Productivity and Patriotism: the Management Narrative of New South Wales Rail Chief Commissioner James Fraser, 1917-1929

By Mark Hearn

Abstract

The management narrative of James Fraser, the Chief Commissioner of the NSW Railways and Tramway Department 1917-1929 provided the defining values of the Department’s organizational discourse and reflected the aims of transformational leadership, inspiring managers and staff to share the values he advocated. Fraser sought to impose a regime of disciplined productivity upon rail and tram workers based on scientific management techniques, and linked appeals to increased productivity with patriotism to manage the stresses imposed on the Department during the First World War. Fraser's narrative reflected the values of liberal governmentality in shaping the conduct and culture of the workforce. It is argued that the narrative turn may establish a more fruitful analytical relationship between business history and organization studies by uncovering the discursive codes and values embedded in organizational culture and practice.

If there is one thing which will kindle the battle lust and quicken the pulse of James Fraser it is the Empire’s call. He is intensely patriotic. In his judgement no sacrifice can be too great which will tend to bring about a speedy allied victory and all that means to humanity.1

Productivity and patriotism represented the essential preoccupations of the management narrative of James Fraser, the Chief Commissioner of the New South Wales Railways and Tramways Department in the period 1917-1929. An engineer by training, Fraser sought to impose a regime of disciplined timekeeping and accelerated productivity upon rail and tram workers by employing the techniques of Taylorism or scientific management. During the First World War Fraser’s management narrative was designed to identify the tasks of the government-owned NSW Railways with the needs of the Australian nation, conflating appeals for increased productivity with pleas for a sense of patriotism, as he sought to manage the performance stresses imposed on the service and the demands he was making on the workforce. Fraser’s determination to implement productivity reforms exacerbated the wartime tensions in the rail service and sparked the "Great Strike" of August-September 1917, which began in the Department’s rail and tram workshops and spread throughout the service and across a number of NSW industries, disrupting the key transport and mining sectors.

Fraser’s management narrative provided the defining values of the Department’s organizational discourse. Sweeping claims have been made about the formative ontological nature of organizational discourse. Grant et. al. observe that ‘organisational discourse brings the organisation into being, by shaping and reinforcing the values the members of the organisation share together.’2  Czarniawska asserts that ‘organisational narratives’ are ‘the main mode of knowing and communication in organizations.’3 Addressing the issue of whether ‘organizations are nothing but discourse’ Fairclough urges a ‘critical realist’ perspective of the relationship between organizational communication and structure to clarify the complex relationship between discourse and ‘other social elements’ and structures.4 

The relationship between structure and discourse may also be clarified by an analysis of historical experience. Clark and Rowlinson argue that the turn to history may yield more ‘theoretically informed’ organization studies, and an acknowledgement that ‘organisational cultures are “historically based”’.5 This is certainly true of the tradition-bound nature of the state-owned and bureaucratic NSW Railways. A Business History survey has noted a move away from traditional preoccupations with ‘corporate/industrial structure and performance’, by British business historians.6 A turn to narrative or discourse may establish a more fruitful analytical relationship between business history and organization studies by uncovering the discursive codes and values embedded in organizational culture and practice.

Leaders may play a critical role in defining organizational discourse. Fraser’s narrative reflected the aims of transformational leadership, seeking to inspire managers and staff to embrace change and share the values he advocated.7 Fraser's discourse is described as a management narrative to emphasise its sustained and thematic nature, a form of ‘public’ narrative reflecting cultural discourses from the wider public sphere that Fraser articulated to fashion organizational performance and values.8Fraser's narrative reflected the values of liberal governmentality as it developed in the early twentieth century, constructing new techniques for the disciplined performance and surveillance of a productive workforce. Rose has taken Foucault’s definition of government - ‘the conduct of conduct’ – as a reference to ‘…all endeavours to shape, guide, direct the conduct of others’. In liberalism, shaping conduct sought not to crush the human capacity to act, but ‘to acknowledge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives’.9 These techniques could include scientific management, creating a workforce under surveillance and made self-conscious of its own productive performance, as Patmore and Taksa have discussed;10 they also included values that flowed from prevailing liberal economy and political culture.

