One afternoon in 1952, a group of three Malays and one Indian in postmen’s uniform came to the offices of Laycock & Ong to see me. No longer in Laycock’s room, I met them in the outer office – not air- conditioned, hot, humid and noisy with the sound of traffic and hawkers. The Postal and Telecommunications Uniformed Staff Union, they told me, had put forward claims for salary revisions but had so far not been successful, and they had been given permission to engage a lawyer to appear for them. I asked John Laycock whether I should accept the case, given that there would not be much money in it. He told me to carry on for the sake of the goodwill, so I did it without asking for legal fees. This decision to represent the postmen was to be a turning point in the history of the trade unions and constitutional mass action. Little did I know that I would be guiding union leaders in a strike that in two weeks changed the political climate. It put the colonial government on the defensive and encouraged workers’ militancy. But it also created the conditions for the communists to reorganise their mass support.
P. Govindasamy, a mail officer (one grade higher than postman), was not well-educated but briefed me in adequate English. He was totally relevant and reliable. He was later to be elected MP in a neighbouring constituency and helped me look after mine. The negotiations with the Establishment Branch of the government secretariat, which lasted from February to May, produced only the same salary revisions that applied to postmen in Malaya although I had argued that the work was more onerous and the cost of living higher in Singapore.
We were coming to a crunch. One Sunday morning, the union held a pre-strike meeting at their quarters in Maxwell Road, where large families lived in one-room flats with communal kitchens and toilets. Nearly the entire union of 450 postmen turned up. My presence was to give them moral courage, and to reassure them that what they were doing was not illegal, especially since no strikes had been held in Singapore since the Emergency was declared in 1948. In bazaar Malay, I got my views across to all, mostly Malays, the rest Chinese and Indians. They decided to give strike notice.
Before the strike began on 13 May, Keng Swee, who had returned from England, arranged a dinner at the Chinese Swimming Club in Amber Road for me to meet an associate editor of the Singapore Standard, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam. Raja was a Malayan of Jaffna Tamil origin. He had been in London for 12 years until 1947, associating with a group of Indian and African nationalists and British left-wing personalities, and writing anti-colonial tracts and newspaper articles. He was a good listener. Out in the open by the swimming pool, against the music and the hubbub of the swimmers, I briefed him on the background to the strike. He had been waiting for a good issue on which to challenge the colonial government, and was eager to do battle for the postmen.
While the postmen were picketing peacefully on the first morning of the strike, the government sent a large contingent of Gurkhas armed with revolvers and kukris into the General Post Office in Fullerton Building on Collyer Quay, the most prominent part of the business district. The deputy commissioner of police announced that police with sten guns would stand guard at all post offices until the strike ended.
Next day, the newspapers carried photographs of the Gurkhas and police and, in sharp contrast, a moderate statement by the president of the union saying that the postmen would refrain from picketing until their intentions were clearly understood. Public sympathy swung towards the postmen. The following day, the government withdrew the Gurkhas and the pickets resumed peacefully.
At the government secretariat at Empress Place, leading the negotiating delegation of the Postal and Telecommunications Uniformed Staff Union in May 1952. At far right is mail officer P. Govindasamy, who later became an MP.
The Singapore Standard was a locally owned newspaper with a much smaller circulation than the pro- British Straits Times, but its voice counted in this contest. Many locals read it, forcing some colonial officials to read it as well. In his editorial, Raja took a sardonic swipe at the racial bias of the colonial government, questioning the right of British expatriates to receive better pay than the locals; they had been given $1,000 in expat pay, but the postmen were refused an extra $10 a month.
Meanwhile, the mail piled up, to everyone’s inconvenience. The public had to collect their letters and parcels on their own. In spite of this, the public was for the postmen because of their moderate actions and the statements I drafted for them. Raja’s headlines and editorials in the Singapore Standard helped enormously.
The Malay newspaper Utusan Melayu backed the strikers, for most of the postmen were Malay. So did the Chinese dailies, the Nanyang Siang Pau and Sin Chew Jit Poh, where many communist sympathisers among their reporters and editors always opposed the government.
The Straits Times, on the other hand, was British-owned and run. It had a capable editorial writer, Allington Kennard, who tried to be neutral but found it difficult not to be pro-government.
