Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 2003 1 (26)
NEW UNIONISM IN THE OLD ECONOMY:
COMMUNITY AND COLLECTIVISM IN THE
PILBARA’S MINING TOWNS
BRADON ELLEM*
T
his 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.
INTRODUCTION
For a little over three years, Western Australia’s Pilbara region has been the
site of a series of struggles between resource companies and workers over union
recognition. Beneath this has been an equally tense, if less explicit, struggle over
union structure and strategy, in some senses a struggle between past and present.
This saga has only attracted national attention at dramatic moments, such as
November 1999 when BHP Iron Ore (BHPIO) offered its workforce individual
contracts, April 2002 when Rio Tinto workers rejected the offer of a non-union
agreement and November of that year when union activists ‘blitzed’ the mining
towns of Tom Price and Paraburdoo. Running through these events has been a
* Associate Professor, Work and Organisational Studies, School of Business, Faculty of Economics
and Business, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006. Email: [email protected]
This paper draws on a related project funded by the University of Sydney’s ‘Sesqui Research and
Development Scheme’. This is an expanded version of a paper presented to the 17th Conference
of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, in Melbourne,
February 2003. I have drawn on helpful comments from people who attended that session and
from Marian Baird, Rae Cooper, Bob Fagan, Andy Herod and David Peetz. I thank Troy Burton,
Michael Crosby, Justine Evesson and Shannon O’Keeffe for help and ideas as the project began.
My greatest debts are to the Pilbara residents with whom I have had many discussions about these
issues, to those who attended focus groups, and to the ACTU’s Pilbara organisers, Will Tracey
and Stewart Edward. Any failings in this paper are my responsibility.
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complex reworking of unionism itself as workers have sought to reinvigorate
collective action across this once solid union space. This reshaping of unionism
is the central concern of this paper. In the Pilbara’s iron ore sites, the organising
strategy of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has been seized
upon with particular enthusiasm, meeting with a striking localised response. This
meshing of national union strategy and local action has seen the appearance of
a single-union structure and an inchoate community unionism in Rio Tinto’s
Hamersley Iron sites.
This paper sets out to explore the terrain in and around the key sites of this
transformation, the mining towns of Hamersley Iron, examining the meanings
and prospects of this round of union restructuring. To do so, the paper draws
upon the work of a number of human geographers whose understandings of the
nature of space are pivotal in explaining not only union struggles in apparently
unique social contexts like the Pilbara but also industrial relations more generally.
These insights are all the more significant here because the forces engaged in
these particular struggles have themselves developed and deployed strategies
which are explicitly spatial.
GEOGRAPHIES
OF WORK, COMMUNITY AND UNIONISM
This section introduces the key spatial concepts of mobility, locality and place
consciousness. It also draws, more briefly, on the intermittent interest of
some industrial relations scholars and labour historians in labour–community
coalitions and community unionism and begins to draw these two bodies of
literature together.
Although most industrial relations scholarship remains wedded to aspatial
conceptions of social relations, there is an emerging interest in what might be
called the geography of the social relations of work (see in particular the special
issue of Labour & Industry 2002). For the most part, however, space has been
understood simply as a bare stage on which the ‘real’ action of industrial relations
occurs. Space can be discussed in an empirical sentence or two, usually in terms
of obvious physical features or perhaps some apparently geographically specific
practices, before turning to whatever the core topic may be (Ellem & Shields
1999). For geographers, however, space is made, not given. How space is used
and defined is central to the making of the world. All relationships, whatever else
they are, are necessarily spatial.
One of the geographical concepts which industrial relations scholars have used
is centred on the relative mobilities of capital and labour. In general, it is argued
that capital’s mobility is a source of power whereas immobility is a weakness
for labour. But is labour always and everywhere made weak by this situation?
It may well be that the very ‘rootedness’ of labour can be a source of power in
communities, industrial relations and politics. In other words, space can be remade
by labour’s agency. We know from a range of historical examples that working
people and their families have made quite distinctive local cultures. The ‘union
town’ is the most obvious of these, often giving an enduring institutional form
to such a culture (Storper & Walker 1989; Beynon & Hudson 1993; Ellem &
Shields 2000, 2001).
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There are two sets of reasons which explain the importance of space for understanding the social relations of mining. The first turns on capital’s immobility
in specific operations. A resource company may close down its operations at a
particular site because its management objects to local or national politics or
to the habits of a workforce or the role of unions, but the ores will remain
where they are. It does not have the same mobility that is said, for example, to
characterise manufacturing or information technology. Local managers must,
then, seek to overcome the leverage which labour might acquire from capital’s
immobility. Secondly, this immobility of specific capitals can give labour, communities and governments a degree of power (as the emergence of environmental
and community programs testifies). Labour and the communities in which it is
reproduced are, then, likely to strive to remake space. Because much hard-rock
mining happens to lie in regions remote from metropolitan centres, it is still more
likely that locally specific customs will emerge. Labour’s own immobility in places
of living, consumption and, in every sense, reproduction set against capital’s
enforced ties to a given productive space means that non-mine issues and townbased conflicts are likely to be at least as significant as capital–labour struggles.
In any event, these geographies of power run through the making of the social
relations of work.
For the purposes of this paper, it is important to understand that these
arguments about mobility only constitute a starting point. The paper suggests
that these mobilities of capital and labour meet in particular, and contested, intersections—labour markets, workplaces, regulatory regimes and towns themselves.
Human geographers have tried to show how physical geography and social forces
shape these intersections.
The physical geography of mining spaces such as the Pilbara may on the face
of it seem all-determining. In particular, the Pilbara’s isolation from metropolitan
Australia may be taken to account for much of its apparently idiosyncratic industrial relations (Dufty 1984; Swain 1995). However, this is to ignore the economic
structuring of, and market relationships within and around, particular physical
spaces. Doreen Massey has shown how neither the physical nor the economic
alone explains the making of social place. It is, she argues, the tensions between
physical isolation and economic integration—not simply one or the other—which
shape places (1994, pp. 138–9). Thus, mining sites like the Pilbara are best understood as being at once isolated and yet thoroughly integrated with (and in part
defined by) global economic forces and structures.
Much geographical analysis focuses, then, on capital’s agency in creating ‘place’
out of these physical spaces. In mining, this is both important and difficult because,
as has been suggested, capital loses much of its generic mobility and, furthermore,
has relatively few sites of possible capital accumulation. The growing concentration of mining capital into the hands of the world’s two largest resource
companies, BHP-Billiton and Rio Tinto, adds to the analytical importance
of understanding how capital seeks to create what David Harvey (1982) calls
‘spatial fixes’ which best suit their needs. A specific form of this is what Andrew
Jonas (1996) describes as ‘local labour control regimes’. Mining companies across
the globe have achieved this control in a range of ways: attempting to control
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the towns where miners live, fragmenting labour processes and labour supplies
while constructing their own forms of place consciousness.
What remains left out of these accounts is an explanation of the agency of
labour in the making of these geographies of work. Neither physical space nor
capital alone makes places and consciousness of them. Rather, it is the collision
of capital’s productive ‘space’ and social ‘place’ which make and remake what Jamie
Peck calls local ‘geographies of labour’ (1996, p. 15; Massey 1984). How, then,
are these geographies and senses of place actually constructed? For Andrew
Herod the central challenge in answering this question is to understand that for
workers, just as for capital, the ability to ‘manipulate geographic space in particular
ways is a potent form of social power’ (1997, p. 3). These contests over the
geographies of power are by no means confined to the workplace, or to workers’
institutions. As this paper will show, they are not even necessarily confined to
issues arising in the workplace (for a fuller discussion, see Ellem 2002b).
How might these geographies of power at any one site affect social relations
at others? In large but sparsely populated spaces such as the Pilbara, this is an
important question, especially when labour control regimes vary from one
mining company to another. Part of the answer lies in the maintenance and
transfer of union and community traditions not only over time but also across
space. In her work on spatial variations in the fortunes of British unions, Wills
argues that ‘[w]hat workers do, or fail to do in one place, makes a difference to
wider processes of uneven development’ (1998, p. 371); that is, that as workers
reshape relationships in one site or town they may be remaking the terrain (real
and imagined) over which others will struggle. In the case explored in this paper,
union renewal at one site began in the wake of successful union resistance to a
de-unionisation drive at another.
To address the core issue in this paper, the changing nature of unionism in
struggles over union recognition, a closer exploration of the spatiality of worker
organisation itself is required. Historically, unions were structured around crafts,
occupations or industries. Changes in the scale of their operations (in Australia
shifting between State and federal spheres) reflected general political structures
and immediate threats and opportunities. However, the organisational and
spatial framing of unionism tended to remain stable within these scalar shifts.
The workplace was privileged over community, the paid worker over family.
Nonetheless, from time to time, there have been suggestions that labour could
be organised in different ways and for different purposes. ‘Organising unionism’—
the present core strategy of grassroots renewal—is one such development (for
recent discussions, see Forbes-Mewett & Griffin 2002). Another innovation, less
acknowledged but central to this paper, is community unionism—one which
would appear to lend itself to an explicit discussion of the spatiality of union
structure and strategy.
