Written by: Michael Williss on 14 November 2025
On November 3, 2025, the working class lost an outstanding leader, and our Party lost an outstanding member.
Comrade Ron Owens, 90, came to Adelaide from Broken Hill as a young man seeking work. He already had eight years of experience working in the Broken Hill mines when he came to Adelaide. He started at a factory where conditions were terrible, left, and walked up to a construction site offering to do labouring. He was taken on and stayed for six years, gaining experience as a rigger and as a pile-driving crane operator. In that capacity, he was sent to Sydney to drive piles for the expansion of the new Sydney Airport runway out into sea water. While there, he had a brief discussion with Norm Gallagher about working in the Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF)
When he returned to SA, he worked all over the state as a rigger and crane driver. Then, in the late 60s, when Les Robinson came to SA from NSW to lead the SA Branch of the BLF, he was taken on as its sole organiser. He and Les soon became a working class tag team in an ongoing wrestle with the boss class over union rights and workers’ gains.
The SA BLF had been very poorly run prior to Les Robinson’s arrival, and had only 300 members when Ron started organising. Ron had to go as far as Ceduna on the West Coast, and down to the South-East, signing up members and collecting their membership fees. By the time of the BLF’s joining other construction unions in the CFMEU, it had 4.500 labourers as members.
Cleaning up the industry included stopping the use of the hod, a wooden structure on a long shoulder pole, used to carry bricks or mortar up ladders. It was dangerous and backbreaking. Ron also put a stop to riding the hook, also very dangerous, although there was a certain bravado in being a “doggie” and riding the plank.
As Party members, Ron and Les worked closely with former Ironworkers SA State Secretary and Central Committee member Charlie McCaffrey, as well as welcoming and mentoring the growing numbers of left-wing students wanting to expand the Worker-Student Alliance and integrate with the working class.
In October 1969 they had shown their support for students protesting against the US War of Aggression Against Vietnam by defying a United Trades and Labour Council (UTLC) ban at the official Labour Day procession on the carrying of slogans attacking police brutality. They organised their members, and together with the students and other militant workers, they had marched as a large separate group.
On another occasion, Ron and a group of BLF members present at a Vietnam Moratorium march repelled a group of Nazis who had tried to disrupt the anti-war demonstration. That is an example worth reflecting on today.
As a young uni student and a recently joined member of the Party, I was always welcomed at the BLF office, and looked after when I had holiday jobs in the industry. On one occasion, there were a couple of us working on digging foundation trenches at the Institute of Technology Levels campus, and I told Ron that we had no facilities on site. We had to sit on our backsides in the dirt to eat our sandwiches. There was no shade. The next day, Ron pulled up in his car, and got out holding a handkerchief to his right eye, and looking quite distressed. He introduced himself to the site supervisor and asked him if he had anything for his eye.
“Yeah, I’ll have a look. What have you done to it?” said the supervisor.
“Me, nothing,” said Ron. “But there’s something bloody wrong with it, ‘cos I can’t see a lunch shed for those three blokes over there. Get one by tomorrow!”
And it was there the next day.
One of the other blokes on the job had done some work on the wharves in Melbourne.
“Did you ever come across Ted Bull?” I asked. Ted was the WWF Victorian branch secretary.
“Hell yeah,” he laughed. “Only a thin, wiry bloke, but the toughest bastard I’ve ever met.”
Les Robinson was a small bloke, but also very tough. When he and Ron went into a struggle, they went in to win.
In June 1970, the membership drive was in full swing. Les and Ron were both arrested on the new Modbury Hospital site, which they had entered to sign up members. There was no law against them doing so, and any penal provisions against unions had been smashed the previous year through the great struggle to free Clarrie O’Shea, so the police arrested them under laws never intended for use in an industrial dispute. Les was charged under the Road Traffic Act and Ron under the Police Offences Act and the Lottery and Gaming Act.
More significantly, both faced charges issued by the Chamber of Manufacturers of having breached orders made in the SA Industrial Commission that the union should stop hindering the business operations of certain building companies and three sub-contractors. This use of civil proceedings in an industrial dispute was a new ruling class tactic following the defeat of the penal powers of the Arbitration system in the O’Shea struggle.
When the BLF officials sought the support of the UTLC, its acting secretary, J Calnan, wrote back denying that “the arrests were ordered by the construction companies…it cannot be said that the charges are in the nature of an industrial matter.”
