When saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ could get you sacked

Just before my 18th birthday, in July 1988, I landed my first full-time job, as a lay-by clerk at Ahern’s department store in Perth’s city centre.

My workday started with getting off a bus at 8am in St George’s Terrace. I collected a bundle of twenty copies of the West Australian from Newspaper House and, with papers under arm, made my way to Ahern’s in the Hay Street Mall. I then navigated a rabbit warren of offices via the back stairs to deliver each copy to a director’s desk.

Then I clocked in at the lay-by department. In those days a customer who couldn’t afford to pay for an item up front could opt to make six payments over six weeks. The item would remain on the shelf in the lay-by department until it had been fully paid for.

Many Ahern’s staff had customer account cards: they were offered discounts to encourage them to spend at the store. My manager, a middle-aged woman with an eye for the latest 1980s fashion, had the largest Ahern’s card debt of all.

One Friday morning, several weeks into my employment, I arrived to face her questions.

“Nick, I hear you have been selling communist newspapers. Is this true?”, she asked.

This was the 1980s; the Cold War was still raging. Being accused by your boss of being a communist was not to be taken lightly.

My thoughts raced back to the evening before. Thursday night was late-night shopping in Perth. I had joined comrades after work in the mall selling the socialist newspaper Direct Action. The cover that week was emblazoned with the words “Free Nelson Mandela” and featured a portrait of the African National Congress leader. The centrespread featured an article on a strike wave that had gripped South Africa’s poverty-stricken townships.

Some evenings, sales of the paper were hard going. But that night Direct Action was selling like hot cakes. At one point I looked up and made eye contact with a woman I recognised as an Ahern’s sales assistant. She was a friend of my boss and often came by the lay-by counter. When she saw me, her face moulded into a look of disbelief and then a vitriolic scowl. I felt a sense of dread.

My thoughts returned to the present. What should I do? I responded to my boss with a firm denial. Later that morning, she told me to go to the human resource manager’s office. There, I was told that my performance was not up to scratch. I would be finishing up in two weeks. “Use the notice period to find yourself a new job”, I was told.

I attended the weekly Resistance branch meeting upstairs in a Northbridge arcade the next afternoon. Resistance was the youth organisation of the Socialist Workers Party, which I had also recently joined. I spoke to the SWP organiser, Dave.

“Are you a member of the union?”, he asked. Unfortunately, I wasn’t, though the prospect of the right-wing Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association coming to the aid of an alleged communist was slim. Frank suggested I talk to Leon, a comrade involved in the Law Reform Subcommittee of Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) WA, the main gay activist campaign group in Perth at the time.

Leon explained that the West Australian Equal Opportunity Act prohibited discrimination in employment based on “political conviction”. Ironically, it offered no protection to gays. Sodomy was still a crime in Western Australia. Though decriminalisation was achieved in 1990, the Equal Opportunity Act wasn’t amended to include sexual orientation until 2002.

On Monday morning, during my morning tea break, I headed into the Equal Opportunity Commission on St George’s Terrace and picked up a complaint form. Over the following days I reported my complaint and met with my assigned case manager, Graeme Innes. Today, Innes is a company director and university vice-chancellor. For a decade, he was Australia’s Disability Discrimination commissioner. Back then he conciliated anti-discrimination complaints.

Soon Innes was in my workplace asking questions. My manager told him I slacked on the job and my probation “hadn’t worked out”. By the end of the second week my employment was coming to an end. It seemed the complaint was going nowhere.

At this point, Equal Opportunity Commissioner June Williams stepped in. Williams was a former co-convener of the NSW Women’s Electoral Lobby, where she had lobbied hard to introduce anti-discrimination legislation. She took on the role of Equal Opportunity commissioner after the WA Burke government implemented anti-discrimination legislation in 1984, and she held the position for the following seventeen years.

Williams asked me if I was a member of a political party. I told her I was a member of the SWP.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” she said. “We’ve never handled an employment complaint relating to political discrimination before.”

Williams explained that, if both parties were willing, a conciliation conference could be held. If that failed, I could consider taking the matter to a court hearing. She suggested I locate a “support person” to take with me. I nominated SWP comrade Richard, who had several years of experience as a union delegate with the Public Sector Union.

The conciliation conference took place in the commission offices. I sat on one side of the table with Richard next to me. On the other side sat three Ahern’s company directors. They were all men, each nearing retirement age with pale complexions and bald heads.

One of them, his face as red as his whiskers, thumped the table and shouted, “This would never happen in the Industrial Relations Commission!” Williams, who sat between us, politely reminded him that we were not in the IRC.

A short break followed before the Ahern’s directors returned with an offer. I would be re-employed on a part-time casual basis, not on the shop floor but at as a packer in Ahern’s distribution warehouse in the industrial suburb of Claisebrook. I would also receive a written reference acknowledging that I have been a “loyal and diligent” employee.

I accepted the offer. The new job involved earlier starts but my new workmates were welcoming. In the afternoons, I set about applying for other jobs. A month later, I landed a state government job.

My last day at the Ahern’s warehouse was Melbourne Cup Day. At noon, we gathered around a TV set for the race and then went to the pub for lunch. In Melbourne Cup tradition, each of the women in my workplace donned a fashionable hat. There was a competition for the best hat.

I wore a construction hard hat with a Builders Labourers Federation sticker slapped on the front. It bore the words, “Dare to struggle, dare to win!” My workmates thought it was hilarious. For me, it was a middle finger to Ahern’s management.

Fourteen months later, Nelson Mandela was released from prison following secret negotiations between the ANC and South Africa’s apartheid regime. Four years after that, he became president of a multiracial South Africa. A now sympathetic media transformed Mandela from a “terrorist” to an elder statesman. Mandela obligingly reciprocated, heading a government committed to private enterprise, foreign investment and privatisation of “inefficient” state-run services.

Today, the slogans of the anti-apartheid movement are buried in the past. Yet, social media posts about Israel’s Gaza genocide can get you fired, as the cases of journalists Antoinette Lattouf and Peter Lalor demonstrate. And protesting on campus can get you suspended from your studies or facing disciplinary action amid a witch-hunt by increasingly McCarthyite university authorities.

These examples demonstrate that free speech is never a right guaranteed under capitalism, but a right that we must fight for, again and again.

Nick Everett is the chairperson of Friends of Palestine WA.