Jack Heffernan interviewed by Richard Raxworthy in the Labor Council of New South Wales oral history project [sound recording]

Mr Heffernan, Secretary of the Sheet Metal Workers' Union of Australia, talks of his early life; his trainee apprenticeship; working conditions; experiences as delegate; change to machinery; pattern making; involvement in the NSW Management Committee; Communist Party involvement in the Union; joining the ALP; Tom Wright; Management Committee; working in the Union office; industrial democracy; Chifley government; coal strike; expulsion from the ALP; conciliation and arbitration in the 1940s and 1950s; Evatt; his NSW ALP left steering committee; his readmission to the ALP; industrial groups; ballots; strengths and weaknesses of the ALP; his relations with Laurie Short; nationalization of banking; AICD; peace movement; factions within the ALP; hospital boards; socialist alternative pamphlet; BLF and green bans; cooperation between metal unions; demarcation issues; union officials; Whitlam government; penal clauses; equal pay for women; improvements to the arbitration system; TUTA; shipbuilding industry; effect of union work on family and social life.