Rail transport in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia developed in the context of colonial expansion and the inauguration in 1901 of the federation of the colonies as the Commonwealth of Australia. The railways quite literally helped bind the new nation together, and Fraser was proud of the NSW Railways contribution to state and national development. National policies of tariff protection, immigration restriction of non-whites and protection of workers wages and entitlements through state-sponsored arbitration all promoted an insular, protectionist economy and culture, suspicious of foreigners and foreign ideas – those that did not flow from the cultural inheritance of the United Kingdom.11 An interventionist form of liberal governance established an ‘apparatus of security’ to develop the economic and social utility of the governed through ‘bio-politics’ - administering populations though interventions in health, education and work: arbitration also provided techniques for the surveillance and regulation of the workforce.12 Taylorism and the ‘cult of efficiency’ advocated by academics and embraced by the NSW Railways promised to fulfill the ambitions of liberal governance by promoting discrete regimes of workplace control and improved productivity.13 Like many other private and public institutions in the period, the NSW Railways Department was extremely hierarchical, bound by tradition and strict operational rules that necessitated respect for discipline and procedure. The Department was also an insular culture, favouring internal promotion by seniority and adherence to its own codes and culture of skill and safeworking. The attraction of the American Frederick Taylor’s dream of ‘an ordered, individualized, sanitized, hierarchically differentiated, rational industrial environment’ overcame this instinctive suspicion.14

Hostility to illegitimate external influences coloured Fraser’s management narrative, and fueled a passionate and vividly descriptive rhetoric that often went beyond a plain recitation of the aims and purpose of railway enterprise. As Fraser observed in January 1917, his ambition was to promote productivity and efficiency by destroying the ‘dread disease’ of 'slow work'. There were workers in the NSW rail and tram service, Fraser warned, who were spreading this disease. It was his intention to drive these workplace subversives, the agents of 'industrial ferment and disorder', from the Service.15 Fraser identified a significant ‘other’ who represented disordered values that loyal Department managers and workers could unite against and cast from the service. Yet not all rail and tram staff embraced Fraser’s appeals, and in fulfillment of his patriotic and productive mission Fraser triggered intense industrial conflict.

The Making of a Chief Commissioner

By 1917 Fraser brought nearly forty years experience to his position as Chief Commissioner. The child of immigrant Scottish Highlanders, James Fraser was born in the southern NSW town of Braidwood in 1861. A brilliant student at Sydney Grammar, Fraser became a cadet under John Whitton, the railway’s leading engineer, in 1878. Fraser’s career accompanied the great period of rail expansion across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as inefficient and unprofitable private rail investment gave way to the centralized development of the rail network under the direct control of colonial and later state governments from 1855.16 556 miles of rail track in NSW in 1879 grew to 5,559 miles by 1916. Fraser became one of the senior engineers responsible for the expansion of the rail system, supervising significant projects including the construction of the Zig-Zag at Lithgow – the innovative solution to bringing trains down from the Great Dividing Range to the plains of central western NSW. Energetic and determined, Fraser had few interests beyond the railways: ‘recreation revealed itself in work.’ Fraser also revealed himself as ‘a born leader of men’, inspiring enthusiasm and confidence. By 1903 Fraser was the Chief Engineer responsible for all NSW rail lines. In 1914 he became the Deputy Chief Commissioner.17

At the outbreak of the First World War the NSW Rail and Tram Department was the single largest enterprise and the largest employer in NSW, with over 45,000 staff. In terms of both passenger and freight transport, it was the undisputed age of rail, and the Department played a vital role in maintain the productive wartime functions of the economy. It was the proud imperial comparison of the ostensibly nationalistic journal Lone Hand that the Department’s annual £10 million revenue by 1917 was exceeded only by the revenue of the four largest railway companies in the United Kingdom.18 The achievements of Australian national building, like its cultural values, were often defined in reference to the metropolitan source of industry and culture, a successful resettlement in the new nation that Fraser embodied: a “Scottish-Australian’, whose ‘strong Gaelic face tells its own tale – a tale of dour and indomitable effort, of a life of tireless, strenuous industry.’ The ‘tale’ that Lone Hand cultivated was one of deep ancestral tradition renewed in the young developing country. Scotland had provide Fraser’s genetic inheritance but Australia had formed the man: years of ‘strenuous progress in the office and in the field’ had led Fraser to the Chief Commissioner’s office, ready to face the test of war:

The fighting strain of the Fraser clan has not weakened under our Austral sun, and it is no idle dream to say that if national peril made it necessary James Fraser and his sons [both serving in the Australian Imperial Force in Europe] would be in the vanguard as in the days when Scotland wrote on the tablets of history her unquenchable, unconquerable love for freedom and liberty.

In fulfillment of this patriotic and cultural mission Fraser introduced some of Taylor’s scientific management initiatives, including time and motion monitoring of staff and incentive payment schemes. The Department made its first attempts to introduce a Taylorist-style card system to monitor work and to improve production efficiency at the Eveleigh workshops in 1915. Eveleigh employed over 3,600 men in various shops dedicated to the construction and maintenance of locomotives and carriages. With such a large concentration of staff, the workshops provided a convenient laboratory for testing new management techniques and work systems. Workshop foreman were to mark time cards to record the tasks fulfilled by each employee.19 Revealing a sensitivity to the foreign nature of his initiatives, Fraser argued that ‘the object was not to “Americanise” the system, but simply to get a proper, fair and right record of the work done and exact cost of every article.’20 Fraser insisted that his reforms were not ‘the Taylor system’, as he called it, which he acknowledged imposed a monotonous production regime on the worker, ‘with no consideration for the individual.’21

