Explaining Union Decline: Remaking Power Relations in the Pilbara Iron Ore Industry
Bradon Ellem
How have scholars tried to explain marked union membership decline in the global north, and how have they assessed consequent “union renewal” strategies? In this journal in 2020, Bowden argued that most accounts of unionism failed to explain decline, relied too much on state policy as causation and were too optimistic about those renewal strategies. One way to respond to these important general claims is to assess, as this article does, a striking and important local instance of decline and unsuccessful strategy – Pilbara unionism, once an archetype of mining workers’ power – and to do so over the entire history of an industry. In explaining the fall of the Pilbara mining unions, which for 20 years until 1986 had seemed so strong, “power resources” and geography itself were remade by capital in ways that were entwined with, but did not always rely on, state action. This argument recasts debate about decline in two ways: by drawing on a longer timeframe than is common in industrial relations scholarship and by adopting a more theoretically explicit, and inter-disciplinary, framing than is usual in the labour historiography addressing these issues. The explanation offered here shows how, after just 20 years of mining, union power in the Pilbara unravelled. Employer strategy, the precise nature and timing of state intervention, and the geographically-textured nature of employer and union power explain the rise and fall of these unions.
Speed-Ups and Related Problems: The UAW and Grassroots Grievances in the Immediate Post-World War II Period
Timothy Minchin
Scholarship on the United Automobile Workers – for many decades the largest industrial union in the USA – has focused heavily on the landmark wage and benefit gains that the union won, especially through pattern bargaining in the post-World War II era. The UAW has been praised as an “American Vanguard” that secured landmark wages and benefits for its members in widely publicised national contracts, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. This article interrogates this image through the lens of the UAW’s executive board minutes, its top decision-making body. Although bargaining gains in these years were real, the national “pattern” was not as uniform as was reported and was constantly under pressure. Despite the gains, postwar autoworkers had many grievances, especially over workloads and “speed-ups.” Workers testified before the board about these complaints, showing that plant conditions were more important to many than wages and benefits. Usually precipitated by these issues, local strikes were a constant problem. As these records show, there was more to the UAW’s history in these years than pattern bargaining. These findings build on literature that has explored rank and file dissatisfaction in the auto industry, but extend it beyond local studies, showing how the union’s top leaders experienced the impact of members’ restlessness. The article also demonstrates that workers’ dissatisfaction occurred much earlier than the 1960s and 1970s, the era that has received more attention, throwing light on the roots of subsequent discontent.
More Lessons of the Accord: The 1986–87 Plumbers’ Union Dispute
Lucie Newsome, Danielle Miller, and Tony Ramsay
The early phases of the Price and Incomes Accord sought to constrain money wage increases in order to reduce the rate of inflation. Despite this, in 1986 and 1987 the Plumbers & Gasfitters Employees’ Union of Australia engaged in industrial action to pressure employers into increasing wages. Using this case study, we examine the capacity for individual trade union agency for wage increases in the context of Accord Mark II. The article draws on document analysis combined with interviews with six of the dispute’s key actors and close observers. It finds that trade union agency was quashed by various political and industrial actors and institutions. This threatened the financial survival of the NSW Australian Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees’ Union, who faced legal sanctions during the dispute.
“Guiding the Wobbly Hand of Justice”: The Early Years of the Council for Aboriginal Rights, c. 1951–55
Jennifer Clark
The Council for Aboriginal Rights (CAR) was formed in Melbourne in 1951 in response to strikes by Indigenous workers in Darwin for better wages and conditions. Representing a significant shift in Aboriginal rights advocacy, from labour strike to public organisation, CAR lobbied government, gathered and disseminated information, and built a network of activists. This paper focusses on the formative years of CAR, as a pivotal organisation that bridged strike action to left-wing politics, humanitarianism, feminism and anti-colonialism. Using the seven primary goals of CAR’s constitution as a starting point to identify key themes and approaches to advocacy, this paper concludes that CAR took a broadly educative approach to labour reform that recognised the complexity of Indigenous disadvantage and the importance of increasing public awareness. CAR served as an important intersecting point for sympathetic groups and individuals who came together to create a political environment of support for Indigenous people, laying crucial groundwork for the success of the 1967 Referendum.
Parching for Principle: Hotel Boycotts in Regional Australia, 1901–20
Iain McIntyre
This article serves as the first in-depth study of the nature, dynamics and growth of a set of consumer boycotts in early twentieth-century Australia. Labelled “beer strikes,” these targeted hotels over issues such as the price and quality of alcohol, food and accommodation, as well as the treatment of staff. The article examines how campaigners created and adapted a body of tactics and forms of organisation between 1901 to 1920, to the point where beer strikes became an established and recurring form of contestation. Identifying beer strikes as a primarily regional tactic, it also sheds new light on consumer activism outside of cities. It finds that beer strikes had continuities with other forms of working-class activism: making use of methods of organisation rooted in unions and in labour politics, and drawing on modern adaptions of ideas concerning “fair” prices and rightful compensation for work. It demonstrates that boycotts played a greater role in Australian working-class distributive and consumer struggles than has been previously acknowledged.
So How Did We Get Here? A Historical Case Study of Migrant Employment in the New Zealand Hotel Sector
David Williamson and Candice Harris
This article maps the transition from a corporatist to a neoliberal consensus in the hotel industry in New Zealand, focussing on the changing labour conditions for migrant workers. We show how the current vulnerabilities for migrant workers such as poor pay and conditions, and low unionisation came into being. While much “presentist” research takes migrant worker vulnerability in hospitality and tourism for granted, this article finds that migrant workers did not always experience such vulnerability, but rather, this was constructed over time. The impacts of employment legislation and ownership changes during the 1980s and 1990s were crucial. By taking a critical historical employment relations approach, we better contextualise the current moment of labour shortages, reliance on migrant labour and by “race to the bottom” employment conditions. This suggests that the drive for sustainable employment practices will remain “aspirational” until the power imbalance in New Zealand employment relations is addressed.
Alcohol, Work and Play in Convict Australia
Shannon O’Keefe, Matthew Allen, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, and Michael Quinlan
This article critiques previous attempts to contextualise the culture of drinking in convict Australia arguing that such practices were embedded within a moral economy of work. It explains the importance of alcohol in British society and the manner in which its relationship to labour changed with industrialisation. Analysing quantitative and qualitive evidence drawn from court and convict records, it demonstrates how alcohol was used to motivate labour in both rural and urban settings. Looking more closely at the timing of drinking charges, it identifies distinct patterns for urban and rural convict workers documenting an increasing management tendency to distinguish sober work from drunken leisure. It concludes with a discussion of popular drinking as a form of agentive resistance and its policing as a means of labour management.