Unionist and clever boxer fought back when stung
STAN SHARKEY: 1933-2024
Stan Sharkey was the national leader of building workers, a former amateur and professional boxer, jockey, apprentice bricklayer and then skilled tradesman and communist.
Sharkey served as the first joint national secretary of the Construction Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), and held senior positions in the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU).
Stan Sharkey was president of the Building Workers Industrial Union, and is seen here on the site of the Grosvenor Building in Sydney in 1984.Credit: Fairfax
Along with other now-departed veterans, such as Pat Clancy, Tom McDonald and Ernie Boatswain, he provided leadership to establish industry superannuation and severance pay and to ban unsafe practices.
Sharkey was born in Matraville, Sydney, one of 12 children to James Patrick Sharkey (World War I veteran and jack-of-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 Indigenous, Anglo and Celtic Australians.
During World War II, his mother joined Jessie Street’s Progressive Housewives Association, which later became the Union of Australian Woman, loosely aligned with communist sympathisers. Yet both his parents were members of the Labor Party in a stretch of Sydney’s eastern suburbs that was unmistakeably poor.
Stan and Paula Sharkey after Stan’s life was threatened via gunshots and car tampering in 1985.Credit: Fairfax Media
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, he was sent to Billy Moran’s gymnasium near Central rail station for boxing lessons. He needed toughening. Schoolkids would bully him, 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 and who could deliver a powerful upper right cut, Sharkey presented in the 1970s onwards as mellow, calm and even gentlemanly.
Sharkey says that Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, Howard Fast’s novels (Spartacus was his most famous), the Rev Hewlett Johnson’s Red Dean of Canterbury, 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 relented only when the whole edifice finally collapsed.
Sharkey was humble, mostly without hubris; it was common to hear him described as the nicest of all the union leaders, a listener, always trying to find common ground, but with a steely determination to get the right outcome.
During his boxing career, 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 pep talk, 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 work 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. In a sometimes-rough industry, Clancy counselled to never get provoked into fisticuffs.
After the end of World War II, the BWIU and others established the Tranby training college for Indigenous, 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 co-operative.
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.
Stan Sharkey addresses builders at the “Save the Building Industry Rally” at Chifley Square in 1976.Credit: Fairfax Media
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, Sharkey 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 …” . Automatic rifle fire hit the apartment block. The next day, police advised that his car was wired to explode. Such bastardry led the NSW premier Neville Wran to call for the deregistration of the BLF, which the NSW and federal Labor governments immediately proceeded to do.
Stan Sharkey in 1985.Credit: Fairfax
Along with Ernie MacDonald, a then 33-year veteran of Civil and Civic, 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 and ensuring the workforce was effectively trained and credentialed was a moral imperative for leaders of their calibre.
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, and 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 Sharkey to paint him as a saint. He was human, real, flawed, vulnerable, honest, understated, brave, and he 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 met Nelson Mandela after his release from prison in South Africa in early 1990.
Stan Sharkey - NSW Secretary of The Building Workers Industrial Union, 1980.Credit: Fairfax
Sharkey died in June after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. Before his mind went blank, he completed memoirs, A Life Well Lived, to recollect key events.
It is fitting that when he 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.
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 – and a mob of grandchildren.