The Eveleigh workshops also provided a focal point for unrest and militancy. As discontent mounted with intensified working conditions, low pay and a rising cost of living, there had been over forty strikes in various parts of the Eveleigh complex since the outbreak of the war. Fraser suspended the card system in late 1916 in response to union and worker complaints.22The Co-Operator, the journal of the major rail union in NSW, argued in July 1916 that Fraser’s card system would amount, despite Fraser’s protests, to an intensified and slavish production process. ‘…Scientific management seeks to make the task of the worker more monotonous than it ever was, to take from his work the last vestige of individuality, and to make him a mere cog in the machinery of production.’23 The radical Industrial Workers of the World also conducted a militant campaign against Taylorism, arguing that rather than being made to speed up production, workers, who gained nothing from capitalism, should ‘slow down’. The IWW had only small following, but it’s activities attracted attention amongst rail and tram workers. The authorities accused the group of attempting to subvert the war effort.24

Fraser’s Symbolic Leadership

Fraser remained determined to implement productivity reforms in the railways, although it would be misleading to say that he relied only on a relatively narrow background as an engineer or on implementing scientific management initiatives to impose his aims. Fraser also employed a considerable capacity for symbolic leadership and ‘sense-making’, for creating a consensus for creating ‘shared meanings about the nature of the organization.’25 Fraser also revealed a capacity for the judicious and strategic deployment of his own personal intervention in the workforce and amongst his fellow managers in attempts to galvanise support for his aims. It was in the context of the tense stand-off over the card system that one of the most striking of Fraser’s personal interventions occurred in the afternoon of 23 November 1916, when as Acting Chief Commissioner he attended the Eveleigh railway workshops to address the staff.26 It was unusual for a senior commissioner to address the staff during working hours in such a direct and indeed dramatic fashion, an intervention that was prompted by the unprecedented crisis of the war and the intensifying political and industrial conflict that the war had produced. The meeting was held only a month after the first conscription referendum ballot. The determination of Prime Minister Billy Hughes to introduced compulsory military service for overseas duty had split the Australian Labor Party at both the national level and in New South Wales and caused bitter division within the community. The address also came at a time when the leaders of the IWW were on trial in Sydney over charges of arson and sedition.27 A prolonged, month-long coal strike had disrupted industry and forced a serious restriction of rail and tram services.28

In response to Fraser’s unusual personal intervention, the workshops employees 'clustered like bees' around a specially constructed platform in the old erecting shop, one of Eveleigh’s long and lofty brick halls where Fraser, accompanied by a number of senior managers, addressed the men.29 The tone of the address was of the leader coming amongst his followers to reassert his authority and to re-establish the appropriate lines of hierarchy and service. Fraser was physically imposing; he was 6 feet 8 inches tall and ‘conveyed a powerful impression of physical and mental strength.’30 Looking down over the assembly from the platform, Fraser said he came to clarify the feeling of unrest and disturbance triggered by the intensifying war and its attendant homefront divisions. He was a self-styled bearer of the truth: ‘let us assume this is a glass house, a palace of truth. I have come here to-day to tell the truth.’31

Fraser reminded the men that he had exercised his personal authority on their behalf. He had intervened in the recent minimum wage case: 'I have personally taken action which has benefited many of the lower paid men in this establishment'. During the last year he had intervened in 43 aggravating 'little' strikes. 'If these matters could be settled by me, as between myself and the men concerned, it would have been a damned sight easier to settle it without any strike at all'. Fraser made no direct reference to the controversial card system, although he reminded his audience that like them, he also worked under intense pressure, and that his own time was ruthlessly engineered. 'I have two or three deputations every day. My time is mapped out a fortnight in advance.'32

Fraser believed that the vast majority of men were ‘good’ and ‘loyal’ workers who accepted the sacrifices that the war imposed. 'The good men I have a hearty affection for', and any employer would be glad to have them. Fraser’s reassurance was prompted by a series of petitions presented to him at the beginning of the meeting signed by 259 fitters, boilermakers and their assistants expressing their loyalty, and refuting ‘malicious’ and ‘disparaging’ claims they believed had been referred to Fraser – and implying that not all workshops employees shared their views.33

Fraser acknowledged 'the wasters', in the workforce, 'deliberately going slow', although he would not accept that their militancy had any justification. He repeatedly assured the men that 'the war hardly effected you at all...[he did not] believe the railway men will be asked to suffer to anything like the same extent as the rest of the community'. Fraser felt that he had played a vital role in preventing their suffering; the men at Eveleigh were ‘citizens of the Empire’ who had been shielded from the worst effects of the war by his personal intervention. Despite a steep increase in the cost of steel, coal, other materials and spare parts, Fraser told the men that he had refused to sack staff or to reduce their wages. Fraser had directed his senior managers that ‘So long as there is profitable work on which we can keep you employed, you will be kept employed.’34

