Green Bans – inspired trade union organising working with community organisations

This is an inspired example of highly successful trade union organising, militant opposition and working with community organisations equally opposed to exploitative urban development in Sydney and other Australian cities in the early 1970s and equally valid today.

Australian building worker Jack Mundey played a leading part in starting the ‘Green Bans’ in the 1970s as leader of the former New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation. This involved action by building workers on key sites and developments considered by local resident’s groups and workers to be socially, financially and environmentally wrong.

Community Action Magazine interviewed him when he was in London in early 1976 and published the following in Community Action Magazine No. 24, February/March 1976. Jack Mundy died aged 90 in May 2020.