Raja was enjoying the fight. This was crusading at its best – fighting for the downtrodden masses against a heartless bunch of white colonial exploiters. His polemical style was emphatic. Many years hobnobbing with Indian and West Indian anti-imperialists had given him a heavy touch. My three years of sparring with friendly and sympathetic British students of the Labour Club in Cambridge had given me a different diction, and a preference for the understatement. So we played a duet, Raja strong and vigorous, I courteous, if pointed, always more in sorrow than in anger. I phoned him to make suggestions, relaying reactions from our supporters; he checked his editorial pitch with me. He would bring his galley proofs to my home for discussions, or we would talk on the phone, often well past midnight, just before his paper went to bed. The Singapore Standard forced the pace and the establishment paper, the Straits Times, had to publish my letters to keep up an appearance of impartiality.
By the end of the first week, popular opinion turned strongly against the administration. British colonial officers had not been accustomed either to presenting their case in order to win public backing, or to dealing with local men who politely showed up their contradictions, weaknesses and cavalier attitudes. Exposure of the high-handedness of the government officers who dealt with the postmen moved other unions to come out in open support of them. Even the secretary-general of the pro-establishment Singapore Trade Union Congress, who was a close associate of Lim Yew Hock and an executive committee member of the Singapore Labour Party, joined the bandwagon. He announced the launching of a fund “to help the postmen to carry on their strike to a successful end”. The Singapore Standard invited contributions from the public and collected donations from individual donors.
The government was rattled. The colonial secretary offered “to resume negotiations as soon as the employees return to work”. I replied that if the workers called off their strike and the negotiations then failed again, they would face the prospect of a second strike. “This pattern, if repeated several times, will reduce the strike, the union’s last weapon in collective bargaining, to a farce.”
At a Legislative Council meeting on Wednesday, 20 May, the governor himself warned the postmen that the government would not be forced by strike action into submitting to all their demands. The following day Raja riposted in the Singapore Standard:
“For the first time in the history of the trade union movement in this country, the foremost official in the colony has publicly questioned the validity of the strike weapon. Put more bluntly, Mr Nicoll (the governor) says that the government considers pressure through strikes, whether justified or not, whether illegal or not, as something which the government cannot tolerate.”
This hurt. British officials were demoralised by this turn of events. They were taking a pummelling in public. The colonial secretary responded by promising the 500 striking postmen and telegraph messengers that he himself would conduct negotiations with their union representatives if they reported back for work. I persuaded the union leaders to take a fresh position and announced that the strike would be suspended for three days.
That saved the face of the colonial secretary and his officials. Negotiations resumed on 26 May and ended
with a satisfactory agreement.
It was the first strike since the Emergency Regulations were introduced in June 1948, and it was conducted completely within the law, with no threats or violence or even disorderly picketing. The fight had been for public support and the union won. After this demonstration of the incompetence of the British colonial officers, the people saw that the government was vulnerable when subjected to scrutiny.
The press exposure and publicity enhanced my professional reputation. I was no longer just a brash young lawyer back from Cambridge with academic honours. I had led striking workers, spoken up for them and was trusted by them. I had delivered without much broken crockery. I gained enormously in the estimation of thousands of workers in Singapore and Malaya without frightening the English-educated intelligentsia. My friends and I were now convinced that in the unions we would find the mass base and, by extension, the political muscle we had been seeking when discussing our plans for action during all those beery nights spent pub-crawling in London after meetings at Malaya Hall. We had found the way to mobilise mass support.
Non-communist groups were encouraged, even emboldened, by this demonstration of constitutional, peaceful, non-violent mass action to redress legitimate grievances. A spate of trade unions and clan associations approached me to be their legal adviser, and I was happy to collect them as potential political supporters. Most paid nominal fees to Laycock & Ong to put my name down on their letterheads as their Legal Adviser. I attended many of their annual dinners or general meetings. I learnt to get along with different Chinese language groups, some Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking like the Chinese Printing Workers’ Union, many only dialect-speaking like the Singapore Hakka Association.
It was often embarrassing because my Chinese was totally inadequate. I felt greatly ashamed of my inability to communicate with them in what should have been my native tongue. Once again, I started to make an effort to learn Mandarin. I got myself a teacher and a small tape-recorder. I shared the teacher with Hon Sui Sen, who had now become commissioner for lands, taking lessons at his government quarters at Cantonment Road. But progress was painfully slow. I had little time and, worse, few opportunities to practise the language.
However, I did not need Mandarin for my next major involvement in industrial action. In December 1952, 10,000 mainly Indian members of the Naval Base Labour Union gave strike notice out of the blue, and on 29 December, the workers at the base in Sembawang downed tools, to the discomfiture of the naval officers in charge and of the Singapore government. Royal Navy ships that had reached Singapore from the war in Korea – a carrier, two frigates and a submarine – were held up and could not be repaired. The governor intervened, but after two fruitless meetings, representatives of both sides agreed to send the dispute to an independent arbitrator, John Cameron, a Queen’s Counsel from the Scottish Bar. The union asked me to present their case.
