|
|
|
Book Review
| Bradon Ellem, Hard Ground: Unions in the Pilbara, Pilbara Mineworkers Union, Port Hedland, 2004. pp. 79. $20.00 paper (PO Box 439, Port Hedland WA 6721).
|
There is a place far to the north
Where the true believers have come forth
Shoulder to shoulder, a united band
This is where the last 500 stand.
|
|
|
| The 'last 500' in this poem by Nancy Missler, a shovel operator on the Newman mine in Western Australia, were the 500 union members at BHP Iron Ore who stood their ground — hard ground — and refused to sign individual Workplace Agreements or WPAs (pronounced 'woppas') when offered them by the company. This book tells their remarkable story — remarkable by comparison with what happened on other occasions when big mining companies sought to deunionise a worksite in the metalliferous mining sector, because on this occasion the unionists could fight back. And remarkable because of the twists and turns in the story, as emotions are wrung, cards are trumped, backs are stabbed, and the unions are vanquished, victorious, vanquished, victorious, and ... ? By the end of the story, you still do not know how things will turn out. But you know that something special has happened that is of much greater significance even than the impact on the lives of the 39,000 people in the Pilbara region. Because the story that Bradon Ellem skilfully weaves tells us that unions do have a future in Australia after all. |
1
|
|
The book is unusual in other ways, at least compared to most that are reviewed in academic journals. It is short, in A4 format, with lots of fabulous photos (albeit mostly black and white) and some useful text boxes (OK, some of those could have been better placed but these are minor complaints). There are no references, but it does not need them because they are all contained in Ellem's academic articles in Journal of Industrial Relations and Australian Geographer. If you have not worked it out already, it is very readable. Once I started, I had to keep reading till I finished, four cups of tea later. Ellem, an accomplished academic, has done what not enough academics do — he has written a story of the workers, for the workers. The book is published by the Pilbara Mineworkers Union (PMU), the united union that emerged to cover the terrain previously occupied by five oft-warring unions. But the book does not exalt the PMU, indeed, it lays bare the PMU's failures and weaknesses, but the book's strength lies partly in the insight these provide. |
2
|
|
Ellem's story — the workers' story — begins with the Pilbara as a union place through the 1960s and 1970s, and tells of the major disputes at Robe River in 1986 and Hamersley Iron in 1992, where the employers used the full force of the law to defeat the unions, and then used WPAs to remove them. He tells how and why BHP Iron Ore, the last remaining unionised company, decided to move against the unions in 1999 through offering WPAs, how half the workforce signed in a few weeks, and how the unions' legal action to stop the company from offering WPAs was ultimately unsuccessful but bought time. We find out how the unions turned things around by forming a united front (the hardest task of all) and strategising at multiple levels — national, state, local (a key focus) and workplace — using many of the techniques encompassed by the 'organising model'. We learn of how the BHP unions stopped the company's deunionisation strategy dead in its tracks. Of how the unions started using the same techniques in the Robe and Hamersley sites, now owned by anti-union giant Rio Tinto, and shocked management when they succeeded in obtaining a 'no' majority in ballots run by that company after it sought to move to a federal non-union 'collective' agreement following the new Labor government's removal of the WPA option from the state system. He shows us how the PMU's subsequent efforts to unionise the Rio Tinto sites were thwarted when the national office of one of the unions, against the wishes of its local membership, secretly negotiated a federal consent award with Rio Tinto, and the anger and bitterness this created. And finally he tells of how the PMU workers at what is now BHP Billiton regrouped and restrategised, and looks to the future. |
3
|
The cards are stacked against the Pilbara Unions. Federal law allows the companies to breach freedom of association by only hiring employees who agree to sign individual contracts, now Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs). So, natural attrition constantly eats away at the PMU's density. Yet really, the unions in the Pilbara, like the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), should be long dead and buried. That they are not is a testament to them. They have provided lessons for all Australian unions. Sure, much about the Pilbara is special, and much of the book tells us about the local dimensions of the story — but events since then have taught us the general relevance of almost everything the Pilbara unions did, even the highly successful house visits. (I remember thinking in the 1990s that these were one Yankee innovation that would not catch on here — now they are used by many unions.) In time, I suspect many unionists will agree with the last lines of Nancy Missler's poem:
Now you will see our flag again,
We fight the odds, we fight to win.
A watershed across this land,
We're the FIRST 500 and here we stand.
|
4
|
| | | | |
| Griffith University |
DAVID PEETZ | |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|