Community unionism is generally understood to be a form of union organisation where the traditional ‘vertical’ structure of a union (from workplace ‘up’
to national office) is supplemented by a ‘horizontal’ structure. The latter consists
of relationships with other organisations, usually assumed to be at the local scale,
such as women’s groups, church groups, ethnic associations and similar bodies
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or single-issue pressure groups (Wills 2001). There has been very little discussion
of community unionism in Australia thus far (cf TUTA 1996, pp.15–19) and, when
it has, there has been something of a tension within it. The core problems are
that community unionism seems to be understood as an addition to union
practice; from the viewpoint of those outside unions, these alliances seem to
be contingent on, and mainly directed to, a union’s needs, not to a wider
constituency. For neither party does this community focus appear to be a significant re-orientation of union practice (Wills & Simms 2002). Yet, it is certainly
arguable that community unionism could emerge ahead of any formal policy or
academic debate because a genuine commitment to unionism ‘from below’ is likely
to lead to further changes in union structure and strategy.
Most analyses of community unionism in the industrial relations literature have
focused on ‘labour–community coalitions’ rather than community unionism itself.
They, too, underplay the possibility of new union forms. Drawing mainly on
literature from the United States (Craft 1990; Craypo & Nissen 1993), it has
been suggested that under some circumstances unions can build alliances with
other groups in particular places around particular issues, most notably service
delivery and plant closures (Patmore 1997; Thornthwaite 1997; Labour History
2000). However, there has been considerable skepticism about advancing beyond
such ad hoc alliances. Craft (1990), upon whom many empirical studies draw, is
not at all sanguine about the extension of community coalitions. This argument,
however, is marked by a functionalist view of union purpose which privileges
immediate workplace concerns and therefore makes other activities either
secondary to, or merely instrumental in, those concerns. It is also, more importantly for this paper, marked by a view of community which seems to define community as external to unions rather than as a social structure in which workers
are embedded. In other work, which draws upon both new forms of community
politics in action and new conceptualisations of community and unionism
(Tufts 1998; Pastor 2001; Wills 2001; Wills & Simms 2002), there are signs of
an emergent rethinking of labour politics more broadly. This literature speaks
not of coalitions but of union transformation.
Drawing this section of the paper together: capital’s drive to accumulate
generates productive spaces in which local managers must seek to define and
control the attendant social spaces and worksites which are created. How, then,
might unions change and how might they reclaim power in spaces where
they once held it? Beginning in the next section, the paper suggests that there
are some circumstances under which work and community issues appear to
be inseparable and that community unionism may develop more or less ‘from
below’.
WORK,
COMMUNITY AND REGULATION IN THE PILBARA
The physical geography of the Pilbara is both visually striking and analytically
significant. The region’s size is certainly impressive. The Pilbara covers over half
a million square kilometres, from the Indian Ocean to the Northern Territory
border, and is populated with only about 39 000 people (www.pdc.wa.gov.au).
The nearest town of any size outside the region is the tourist centre of Broome,
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600 kilometres to the north of Port Hedland; the State capital, Perth, lies 1600
kilometres to the south. Physically isolated it is. Drawing on Massey, though, it
is the economic and social reworkings of this space that are of most significance.
For the Pilbara is thoroughly integrated in global circuits of capital and global
markets: approximately 170 million tonnes of iron ore were mined in 2002. The
great bulk is shipped to Japan, China and Korea, with export income totalling
over $3 billion (www.dme.wa.gov.au; also DRD 2000). This section explores this
relationship between isolation and integration, alongside an examination of
trajectories of work and regulation in the Pilbara.
In examining the physical geography of the Pilbara, it is the immense distances
and differences within the region which are of most analytical significance. The
region is far from undifferentiated. Each major company operates in more or
less distinct spaces. These physical geographies have intermeshed with the social
in two ways. Firstly, they have provided a basis upon which local managements
have successfully fractured an often fragile labour unity. Secondly, they
have shaped one form of place consciousness, in which parts of the Pilbara
are defined in terms of the company mining there—be it BHP-Billiton or Rio
Tinto. BHP-Billiton’s BHPIO has mines in the central parts of the Pilbara,
centred on the town of Newman, while its port and treatment facilities are
450 kilometres away at Port Hedland. Rio Tinto oversees mining through
Hamersley Iron, a wholly-owned subsidiary, and Robe River Mining, in which
it has a majority share. The major Hamersley mines are close to each other at
Tom Price (opened in 1966) and Paraburdoo (1972), about 300 kilometres to the
west of Newman. The Robe River mines are located near Pannawonica, only
about 80 kilometres in from the coast. As is the case with BHPIO, each set
of mines has its own rail link to its ports, Dampier for Hamersley and Cape
Lambert for Robe.
These spatial characteristics have posed problems for labour. Firstly, the distance of the Pilbara from metropolitan centres may in the heyday of unionism
have facilitated local initiative but, when unions are struggling, it compounds the
isolation because the region is simply so expensive to resource from national union
headquarters. Secondly, the making of discrete company spaces has tended to
insulate workers in one space from events in another. Following Wills, it is clear
that companies have constructed their own locally specific fixes markedly differently from those in the nearest sites, a few hundreds kilometres away. For unions,
the task has been not only to refurbish union traditions from the past but
also to build upon success at one site and take it to another. This calls for
many things, of which effective communication into a non-union space is the
most striking.
Although Hamersley’s operations are integrated across these spaces in terms
of infrastructure and management, labour is inevitably divided. These are not
the large and concentrated labour forces which characterised mining and from
which mining unionism sprang on the coalfields in the nineteenth century.
Hamersley’s 1200 employees are spread over half a dozen sites. The company’s
management has divided its labour force still further, with the growing use of
‘fly-in/fly-out’ (FIFO) labour and of contractors (www.hamersleyiron.com).
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Just as the geography of the Pilbara tends to create labour fragmentation, so
too does the spatial and temporal organisation of mine work. Most of the Pilbara’s
mines are massive sites, the open cuts being several kilometres long and hundreds
of metres deep. Yet, at any one time, there are only a few workers engaged in
labour at any one site within the mine, be it the pit itself (referred to as ‘the hill’),
crushing plant, maintenance depot or train-loading facility. On the hill, labour
is divided between a range of classifications—shovel operators, dump truck
drivers, drillers and blasters. Before Hamersley’s successful de-unionisation
push a decade ago and before union restructuring at BHPIO, this division of
labour was the basis of organisational fragmentation and frequent inter-union
rivalry. The mines’ shift arrangements break up labour still further because the
rosters for the twelve and a half hour shifts (the basis of most production) are
set alongside a plethora of other shift and roster types. There are different start
times, shift lengths, and roster sequences. For example, at Hamersley’s Paraburdoo
mine, there are seven different sets of arrangements to cover different sites. The
rostering of days worked varies too. For example, some work three days, three
nights and then six off; others, four days on, four off, four on, two off. Perhaps
the single most telling element of this fragmentation is the use of FIFOs, long
a feature of physically isolated spaces such as the Pilbara and one replete with
socio-spatial significance. There have been few attempts to analyse the impact
of FIFO on Australian mining regions. Those which do, point to the costsavings achieved by companies but do not deal with the evident advantages that
FIFO affords to capital in overcoming its one strategic weakness in relation to
labour, its relative immobility (for example, Storey 2001). FIFOs have generated
immense discontent not only among union activists but also among some business
owners (PST 2003; author’s interviews, anonymous small businesses, Paraburdoo;
Edward; anonymous Hamersley employees).
This manipulation of space through alternative ways of sourcing labour has
been one the most contentious elements of work relations and of social relations
in the towns. Life in the mining towns has been marked by capital’s command
of space in ways as compelling as those on the mines. Paraburdoo and Tom Price
have seen massive drops in population. Indeed, recently published data from the
Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that Paraburdoo had experienced the
biggest fall in population of any town in Australia (ABS 2003). Locals say that
life is becoming more difficult as shops and schools close, sporting teams and
clubs disappear and hospital facilities are threatened. Population decline has also
broken up the traditional physical intimacy of these spaces as houses have been
deserted or demolished. The supposed norm of the chat over the back fence or
a cup of tea with the neighbours is not so easy when there are two or three empty
houses, or even more, vacant lots, between the occupied ones.
What then, of labour and community responses to this, of the remaking of
their own social space? Unionism emerged almost with the arrival of mining
capital in the Pilbara and yet little has been done to record its trajectory from
apparent apotheosis in the 1970s to the nadir of defeat at the hands of the
New Right. The setbacks suffered by unions in the late 1980s at Robe River and
the early 1990s at Hamersley meant that when Rio Tinto became the dominant
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force in these companies and across these sites, it inherited non-union workplaces
and non-union towns. On the mines, this meant many changes which enhanced
managerial prerogative. The most significant of these, as we shall see, was the
individualisation of grievance procedures and assessments. Because iron ore
was the raison d’être of the towns, the collapse of unions on the mines meant
their effective disappearance from these towns altogether. Unions became
invisible. The spatial fix which the companies oversaw—their version of ‘place
consciousness’—was constructed without reference to (or perhaps against)
unionism (Thompson 1983, 1984, 1987; Thompson & Smith 1987a,b; Swain
1995; Read 1998; for more recent interest in Hamersley, Hearn Mackinnon 2003;
Tracey 2003).
Despite defeat at Robe and Hamersley, other areas of the Pilbara remained
union strongholds, at least numerically. The BHPIO sites at Newman and
Port Hedland were union workplaces until the company launched its individual
contract offer in November 1999. It soon became clear, though, that this union
strength was more apparent than real when roughly half the workforce walked
away from their unions. The ACTU’s initial intervention was undertaken through
the national Organising Centre. The ‘trouble-shooting’ organiser, Troy Burton,
and his permanent successor, Will Tracey, worked with local convenors and
delegates to revamp union structures. They did so by burying the traditional
demarcations which had done so much to damage the unions to the very eve of
BHPIO’s move. From the summer of 1999–2000, local workers themselves built
what was, in effect, a one-union site (Ellem 2002a for a full account). A small
band of union members in Hamersley’s workforce—the ‘dirty dozen’ (Tracey
2003)—remained, and some new workers were sympathetic to unionism, too. The
union renewal at BHPIO struck a chord as news (albeit limited) filtered across
the Pilbara of new union structures and the mobilisation of community
interests.
