Electricity and the Linesmen’s Lot

Electricity is pumped around the state of Victoria though the veins and arteries we call the grid system. This system has grown from a transformer and a few poles along a couple of streets, in the Melbourne CBD, in the 1880s, to the vast network that it is today. The linesmen put these lifelines in place; and I think how far their trade has come.

In 1879, the same year Ned Kelly, was bailing up the town of Jerilderie, poles were being put up around the Melbourne Cricket Ground with lights, fed by big batteries, to light the ground so that Melbourne could play Carlton in the very first night football game.

But the big arc lamps blinded the players who looked directly into them and cast dark shadows everywhere else and if spectacular, they were not very successful. Today’s MCG lights turn night into day, and just one column demands more electricity than the whole of the Melbourne CBD in the 1880s.

Around this time, Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, in competition with each other, developed the incandescent lamp and electricity became a commodity. Entrepreneurs sensing a quid to be made created little supply companies all over Melbourne and flogged this new stuff called electricity. People were fascinated with the new modern day technology but they couldn’t fathom it. They recognised the danger yet couldn’t explain it. When a man got an electric shock in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne and died, people warned their children not to lean against the poles. The technical advice given in the Australasian Journal was not to touch the wires but if you could train your dog to nuzzle them into the gutter then all well and good.

By the time the Electrical Trades Union was formed the Melbourne City Council had consolidated its dominance as the power supply company and had swallowed up many of the smaller supply companies. It built the Spencer Street Power station, filled it with twenty General Electric Dynamos that pumped 3000 volts d.c. down the electrical veins and arteries put up by the linesmen. One hundred plus kilometres of cables criss-crossed the city and spread into the outer suburbs of Carlton and Collingwood like rampant blood vessels in a horror movie. It should be noted that there were no government controls of this yet to be recognised killer commodity. It was not yet considered a utility. There would be no regulation of any sort until the Electricity Commissioners’ Act was passed in the Victorian Parliament in 1918; and that was too late for young Arthur McCoy. It was in 1910 that the ETU recorded its first fatality.

Arthur was 25 feet up a pole on the corner of Cardigan Street and Argyle Square in Carlton when he let out a loud life draining sigh. He was across 400volts and by the time his mate Alexander Thompson cut the wire he was hanging limp. It was as quick at that. The ETUs very first union secretary, Andy McPhail argued in Trades Hall that it was the result of work practices that were putting profit before safety.

Linesmen were certainly were saying it again in 1938 when the workers resolved to form a Linesmen’s safety Council; and how they needed one! There had been an increasing number of accidents, some fatal, due, it was argued, to the nervous strain brought about by speed-up methods of their employer. The linesmen complained about getting the jitters. The problem, the ETU argued, had been brought about by supervisors who had no practical experience and were competing with each other and pushing the blokes to work on live equipment beyond the point of coping. When the issue went to the commission the linesmen were issued rubber mats and safety belts but told that the reduction of working hours was an industrial matter and should be considered separately. The hearing was hardly over when two highly specialist workers were killed at Warragul in Victoria when a connecting jumper from a dead line fell across a 22 000 volt line below.

Although, linesmen are specialised and highly skilled at what they do, it wasn’t until 21 October 1969 that they were to become an apprenticed trade. It didn’t seem to make much difference to their plight. A decade later the newspaper headlines were; ‘VIC COMMISSION PLAYS DIRTY WITH LINESMEN: SEC ATTIDUDE CONDEMNED’. Even though they publicly recognised that on many occasions linesmen worked long hours without meal breaks they wouldn’t consider even a disability payment for recompense for their efforts. They were the only trade classification not to have a disability payment and yet it was difficult to find others who were more worthy.

There are not many tradespeople who can put down their pliers and find they have frozen to the spot when they go to pick them up, yet it is not unusual for it to happen to linesmen at those colder times of the year. It would take a long Arbitration Commission investigation and ruling before they could get anything like a fair go for their disabilities.

And anyone who knows ETU history will know of the fight over the use of cancerous creosote poles. They will know how it had to come to a last-stand by the linesmen in the 1980s before that deadly substance was no longer used to coat electricity poles.

Today, a century later, the linesmen have gone full circle. The electrical blood flows down the veins and arteries of the grid with a demand greater than ever before. Maybe now people take electricity for granted rather than fathom it. They are now happy to lean against the poles because they do take for granted the expertise of the linesmen who install them. Those linesmen have been pushed back to the privatised environment of Arthur McCoy’s days, and their fight is still as the ETU’s first secretary put it. ‘It was a pure case of sweating to pay such workers who were in constant danger… as labourers.’ How those words echoed ironically in 2004 at Carringbush, where power workers met and heard it said that ‘…the privatised power companies have little regard for the skills of line workers… and the shortages must lead to the use of non-skilled labour and increases in accidents…’ It is still a constant battle to see that workers’ do not bleed onto Victorian soil and their safety is not compromised for the sake of profit?