(2024) Unionist and Clever Boxer Fought Back When Stung. Stan Sharkey, 1933-2024.

Published in edited form on-line in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 June 2024

Stan Sharkey (1933-2024), NSW and national leader of building workers, former amateur and professional boxer, jockey, apprentice bricklayer, then skilled tradesman, communist, deserves tribute for an interesting, vital, important life.

Sharkey served as the first joint National Secretary of the Construction Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), and held positions as National Secretary, Assistant National Secretary and New South Wales Secretary of the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU).

Along with other now departed veterans, such as Pat Clancy, Tom McDonald and Ernie Boatswain, he provided leadership to establish industry superannuation, severance pay, and banning unsafe practices.

Born in Matraville, one of 12 children to James Patrick Sharkey, World War I veteran and jack-0f-all-trades, and Gladys, domestic duties, Stan grew up short, tough, and stone broke in a community of labourers, tradies, and domestic workers, in a mixed community of Aboriginal, Anglo and Celtic Australians.

During World War Two, his mother joined Jessie Street’s Progressive Housewives Association, which later became the Union of Australian Woman, loosely aligned with communist party sympathisers. Yet both his parents were members of the Labor Party in a stretch of Sydney’s eastern suburbs that was unmistakenly poor.

A cousin of his father, Lance Sharkey (1898-1967), long-time leader of the Communist Party of Australia from the Depression years to the 1960s, became the more powerful, political influence.

Aged eight, after numerous schoolyard fights at Matraville School, then Daceyville Primary, the boy was sent to Billy Moran’s gymnasium near Central rail station for boxing lessons. He needed toughening. Schoolkids would bully, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting “Sharkey the Com, Sharkey the Com”, alluding to his notorious relative.

Moving to Maroubra Junction High, on a short fuse, Sharkey punched one tormentor and was expelled.

Remarkably for someone who trained hard, was fiercely competitive, who could deliver a powerful upper right cut (as an amateur, he was unbeaten in fights at the Sydney Stadium; as a professional, Sharkey says he fought 17 professional bouts in the light-weight class, for 12 wins and a draw), Sharkey presented in the 1970s onwards as mellow, calm, even gentlemanly.

Before his mind went blank, he completed memoirs, A Life Well Lived, to recollect key events.

Sharkey says that Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, Howard Fast’s novels (Spartacus was his most famous), the “Red Dean of Canterbury”, the Rev. Hewlett Johnson’s The Socialist Sixth of the World, radicalised him. Listening to speakers in the Sydney Domain sealed his interest in communism, and he was schooled in Marxist political economy at the CPA Marx schools. A lifetime adherent to Soviet communism, he only relented when the whole edifice finally collapsed.

Sharkey was humble, mostly without hubris; it was common to hear him described – of all the leaders of his union – that he was the nicest, a listener, always trying to find common ground, but with steely determination to get the right outcome.

During his boxing career, the Melbourne-based sports commentator Ron Casey wrote a full-page feature in the Daily Mirror newspaper in which he described Sharkey as “a clever boxer, who fights back best when stung”. Years later, Sharkey recalled that those few words summed up his whole philosophy of life.

When he was elected a full-time organiser of the BWIU, the then State Secretary, Pat Clancy, inducted the recruit. Part peptalk, part admonition, Clancy insisted on impeccable personal behaviour, and the need to dress neatly, wearing a shirt and tie, but nothing flashy. This was no bourgeois hankering for respectability; it was reflective of a working-class determination to confidently look the part in representing and defending members. Smart casual was more common in the 1980s onwards. Clancy always insisted on a mindset of courtesy, not only to union members and non-member workers on sites, but also with employers, making sure that before speaking to members on the job, the organiser visited the Site Office to advise management that they were there, before commencing to talk to anyone. In a sometimes-rough industry, Clancy counselled to never get provoked into fisticuffs.

After the end of the Second World War, the BWIU and others established the Tranby training college for Aboriginal people, predominantly young people, in a property purchased for that purpose in Glebe. The union donated money towards the purchase but also organised volunteer labour among its members to convert several old houses into a modernised training college. They touted for apprenticeships for such young people. Many an apprentice carpenter, for example, was trained on-the-job in the construction of the Opera House. For many decades, Sharkey was intimately involved in this cooperative.

In the late 1960s, Sharkey campaigned to ban “overhand” bricklaying. This was where there was no external scaffolding; bricklayers worked on the edge of a many-storeyed building, without protection, hanging over the ledge, nothing between them and the concrete footpath below.

Another industrial campaign centred on accident pay and full award wages for all building workers injured on the job. The building industry was dangerous. Yet compensation payments were inadequate to cover mortgage or rent assistance for a family, let alone normal expenses. Numerous stop-work meetings and, ultimately, various hearings before the Industrial Relations Commission yielded a positive outcome.