During the long non-union period at the Rio Tinto sites, a particular
geography of power was constructed as mining capital built upon the strategic
advantages afforded to it by the Pilbara’s physical characteristics. Labour
was fragmented and communities were marginalised as capital appeared to
overcome the major strategic weakness it faced, its relative immobility. Yet,
the revitalisation of unionism at BHPIO and, as the next section explains, new
State legislation meant that space might yet be remade and a new kind of
unionism emerge.
NEW
UNIONISM IN THE
HAMERSLEY
MINING TOWNS
The immediate cause of regulatory change at Hamersley Iron (and elsewhere in
Rio Tinto’s Western Australian operations) was the State Labor government’s
new industrial relations policy. Hamersley Iron had been one of the first major
companies to take advantage of the regime of Western Australian Workplace
Agreements (WPAs) introduced under the previous government’s Workplace
Agreements Act 1993. The WPAs, which were often as brief as one page, allowed
all but free reign to management and rendered union membership useless, a moot
point as the unions had disappeared from the sites anyway (for the legislation,
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see Wallace-Bruce 1998; Ford 1999; Bailey & Horstmann 2000; on WPAs,
see Ellem 2002a; Tracey 2003). There had been no union recognition since then.
The new Labor Relations Reform Act 2002 would phase out WPAs by March 2003.
Rio Tinto had other options to try to maintain its regimes of labour control. These
options lay at the federal scale, with Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs)
or non-union collective agreements, 170LKs (so named from the relevant
section of the Workplace Relations Act). Early in 2002, Rio Tinto decided to opt
for LKs, believing them to be less cumbersome than any available form of
individual agreement—or ‘just more efficient’, as a spokesperson put it (quoted
in The Australian 6 March 2002). For the management, the immediate problem
was that the Workplace Relations Act required that any proposed agreement be put
to a ballot of employees.
For unions, then, the LK ballot opened the possibility of claiming the public
profile they had been denied for nearly a decade. They would find many
workers willing to listen. A handful of Hamersley workers had met BHPIO
activists and union officials and had begun to agitate for collective action by early
2001. There was other evidence, too, of worker discontent at Hamersley Iron.
These hints might have alerted observers to the possibility that despite years
of non-unionism and quite sophisticated management, there would be a solid
‘no’ vote.
Among disaffected Hamersley workers, there was a striking similarity in interpretation of the trajectory of local work relations. Regardless of their previous
attitudes to unions, most workers felt that in the mid-1990s, managers had been
genuinely committed to a new, cooperative model of work. However, by 2001,
many were arguing that there had been a discernible change: shift systems were
altered with little notice; hours of work were increased; real hourly rates of pay
came down. Much of the worker hostility arose not so much from the outcomes
as from the processes of individually-scaled regulation, in particular, grievance
procedures. The company’s ‘Fair Treatment Procedure’ had become widely
unpopular as had performance reviews (Hamersley Iron n.d.; author’s interviews
with anonymous Hamersley employees; Will Tracey 19 September 2001;
author’s focus groups).
In a series of author’s focus groups, these complaints were the subject of close
discussion. The company’s grievance procedure was at best regarded as too slow
(Focus Groups 1, 3, 5, 6, 7). Others said that, all too often, ‘nothing happens’
(FG 1); one was of the view that ‘it’s designed to wear you down’ (FG 2). The
company’s assessment system was also considered inconsistent and unclear. These
workers pointed to contradictions within the company rhetoric of individualism:
the ‘one-on-one’ was not so much unfair as simply untrue; rather, the company
really pitted one employee against two or three supervisors and managers (FG
3, 6, 7). The management’s control of time and space was frequently discussed:
managers, said one worker, ‘changed shifts more than undies’ (FG 1). All the
concerns commonly raised by shift workers in other industries and occupations
were raised here: the general effects on the quality of working life and social life
(FG 1, 3, 8); uncertainty about family time (FG 1, 8); loss of pay associated with
changes (FG 1, 2)
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Much of this discontent reflected an antipathy to broader management
practices. Workers in focus groups and interviews expressed profound discontent
with the high turnover of onsite managers and what they saw as the inexperience
of many managers. Many felt that conditions at Hamersley Iron had deteriorated
under Rio Tinto’s ownership. Some attributed this to Rio’s sole concern with
profit (FG 3), others to the rhetoric of shareholder returns (FG 6), others to
the parent company’s ideology (FG 8). The most frequent complaint turned on
perceptions of the management’s overall attitude. This was encapsulated in what
had become one of the most commonly told stories in the towns—that senior
mangers had told workers that ‘if you don’t like it, you can fuck off’ (FG 1, 2;
author’s interviews with anonymous Hamersley employees).
The workplace was not the only space in which discontent was evident. There
were also concerns which related to community life in the mining towns. People
were alarmed by falling population, low numbers of locals employed, declining
social life and facilities, and the impact of FIFOs and reliance on contractors. Of
these issues, the one generating the deepest concern was that local people needed
to be employed to keep the mining towns ‘active’. These issues were never far
from the surface and appeared to be growing in significance as rumours came
and went of new mines being opened. For many small business people, the
company appeared to focus on Perth or overseas, with a purely rhetorical
commitment to the local communities (author’s focus groups; author’s interviews
with anonymous Hamersley employees; Stewart Edward; anonymous small
businesses, Paraburdoo).
However, neither workplace nor community grievances necessarily translated
into support for unionism. Even those workers who were most critical of the company insisted time and again that the ballot was not a vote about unionisation.
This applied regardless of more general attitudes to unionism. In focus groups
the best response from a union standpoint was that the result was ‘not mainly’ a
vote for unions (FG3); it was ‘not necessarily’ a pro-union vote (FG6). Most
responses were more forceful when asked if the ballot was a pro-union vote: ‘no’
(FG1, 4, 5), ‘no way’ (FG7) and ‘absolutely not’ (FG8).
When these workers did discuss unionisation, it was clear that they had very
clear ideas about the shape that a new union should take. They wanted a unified
union structure grounded in local worksites, not separate, occupationally-based
unions. Four representative quotations give a feel for this:
There used to be more infighting than anything else and among a lot of people there
would be that sort of concern (FG 5).
If we had a union it would be a mining union . . . that’s what we need—one union
for the whole lot . . . the people are looking for something new (FG 1).
We spent year and years in the unions here in the Pilbara fighting each other . . . if
the union was ever to come back here, it would need to be an industry union,
everybody in the industry represented by the one union (FG 8).
One union’d be the go to stop that sort of shit [demarcation disputes]; one union is
what you want . . . if you formed into one union, you’re a power to be reckoned with
(FG 3).
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These views seem to have emerged from local readings of Pilbara union history
and geography, underpinned the ways in which unions’ apparent failings in the
1980s had been remembered. Despite immense discontent over a broad range
of work and community issues, there was immense scepticism about the legacies
of, and prospects for, unionism. Furthermore, mineworkers and their families
simply could not believe that unions would re-appear in these sites—and many
were wary or even fearful of associating with them if they did.
Union officials and activists elsewhere in the Pilbara and most ACTU officials
shared this reading of the terrain. The union campaign for a ‘no’ vote in the LK
ballot was, then, to be shaped by this geography and history. This was so in two
ways. Firstly, the site of the campaign would be the towns themselves, not the
mines. The first physical intimation of unions reclaiming space in the Hamersley
towns had come before the ballot was announced when, in August 2001, the
mining unions set up a stall at the Nameless Festival, a fair in Tom Price. As
the union bulletin Rock Solid (based at the BHPIO sites) put it, in a perfect
summation of spatial politics and imagery, this put the unions back into ‘the
heart of Rio Tinto territory’ (Rock Solid 33). Parliamentarian Jon Ford reported
that many of those at the festival had told him that ‘it was good to see a union
presence in town’ (Ford 2001, emphasis added). Secondly, this reading of local
geographies of power—especially of long union absence and local fearfulness—
meant that within the towns particular spaces and strategies would be central to
the campaign. The unions deployed a low-key approach to gathering support
for the ‘no’ case, eschewing the public rallies and mass meetings so central to
union tradition. The renewal campaign would, then, begin in homes, not
workplaces or any other public space. Thereafter, small meetings and a series
of ‘one-on-ones’ were held. This local renewal was never, however, purely local.
It drew upon other sites of power to achieve local change. Thus, unionists from
BHPIO and Perth added their logistical and personal support to the emerging
network of Hamersley’s pro-union activists. The catch was to draw on the
resources offered by the labour movement without attracting suspicion that this
was another drive by ‘outsiders’ to direct the lives of Hamersley workers and
families (author’s interviews, Will Tracey 19 September 2001, Troy Burton
16 May 2002).
On 5 April 2002, the result of the ballot was released. After nearly a decade
of individual contracts and weeks of intense campaigning by the company,
most workers at most of Rio’s sites had voted ‘no’. At Hamersley Iron, the
focus of most union attention, nearly 60 per cent of those voting cast against
the LK. The result was surprising enough to many participants and observers,
including many in the union movement, but it was simply stunning for the
management. In the words of one experienced observer, it was ‘head-in-thehands, staring-at-the-floor kind of shock’ (Bachelard 2002; see also Treadgold
2002).
