Bradon Ellem

The Neoliberal State, Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining in Australia

For nearly 12 years from 1996, the Australian government pursued a neoliberal industrial relations agenda, seeking to break with structures based on collective bargaining and trade unions. In the name of choice and deregulation, this agenda involved unique levels of state intervention and prescription - and anti-unionism. In the last round of legislative change, the 2005 laws badged as Work Choices, the government overreached itself and in 2007 was defeated in a general election. As in the UK after Thatcher, the extent to which collective bargaining can be restored and trade unions regain a voice is problematical. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008.

New Unionism in the Old Economy: Community and Collectivism in the Pilbara's Mining Towns

This paper focuses on union renewal and the nature and prospects of ‘community unionism’ as unions struggle to define and control the spaces in which workers and their families labour and live. It assesses the processes of union renewal in the iron ore industry in Western Australia’s north-west, where the Pilbara Mineworkers Union, a new organisation, has appeared. This union aims to organise workers nominally covered by four mining unions and appears to be an emergent ‘community union’, in a social and spatial setting where work and community issues overlap. The new organisation has followed on from other Pilbara struggles in which the organising strategy of the Australian Council of Trade Unions has been seized upon with particular enthusiasm, meshing with local traditions and the needs of the present. These developments cannot be fully understood without thinking about the geographies of work, community and regulation which have been interconstitutive with unionism’s Pilbara trajectory. Analysing this case begins to provide a specific illustration of how union structures and strategies actually do change, as opposed to merely recapitulating arguments about how unions should change.

Scaling labour: Australian unions and global mining

In recent years the ore-rich region known as the Pilbara, in north-western Australia, has been the site of intense struggles over the regulation of labour.Two of the worlds biggest resource companies have been pitted against an oftendivided local labour force, but they have not had things all their own way. Drawing on the work of a number of geographers, the article shows how these disputes can be understood more richly than simply as another bout of union recognition disputes. If physical geography – rich ore bodies and isolation from metropolitan centres – or the contest between global capital and local labour are important, they are only the starting points for a textured,‘spatialized’ understanding of capital-labour relationships.The article argues that space is made and argued over in many ways and that there are many scales in addition to the local and the global at which conflicts are constructed and resolved.

Anti-unionism, Employer Strategy, and the Australian State, 1996-2005

One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. While some tactics have emerged organically through new management practices, the reconfiguration of employer strategies has been primarily state-led; legislative and non-legislative interventions have created opportunities, incentives and pressures for firms to adopt anti-union strategies.

Dialectics of Scale: Global Capital and Local Unions in Australia’s Iron Ore Industry

For over five years, Western Australia’s Pilbara iron ore mining region has been the site of a series of intense struggles over worker representation. Thus far, unions have avoided a repeat of defeats suffered in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, new forms of local interaction have emerged alongside new kinds of union structures. To explain these developments, this article goes beyond mainstream industrial relations scholarship and draws from the work of human geographers. By focusing on the making of space, it is possible to make clear the meanings of these particular intersections of the local, State, national and global scales. In so doing, three dialectical tensions are addressed: those within the ‘local-global’ structuring of this productive space; those within the interplay of national and local union settings; and also between these processes. Neither scale nor space itself is hierarchical. No one scale - local or global - can be accorded priority. Nor can any one space - the workplace or the town - be thought of without the other.

Why do Unions form Peak Bodies? The Case of the Barrier Industrial Council

Despite the long history and continuing importance of peak union bodies in Australian industrial relations, there have been very few attempts to analyze, let alone theorize about, their development. This omission in the literature is particu larly striking in relation to the origins of such bodies. Those rare treatments that do examine the formation of peak union bodies are unsatisfactory; most either assume that such forms of unity are inevitable or point to external causes in a rather mechanistic way. We propose a model of peak union formation that com bines internal and external processes, emphasizing the connection between them. We argue that for any group of unions to form a peak body, a state of internal equilibrium must exist between the unions concerned, and that these unions must also be presented with a clear external threat or opportunity. The model is used here to explain the origins of one of the oldest continuous local peak bodies in Australia, the Barrier Industrial Council, but we suggest that the model has a general applicability.

Peak Union Campaigning: Fighting for Rights at Work in Australia

Many peak unions are in crisis, their traditional reliance on economic or political exchange with employers and the state undermined through falling union membership and the collapse of national bargaining systems. New methods, chiefly as agents of mobilization, and new sources of power, including community organizations, are often advanced as solutions. In Australia, where trade unions faced a fundamental and immediate threat from a national government after an election in 2004, the ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign signalled a shift in peak union strategy. Although this campaign unseated the government in 2007, its legacy is unclear: reviving the power of peak unions and conceptualizing the means to do so remain difficult.

Re-placing the Pilbara's mining unions

This paper examines the attempt by mining management in Western Australias Pilbara to replace mining unions—quite literally—by removing them from the processes of representation and bargaining. It analyses the way in which those unions have tried to re-place themselves, in the senses of transforming themselves in those spaces in which they were already operating and reviving themselves where they were not. Where unionists have succeeded in these engagements, it has been by working at a range of geographical scales, using the ‘power of place’ in the Pilbara and reshaping traditional geographies of union organisation. It is suggested here that many of these emergent outcomes are the result of the embeddedness of geographically specific historical structures along with new intersections of nationally and locally scaled labour politics.

Trade Unionism in 1998

On 8 April 1998, the early morning news announced that, overnight, all the Maritime Union of Australia’s members employed at Patrick Stevedores had been dismissed. The ’phoney war’ on the waterfront was over and it seemed that the long-predicted climax was at hand. It was, without any doubt, the defining moment for unions and industrial relations in 1998. This was not simply because of the importance of that industry; rather, the dispute also encapsulated the major difficulties faced by many other unions, as well as highlighting some of the ways in which unions might resist assaults from employers and the state and begin to regenerate themselves. The waterfront dispute can be examined, then, alongside the causes and trajectory of other, no less complex, disputes. This review will attempt to do this, while describing the changing structures, relationships and strategies across the spectrum of unionism in Australia. In so doing, it will examine union developments against the backdrop of continued economic crisis and changes in work, a federal election and the hostility of the federal government, while also trying to explore the fate of workers and organisations away from the more spectacular heights of industrial conflict and with fewer, or less obvious, resources on which to call.

Beyond Industrial Relations: Work Choices and the Reshaping of Labour, Class and the Commonwealth

The meaning of WorkChoices for labour, for organised labour, is problematical indeed given such a massive re-alignment of class and state power and ideology. The aims of the new Act are may require a concomitant re-ordering of the union movement and may prove to be the greatest re-working of employment regulation Australia has seen.