Fraser conceded that he could not entirely control the workforce or settle all industrial disputes. One group of workshops employees, the Moulders, the workshops’ parts makers, had been on strike for two months and refused to return to work. He accused the Moulders of 'an offence against the community', suffering under the burdens of war. If only the Moulders had approached him with their problem, 'I would have told them what I would do about it.' Fraser’s address placed considerable emphasis on the personal pronoun. Fraser was prepared to engage in continuing dialogue with the men, but his narrative of the truth was a one-way exchange: he concluded by assuring the men that if they had any lingering doubts about how to understand the position they faced, 'I will try and convert you to my views'.35

The Eveleigh address was produced as a pamphlet by the Department to spread Fraser’s views to a wider audience. Just how strongly Fraser felt about the threat posed by industrial unrest was indicated a few months later, when he delivered an address to the recently established NSW Government Railway and Tramway Literary and Scientific Association in January 1917. In ‘Slow Work’ Fraser addressed his Department management peers who dominated Association membership. Fraser did not outline any specific proposals or techniques for improving productivity; ‘Slow Work’ was essentially an exercise in impassioned rhetorical advocacy, asserting the moral value of work and condemning the immorality and the unpatriotic nature of those who advocated slow work, a ‘tragedy’ that could lead to ‘national suicide.’36

Fraser argued that slow work was a ‘disease’ that had made a serious impact on rail productivity over the decade 1906-1916. Slow work was partly a product of poor workplace supervision and planning by rail or tram managers; but the chief villains in his mind were radicals in the workplace spreading ‘poisonous ideas’ and who took ‘real pleasure’ in causing delays or damaging departmental property: ‘“Work Slowly”, “Stop work”, “Do what damage you can”, are mottoes they endeavour to instil, and they get a following in those they have contaminated.’ Fraser was not specific about the nature of ‘the agents of industrial disorder’ who fomented slow work in the railways; he suggested that they favoured the colour ‘red’ and that ‘the disease was undoubtedly imported here’. It was common for those opposed to left-wing radicalism in the period to stress its illegitimacy by describing it as a form of ‘contamination’ introduced from beyond Australia’s shores. Billy Hughes vilified radicals in similar terms during the 1916-1917 conscription debates.37

Seven of the Department’s managers responded to Fraser’s ‘masterly treatment’ of the subject in the ensuing discussion. Two of them specifically identified the IWW as the source of trouble, and all linked the productivity problems facing the Department to the welfare of the Australian nation. O.W. Brain, the Chief Electrical Engineer, could not believe that the same Australians who had played such a loyal role in the Great War could be ‘guilty of setting up the doctrine of slow work’. The ‘glib-tongued agitators of the I.W.W. class’ had to be ‘culled from the ranks’.

The exchange in shared values between senior rail managers was a critically important feature of Fraser’s address. The Association provided a platform to express and reinforce the values that they shared – or at least that Fraser expected them to share. Fraser interpreted his role as a paternalistic leader; responding to the comments, he observed that ‘I am what may be called the “father” of this Society’. Like all good fathers, Fraser took ‘…a keen and personal interest in the Society, and have therefore presented this paper at its first meeting.’ ‘Slow Work’ was subsequently published in the Department’s journal, The Railway and Tramway Budget, for wider dissemination amongst the staff.

The 1917 Strike

The opportunity to cull the IWW-style agitators from the Department’s ranks was provided by the Great Strike of 1917. On 2 August 1917 workers at the Department’s tram workshops at Randwick, and at the Eveleigh workshops, went on strike in protest at the reintroduction of the card system by Fraser. The strike quickly spread throughout the rail and tram service, and into a number of other crucial power supply and transport industries. The card issue was subsumed in a wider protest against wartime conditions. It is estimated that over 70,000 workers, up to 14 per cent of the NSW workforce, took part. However over 40 per cent of the rail and tram workforce remained on the job. The Nationalist Government in NSW, which had come to power as a result of Labor’s split over conscription, acted aggressively to defeat the strikers, and established an army of strike breakers who helped keep the trains and trams running. By early September the strike had collapsed, and the unions that supported it were deregistered by the NSW Industrial Court. Several of these unions took years to effectively reorganise.38

Fraser moved quickly to take advantage of the fact that the unions were deprived of official recognition by the state, facilitating the establishment of in-house unions who would be loyal to the Department. Over 3,000 of the strikers were refused re-employment by the Department; many others who were re-employed lost their seniority rights, or were forced to return to lower-paid positions than they had held prior to the strike. As Fraser made it clear to a meeting of senior rail and tram managers on 10 September 1917, the day the strike collapsed, ‘men who are known to be agitators will not be re-employed at all.’ Fraser’s definition of agitators included a wide category from IWW activists to those strikers who had simply joined picket lines, or took an ‘active’ part in the strike. The determination to specifically target key groups of agitators is indicated by the fact that of 141 Moulders employed at Eveleigh prior to the strike, and who had persistently engaged in industrial action, only 50 were re-employed after the strike.39

