Victorian Trades Hall

You are looking at the oldest continually functioning trade union building in the world. That is not an exaggeration. The original Trades Hall opened in May eighteen fifty-nine, a modest timber building financed entirely by workers and built by their own labour. It is still in use by trade unions today, over a hundred and sixty years later. And the reason it exists traces back to one of the most significant labour victories in human history.

In eighteen fifty-six, stonemasons working on buildings around Melbourne downed tools and marched to demand an eight-hour workday. They won. Melbourne became one of the first places in the world to achieve the eight-hour day, years before most of Europe or America. That victory directly led to the creation of this building as a permanent home for the labour movement. The workers needed a place to organise, educate, and gather, so they built one themselves.

Between eighteen seventy-four and nineteen twenty-five, the hall was rebuilt and expanded by Joseph Reed, the same architect behind the Melbourne Town Hall, the Royal Exhibition Building, and the State Library. The current building is a layered history of over fifty years of construction, each wing added as the union movement grew. The Victorian Labor Party was born in this building. The Australian Council of Trade Unions was founded here. It is one of the most historically important sites in Melbourne, yet most tourists walk right past it. The building is classified by the National Trust and is on Australia's Tentative List for UNESCO World Heritage status as part of a nomination for Workers' Assembly Halls. If it gets the listing, it would be the first trade union building in the world to receive World Heritage recognition.