The MEAA Media section has a century of experience campaigning on behalf of the profession, making it one of the oldest media unions in the world.
MEAA Media is the name for the media workers section of MEAA. The section traces its history from 1910 with the foundation of the Australian Journalists’ Association which was formed at a meeting of journalists in Melbourne after several unsuccessful attempts to form a bond or union as a professional association for journalists.
At the time, journalists were often working for "a-penny-a-line". As a reporter on a daily newspaper, you were probably paid in the region of £3 or £4 per week for working something in excess of 60 hours – across at least six days a week. That is, of course, if you were paid a weekly wage at all. One of the journalists working as a "penny-a-liner" was Keith (later Sir Keith) Murdoch, father of Rupert, who was scratching a living from piece work as a federal parliamentary reporter for The Age in Melbourne (the then national capital).
The meeting was called by Melbourne Herald reporter B.S.B. “Bertie” Cook. He had begun work there, aged 12, as a copy boy. After 10 years he was a reporter earning £3 for a 70-hour week. Concerned by journalists' working conditions, he joined with colleagues in several failed attempts to form an effective industrial association. But in 1910 Cook saw an opportunity under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 for journalists to register as an industrial organisation. The Act provided that “an employer shall not dismiss an employee or injure him in his employment or alter his position to his prejudice by reason of the circumstance that the employee is entitled to the benefit of an industrial agreement or award”.
Having taken advice from Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and the federal industrial registrar, A.M. Stewart, Cook was told that the legitimacy of registration by journalists as an industrial organisation was unclear and there would have to be a test case to determine this.
On December 1 1910, Cook sent the following letter out to journalists around the country:
A meeting of journalists, i.e. persons professionally and habitually engaged on staff of newspapers or periodicals, will be held at the cafe in the basement of the Empire buildings, Flinders St., Melbourne on Saturday Dec 10th at 8pm sharp for the purpose of considering the question of forming an organisation to secure registration under the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act.
You are invited to be present and to extend an invitation to any other qualified person with whom you are acquainted.
On behalf of the committee,
Yours faithfully
B.S.B. Cook
Melbourne Herald
On December 10, more than 100 journalists crowded into the cafe (262-268 Flinders Street, Melbourne). Cook says this was “a fair proportion of journalists, in those days, who would be qualified to attend. Some of these were not too sure about what they were getting themselves into, feeling it would be “infra dig for the ‘gentlemen of the Press’ to have to seek the protection of the law in arranging their working hours and salaries”, but “after this is seemed as if the floodgates of discontent had broken their banks and speaker after speaker told of the intolerable hours they had to work and of the miserable salaries they were getting”. Sound familiar?
A secret ballot was held on the motion: That this meeting of press writers of Australia affirms the desirability of forming an organisation for registration under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act of Australia. While some abstained, the motion was passed 78 to nine.
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