Neither managers, nor unions, let alone a clearly disenchanted workforce, was
sure what the next move might be. The company began to look at the implications for its own internal management and to consider a fallback position;
the ACTU and the disparate unions debated the way ahead in the light of this
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somewhat unexpected opportunity; workers wondered what their options
would be.
The company set out to regroup. Managers organised their own focus groups
and continued their one-on-ones, trying to understand what had gone wrong
and how the problems might be addressed. In general terms, they articulated
their reaction as managers have often done in similar situations: ‘thanks for the
wake-up call; we hear you’. By June, an internal report into the LK ballot had
been completed and specific grievances identified. Among the key recommendations were further reviews of the assessment system, better pay offers,
improved communication within the organisation and better community liaison.
However, many of the problems they faced were complex and others perhaps
intractable. For example, any move to set up effective ‘Community Steering
Groups’ (perhaps an unfortunate description) would be likely to attract some
cynicism, not least because the unions had called for just the same thing. More
importantly, any genuine attempt to alter company relations with the local communities or reconsider management staffing decisions would appear to stand in
contradiction to Rio Tinto’s commitment to the use of FIFO and its apparent
churning of managerial staff through the organisation (Hamersley Iron 2003;
author’s interview, Troy Burton 16 May 2002; Weekend Australian 6–7 April 2002;
Treadgold 2002).
The immediate concern Hamersley faced was just which regulatory instrument
should now be favoured. To continue its policy of union avoidance, there were
three options: a revised LK offer, federal AWAs or the new Western Australian
Employer-Employee Agreements. Whatever their chosen option, the management had plenty of time because, under the legislation, these WPAs would remain
in effect until 14 March 2003. So, although the Act had given the unions the
opportunity to remake themselves in ‘Rio territory’, it also provided the companies
with some very valuable breathing space. They would, as we shall see, use this
effectively. Hamersley chose the instrument which would give them the most
flexibility: they began to offer AWAs, which included a wage increase, to the
workforce.
As relieved as they were by the LK ballot result, union officials, activists and
supporters now faced a number of challenges to be worked through in a very
difficult and volatile setting. Initial uncertainty about Hamersley’s response gave
way to concern when it emerged that AWAs would be offered to the workforce.
One response might have been (as would often have been the case in the past)
to use the small number of union workers on site as the basis for a quickly stitched
together award. This might have pre-empted the AWA offer, and it certainly
would have given the unions something material to show to workers. But with
union renewal being driven from below and grounded in local concerns, this was
not seen as a viable strategy. Nor did it seem a feasible one for the creation of
durable local structures. Most national and local union strategists recognised the
clear signal from Pilbara workers that neither union rivalry nor the imposition
from outside of one particular union would be acceptable (author’s interviews,
Stewart Edward; Troy Burton 15 November 2002; Will Tracey 14 November
2002).
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These complexities were compounded by other factors which reinforced
each other: the need to maintain their position at BHPIO; the unions’ limited
financial and logistical resources; and tensions within and between existing unions.
Although beyond the scope of this paper, the impact of events at BHPIO remained
significant. That company’s management faced the same problem as Rio Tinto’s:
how to regulate the terms and conditions of those employees who had switched,
in this case, to WPAs in and after November 1999. When rumours began to
circulate that some of the workforce would be offered AWAs, the unions had
to spend a lot of energy addressing that issue across the BHPIO sites in Port
Hedland and Newman. How exactly the unions should resource this campaign
and build on the LK result at Hamersley was by no means obvious. The State
unions and the ACTU struggled to develop a coordinated response, to organise
funding and to agree upon a structure for unionism at Hamersley. With Western
Australia’s union density the lowest in the country and a range of massive projects
being announced elsewhere in the Pilbara the temptation for a union to break
ranks and go it alone would have been strong (ABS 2002; author’s interviews,
Troy Burton 16 May 2002; Stewart Edward). Indeed, as will be seen, the
temptation proved to be irresistible for one national organisation.
Eventually, the four relevant unions—the Australian Workers Union, the
Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the Australian Manufacturing
Workers Union and the Electrical Trades Union—agreed to work with the
ACTU. They would fund an ACTU organiser (based in Paraburdoo) and, in
the most critical development, would agree to the formation of a new body,
the Pilbara Mineworkers Union (PMU). This organisation would be a nonregistered union cutting across existing demarcations: ‘a grassroots organisation
of Hamersley Iron workers that want to have a voice in their workplace and their
community . . . independent of, but [working] closely with industrial unions’
(PMU 2002). The local activists now had what they had insisted upon: a single
union for Hamersley workers.
There were two senses in which the PMU appeared to be a new kind of
organisation. Firstly, it was novel in structural terms. The way in which ACTU
organising had played out in the Pilbara, meant that, after an initial, nationallybased response, local insistence on a specific union form became ever more
important. The local had effectively shaped State and national union strategies,
most obviously and specifically with the formation of a single-union body
for Hamersley. Secondly, it was new in organisational terms. From the very
beginning, the new body’s aims and concerns targeted community issues such as
the impact of contractors and FIFOs and the declining social fabric. Indeed, in
spatial terms, the new organisation’s presence was solely in the towns, in homes
and FIFO quarters, on town notice-boards and in gatherings in pubs.
How, then, did the new union begin to develop? The ACTU’s new Pilbara
organiser, Stewart Edward, began work in June 2002 by continuing the low-key
approach to organising which had been agreed upon. The company’s reaction to
the LK result—the fact that management had done anything at all—had given
the unions a hook. They could now argue that there was now concrete proof of
the power of collective action. The ‘no’ vote, they said, had been a collective act
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in itself, and it had worked because the company said that it was now listening
and making changes (Anvil various issues; author’s interviews, Troy Burton
16 May 2002; Stewart Edward). Edward was initially supported by a small
‘official’ team (Burton and Tracey) with local workers and family members.
Their tasks were twofold: to understand work organisation, shift arrangements
and local issues; and to show that union renewal was no longer merely hypothetical. Thus they set out to map the worksites for areas of likely union strength
(although unlike BHPIO this was necessarily done offsite). They quickly
established and circulated a bulletin, this one entitled The Anvil, under the
banner ‘forging a better future for [Rio] families and communities’ (Anvil 1).
That the focus of the union campaign was to be upon both town and mine
was immediately obvious. The unions used the first issue of the bulletin to call
on the company to set up Community Consultation Groups to address the impact
of corporate decisions on the towns (Anvil 1). This was not simply rhetorical.
The new organiser established official as well as informal linkages with community
groups, town workers and small business owners in Paraburdoo. Edward was soon
involved in the town’s Community Centre, a critical conduit for local interactions,
grievances and knowledge. The volunteers here echoed wider social concerns
about population decline, education and healthcare. More broadly, they were
anxious about the general uncertainties generated in this environment and high
costs of living (author’s observations, interviews, 15 November 2002).
Through the middle months of 2002, the union sympathisers in the mining
towns worked to build their networks and to campaign for a return of union
organisation and award coverage to the Hamersley sites. There was pressure from
some pro-union workers for a more dramatic gesture of union re-appearance
at the mines and for the PMU to go straight for an award. This increased as
workers began to succumb to the company’s AWA drive. The management’s
consistent theme was that workers needed to make up their minds sooner rather
than later. The equally consistently rebuttals in The Anvil—that March 2003 was
a long way off—seemed to be less effective (Edward 2003). What, then, was to
be done?
Maintaining the overall strategy of building from below, the unions now moved
to alter one element of it, namely its geography. The unions would very publicly
enter these non-union towns, running a North American style ‘organising
blitz’ in Paraburdoo and Tom Price. This was timed for the week beginning
11 November 2002, three years to the day since the BHPIO contract initiative.
To minimise the risk of this being portrayed as an ‘outside’ or ‘third party’ intervention in the lives of otherwise contented workers, it was delegates as well as
officials who undertook the blitz. They came from a range of union types across
Australia, with ACTU funding ensuring at least some female representation
(shown in the debrief meetings to have been a particularly significant intervention). The delegates were provided with background and instruction by
workers from BHPIO and from ACTU officers and trainers. About two dozen
delegates braved November’s heat in a comprehensive doorknocking of both
towns. They visited homes in pairs, often spending as much time in discussions
with partners as with the mineworkers themselves. The overlap of work and
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family issues, town and mine issues, was again striking. Localised concerns about
schooling, healthcare and community social facilities were raised as often as
workplace discontents (author’s interviews, Troy Burton, 15 November 2002;
Stewart Edward; Kathleen Galvin; author’s observation, 13–15 November
2002).
Whatever its result, the blitz would be of symbolic significance. It was the
biggest union presence in these towns since 1994 when, in the wake of Hamersley
Iron’s successful contract offer and under threats of court action, the unions had
shut up shop and disappeared (Hearn Mackinnon 2003; Tracey 2003). The very
space from which the blitz was launched was the old union room in Paraburdoo’s
town centre. So little used had it been and so abrupt the unions’ departure that
the filing cabinets still held union materials untouched since the early 1990s,
except for those seized for various rounds of litigation. As the unions tried to
rebuild in 2002, the room’s old stickers with one union denouncing another told
a cautionary tale (author’s observation, 13–15 November 2002).
As it turned out, the blitz was more than symbolic—it was an organisational
success. However, like the LK result, this generated new tensions. In short, what
was to happen next? The blitz resulted in about 70 per cent of those who were
contacted filling in the PMU’s form, that is, just over 100 workers in Paraburdoo
and Tom Price. O
COMMUNITY AND COLLECTIVISM IN THE
PILBARA’S MINING TOWNS
BRADON ELLEM*
T
his 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.