In the early 1970s, Stan successfully fought against the dispossession of the indigenous population of La Perouse for a development by L.J. Hooker.

In the struggle against the lawlessness of the BLF, one incident stands out. In the early 1980s, one night after midnight he heard a noise “like metal rubbing on metal” coming from his car parked below his bedroom window. A light shone in the dark and one of the men interfering with his vehicle, features obscured in the gloom, shouted: “One way or another we’re going to get you…”. A clip load of automatic rifle fire hit the apartment block. The next day, police advised that his car was wired to explode. Such bastardry led Premier Wran to call for the deregistration of the BLF, which the NSW and Federal Labor governments immediately proceeded to do.

Along with Ernie MacDonald, a then 33-years’veteran of Civil and Civic – the Lend Lease company, Sharkey played an important role in the Construction Industry Development Agency, the body set up by the Hawke Labor government in 1991 to radically overhaul the building industry. Conducting business fairly, ensuring the workforce was effectively trained and credentialled, was a moral imperative for leaders of their calibre.

Sharkey spent several years in Melbourne trying to integrate the remnant of the old BLF and other unions into the new CFMEU.

A lot fell on Sharkey’s shoulders. Frustratingly, he lamented that: “Only a small minority of the elected officers of the Branch had sufficient of the personal qualities to face up to the enormous task ahead.” In NSW, of one able, yet somewhat cantankerous colleague, Sharkey quipped that he “was like a prized cow that gives a record amount of milk and then knocks the pail over spilling the lot”.

In 1990, he called one of the Labor Council representatives on the Board of NSW State Super and said: “I know you have consolidated the sites at the corner of Phillip, Bent, & Bridge Street. I bet you intend to do a big development, a couple of office towers. The rumour ‘around the traps’ is that you’ll award the job to Lend Lease. Can I get you to reconsider? I think you should assess the bid by Bruno Grollo. It would be good in Sydney if Lend Lease had a bit of competition.”

“Grocon [Grollo’s company] are doing 101 Collins Street. You could use the same builders and same architects for both. Grollo have not done a big one in Sydney. I cannot guarantee everything would be strike-free. You know that. But I can guarantee I will personally have my eye on the job and make sure any unnecessary disruptions are minimised and prevented.” This indicated an entrepreneurial flare. Governor Phillip and Governor Macquarie Towers, two office landmarks of Sydney were the result.

It would dishonour Stan to paint him as a saint. He was human, real, flawed, vulnerable, honest, understated, brave, who made a fair share of mistakes. He was sometimes wrong, tough on himself for needing to do better, but broadly respected across ideological barriers.

He was also a strong internationalist and part of the Australian union leadership that financially supported the African National Congress and many other international union-related bodies. He personally met Nelson Mandela after his release from prison in South Africa in early 1990.

Stan died in June after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.

It is fitting that when Stan died the South Sydney Rabbitohs released a statement mourning the loss of a renowned supporter, who did so much to organise for the Club’s return, after a two-year hiatus, to the official rugby league competition. In 1999 he was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for services to the union movement.

Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot wrote that we are all born “astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” Those words suggest we better make the most of the time we are given. Stan Sharkey lit the stage for the union movement, his members, and his family. He illuminated and enriched thousands of lives and was a guide to many.

He is survived by his wife Paula, and his five children Maxine, Steve, Kerry, Debra and Emma – of whom he was immensely proud (all completed tertiary education), and a mob of grandchildren.

Postscript (2024)

John Sutton, the retired, former National Secretary of the CFMEU, asked me to write something on Stan.

The State Super Board member was me. We hadn’t selected anyone at the time. Sharkey was wrong in assuming Lend Lease were “the pea”. I reported his views and absented myself from any decisions on that project.

In my day in the union movement, I admired Sharkey as a sea-green incorruptible figure in a difficult industry. .

The old BWIU leadership were mostly pro-Moscow communists. Some parts of the Labor Right called them ‘ocker Stalinists’ as distinct from the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) types who were from the 1970s onwards Eurocommunist in their sympathies. (Here is not the place to unpack all that that meant.) The political outlook of both was far from my political sympathies, but almost always these comms were principled, constructive on industrial relations disputes (though sometimes some of their number were excessively militant), but at the leadership level, their word was their bond. You did a deal, you shook hands, they honoured. I liked them, particularly Stan, who ran against me as Assistant Secretary of the Labor Council of NSW in 1984. We came to know, like, and respect each other from then on.

After Sharkey’s retirement, the capture of the CFMEU by criminals and thugs, with no ideological pretensions or discernible Labor principles, is a great contemporary scandal and disaster for the Australian union movement.