William Spence
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William Guthrie Spence (7 August 1846 - 13 December 1926), Australian trade union leader and politician, played a leading role in the formation of both Australia's largest union, the Australian Workers Union, and the Australian Labor Party.
Spence was born in the Orkney Islands, Scotland, the son of a stonemason, and migrated to Australia with his family as a six-year-old child. He had no formal education and worked as a farm labourer in the Wimmera district of Victoria from the age of 13. Later he acquired a gold-mining license and worked for various mining companies. In 1874 he was one of a number of militant mine-workers who formed the Amalgamated Miners' Association of Victoria, and he became the union's general secretary in 1882. He led the union into mergers with similar unions in the other Australian colonies, forming the Amalgamated Miners' Association of Australasia. In 1886 Spence also helped form the Amalgamated Shearers' Union.
Since the Australian economy was expanding rapidly at this time and there was an acute shortage of labour, the unions were in a strong bargaining position and were able to secure great improvements in the living standards of Australia's rural working class. But the Depression which began in 1891 led to acute class conflict as the mine owners and graziers tried to cut wages to remain solvent in the face of falling commodity prices, and the unions resisted. In 1894 Spence led the amalgamation of the miners, shearers and other rural workers into the Australian Workers Union (AWU), Australia's largest and most powerful union. There were bitter strikes in the maritime and pastoral industries, in which Spence played a leading role, although he was generally a force for moderation in the labour movement.
The defeat of the strikes of 1891-94 led Spence and other labour leaders to move into politics. Spence supported the formation of the Progressive Political League, an early labour party, in Victoria in 1891, and in the same year supported the first election campaign by the Labour Party in New South Wales, which won a number of seats in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly. In 1898 Spence entered politics himself, becoming MP for Cobar in western New South Wales. He remained president of the AWU, making him one of the most powerful men in New South Wales politics. He described himself as "an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, socialist."
Unlike many in the labour movement, Spence supported the federation of the Australian colonies, and in 1901 he was elected to the first Australian House of Representatives as MP for Darling. Like most of the older generation of labour leaders who were born in the United Kingdom, Spence was associated with the more conservative wing of the Australian Labor Party, led by Billy Hughes. He was not really suited to parliamentary life and did not hold office in the Watson or Fisher Labor governments. When Hughes became Prime Minister in 1915, however, Spence became Postmaster-General in his government.
In 1916 Hughes decided to introduce conscription to maintain Australia's contribution to the Allied forces in World War I. Most of the Labor Party bitterly opposed this, but Spence sided with Hughes. As a result he was expelled from the party along with Hughes and the other conscriptionist MPs. He was also deposed as president of the AWU and shortly after was expelled from the union. At the 1917 federal election, although Hughes was easily returned to power, Spence lost his seat, mainly because the AWU organised the rural workers to oppose him. Shortly after he was returned to Parliament at a by-election for the Tasmanian seat of Darwin, but he retired in 1919. He took up farming and died at Terang, Victoria, in 1926.
Spence was typical of the founding generation of the Australian labour movement, in that he was born in Britain rather than Australia, was self-educated, was active in the temperance movement and was an active Protestant Christian - he was a Primitive Methodist lay preacher. Like most of his generation, he was loyal to the British Empire and thus supported conscription, while the younger, Australian-born and more secular (or Irish-Catholic) wing of the labour movement opposed it. Unlike Hughes, he soon regretted his break with the Labor Party and never recovered from his rejection by the union he helped found.
In 1972 the Canberra suburb of Spence was named after William Guthrie Spence. In October 2003 the Australian Workers' Union named its Melbourne headquarters in Spence's honour.