INTRODUCTION
For a little over three years, Western Australia’s Pilbara region has been the
site of a series of struggles between resource companies and workers over union
recognition. Beneath this has been an equally tense, if less explicit, struggle over
union structure and strategy, in some senses a struggle between past and present.
This saga has only attracted national attention at dramatic moments, such as
November 1999 when BHP Iron Ore (BHPIO) offered its workforce individual
contracts, April 2002 when Rio Tinto workers rejected the offer of a non-union
agreement and November of that year when union activists ‘blitzed’ the mining
towns of Tom Price and Paraburdoo. Running through these events has been a
* Associate Professor, Work and Organisational Studies, School of Business, Faculty of Economics
and Business, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006. Email: [email protected]
This paper draws on a related project funded by the University of Sydney’s ‘Sesqui Research and
Development Scheme’. This is an expanded version of a paper presented to the 17th Conference
of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, in Melbourne,
February 2003. I have drawn on helpful comments from people who attended that session and
from Marian Baird, Rae Cooper, Bob Fagan, Andy Herod and David Peetz. I thank Troy Burton,
Michael Crosby, Justine Evesson and Shannon O’Keeffe for help and ideas as the project began.
My greatest debts are to the Pilbara residents with whom I have had many discussions about these
issues, to those who attended focus groups, and to the ACTU’s Pilbara organisers, Will Tracey
and Stewart Edward. Any failings in this paper are my responsibility.
THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, VOL. 45, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2003, 423–441
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complex reworking of unionism itself as workers have sought to reinvigorate
collective action across this once solid union space. This reshaping of unionism
is the central concern of this paper. In the Pilbara’s iron ore sites, the organising
strategy of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has been seized
upon with particular enthusiasm, meeting with a striking localised response. This
meshing of national union strategy and local action has seen the appearance of
a single-union structure and an inchoate community unionism in Rio Tinto’s
Hamersley Iron sites.
This paper sets out to explore the terrain in and around the key sites of this
transformation, the mining towns of Hamersley Iron, examining the meanings
and prospects of this round of union restructuring. To do so, the paper draws
upon the work of a number of human geographers whose understandings of the
nature of space are pivotal in explaining not only union struggles in apparently
unique social contexts like the Pilbara but also industrial relations more generally.
These insights are all the more significant here because the forces engaged in
these particular struggles have themselves developed and deployed strategies
which are explicitly spatial.
GEOGRAPHIES
OF WORK, COMMUNITY AND UNIONISM
This section introduces the key spatial concepts of mobility, locality and place
consciousness. It also draws, more briefly, on the intermittent interest of
some industrial relations scholars and labour historians in labour–community
coalitions and community unionism and begins to draw these two bodies of
literature together.
Although most industrial relations scholarship remains wedded to aspatial
conceptions of social relations, there is an emerging interest in what might be
called the geography of the social relations of work (see in particular the special
issue of Labour & Industry 2002). For the most part, however, space has been
understood simply as a bare stage on which the ‘real’ action of industrial relations
occurs. Space can be discussed in an empirical sentence or two, usually in terms
of obvious physical features or perhaps some apparently geographically specific
practices, before turning to whatever the core topic may be (Ellem & Shields
1999). For geographers, however, space is made, not given. How space is used
and defined is central to the making of the world. All relationships, whatever else
they are, are necessarily spatial.
One of the geographical concepts which industrial relations scholars have used
is centred on the relative mobilities of capital and labour. In general, it is argued
that capital’s mobility is a source of power whereas immobility is a weakness
for labour. But is labour always and everywhere made weak by this situation?
It may well be that the very ‘rootedness’ of labour can be a source of power in
communities, industrial relations and politics. In other words, space can be remade
by labour’s agency. We know from a range of historical examples that working
people and their families have made quite distinctive local cultures. The ‘union
town’ is the most obvious of these, often giving an enduring institutional form
to such a culture (Storper & Walker 1989; Beynon & Hudson 1993; Ellem &
Shields 2000, 2001).
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There are two sets of reasons which explain the importance of space for understanding the social relations of mining. The first turns on capital’s immobility
in specific operations. A resource company may close down its operations at a
particular site because its management objects to local or national politics or
to the habits of a workforce or the role of unions, but the ores will remain
where they are. It does not have the same mobility that is said, for example, to
characterise manufacturing or information technology. Local managers must,
then, seek to overcome the leverage which labour might acquire from capital’s
immobility. Secondly, this immobility of specific capitals can give labour, communities and governments a degree of power (as the emergence of environmental
and community programs testifies). Labour and the communities in which it is
reproduced are, then, likely to strive to remake space. Because much hard-rock
mining happens to lie in regions remote from metropolitan centres, it is still more
likely that locally specific customs will emerge. Labour’s own immobility in places
of living, consumption and, in every sense, reproduction set against capital’s
enforced ties to a given productive space means that non-mine issues and townbased conflicts are likely to be at least as significant as capital–labour struggles.
In any event, these geographies of power run through the making of the social
relations of work.
For the purposes of this paper, it is important to understand that these
arguments about mobility only constitute a starting point. The paper suggests
that these mobilities of capital and labour meet in particular, and contested, intersections—labour markets, workplaces, regulatory regimes and towns themselves.
Human geographers have tried to show how physical geography and social forces
shape these intersections.
The physical geography of mining spaces such as the Pilbara may on the face
of it seem all-determining. In particular, the Pilbara’s isolation from metropolitan
Australia may be taken to account for much of its apparently idiosyncratic industrial relations (Dufty 1984; Swain 1995). However, this is to ignore the economic
structuring of, and market relationships within and around, particular physical
spaces. Doreen Massey has shown how neither the physical nor the economic
alone explains the making of social place. It is, she argues, the tensions between
physical isolation and economic integration—not simply one or the other—which
shape places (1994, pp. 138–9). Thus, mining sites like the Pilbara are best understood as being at once isolated and yet thoroughly integrated with (and in part
defined by) global economic forces and structures.
Much geographical analysis focuses, then, on capital’s agency in creating ‘place’
out of these physical spaces. In mining, this is both important and difficult because,
as has been suggested, capital loses much of its generic mobility and, furthermore,
has relatively few sites of possible capital accumulation. The growing concentration of mining capital into the hands of the world’s two largest resource
companies, BHP-Billiton and Rio Tinto, adds to the analytical importance
of understanding how capital seeks to create what David Harvey (1982) calls
‘spatial fixes’ which best suit their needs. A specific form of this is what Andrew
Jonas (1996) describes as ‘local labour control regimes’. Mining companies across
the globe have achieved this control in a range of ways: attempting to control
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the towns where miners live, fragmenting labour processes and labour supplies
while constructing their own forms of place consciousness.
What remains left out of these accounts is an explanation of the agency of
labour in the making of these geographies of work. Neither physical space nor
capital alone makes places and consciousness of them. Rather, it is the collision
of capital’s productive ‘space’ and social ‘place’ which make and remake what Jamie
Peck calls local ‘geographies of labour’ (1996, p. 15; Massey 1984). How, then,
are these geographies and senses of place actually constructed? For Andrew
Herod the central challenge in answering this question is to understand that for
workers, just as for capital, the ability to ‘manipulate geographic space in particular
ways is a potent form of social power’ (1997, p. 3). These contests over the
geographies of power are by no means confined to the workplace, or to workers’
institutions. As this paper will show, they are not even necessarily confined to
issues arising in the workplace (for a fuller discussion, see Ellem 2002b).
How might these geographies of power at any one site affect social relations
at others? In large but sparsely populated spaces such as the Pilbara, this is an
important question, especially when labour control regimes vary from one
mining company to another. Part of the answer lies in the maintenance and
transfer of union and community traditions not only over time but also across
space. In her work on spatial variations in the fortunes of British unions, Wills
argues that ‘[w]hat workers do, or fail to do in one place, makes a difference to
wider processes of uneven development’ (1998, p. 371); that is, that as workers
reshape relationships in one site or town they may be remaking the terrain (real
and imagined) over which others will struggle. In the case explored in this paper,
union renewal at one site began in the wake of successful union resistance to a
de-unionisation drive at another.
To address the core issue in this paper, the changing nature of unionism in
struggles over union recognition, a closer exploration of the spatiality of worker
organisation itself is required. Historically, unions were structured around crafts,
occupations or industries. Changes in the scale of their operations (in Australia
shifting between State and federal spheres) reflected general political structures
and immediate threats and opportunities. However, the organisational and
spatial framing of unionism tended to remain stable within these scalar shifts.
The workplace was privileged over community, the paid worker over family.
Nonetheless, from time to time, there have been suggestions that labour could
be organised in different ways and for different purposes. ‘Organising unionism’—
the present core strategy of grassroots renewal—is one such development (for
recent discussions, see Forbes-Mewett & Griffin 2002). Another innovation, less
acknowledged but central to this paper, is community unionism—one which
would appear to lend itself to an explicit discussion of the spatiality of union
structure and strategy.
Community unionism is generally understood to be a form of union organisation where the traditional ‘vertical’ structure of a union (from workplace ‘up’
to national office) is supplemented by a ‘horizontal’ structure. The latter consists
of relationships with other organisations, usually assumed to be at the local scale,
such as women’s groups, church groups, ethnic associations and similar bodies
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or single-issue pressure groups (Wills 2001). There has been very little discussion
of community unionism in Australia thus far (cf TUTA 1996, pp.15–19) and, when
it has, there has been something of a tension within it. The core problems are
that community unionism seems to be understood as an addition to union
practice; from the viewpoint of those outside unions, these alliances seem to
be contingent on, and mainly directed to, a union’s needs, not to a wider
constituency. For neither party does this community focus appear to be a significant re-orientation of union practice (Wills & Simms 2002). Yet, it is certainly
arguable that community unionism could emerge ahead of any formal policy or
academic debate because a genuine commitment to unionism ‘from below’ is likely
to lead to further changes in union structure and strategy.
