Content area
Full text
Labor Rights and The Coolie Question
In 2014 the conservative Australian Institute of Public Affairs called for the abolition of the minimum wage--at the time AU$16.87, the highest in the industrial world and twice that of the United States.1The Australian minimum, enacted in Victoria in 1896, was the first in the world. Other nations copied it, and the International Labor Organization inscribed it as an international convention in 1928. Responding to calls for its abolition, University of Melbourne historian Marilyn Lake reminded Australians that the minimum wage was a "symbol of Australian values." Envisioned as a "living wage, sufficient to meet the variety of needs of a person living in a civilized community ... [it] recognized workers as human beings and equal citizens," she wrote.2
Why did Australia lead the world with its minimum wage? Lake takes a world-history approach to answer this question. Australians in the late nineteenth century were keenly aware of global labor trends, she argues, in particular the spread of contract, indenture, and sweated factory labor in the era of slave emancipation. Their perspective was unusually "global" because the Australian colonies were not, as conventionally understood, isolated outposts of Britain. Rather, Australia was proximate to mass Asian labor emigrations and was itself the "site of dynamic encounters between the subjects of the British and Chinese empires."3In Victoria, a politics of labor "protection" connected concerns with domestic sweating, Chinese immigrant workers, and competition from foreign manufactures. Although the Chinese in Melbourne were not indentured--in some cases they formed their own labor unions--whites targeted them as "coolies" to explain the perceived threat of cheap Chinese labor. Labor protection, which included a state-sanctioned minimum wage, embodied the "fantasy" of a "White Man's World" and the first federal "White Australia" policy (1901), which excluded all Asians from immigration.4
Inspired by these issues, Marilyn Lake and Sophie Loy-Wilson coconvened an international...