The bull system

Industry > Waterside Workers > The Bull System

Benefits won by the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) before 1914 were long gone by the 1930s. A mile of wharves on Hickson Road, between Darling Harbour and Miller’s Point was known to wharfies as The Hungry Mile. Each day, men assembled at the gates to seek casual and ill-paid work. As a ship came in to be loaded or unloaded, stevedoring agents selected a few of the men.

The stress and humiliation were intensified by the “bull” system of selection: the agents wanted big, muscular, compliant men - the “bulls”. Agents favoured non-union Permanent and Casual workers (P and C’s or scabs). Brawls were common between WWF and P and C members.

Under the stress of supplying war materiel, this regime crumbled. Ships’ captains complained of theft, army officers described sabotage, and everyone denounced the slow pace of work. To remove this lethal bottleneck, the Curtin Government created a Stevedoring Industry Commission (SIC), including Jim Healy of the WWF as well as employer groups. In early 1943 the SIC scrapped the bull system in favour of self-selecting gangs who rotated the work.

The new system was widely welcomed - except in Pyrmont where resistance was led by Pyrmont’s anti-communist branch executive, in opposition to the Federation and its Communist Party leaders. When 3000 wharfies met in Leichhardt Stadium in March, and declared a strike, this was “in effect a strike against the federal body.” (Margo Beasley, Wharfies). After days of intense lobbying, the vote was reversed, the rank and file soon acknowledged the benefits of the innovation, and the bull system was dead.

The abolition of the system transformed waterside work, as the Sydney Morning Herald (7 June 1951) described it :

The "bull system" has gone. Men are now allocated to employers by the Stevedoring Industry Board from pickup depots at Towns, Bond and Sussex Street… Wharfies now group themselves into gangs and elect gang leaders…. It is a healthier system, and a ready-made foundation for a sound incentives system…

Working conditions have been greatly improved. Before the war, shifts were of 12 hours, and it was not uncommon for the same teams to work on for 24 hours. There are still men about the wharves who remember having worked such punishing shifts as 48 hours, broken only for meals and smoke-ohs.

To-day's award provides for three shifts of eight, six and seven hours—8 a.m. to 5 p.m., 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., midnight to 7 a.m.….

"Attendance money"… was a first step towards decasualising the industry. If a man turns up and there's no work for him, he gets 12/.