Bruce Hearn Mackinnon | CRA/Rio Tinto in the 1990s: A Decade of Deunionisation | Labour History, 97

CRA/Rio Tinto in the 1990s: A Decade of Deunionisation

Bruce Hearn Mackinnon^*

Given the scale of Rio Tinto's battles with the Australian union movement during the roll out of its deunionisation program throughout its diverse mining and manufacturing operations, there is much to be learnt from examining how the company first introduced its 'staff' employment system at its Tiwai Point smelter in New Zealand in 1991, Hamersley Iron in 1993, and at its Comalco-run Bell Bay and Weipa operations during 1994–96. More importantly, however, it is worth knowing why the company was so successful in deunionising previously 'soldered on' union territory. Though no doubt assisted by sympathetic legal, political and economic environments, it was ultimately the demonstration of managerial strength and determination, coupled with a hesitant union leadership, which led to the success of the company's deunionisation strategy. As the union movement makes tentative steps to attract workers back to the fold, there are valuable lessons to be gained from analysing these momentous events which constitute such a transformational period in the history of Australian industrial relations.

There is a growing body of evidence that increasing numbers of firms have been actively pursuing deunionisation strategies to enhance managerial hegemony.¹ While this has long been a feature of industrial relations practice in many overseas countries, particularly the United States, its emergence and growth in Australia is a more recent phenomenon.² Arguably, Rio Tinto (formerly CRA) has been at the vanguard of this employer push in Australia over the past decade and a half, beginning in 1993 with the deunionisation of its Hamersley Iron (now Rio Tinto Iron Ore) operations in the once staunchly unionised Pilbara region of Western Australia. Prior to these events, during the 1980s, a 'New Right' agenda was adopted by some employers, resulting in the implementation of militant union busting tactics at, amongst other locations, the Mudginberri abattoirs in the Northern Territory, Dollar Sweets confectionary plant in Victoria and at Peko-Wallsend's Robe River mine in the Pilbara.³ So, while by no means the first company to adopt a militant deunionisation agenda,⁴ the breadth and sophistication of the CRA/Rio Tinto case is one with no parallel in the history of Australian industrial relations.

The prime motivation for the company to embark on such a radical course of deunionisation, clearly stemmed from the falling commodity prices, particularly for both aluminium and iron ore, which occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a commodity producer with no opportunities for product differentiation, cost minimisation has always been an imperative for companies such as Rio Tinto. Deunionisation offered an opportunity for work intensification, via changed work practices, and a significant reduction in the size of the workforce, leading not only to improved labour productivity, but crucially, a shift in income share from wages to profits. With this motivation, the opportunity to roll out its deunionisation program presented itself, following changed political and legal environments both in New Zealand and in Australia.

This analysis explains how Rio Tinto (then CRA) shifted its workforce onto individual 'staff' contracts, which led to the deunionisation of its iron ore, bauxite, aluminium and other operations. Space prevents an analysis of the company's similar deunionisation program rolled out at its Boyne smelter in Gladstone, at Peak Gold or its Argyle diamond operations. Suffice to say that the experiences were remarkably similar to the events examined here. The only sector where staunch union resistance successfully withstood Rio Tinto's deunionisation campaign was the coal sector, where the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) waged a war of attrition with the company in the latter part of the 1990s, leading finally to the company accommodating collective bargaining.⁵

In recent years there have been intermittent attempts to re-establish grass roots community based unionism in the formerly fully unionised Pilbara region. Ellem has provided a rich historical account of these developments and the reasons for their successes and failures.⁶ At the time of writing (late 2008), train drivers, members of the CFMEU, employed by Rio Tinto, were engaged in the first strike at the company's Pilbara operations since the events of 1993. In light of these current developments, it would seem an opportune time to reflect on how Rio Tinto went about implementing their deunionisation program, thereby highlighting what lessons there are for the union movement today, in their efforts to re-organise and/or resist new deunionisation campaigns by employers.

