Tom McDonald: union leader and pioneer of superannuation

TOM MCDONALD: 1926-2022

Tom McDonald was a building union leader, industry reformer and a pioneer of superannuation with longstanding ramifications for all workers.

Union activist Tom McDonald

McDonald instigated stronger health and safety practices and better working conditions in the building sector, making it one of the safest and most efficient.

When the barristers’ Wentworth Chambers in Phillip Street was under construction in 1957, the workers when putting the formwork up around the outside of the building had to lean over, lock their knee on the inside piece of formwork and nail it as they connected everything together. It was extremely dangerous. Strikes and hearings followed.

Following the intervention of McDonald, the Department of Labour and Industry committed to designing external scaffolding that workers could use. As projects were getting taller, this transformed how building workers worked around the outer extremities of buildings.

Tom McDonald was one of 10 children born to Elizabeth (“Liz”) Sarah (née Davis) and Thomas McDonald. The experience of poverty, depression and war shaped Tom and many of his generation. Raised in Glebe, he left school at 14. His father was a cleaner for the Sydney City Council who died after falling from a tram in 1954.

Liz McDonald was a full-time mum; one daughter required constant care, stricken with cerebral palsy. One child died as a toddler; another, aged 23, died from glomerulonephritis (Bright’s disease), which if detected early and treated might not have been fatal. Those were the days before universal healthcare.

Tom’s mother called the stagnant water lying under broken floorboards at their two-bedroom tenement in Glebe “a kitchen with water views”.

He almost failed to complete an apprenticeship because he was cranky about poor work conditions on Cockatoo Island. McDonald led his first strike of the apprentices arguing for more work and for competent training. He sought to self-educate as a tradesman until he found a friendly builder who helped him complete his training.

Feeling that the communists had better explanations for the woes of the world, in the mid-1940s McDonald joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). McDonald met bootmaker Tom Payne, one of the CPA founders, who lived nearby. Finalising his apprenticeship, McDonald then joined the Building Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia (BWIU).

McDonald was appointed temporary organiser in 1950, and then as an organiser, later elected NSW Assistant Secretary, then NSW branch secretary and then national secretary.

He was widely seen as principled, hard-working, and honest. In the BWIU the leadership was known for sticking to agreements. “My word is my bond” more than any Marxist precept was applied.

Tom McDonald (centre) with Bill Kelty and Ged Kearney singing Solidarity Forever.

In 1971, the establishment of accident pay, the payment of the difference between workers’ compensation and full award wages paid by the employer, was a major achievement of the union.

Long-service leave for the building industry was another achievement. The Wran government legislated accordingly after winning office in 1976, enabling a portable long-service benefits scheme; similar schemes were then adopted throughout Australia.

Australia’s modern system of superannuation never would have materialised without McDonald’s strategic nous in the first term of the Hawke government. Winning superannuation for building workers transformed Australia.

In 1983, the building unions conducted a campaign for a wage increase. The employers agreed to a weekly $9 allowance being paid. But when the matter went before the court, the claim was rejected as a breach of wage-indexation guidelines. Bill Kelty and Garry Weaven, the then Secretary and Assistant Secretary of the ACTU respectively, proposed: “Why don’t we seek to develop a campaign for superannuation – a $9 superannuation scheme?”

At first, McDonald saw numerous complications: “My mind boggled about all the problems, in trying to establish throughout Australia a central scheme with big builders with modern, administrative systems down to a small employer who uses the glove box of his ute as his office. I walked back from down the other end of the city to the office, and I thought, ‘Well, if ever we’re going to get superannuation this was the moment because we had the ACTU supporting it.’”

The employers were morally committed to pay $9. McDonald saw that the emergence of computerisation in the 1980s made the decision to establish superannuation in the building industry possible. The superannuation claim spread to other industries as new industry funds were formed. The rest is history. The industry fund McDonald founded, Cbus, now manages over $70 billion in members’ money.

Throughout BWIU history, there was an emphasis on wider activism. With the building of the Opera House, the union wanted a working-class artist to perform. In 1960, a visit by Paul Robeson, the charismatic American baritone performer and activist, was arranged. The construction workers gave him a safety helmet, writing “Paul” across the front. Robeson delivered a stirring rendition of Ol’ Man River.

Three of the 10 McDonald siblings were conferred Membership of the Order of Australia – Tom in 1994 for services to Australian unionism and superannuation. His brother Don in 2010 for service to community health through the Schizophrenia Research Institute and sister Helen Hewitt in 2019 for significant service to the superannuation industry, to mental health and to women.

Audrey McDonald, Tom’s soulmate, fellow activist and partner of 62 years, was in 1989 was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the trade union movement and to women’s affairs.

Tom McDonald died on April 16. Few Australians have had more consequence upon their fellow Australians within their lifetime.

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