The conduct of the strike, and the response to it by Fraser and the NSW Government, was driven by the intensely felt impact of the war. The day the strike began the Sydney newspapers carried prominent reports of a major allied offensive which had been launched on the western front – another stage in the grim third battle of Ypres, which stirred patriotism at this latest attempt to decisively break the German line.40  The Sydney Morning Herald accused the strikers of treason to the men perishing in battle: the war was ‘the one urgent duty of the Empire’, and ‘every true unionist will from now on put the war before everything if he values his birthright and all his hardly-won privileges.’41

Sensitivity to accusations of disloyalty to nation and Empire were revealed when Fraser addressed a meeting of 1,500 strikers on 20 August at the Railway Institute.

As the Chief Commissioner walked on to the platform one of the strikers called upon the men to show that they were not disloyal by singing the National Anthem. There was a ready response, and before the strikers resumed their seats cheers were given for the ‘Boys at the Front’ and ‘Solidarity.’

When he rose to speak Fraser acknowledged that the meeting had been opened in the ‘right and proper way by men who are loyal to the Empire and their King’, and he added: ‘I believe you would be loyal to the department and yourselves, but you have been misled into going out on strike.’ Although Fraser remained adamant that his card system was not Taylorism, he faced persistent interjections of disbelief and hostility, reflected in images that the strikers displayed during a protest march conducted through the city streets that same day. One placard featured a caricature of Fraser presenting a railworker with a ‘monster card’ behind which lurked ‘a huge negro armed with a cat o’nine tails.’42 During the 1916 conscription referendum debate wild rumours had circulated that ‘coloured labour’ would be introduced to replace workers conscripted for military service.43 The strikers revived this fear to accuse Fraser of a symbolic betrayal of nation and race, a potent indictment from a people united in a commitment to a White Australia.

The close relationship that Fraser drew between patriotic loyalty to the Empire and loyalty to the Department was reflected in the wartime editions of TheRailway and Tramway Budget. Messages from rail and tram employees serving in France were regularly reprinted in The Budget; many editions featured photos of ‘Railway Heroes’ who had died on active service, and articles commemorated their bravery and a keenly felt loss of workmates and family members. A full page Roll of Honour of rail and tram employees killed in action appeared in every edition.44

Fraser had asserted his symbolic and patriotic leadership on the morning of 4 August, only two days after the strike began. At a time when the entire rail and tram system had been thrown into chaos, Fraser summoned his fellow managers to the Commissioners boardroom to mark the third anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Fraser reaffirmed ‘our loyalty as citizens of New South Wales to the Empire in the great struggle in which that Empire is engaged.’ Fraser made no reference to the strike; he did however observe that in the last twelve months, Australians had seemed less inclined ‘to part with either the last man or the last shilling’ in support of the Empire’s cause in the war, as Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher had promised in 1914. Every Australian, on the home front or on the battlefields of France and Belgium, had a responsibility to bring the war to a successful conclusion, and he urged his fellow officers to swear an oath to that effect. Supporting Fraser, Deputy Chief Commissioner Edmund Milne sharply linked the strike and the war: ‘Now, gentlemen, when you have the enemy at the gate as well as 12,000 miles away, you Australians, what is your duty? Think it over.’ To adhere to their duty, Milne appealed to their sense of ‘British endurance’ – ‘it is a trait of our national character that we are proud of.’ The meeting closed with the singing of the National Anthem, God Save The King. Leading his fellow managers in this rededication to duty, prominently reported in The Budget, Fraser presented himself not only as a rail manager but as a guardian of civic duty, rising above the turmoil of illegitimate industrial conflict to reassert the values that the Department and the community should embrace.45

To exercise his managerial control of the Department the most powerful of the weapons at Fraser’s disposal were not time cards or stop watches, the techniques of scientific management. The most reliable instruments of Fraser’s authority were the Department's 4,700 white collar salaried officers - managers, workplace supervisors and stationmasters - the overwhelming majority of whom were members of the Railway and Tramway Officers Association, formed in 1913, just in time to develop as another instrument of Fraser's new disciplinary and productivity strategies. The RTOA conceived of union solidarity as a form of corporate allegiance to the Commissioners and the Department, not in unity with the other rail and tram unions over industrial grievances or political protests.46 Of Fraser's confirmation as Chief Commissioner in January 1917, The Railway and Tramway Officers Gazette, the journal of the RTOA, gushed that the railways '...require a mind that can see through or around the block. Mr. Fraser's is the great engineering brain that has penetrated many railroad problems and made the ways easier for our trains, and in many cases more beautiful for our travellers.'47 The overwhelming loyalty of the salaried staff to their employer was a key factor in the strike's collapse: only 10 of them supported the 1917 strike.48