Ron later told 3CR’s Construction Gang radio interviewer that he had not been scared.
“The most frightened bloke was Hawke. He was a dog, that bloke, working behind the scenes...he was going to do wonders, but he did bloody nothing.”
His treachery was revealed when it was disclosed that the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ (ACTU) Bob Hawke had been in secret negotiations with the UTLC, Collaroy Constructions, the Chamber of Manufacturers and the Australian Labor Party (ALP)-led Plasterers’ Union (which claimed the labourers as their members), and had approved a strikebreaking proposal whereby a supervisor from the construction company would be enrolled as an FEDFA member (a union contesting coverage of crane drivers on construction sites) and placed on standby to operate the crane should the BLF member driving it walk off during a concrete pour.
When their court case resumed on September 9, the two refused, as trade union leaders, to recognise the authority of the bosses’ court and were fined and jailed for three weeks.
Bosses look for new penal powers
The try-on in the capitalist courts emboldened the employers. They were desperate for new penal powers to replace those smashed in the O’Shea struggle in 1969. Again, they focused on the BLF. It was the most militant union in SA. After Les and Ron began recruiting members in 1967, they had grown the union from 300 to 3000 members. But the recruitment often involved picketing worksites and taking advantage of contradictions between competing employers and contractors.
(Ron and SA BLF President Snowy Cameron, c. 1971)
In 1972, a dispute arose between the union and Adriatic Terrazzo and Foundation which went to the courts seeking an injunction against the union on the basis of another civil law, the law of torts. A tort is a harm or damage caused by the action of another person who, if found guilty, is liable to make good the harm or damage, typically by a payment to the successful claimant. It was intended to resolve matters between persons in the civil arena, not between unions and employers in the industrial arena.
Les and Ron refused to appear to answer the charges and instead concentrated on reestablishing picket lines broken up by police the previous day and strengthening those at Adriatic sites. Concrete deliveries to Adriatic sites were blocked. This was despite a director of Adriatic, Mario Candeloro, admitting in the Supreme Court that he had threatened to blow Robinson's head off with a shot-gun if concrete deliveries to the firm were stopped or the men were forced to join the union.
Having defied the court, Les and Ron were arrested within days and jailed indefinitely for contempt of court. Les and Ron adopted an attitude of proletarian defiance and firm class resolve. "I will stay in as long as is necessary to win this dispute,” said Les. “I will not purge myself to the court unless it means we can win the dispute.”
"By winning, I mean that Adriatic Terrazzo & Foundations Pty. Ltd. agree to employ union labour. I will settle for nothing else."
"This is the policy of our members and it is paramount that we uphold this policy, even if it means going to jail."
Ron agreed. "Nobody likes the thought of going to jail,” he said. “However, I'm defending union principles and I'll stay inside indefinitely. I won't purge myself, either."
Although sent to jail for an Indefinite period for contempt of the Supreme Court, Les and Ron were heartened by support from prison officers who, at a meeting the previous week, declared unanimously that they would not process any union official arrested under the tort law. Non-processing of prisoners meant that they would not be documented, escorted, locked in a cell or supervised by the officers.
Further heartening support came from CPA (M-L) leaders Ted Hill, Clarrie O’Shea and Ted Bull, who sent a message of encouragement to them in jail.
Ron was certainly heartened by the action of his wife Bev, who went to building sites to gain support for the two jailed officials.
The federal executive of the ABCEF (ie. BLF) also sent three Victorian comrades to assist the SA branch while Les and Ron were inside. Marco Masterson wrote in May 1973 that “1972 ended a year of great struggle by the Federation on many fronts: wages, and against the war in Vietnam, building Unionism and job improvements…But I feel our best effort was in South Australia.”
With Les and Ron in jail, builders’ labourers decided at a strike meeting that, for every day the two officials were in jail, members of the union in SA would do no work. The workers were all the more incensed because of the arrest of 11 unionists who were picketing the job which was the source of the dispute.
In the same week, about 40 key concrete batching operators stopped work indefinitely in protest at the jailing of the two officials. The batchers were members of the AWU, and the AWU secretary, Jim Dunford, said: "We are prepared to back any efforts to get the two union men out of jail. The company, Adriatic Terrazzo & Foundations Pty. Ltd., must be stopped from employing non-union labour."
While rank and file members kept up the struggle to free Les and Ron, the response from other sections of the union movement was less than satisfactory. Placing their hopes on an ALP win in the federal elections, they feared that the dispute would play into the hands of the conservatives. That hostility continued even after the Whitlam (ALP) win.