I spent a few weeks swotting up salary scales and making comparisons between Singapore government and Admiralty wages for the same or similar jobs. Hearing was in camera at the Registrar’s Office in the Supreme Court and lasted for a week in February 1953. Cameron, a seasoned Scottish advocate, maintained an air of impartiality. The Admiralty had an experienced establishment man who knew his salary scales backwards. When Cameron made his award on 11 March, it was clear that he knew the limit of the Admiralty’s budget and was not going to breach it. I had pressed for parity with Singapore government pay rates, but Cameron rejected it.
The union officials were disappointed, and the president was under pressure to reject the award. I saw the officials and persuaded them that it would be unwise to resume the strike after they had accepted arbitration as a means of settlement, that this was part and parcel of constitutional struggle. My views prevailed and the episode did me no harm. Although I lost some standing for obtaining only minor concessions, I had established myself as a legal adviser who played by the rules and was prepared to advise his client union to accept an unfavourable award.
Other strikes were brewing in Singapore and in Malaya. The clerks of the Singapore Union of Postal and
Telecommunications Workers had given notice that they would strike for higher pay on 23 March 1953. It was to be the first-ever strike by government clerks. The union asked me to be its legal adviser. The government offered arbitration and after discussions with me the union agreed. The government put up the names of six members of the Malayan arbitration panel. One of them happened to be Yong Pung How, my contemporary at Cambridge Law School.
For three days the proceedings received considerable publicity in the press and on radio. I had two objectives: to get a good award; and more important, to expose the high-handed and incompetent manner in which British colonial officers dealt with local public servants. I did this without appearing aggressive. Yong Pung How awarded the 1,000 clerks 28 months’ back pay and other increases amounting to about $1 million.
This outcome restored my standing with the workers.
Meanwhile, senior government local officers had been getting restive. Kenny was seething with resentment at an unjust award of special family allowances for expatriate officers only. The Singapore Senior Officers Association had made repeated representations without results. When Keng Swee returned from England at the end of 1951, he worked out a simple strategy that would give them the political muscle to bring the government to heel. Instead of fighting for family allowances, comparable to expatriate allowances, for fewer than 200 local senior officers, Keng Swee proposed that they demand proportionate allowances for all government servants, especially the poorly paid and numerous Division 4 daily-rated workers. Since 1945, wages in government service had lagged behind inflation. After the postmen’s strike had shown what mass action could do constitutionally, the daily-rated workers were eager for industrial action.
In July 1952, Keng Swee helped Kenny to form a Council of Joint Action to represent all government unions and associations with a total membership of 14,000. They demanded family allowances equivalent to non-pensionable expatriate pay. At a mass rally in November, the workers turned up in force to express their resentment at the racial discrimination against local public servants. Their handbill asked, “Is this just?
Europeans have SMALL families and BIG allowances. We have BIG families and NO allowances.”
The elected members of the Legislative Council sensed that there was political credit to be gained from backing the demand for family allowances for the locals, especially the lower paid, and began to speak in support of it in the Legislative Council. Governor Sir John Nicoll, who presided over the Legislative Council meeting, was not amused. He advised them to confine themselves to exercising control “on the higher plane of general policy”, and warned the civil servants, “you cannot put pressure on councillors”.
The Council of Joint Action denied that they had approached the legislative councillors for assistance, but asked whether as members of the public, government servants did not have the right to discuss matters of principle with their elected representatives. The Singapore Federation of Government Employees’ Unions wrote to the colonial secretary to express the “deep distrust which all locally domiciled officers have of expatriate officers in the government”.
Faced with growing resistance and a surprisingly rebellious attitude from his government servants and even from previously meek legislative councillors, the governor sought to defuse the mounting dissatisfaction by appointing a special committee under a well-known economist, F.C. Benham, to “investigate whether the present emoluments of locally domiciled officers are adequate”. After three days of consultation, the committee agreed with the unions that they should receive family allowances. The governor was appalled. This would lead to an enormous drain on the budget. When he rejected the report, six unions threatened strike action. To stave off the strike, the governor promised an independent commission under Sir Edward Ritson. In March 1953, Ritson recommended that expatriate family allowances be abolished.
The Council of Joint Action had shaken the colonial system. After 10 months of further negotiations, the government approved a salary scale that gave bigger increases to the higher-paid than to the lowest-paid government workers or those in between. Thus the colonial government denied Keng Swee and Kenny the political credit with the blue-collar workers that they had sought.