR continued to liaise with each of these unions and with the peak bodies – state organisations like Unions NSW and the national body, the ACTU – while as well it supported each of the Union Indigenous Officers. This enabled these officers to form a strengthened network between unions, working towards the long-standing TUCAR goal of having a network of union support that stretched across the country.^[2]