The Railway and Tramway OfficersGazette interpreted the 1917 strike as a justifying ordeal. In its only coverage of the strike, a Gazette editorial described a 67 year old engine driver who came out of retirement to act as a strike-breaker, recording the moment when the loyal driver brought the train to a suburban platform. Hearty cheers rang out from the crowd; boys begged to ride in the driver’s cabin with him. 'They were giving back to the driver his youth and the joys that made life good and true for him in all the years of his service to his country.' The Gazette expressed his abiding affection for 'the men of the footplate', even those who 'had marched the wrong way' – an oblique reference to the strikers, who would return to work and all would be forgiven:

'How lovely it is to forgive and to be forgiven! One big truth will stand out to be seen and to be realised by men as a result of this strike, and that is, that the officers have always had a greater love for the men than they were given credit for.'49

In November 1917 the Railway and Tramway Budget reproduced a photograph of a strike-breaking engine driver and his crew, whose significance was only briefly explained in a caption; there were no other articles or editorial comments on the strike published in the Budget – like the Gazette, the Budget seemed to consider the strike too shameful for extensive scrutiny. Despite its terse explanation, railworkers understood that the photograph, like the editorial published in the Gazette, represented legitimate and honourable behaviour.50 The photograph was, as Grant et. al. suggest, a visual representation that helped bring the organization and its guiding values meaningfully into being.51 In terms of expressing Fraser’s ideal of organisational behaviour, the photo in the Budget and the editorial in the Gazette were as much manifestations of his management narrative of service to both the Department and the community as any edict he might have directly delivered.

‘Thoroughly Departmentalised’: The Post Strike Period

In the post strike period the Rail and Tram Department was periodically disturbed at various attempts by NSW Labor governments to restore the jobs or seniority rights of the 1917 strikers. Of the 3,000 strikers refused re-employment at Fraser’s direction in September 1917, 2,000 were still seeking re-employment in 1920. An atmosphere of bitterness between strikers and non-strikers often manifested in the workplace. There were three Royal Commissions into aspects of the strike and the financial management of the railways between 1918 and 1924.52

Nonetheless the Department settled into relative stability in the 1920s. The Staff, which replaced the Budget as the Department’s journal in 1924, welcomed Fraser’s reappoinment for a seven year term in 1925, and the appointment of new commissioners to assist him in a task which retained its nation building significance. ‘We know of no positions in the State to which more honour attaches and which offer wider scope for valuable service in the interests of the people. The administration of the New South Wales railways and tramways is the biggest job in the Commonwealth of Australia.’53

The Staff added that ‘loyalty to the Administration is the first essential of good service.’ The Department cultivated loyalty through a strategy of welfarism. Dedicated to ‘helping, encouraging and defending’ the Department’s employees, The Staff was a key instrument for disseminating the welfarist strategy, featuring lengthy reports of the sporting activities of rail and tram staff in athletics, boxing, wrestling, soccer, rugby league, golf and cricket. The Staff recorded employee interest in music and gardening – beautifying railway stations or other workplaces, their participation in the annual Railway and Tramway Eisteddfod.54  The Staff also recorded the efforts of the Department to educate its employees in rail operations through the Railway and Tramway Institute. Established in 1891, by 1920 the Institute had 2,000 students enrolled in 27 subjects; its library held over 100,000 volumes. By 1927 over 27,000 Department staff were graduates and members of the Institute, sharing a bond of expertise and loyalty to the service while absorbing a culture of competitiveness that encouraged individualism, as career advancement was predicated on successfully completing the Institute’s examinations.55

Fraser persisted with productivity experiments, particularly bonus or incentive payment schemes. Workers were paid a bonus if they completed the tasks in less than ‘standard time.’ These schemes were primarily effective in the workshops, and Fraser claimed that the bonus scheme significantly improved productivity in the Eveleigh workshops over the course of the 1920s.56 Beyond the workshops, more ad hoc bonus or “reward” schemes were applied to innovative work practices and changes suggested by employees. In 1926 an examining fitter at Harden in southern New South Wales was awarded a bonus for a suggestion to ‘secure sandbox lids with strengthening chain.’ In April 1929 400 gangers and fettlers were awarded bonuses for ‘the best kept lengths’ of permanent way.57

By 1929 the Department had apparently so successively captured the loyalty of the staff and marginalised the influence of non-management approved unions that Arthur Chapman, the secretary of the NSW Australian Railways Union, which covered blue collar railworkers who supported the 1917 strike, complained that ‘the very life of the worker is bound up with the administration. He becomes thoroughly “departmentalised” … the union must assume the lead in these matters, and form its own sports organisations, bands, orchestras and holidays camps, even its motor clubs.’ During the 1930s the ARU established its own sporting groups, a Women’s Auxiliary, even its own brass band; but it lacked the resources to substantially challenge the Department’s influence. The ARU was still recovering from the 1917 strike; the union only achieved its first major industrial award for NSW railworkers in 1924 – seven years after the strike.58