The so-called “progressive” Labor State Premier Don Dunstan led the attack. He claimed that Robinson was not prepared to negotiate and wanted to use his union to defeat a Labor Government, both State and Federally. The Premier's statement had no word of criticism of Adriatic. Angry labourers marched on Parliament house and confronted Dunstan over his statement.
It was only after eight days of jail time that the UTLC met and decided to support the BLF on the principle of opposition to the use of tort in industrial disputes. A unanimous vote banned all Adriatic Terrazzo and Housing Industry Association work until the tort action was dropped and, on that basis, Les and Ron agreed to purge their contempt and were then released from jail. Every member of the union in SA had been on strike, and a national stoppage by construction labourers was imminent.
However, the promised support from the UTLC failed to materialise. Dunstan was facing a state election in March and worked to cool things down. That left Les and Ron vulnerable to further attacks by the capitalist builders, and they were back in court again on February 13, 1973 where their union (now the Australian Building and Construction Workers Federation) was slapped with a permanent order banning it from "interfering with or threatening by illegal means the business of Adriatic Terrazzo and Foundation".
Industrial action had now been established as “illegal means”.
Historian Humphrey McQueen concluded that the lack of action by the organised union movement in support of the ABCWF “opened the door for a strategic attack on the labour movement…What began as a try-on around Adelaide set a battle plan to disorganise labour” (McQueen, We Built This Country p. 226).
Ron’s commitment to socialism extended to his appreciation for what Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party were doing in building New China and fighting revisionism. Ron was President of the SA Branch of the Australia-China Friendship Society for several years in the early 70s.
Deregistration by the bosses
By 1973, the BLF was in the vanguard of union strength in the construction industry. The bosses needed to destroy its influence and filed an application for its deregistration on 21 October 1973. Deregistration was granted on 21 June 1974. It had little effect. There were still 35,000 construction labourers loyal to the union. However, the NSW Branch leadership was hostile to Gallagher and its tactics provided some of the grounds for deregistration. The hostility was a two-way street, and Gallagher had the federal management Committee of the union decide on an intervention into the NSW Branch.
In 1975, Les was sent by the Federal Executive back to Sydney and appointed to lead the NSW Branch of the BLF. Ron was appointed acting state secretary of the SA Branch. Ron was part of a team of interstate BLF officials sent to facilitate the intervention. At one stage, a supporter of the removed Mundey team on a job Ron attended pulled a knife and threatened him.
A misconception fostered by some of Jack Mundey’s supporters was that “green bans” were only implemented by Mundey’s NSW Branch of the BLF. But the Victorian and SA branches were always prepared to stand with community members when they requested assistance to protect areas of cultural and heritage value.
A case in point was a SA government proposal to build police communication towers on mt Barker in the Adelaide Hills. At the time of unsettlement in 1839, it was estimated that 600 Peramangk people lived around the Mt Barker area. Genocide had reduced their numbers by 1984, but surviving families objected to the police towers as their construction would drive away the mingka, a small bird that lived on Mount Barker, one of the most sacred places in the Hills area, and announced the approach of visitors and the imminent death of a loved one. They set up a protest camp at the top of Mt Barker and the BLF put a ban on the towers.
Together with the Plasterers’ Union, the BLF put a stop to the destruction of heritage buildings in Mt Barker. The BLF also fought and saved the facade and part of building of the first women's creche by the Central Market, although it has since been demolished. Together with the BWIU, Ron ad the BLF fought and saved the last bit of natural sandhills by Escourt House, Tennyson that connect with the Semaphore Beach sand dunes, now a protected area.
Ron was always a straight talker and his word was his bond. Back in SA, in a conflict with one builder, the man complained to Ron, “You’re just a bloody stand-over merchant!” Quick with his reply, Ron said “That’s right mate, and I’m standing right over you. Get x, y and z fixed up or you’ll get squashed.” They were fixed.
Of course, Ron was not a one-man band. Shop stewards on jobs knew if they took action up to and including breaking concrete pours, that Ron and his organisers had their backs.
As its right to coverage within the industry grew, and to get around deregistration, the SA Branch of the BLF was rebadged as the Australian Building and Construction Workers Federation (ABCWF). When a new award was won in 1979 to bring SA wages in line with eastern states, the union agreed not to interrupt concrete pours with on-the-job action. The Arbitration Commission decision meant an extra $14 a week over the next two years for 7,000 workers.