Most analyses of community unionism in the industrial relations literature have
focused on ‘labour–community coalitions’ rather than community unionism itself.
They, too, underplay the possibility of new union forms. Drawing mainly on
literature from the United States (Craft 1990; Craypo & Nissen 1993), it has
been suggested that under some circumstances unions can build alliances with
other groups in particular places around particular issues, most notably service
delivery and plant closures (Patmore 1997; Thornthwaite 1997; Labour History
2000). However, there has been considerable skepticism about advancing beyond
such ad hoc alliances. Craft (1990), upon whom many empirical studies draw, is
not at all sanguine about the extension of community coalitions. This argument,
however, is marked by a functionalist view of union purpose which privileges
immediate workplace concerns and therefore makes other activities either
secondary to, or merely instrumental in, those concerns. It is also, more importantly for this paper, marked by a view of community which seems to define community as external to unions rather than as a social structure in which workers
are embedded. In other work, which draws upon both new forms of community
politics in action and new conceptualisations of community and unionism
(Tufts 1998; Pastor 2001; Wills 2001; Wills & Simms 2002), there are signs of
an emergent rethinking of labour politics more broadly. This literature speaks
not of coalitions but of union transformation.
Drawing this section of the paper together: capital’s drive to accumulate
generates productive spaces in which local managers must seek to define and
control the attendant social spaces and worksites which are created. How, then,
might unions change and how might they reclaim power in spaces where
they once held it? Beginning in the next section, the paper suggests that there
are some circumstances under which work and community issues appear to
be inseparable and that community unionism may develop more or less ‘from
below’.
WORK,
COMMUNITY AND REGULATION IN THE PILBARA
The physical geography of the Pilbara is both visually striking and analytically
significant. The region’s size is certainly impressive. The Pilbara covers over half
a million square kilometres, from the Indian Ocean to the Northern Territory
border, and is populated with only about 39 000 people (www.pdc.wa.gov.au).
The nearest town of any size outside the region is the tourist centre of Broome,
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600 kilometres to the north of Port Hedland; the State capital, Perth, lies 1600
kilometres to the south. Physically isolated it is. Drawing on Massey, though, it
is the economic and social reworkings of this space that are of most significance.
For the Pilbara is thoroughly integrated in global circuits of capital and global
markets: approximately 170 million tonnes of iron ore were mined in 2002. The
great bulk is shipped to Japan, China and Korea, with export income totalling
over $3 billion (www.dme.wa.gov.au; also DRD 2000). This section explores this
relationship between isolation and integration, alongside an examination of
trajectories of work and regulation in the Pilbara.
In examining the physical geography of the Pilbara, it is the immense distances
and differences within the region which are of most analytical significance. The
region is far from undifferentiated. Each major company operates in more or
less distinct spaces. These physical geographies have intermeshed with the social
in two ways. Firstly, they have provided a basis upon which local managements
have successfully fractured an often fragile labour unity. Secondly, they
have shaped one form of place consciousness, in which parts of the Pilbara
are defined in terms of the company mining there—be it BHP-Billiton or Rio
Tinto. BHP-Billiton’s BHPIO has mines in the central parts of the Pilbara,
centred on the town of Newman, while its port and treatment facilities are
450 kilometres away at Port Hedland. Rio Tinto oversees mining through
Hamersley Iron, a wholly-owned subsidiary, and Robe River Mining, in which
it has a majority share. The major Hamersley mines are close to each other at
Tom Price (opened in 1966) and Paraburdoo (1972), about 300 kilometres to the
west of Newman. The Robe River mines are located near Pannawonica, only
about 80 kilometres in from the coast. As is the case with BHPIO, each set
of mines has its own rail link to its ports, Dampier for Hamersley and Cape
Lambert for Robe.
These spatial characteristics have posed problems for labour. Firstly, the distance of the Pilbara from metropolitan centres may in the heyday of unionism
have facilitated local initiative but, when unions are struggling, it compounds the
isolation because the region is simply so expensive to resource from national union
headquarters. Secondly, the making of discrete company spaces has tended to
insulate workers in one space from events in another. Following Wills, it is clear
that companies have constructed their own locally specific fixes markedly differently from those in the nearest sites, a few hundreds kilometres away. For unions,
the task has been not only to refurbish union traditions from the past but
also to build upon success at one site and take it to another. This calls for
many things, of which effective communication into a non-union space is the
most striking.
Although Hamersley’s operations are integrated across these spaces in terms
of infrastructure and management, labour is inevitably divided. These are not
the large and concentrated labour forces which characterised mining and from
which mining unionism sprang on the coalfields in the nineteenth century.
Hamersley’s 1200 employees are spread over half a dozen sites. The company’s
management has divided its labour force still further, with the growing use of
‘fly-in/fly-out’ (FIFO) labour and of contractors (www.hamersleyiron.com).
NEW UNIONISM
IN THE
OLD ECONOMY
429
Just as the geography of the Pilbara tends to create labour fragmentation, so
too does the spatial and temporal organisation of mine work. Most of the Pilbara’s
mines are massive sites, the open cuts being several kilometres long and hundreds
of metres deep. Yet, at any one time, there are only a few workers engaged in
labour at any one site within the mine, be it the pit itself (referred to as ‘the hill’),
crushing plant, maintenance depot or train-loading facility. On the hill, labour
is divided between a range of classifications—shovel operators, dump truck
drivers, drillers and blasters. Before Hamersley’s successful de-unionisation
push a decade ago and before union restructuring at BHPIO, this division of
labour was the basis of organisational fragmentation and frequent inter-union
rivalry. The mines’ shift arrangements break up labour still further because the
rosters for the twelve and a half hour shifts (the basis of most production) are
set alongside a plethora of other shift and roster types. There are different start
times, shift lengths, and roster sequences. For example, at Hamersley’s Paraburdoo
mine, there are seven different sets of arrangements to cover different sites. The
rostering of days worked varies too. For example, some work three days, three
nights and then six off; others, four days on, four off, four on, two off. Perhaps
the single most telling element of this fragmentation is the use of FIFOs, long
a feature of physically isolated spaces such as the Pilbara and one replete with
socio-spatial significance. There have been few attempts to analyse the impact
of FIFO on Australian mining regions. Those which do, point to the costsavings achieved by companies but do not deal with the evident advantages that
FIFO affords to capital in overcoming its one strategic weakness in relation to
labour, its relative immobility (for example, Storey 2001). FIFOs have generated
immense discontent not only among union activists but also among some business
owners (PST 2003; author’s interviews, anonymous small businesses, Paraburdoo;
Edward; anonymous Hamersley employees).
This manipulation of space through alternative ways of sourcing labour has
been one the most contentious elements of work relations and of social relations
in the towns. Life in the mining towns has been marked by capital’s command
of space in ways as compelling as those on the mines. Paraburdoo and Tom Price
have seen massive drops in population. Indeed, recently published data from the
Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that Paraburdoo had experienced the
biggest fall in population of any town in Australia (ABS 2003). Locals say that
life is becoming more difficult as shops and schools close, sporting teams and
clubs disappear and hospital facilities are threatened. Population decline has also
broken up the traditional physical intimacy of these spaces as houses have been
deserted or demolished. The supposed norm of the chat over the back fence or
a cup of tea with the neighbours is not so easy when there are two or three empty
houses, or even more, vacant lots, between the occupied ones.
What then, of labour and community responses to this, of the remaking of
their own social space? Unionism emerged almost with the arrival of mining
capital in the Pilbara and yet little has been done to record its trajectory from
apparent apotheosis in the 1970s to the nadir of defeat at the hands of the
New Right. The setbacks suffered by unions in the late 1980s at Robe River and
the early 1990s at Hamersley meant that when Rio Tinto became the dominant
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force in these companies and across these sites, it inherited non-union workplaces
and non-union towns. On the mines, this meant many changes which enhanced
managerial prerogative. The most significant of these, as we shall see, was the
individualisation of grievance procedures and assessments. Because iron ore
was the raison d’être of the towns, the collapse of unions on the mines meant
their effective disappearance from these towns altogether. Unions became
invisible. The spatial fix which the companies oversaw—their version of ‘place
consciousness’—was constructed without reference to (or perhaps against)
unionism (Thompson 1983, 1984, 1987; Thompson & Smith 1987a,b; Swain
1995; Read 1998; for more recent interest in Hamersley, Hearn Mackinnon 2003;
Tracey 2003).
Despite defeat at Robe and Hamersley, other areas of the Pilbara remained
union strongholds, at least numerically. The BHPIO sites at Newman and
Port Hedland were union workplaces until the company launched its individual
contract offer in November 1999. It soon became clear, though, that this union
strength was more apparent than real when roughly half the workforce walked
away from their unions. The ACTU’s initial intervention was undertaken through
the national Organising Centre. The ‘trouble-shooting’ organiser, Troy Burton,
and his permanent successor, Will Tracey, worked with local convenors and
delegates to revamp union structures. They did so by burying the traditional
demarcations which had done so much to damage the unions to the very eve of
BHPIO’s move. From the summer of 1999–2000, local workers themselves built
what was, in effect, a one-union site (Ellem 2002a for a full account). A small
band of union members in Hamersley’s workforce—the ‘dirty dozen’ (Tracey
2003)—remained, and some new workers were sympathetic to unionism, too. The
union renewal at BHPIO struck a chord as news (albeit limited) filtered across
the Pilbara of new union structures and the mobilisation of community
interests.