In late 1929 Fraser prematurely retired due to ill-health and government dissatisfaction with Fraser’s inability to control the department’s deficit – a somewhat unfair criticism, as the department was prone to both political interference in terms of the construction of new rail lines, and growing wages costs that were decided by the arbitration tribunals – that is, beyond the commissioner’s control.59 Fraser had proved doggedly persistent in attempting to increase productivity, and at his official farewell he seemed to believe that he had imposed relative efficiency, and even some degree of harmony in the wake of the 1917 strike. Fraser had anticipated his imminent appointment as Chief Commissioner with an unprecedented address to workers at the Eveleigh workshops in November 1916. He concluded his career by returning to Eveleigh for another extraordinary celebration on 2 November 1929. Before a crowd of over 5,000 railworkers, Fraser stood at a platform over which was draped a large Union Jack. Fraser was thanked for his service as Chief Commissioner not by other senior rail managers, but by speakers ‘from among the men … and they came straight from their work, minus hats and coats.’ Fraser was hailed as one of the ‘greatest railway chiefs we have had’, and who was responsible for ‘the very much improved conditions under which they worked at Eveleigh.’ Fraser responded that ‘he had endeavoured to get the maximum of efficiency out of the staff, and he believed none in the Service had helped more in that object than the men of Eveleigh workshops.’60

Eveleigh had been a centre of industrial militancy during the First World War. The 1917 strike provided Fraser with an opportunity, as Taksa observes, to apply a ‘scientific selection’ of employees, blacklisting active trade unionists and recruiting new staff who did not have a familiarity with the ethos of solidarity and unionism that had previously prevailed in the workshops.61 The improved productivity that Fraser claimed had been achieved at Eveleigh justified either the removal of workers who dissented from his strategies from the workforce or their enforced conformity to his workplace regime. From Fraser’s perspective, the 1917 strike justified the linkages that he had drawn between productivity and patriotism, and that the Department’s workforce should, in the character of its workers, reflect the character of ideal citizens of the Empire.

Fraser did not quite impose unanimity of values and purpose; his management narrative also carried the sources of its own organizational ‘fragmentation’ and resistance. As Bryman concludes, a ‘leaders signs and symbols may be inherently more tenuous and equivocal than has typically been appreciated.’62 A substantial minority of workers remained loyal to their own standards of loyalty to each other, accessing counter-cultural messages through unions and radical politics, and sustained by a sense of grievance at the unjust treatment of the 1917 strikers, in turn stirring a new wave of industrial militancy in the 1930s.63 Yet during the 1920s Fraser had some success in improving productivity and in changing the organizational culture of the rail and tram workforce, as ARU secretary Chapman ruefully acknowledged. As Fraser stood before the assembled Eveleigh railworkers in November 1929 it is hardly surprising that he praised them as representing ‘the greatest body of workmen employed under any single administration in Australia.’64

1Lone Hand, 1 February 1917.

2 Grant, et. al., The Handbook of Organisational Discourse, p.3

3 Czarniawska, Writing Management, p.23

4 Fairclough, ‘Peripheral Vision’, pp.917-918, 922-925.

5 Clark & Rowlinson, ‘The Treament of History in Organisation Studies’, pp.344, 347

6 Higgins, ‘British Business History’.

7 Bryman, ‘Leadership in Organisations’, p.281.

8 Somers, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory’, p.85.

9 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, pp.3-4, 40-47.

10 Patmore, ‘Systematic Management and Bureaucracy’; Taksa, ‘All a Matter of Timing’.

11 Kelly, The End of Certainty.

12 Dean, Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society, pp.20, 128-129, 209.

13 Taksa, ‘The Cultural Diffusion of Scientific Management’.

14 ibid., p.440.

15NSW Railway and Tramway Budget, 1 March 1917.

16 Patmore, ‘Systematic Management and Bureaucracy’, pp.309-312.

17Lone Hand, 1 February 1917; NSW Railway and Tramway Magazine, 1 December 1920.

18Lone Hand, 1 February 1917.

19 Taksa, ‘All a Matter of Timing’, p.17.

20 Hearn, Working Lives, p.28.

21Sydney Morning Herald, 21 August 1917,

22 Patmore, ‘Systematic Management and Bureaucracy’, pp.313.

23 Hearn, Working Lives, p.28.

24 Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, pp.174-177.

25 Bryman, ‘Leadership in Organisations’, pp.276-277.

26 ‘Address by Mr. Fraser to Employees at the Locomotive and Carriage Wagon Shops, Eveleigh, 23 November 1916’.

27 Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, pp.206-209.

28SMH 23 & 25 November 1916.

29Co-Operator, 23 November 1916.

30Lone Hand, 1 February 1917.

31 ‘Address by Mr. Fraser’, pp.3, 5.