Deregistration by Hawke and Labor
The argie-bargie continued in the industry with a spectacular campaign to win superannuation and increased workers’ compensation. By the mid-1980s, finance capitalists were demanding protection from the BLF by the Hawke Government. The Hawke government and the ACTU were threatened by the union’s opposition to their wage-cutting “Accord”.
In 1985, Hawke announced that he and his government would “smash” the BLF. In 1986, the BLF was deregistered federally and in NSW, Victoria and the ACT, then its areas of largest membership. It would have been deregistered in SA as well but for Ron’s good relations with officials of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), the Plumbers’ Union and some other small unions in the Trade and Labour Council (TLC) and the ALP that stopped the SA government and the TLC from supporting Hawke.
Partly, those good relations had been built over time and through skilful handling of demarcation disputes with other unions. It also reflected the advantages that tradespersons’ unions had gained by not standing in the way of BLF action on the job over wages and conditions. These unions had learned, as Ron put it, to “keep their mouths shut’ when the BLs were blueing over wages, because any gain by the labourers would have to flow onto the higher paid skilled tradies to keep their relativities intact.
The first deregistration had been initiated by the bosses; the second by the former head of the ACTU and a Labor PM.
Ron had never had any doubts about the treachery of the ALP. He had stopped work at the Swanport Bridge, near Murray Bridge, when a worker had his hand caught and mangled in a pile-driving accident, and the SA Labor government took him to court over the stoppage.
“We never had a lot of support from the Labor Party,” Ron said recently in an interview with the Concrete Gang on radio 3CR.
He knew where he stood with the Liberals, how they would attack and when. They openly served the construction bosses, whereas Labor had to pretend it was a working class party and disguise the nature and timing of its attacks.
“We didn’t get much out of the Labor Party; we were better off under the Liberals,” he told 3CR.
“Whatever we did we had to battle for.”
Federal President and acting general-secretary
In 1985, Gallagher was jailed on charges of having accepted corrupt payments from bosses. He was released after four months on appeal and a retrial was scheduled. With Gallagher in jail, Ron had been appointed acting general-secretary of the BLF. In July, he attacked Hawke’s proposed legislation to deregister the union, declaring that the proposed legislation put the trade union movement back more than 100 years.
When Gallagher was reconvicted and jailed again, Ron retained his position as the union’s national leader.
The NSW Branch was now led by Steve Black. In September 1986, Steve and Ron went into a building site run by Sabemo to sort out some problems with workers’ compo payments. Sabemo called in the cops, and Ron and Steve were arrested for trespass. They remained in Long Bay jail for refusing the bail condition that they undertake not to commit trespass at the Sabemo site.
They were kept in jail for a month on a charge that carried a maximum penalty of $50 before being released on the condition that they not “trespass” again at Sabemo. They had been brought into court handcuffed together, and were greeted by 50 union members.
By the early 90s, it was evident that the attacks on the BLF could only be defeated by a stronger and more extensive unity of workers, skilled and unskilled, in the construction industry.
It was generally agreed it would be wrong to seek re-registration or even appear to want it. Instead, calls were made for one industrial union of building workers, registered or unregistered.
This was supported by Ron and Victorian comrades led by John Cummins, but was opposed by Gallagher.
The union's Victorian branch removed Gallagher from the position of Victorian state secretary, and in a meeting of the union's federal council in Adelaide in May 1992, Ron, who was federal president of the BLF, was again appointed to replace him as acting general secretary.
Ron and Cummo knew that labourers and other construction workers needed each other’s strength, knew that it was time to move on from the BLF, and saw that through to the creation of the CFMEU.
Norm Gallagher was a great working class leader and a Communist of great distinction who defied the ruling class time and again. But he was out of step with the need to find new ways of organising construction workers to ensure their survival as a fighting core within the whole working class.
It did not surprise Ron that it was a Labor Government, with the connivance of the ACTU, that has launched the latest attack on the union, opting not for deregistration, but for placing the union under Administration and replacing fighting leaders with tame cat officials forced to do the bidding of the Administrator.
What great leaders were the comrades like Ron Owens, Gallagher at his best, Les Robinson, who died on April 3 2025, and the great John Cummins.
Their place in the history of the Australian working class will always be remembered.
The author Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies in the Future Operations Research Group at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of several books about Australia’s foreign relations.