During the long non-union period at the Rio Tinto sites, a particular
geography of power was constructed as mining capital built upon the strategic
advantages afforded to it by the Pilbara’s physical characteristics. Labour
was fragmented and communities were marginalised as capital appeared to
overcome the major strategic weakness it faced, its relative immobility. Yet,
the revitalisation of unionism at BHPIO and, as the next section explains, new
State legislation meant that space might yet be remade and a new kind of
unionism emerge.
NEW
UNIONISM IN THE
HAMERSLEY
MINING TOWNS
The immediate cause of regulatory change at Hamersley Iron (and elsewhere in
Rio Tinto’s Western Australian operations) was the State Labor government’s
new industrial relations policy. Hamersley Iron had been one of the first major
companies to take advantage of the regime of Western Australian Workplace
Agreements (WPAs) introduced under the previous government’s Workplace
Agreements Act 1993. The WPAs, which were often as brief as one page, allowed
all but free reign to management and rendered union membership useless, a moot
point as the unions had disappeared from the sites anyway (for the legislation,
NEW UNIONISM
IN THE
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431
see Wallace-Bruce 1998; Ford 1999; Bailey & Horstmann 2000; on WPAs,
see Ellem 2002a; Tracey 2003). There had been no union recognition since then.
The new Labor Relations Reform Act 2002 would phase out WPAs by March 2003.
Rio Tinto had other options to try to maintain its regimes of labour control. These
options lay at the federal scale, with Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs)
or non-union collective agreements, 170LKs (so named from the relevant
section of the Workplace Relations Act). Early in 2002, Rio Tinto decided to opt
for LKs, believing them to be less cumbersome than any available form of
individual agreement—or ‘just more efficient’, as a spokesperson put it (quoted
in The Australian 6 March 2002). For the management, the immediate problem
was that the Workplace Relations Act required that any proposed agreement be put
to a ballot of employees.
For unions, then, the LK ballot opened the possibility of claiming the public
profile they had been denied for nearly a decade. They would find many
workers willing to listen. A handful of Hamersley workers had met BHPIO
activists and union officials and had begun to agitate for collective action by early
2001. There was other evidence, too, of worker discontent at Hamersley Iron.
These hints might have alerted observers to the possibility that despite years
of non-unionism and quite sophisticated management, there would be a solid
‘no’ vote.
Among disaffected Hamersley workers, there was a striking similarity in interpretation of the trajectory of local work relations. Regardless of their previous
attitudes to unions, most workers felt that in the mid-1990s, managers had been
genuinely committed to a new, cooperative model of work. However, by 2001,
many were arguing that there had been a discernible change: shift systems were
altered with little notice; hours of work were increased; real hourly rates of pay
came down. Much of the worker hostility arose not so much from the outcomes
as from the processes of individually-scaled regulation, in particular, grievance
procedures. The company’s ‘Fair Treatment Procedure’ had become widely
unpopular as had performance reviews (Hamersley Iron n.d.; author’s interviews
with anonymous Hamersley employees; Will Tracey 19 September 2001;
author’s focus groups).
In a series of author’s focus groups, these complaints were the subject of close
discussion. The company’s grievance procedure was at best regarded as too slow
(Focus Groups 1, 3, 5, 6, 7). Others said that, all too often, ‘nothing happens’
(FG 1); one was of the view that ‘it’s designed to wear you down’ (FG 2). The
company’s assessment system was also considered inconsistent and unclear. These
workers pointed to contradictions within the company rhetoric of individualism:
the ‘one-on-one’ was not so much unfair as simply untrue; rather, the company
really pitted one employee against two or three supervisors and managers (FG
3, 6, 7). The management’s control of time and space was frequently discussed:
managers, said one worker, ‘changed shifts more than undies’ (FG 1). All the
concerns commonly raised by shift workers in other industries and occupations
were raised here: the general effects on the quality of working life and social life
(FG 1, 3, 8); uncertainty about family time (FG 1, 8); loss of pay associated with
changes (FG 1, 2)
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Much of this discontent reflected an antipathy to broader management
practices. Workers in focus groups and interviews expressed profound discontent
with the high turnover of onsite managers and what they saw as the inexperience
of many managers. Many felt that conditions at Hamersley Iron had deteriorated
under Rio Tinto’s ownership. Some attributed this to Rio’s sole concern with
profit (FG 3), others to the rhetoric of shareholder returns (FG 6), others to
the parent company’s ideology (FG 8). The most frequent complaint turned on
perceptions of the management’s overall attitude. This was encapsulated in what
had become one of the most commonly told stories in the towns—that senior
mangers had told workers that ‘if you don’t like it, you can fuck off’ (FG 1, 2;
author’s interviews with anonymous Hamersley employees).
The workplace was not the only space in which discontent was evident. There
were also concerns which related to community life in the mining towns. People
were alarmed by falling population, low numbers of locals employed, declining
social life and facilities, and the impact of FIFOs and reliance on contractors. Of
these issues, the one generating the deepest concern was that local people needed
to be employed to keep the mining towns ‘active’. These issues were never far
from the surface and appeared to be growing in significance as rumours came
and went of new mines being opened. For many small business people, the
company appeared to focus on Perth or overseas, with a purely rhetorical
commitment to the local communities (author’s focus groups; author’s interviews
with anonymous Hamersley employees; Stewart Edward; anonymous small
businesses, Paraburdoo).
However, neither workplace nor community grievances necessarily translated
into support for unionism. Even those workers who were most critical of the company insisted time and again that the ballot was not a vote about unionisation.
This applied regardless of more general attitudes to unionism. In focus groups
the best response from a union standpoint was that the result was ‘not mainly’ a
vote for unions (FG3); it was ‘not necessarily’ a pro-union vote (FG6). Most
responses were more forceful when asked if the ballot was a pro-union vote: ‘no’
(FG1, 4, 5), ‘no way’ (FG7) and ‘absolutely not’ (FG8).
When these workers did discuss unionisation, it was clear that they had very
clear ideas about the shape that a new union should take. They wanted a unified
union structure grounded in local worksites, not separate, occupationally-based
unions. Four representative quotations give a feel for this:
There used to be more infighting than anything else and among a lot of people there
would be that sort of concern (FG 5).
If we had a union it would be a mining union . . . that’s what we need—one union
for the whole lot . . . the people are looking for something new (FG 1).
We spent year and years in the unions here in the Pilbara fighting each other . . . if
the union was ever to come back here, it would need to be an industry union,
everybody in the industry represented by the one union (FG 8).
One union’d be the go to stop that sort of shit [demarcation disputes]; one union is
what you want . . . if you formed into one union, you’re a power to be reckoned with
(FG 3).
NEW UNIONISM
IN THE
OLD ECONOMY
433
These views seem to have emerged from local readings of Pilbara union history
and geography, underpinned the ways in which unions’ apparent failings in the
1980s had been remembered. Despite immense discontent over a broad range
of work and community issues, there was immense scepticism about the legacies
of, and prospects for, unionism. Furthermore, mineworkers and their families
simply could not believe that unions would re-appear in these sites—and many
were wary or even fearful of associating with them if they did.
Union officials and activists elsewhere in the Pilbara and most ACTU officials
shared this reading of the terrain. The union campaign for a ‘no’ vote in the LK
ballot was, then, to be shaped by this geography and history. This was so in two
ways. Firstly, the site of the campaign would be the towns themselves, not the
mines. The first physical intimation of unions reclaiming space in the Hamersley
towns had come before the ballot was announced when, in August 2001, the
mining unions set up a stall at the Nameless Festival, a fair in Tom Price. As
the union bulletin Rock Solid (based at the BHPIO sites) put it, in a perfect
summation of spatial politics and imagery, this put the unions back into ‘the
heart of Rio Tinto territory’ (Rock Solid 33). Parliamentarian Jon Ford reported
that many of those at the festival had told him that ‘it was good to see a union
presence in town’ (Ford 2001, emphasis added). Secondly, this reading of local
geographies of power—especially of long union absence and local fearfulness—
meant that within the towns particular spaces and strategies would be central to
the campaign. The unions deployed a low-key approach to gathering support
for the ‘no’ case, eschewing the public rallies and mass meetings so central to
union tradition. The renewal campaign would, then, begin in homes, not
workplaces or any other public space. Thereafter, small meetings and a series
of ‘one-on-ones’ were held. This local renewal was never, however, purely local.
It drew upon other sites of power to achieve local change. Thus, unionists from
BHPIO and Perth added their logistical and personal support to the emerging
network of Hamersley’s pro-union activists. The catch was to draw on the
resources offered by the labour movement without attracting suspicion that this
was another drive by ‘outsiders’ to direct the lives of Hamersley workers and
families (author’s interviews, Will Tracey 19 September 2001, Troy Burton
16 May 2002).
On 5 April 2002, the result of the ballot was released. After nearly a decade
of individual contracts and weeks of intense campaigning by the company,
most workers at most of Rio’s sites had voted ‘no’. At Hamersley Iron, the
focus of most union attention, nearly 60 per cent of those voting cast against
the LK. The result was surprising enough to many participants and observers,
including many in the union movement, but it was simply stunning for the
management. In the words of one experienced observer, it was ‘head-in-thehands, staring-at-the-floor kind of shock’ (Bachelard 2002; see also Treadgold
2002).
