How Labour Governs

About This Book

First published in 1923, How Labour Governs is a pioneering study of the Australian Labor Party and the tensions between parliamentary politics and the trade union movement. Its author, Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957), wrote the book from firsthand experience: from 1919 to 1921 he served as private secretary to John Storey, the Labour Premier of New South Wales, witnessing at close range the clashes between the party's elected ministers and its extra-parliamentary organization.

Childe analyzed the history of what were then the world's first Labour governments — the early Commonwealth governments in Australia in the 1900s and the state governments of New South Wales and Queensland — arguing that a fundamental flaw in the labour movement caused it to lose its way once in power. He traced this failure through the rise and fall of caucus control, the growing rift between industrial and political wings, the influence of the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, and the push for One Big Union. Written in a spirit of bitter disillusion after the party cast him aside, the book remains a landmark in the study of labour politics.

Childe would later become one of the twentieth century's most influential archaeologists, celebrated for works on prehistoric Europe. How Labour Governs was his first book. The work is in the public domain.

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