32 ibid., pp.1-2, 4.

33 ibid., p.4.

34 ibid., pp.4-5

35 ibid., pp.5-7.

36NSW Railway and Tramway Budget, 1 March 1917.

37 Hughes Papers MS1538/20/6.

38 Hearn, Working Lives, pp.29-32.

39 Report of the Royal Commissioner Mr. Justice Edmunds. 1922, pp.xli-xlii, 117.

40SMH 2 August 1917.

41SMH 7 August 1917.

42SMH 21 August 1917.

43Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1916.

44NSW Railway and Tramway Budget, 1 December 1916, 1 January, 2 July 1917.

45NSW Railway and Tramway Budget, 1 September 1917.

46 Hearn, ‘A Good Man for the Department’.

47 Railway and Tramway Officer’s Gazette, January 1917.

48 Report of the Royal Commissioner Mr. Justice Edmunds, p.488.

49Railway and Tramway Officer’s Gazette, September 1917.

50NSW Railway and Tramway Budget, November 1917.

51 D. Grant et. al., The Handbook of Organisational Discourse p.3.

52 Hearn, Working Lives, pp.33-35; Gunn, Along Parallel Lines, pp.299-308

53The Staff, 23 January 1925.

54The Staff, 23 September, 28 October 1926.

55The Staff, 27 April 1927; Hearn, ‘A Good Man for the Department’, p.69.

56 Patmore, ‘Systematic Management and Bureaucracy’, 1988 pp.313-14.

57The Staff, 28 October 1926; 22 April 1929.

58 Hearn, Working Lives, p.42.

59 Gunn, Along Parallel Lines, pp.319-323.

60The Staff, 23 December 1929.

61 Taksa, ‘All a Matter of Timing’, pp.22-23.

62 Bryman, ‘Leadership in Organisations’, pp.285-286.

63 Hearn, Working Lives, p.51.

64The Staff, 23 December 1929.

References

‘Address by Mr. Fraser to Employees at the Locomotive and Carriage Wagon Shops, Eveleigh, 23 November 1916’, NSW Railways Department pamphlet, Rail Printing Office Sydney 1917.

Co-Operator

Daily Telegraph

Lone Hand

NSW Railway and Tramway Budget

Report of the Royal Commissioner Mr. Justice Edmunds, into the administration of the NSW Railway and Tramway Service, 1922.

The Staff

Sydney Morning Herald

W. M. Hughes Papers, National Library of Australia.

Burgmann, Verity. Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge University Press Melbourne 1995.

Bryman, Alan. ‘Leadership in Organisations’, in Clegg, S. Hardy C.& Nord W., eds. Handbook of Organisation Studies, Sage London 1996.

Clark, Peter & Rowlinson Michael. ‘The Treament of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an “Historic Turn”?’ Business History, Vol.46 No.3 July 2004.

Czarniawska, Barbara. Writing Management: Organisation Theory as a Literary Genre, Oxford University Press Oxford 1999.

Dean, Mitchell. Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage Publications London 1999.

Fairclough, Norman. ‘Peripheral Vision, Discourse Analysis in Organisation Studies’, Organisation Studies 26 (6) 2005.

Foucault, Michel. ‘Governmentality’, in Foucault, Michel. Power, Essential Works Vol.3, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, London, 2001.

Gunn, John. Along Parallel Lines, A History of the Railways of New South Wales, Melbourne University Press Melbourne 1989.

Grant, D. Hardy, C. Oswick C. & Putnam L., The Handbook of Organisational Discourse, Sage London 2004.

Hearn, Mark. Working Lives, a history of Australian Railways Union in New South Wales, Hale and Iremonger Sydney 1990.

Hearn, Mark. ‘A Good Man for the Department: the Ethos of the Railway and Tramway Officers Association of New South Wales, 1913-1939’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol.30 No.112 April 1999.

Higgins David M., ‘British Business History: A Review of the Periodical Literature for 2003’, Business History, Vol.47 No.2 April 2005.

Kelly, Paul. The End of Certainty, Allen and Unwin Sydney 1992.

Patmore, Greg. ‘Systematic Management and Bureaucracy: the NSW Railways prior to 1932’, Labour & Industry, Vol.1 No.2 June 1988.

Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom, Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1999.

Somers, Margaret R. ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory’, in Hall J.R. (ed.) Reworking Class, Cornell University Press 1997.

Taksa, Lucy. ‘The Cultural Diffusion of Scientific Management: the United States and New South Wales’, Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol.37 No.3 September 1995.

Taksa, Lucy. ‘All a Matter of Timing: Managerial Innovation and Workplace Culture in the New South Wales Railways and Tramways prior to 1921’, Australian Historical Studies, No.110 April 1998.

Mark Hearn,

Honorary Research Associate,
Work and Organisational Studies,
University of Sydney.

Copyright. Do not cite without the permission of the author. m.hearn@econ.usyd.edu.au

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