Neither managers, nor unions, let alone a clearly disenchanted workforce, was
sure what the next move might be. The company began to look at the implications for its own internal management and to consider a fallback position;
the ACTU and the disparate unions debated the way ahead in the light of this
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somewhat unexpected opportunity; workers wondered what their options
would be.
The company set out to regroup. Managers organised their own focus groups
and continued their one-on-ones, trying to understand what had gone wrong
and how the problems might be addressed. In general terms, they articulated
their reaction as managers have often done in similar situations: ‘thanks for the
wake-up call; we hear you’. By June, an internal report into the LK ballot had
been completed and specific grievances identified. Among the key recommendations were further reviews of the assessment system, better pay offers,
improved communication within the organisation and better community liaison.
However, many of the problems they faced were complex and others perhaps
intractable. For example, any move to set up effective ‘Community Steering
Groups’ (perhaps an unfortunate description) would be likely to attract some
cynicism, not least because the unions had called for just the same thing. More
importantly, any genuine attempt to alter company relations with the local communities or reconsider management staffing decisions would appear to stand in
contradiction to Rio Tinto’s commitment to the use of FIFO and its apparent
churning of managerial staff through the organisation (Hamersley Iron 2003;
author’s interview, Troy Burton 16 May 2002; Weekend Australian 6–7 April 2002;
Treadgold 2002).
The immediate concern Hamersley faced was just which regulatory instrument
should now be favoured. To continue its policy of union avoidance, there were
three options: a revised LK offer, federal AWAs or the new Western Australian
Employer-Employee Agreements. Whatever their chosen option, the management had plenty of time because, under the legislation, these WPAs would remain
in effect until 14 March 2003. So, although the Act had given the unions the
opportunity to remake themselves in ‘Rio territory’, it also provided the companies
with some very valuable breathing space. They would, as we shall see, use this
effectively. Hamersley chose the instrument which would give them the most
flexibility: they began to offer AWAs, which included a wage increase, to the
workforce.
As relieved as they were by the LK ballot result, union officials, activists and
supporters now faced a number of challenges to be worked through in a very
difficult and volatile setting. Initial uncertainty about Hamersley’s response gave
way to concern when it emerged that AWAs would be offered to the workforce.
One response might have been (as would often have been the case in the past)
to use the small number of union workers on site as the basis for a quickly stitched
together award. This might have pre-empted the AWA offer, and it certainly
would have given the unions something material to show to workers. But with
union renewal being driven from below and grounded in local concerns, this was
not seen as a viable strategy. Nor did it seem a feasible one for the creation of
durable local structures. Most national and local union strategists recognised the
clear signal from Pilbara workers that neither union rivalry nor the imposition
from outside of one particular union would be acceptable (author’s interviews,
Stewart Edward; Troy Burton 15 November 2002; Will Tracey 14 November
2002).
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IN THE
OLD ECONOMY
435
These complexities were compounded by other factors which reinforced
each other: the need to maintain their position at BHPIO; the unions’ limited
financial and logistical resources; and tensions within and between existing unions.
Although beyond the scope of this paper, the impact of events at BHPIO remained
significant. That company’s management faced the same problem as Rio Tinto’s:
how to regulate the terms and conditions of those employees who had switched,
in this case, to WPAs in and after November 1999. When rumours began to
circulate that some of the workforce would be offered AWAs, the unions had
to spend a lot of energy addressing that issue across the BHPIO sites in Port
Hedland and Newman. How exactly the unions should resource this campaign
and build on the LK result at Hamersley was by no means obvious. The State
unions and the ACTU struggled to develop a coordinated response, to organise
funding and to agree upon a structure for unionism at Hamersley. With Western
Australia’s union density the lowest in the country and a range of massive projects
being announced elsewhere in the Pilbara the temptation for a union to break
ranks and go it alone would have been strong (ABS 2002; author’s interviews,
Troy Burton 16 May 2002; Stewart Edward). Indeed, as will be seen, the
temptation proved to be irresistible for one national organisation.
Eventually, the four relevant unions—the Australian Workers Union, the
Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the Australian Manufacturing
Workers Union and the Electrical Trades Union—agreed to work with the
ACTU. They would fund an ACTU organiser (based in Paraburdoo) and, in
the most critical development, would agree to the formation of a new body,
the Pilbara Mineworkers Union (PMU). This organisation would be a nonregistered union cutting across existing demarcations: ‘a grassroots organisation
of Hamersley Iron workers that want to have a voice in their workplace and their
community . . . independent of, but [working] closely with industrial unions’
(PMU 2002). The local activists now had what they had insisted upon: a single
union for Hamersley workers.
There were two senses in which the PMU appeared to be a new kind of
organisation. Firstly, it was novel in structural terms. The way in which ACTU
organising had played out in the Pilbara, meant that, after an initial, nationallybased response, local insistence on a specific union form became ever more
important. The local had effectively shaped State and national union strategies,
most obviously and specifically with the formation of a single-union body
for Hamersley. Secondly, it was new in organisational terms. From the very
beginning, the new body’s aims and concerns targeted community issues such as
the impact of contractors and FIFOs and the declining social fabric. Indeed, in
spatial terms, the new organisation’s presence was solely in the towns, in homes
and FIFO quarters, on town notice-boards and in gatherings in pubs.
How, then, did the new union begin to develop? The ACTU’s new Pilbara
organiser, Stewart Edward, began work in June 2002 by continuing the low-key
approach to organising which had been agreed upon. The company’s reaction to
the LK result—the fact that management had done anything at all—had given
the unions a hook. They could now argue that there was now concrete proof of
the power of collective action. The ‘no’ vote, they said, had been a collective act
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in itself, and it had worked because the company said that it was now listening
and making changes (Anvil various issues; author’s interviews, Troy Burton
16 May 2002; Stewart Edward). Edward was initially supported by a small
‘official’ team (Burton and Tracey) with local workers and family members.
Their tasks were twofold: to understand work organisation, shift arrangements
and local issues; and to show that union renewal was no longer merely hypothetical. Thus they set out to map the worksites for areas of likely union strength
(although unlike BHPIO this was necessarily done offsite). They quickly
established and circulated a bulletin, this one entitled The Anvil, under the
banner ‘forging a better future for [Rio] families and communities’ (Anvil 1).
That the focus of the union campaign was to be upon both town and mine
was immediately obvious. The unions used the first issue of the bulletin to call
on the company to set up Community Consultation Groups to address the impact
of corporate decisions on the towns (Anvil 1). This was not simply rhetorical.
The new organiser established official as well as informal linkages with community
groups, town workers and small business owners in Paraburdoo. Edward was soon
involved in the town’s Community Centre, a critical conduit for local interactions,
grievances and knowledge. The volunteers here echoed wider social concerns
about population decline, education and healthcare. More broadly, they were
anxious about the general uncertainties generated in this environment and high
costs of living (author’s observations, interviews, 15 November 2002).
Through the middle months of 2002, the union sympathisers in the mining
towns worked to build their networks and to campaign for a return of union
organisation and award coverage to the Hamersley sites. There was pressure from
some pro-union workers for a more dramatic gesture of union re-appearance
at the mines and for the PMU to go straight for an award. This increased as
workers began to succumb to the company’s AWA drive. The management’s
consistent theme was that workers needed to make up their minds sooner rather
than later. The equally consistently rebuttals in The Anvil—that March 2003 was
a long way off—seemed to be less effective (Edward 2003). What, then, was to
be done?
Maintaining the overall strategy of building from below, the unions now moved
to alter one element of it, namely its geography. The unions would very publicly
enter these non-union towns, running a North American style ‘organising
blitz’ in Paraburdoo and Tom Price. This was timed for the week beginning
11 November 2002, three years to the day since the BHPIO contract initiative.
To minimise the risk of this being portrayed as an ‘outside’ or ‘third party’ intervention in the lives of otherwise contented workers, it was delegates as well as
officials who undertook the blitz. They came from a range of union types across
Australia, with ACTU funding ensuring at least some female representation
(shown in the debrief meetings to have been a particularly significant intervention). The delegates were provided with background and instruction by
workers from BHPIO and from ACTU officers and trainers. About two dozen
delegates braved November’s heat in a comprehensive doorknocking of both
towns. They visited homes in pairs, often spending as much time in discussions
with partners as with the mineworkers themselves. The overlap of work and
NEW UNIONISM
IN THE
OLD ECONOMY
437
family issues, town and mine issues, was again striking. Localised concerns about
schooling, healthcare and community social facilities were raised as often as
workplace discontents (author’s interviews, Troy Burton, 15 November 2002;
Stewart Edward; Kathleen Galvin; author’s observation, 13–15 November
2002).
Whatever its result, the blitz would be of symbolic significance. It was the
biggest union presence in these towns since 1994 when, in the wake of Hamersley
Iron’s successful contract offer and under threats of court action, the unions had
shut up shop and disappeared (Hearn Mackinnon 2003; Tracey 2003). The very
space from which the blitz was launched was the old union room in Paraburdoo’s
town centre. So little used had it been and so abrupt the unions’ departure that
the filing cabinets still held union materials untouched since the early 1990s,
except for those seized for various rounds of litigation. As the unions tried to
rebuild in 2002, the room’s old stickers with one union denouncing another told
a cautionary tale (author’s observation, 13–15 November 2002).
As it turned out, the blitz was more than symbolic—it was an organisational
success. However, like the LK result, this generated new tensions. In short, what
was to happen next? The blitz resulted in about 70 per cent of those who were
contacted filling in the PMU’s form, that is, just over 100 workers in Paraburdoo
and Tom Price. O