Much of the insight into management's thinking at the time was obtained through a series of extensive interviews undertaken with Rio Tinto executives and senior managers during the late 1990s. This analysis is focussed explicitly on identifying and explaining management strategy and, in particular, how and why the company was so successful in deunionising previously fully unionised brownfields operations. In doing so, some account is provided of the strategies, or lack thereof, of the unions at the various sites under examination. The prime interest of this article, nevertheless, is in identifying the management strategy, since unions were, as elaborated below, reactive, rather than proactive, during the events under examination.

Most analysis of declining union density in Australia during the 1990s has tended to focus on structural changes in the economy, on the ramifications of union re-structuring and organising or servicing strategies, and to a lesser extent developments in labour law.⁷ Less attention has been focused on the direct impact of deunionising management strategies.⁸ Cooper et al,⁹ however, have recently detailed the rising tide of anti-union militancy amongst employers in Australia and Waring¹⁰ has examined management initiatives to undermine collective bargaining in the highly unionised black coal mining industry. Peetz provides a detailed survey of management strategies, arguing that a coherent model of decollectivist behaviour has started to emerge in Australia.¹¹. He argues that each action of a decollectivising (that is, deunionising) employer, has both a real and a symbolic dimension. Recognising that deunionising strategies will typically involve a number of mechanisms, Peetz distinguishes between 'exclusivist' and 'inclusivist' company practices, and argues that:

actions are taken both to demonstrate the benefits to the employees of adopting the company's preferred, union-free, model, and to create disutilities for those who wish to pursue an alternative model.¹²

Not only, then, are there two dimensions, but clearly, each is designed to reinforce the other.

In Australia, the offering of individual contracts – formalised from 1996 through the mechanism of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) – has been an important component of company deunionisation strategies. This was made explicit in comments by management consultants World Competitive Practices, that 'AWAs are an important element in achieving management's aim of a non-union workforce'.¹³ As Peetz commented, 'the symbolism here is dualistic: if you sign, you are in, if not, you are out'.¹⁴ A host of other tactics may be employed by deunionising employers, including the use of performance related pay (which acts to breakdown a sense of collective solidarity while simultaneously encouraging competition between workers and enhancing managerial authority), the withdrawal of union fee payroll deduction facilities, restrictions on union access to workplaces and/or company facilities and a refusal or unwillingness to genuinely seek a collective agreement with unions, while simultaneously offering pay increases for those willing to accept non-union individual contracts.

The events at CRA/Rio Tinto's New Zealand Aluminium Smelter (NZAS), Hamersley Iron, followed soon after at Comalco's¹⁵ Bell Bay and Weipa operations, demonstrate the accuracy of this analysis, plus four other vital ingredients in the company's deunionisation recipe, generally overlooked in the literature: firstly, the congruence of economic conditions conducive to management's generation of a climate of fear and uncertainty amongst the workforce over job security; secondly, an appropriate political/legal environment to assist deunionisation; thirdly, the importance for management to demonstrate power and effective leadership, in Rio Tinto's case, reinforced by the adoption of a peculiar organisational theory; and finally, a weakened, disunited, or hesitant union movement. Arguably, the key factor in determining the success of management's introduction of individual 'staff' contracts at CRA/Rio Tinto's operations in the 1990s was the apparent industrial defeat of unions prior to the introduction of 'staff' contracts. Before exploring this, however, it is necessary to examine the role of management ideology and the use of consultants in arming management with a unified mindset, essential to the conduct of a long and intensive struggle to deunionise their operations.

Management Ideology

In developing and implementing its organisational and employee relations agenda, the company utilised the services of two key international management consultants. From 1978 until 1990, the company engaged the services of the Canadian psychoanalyst, organisational theorist and management consultant, Elliott Jaques, one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute.¹⁶ Jaques, a truly original thinker and author of over 20 books and 80 articles, used CRA as the testing ground for his 'stratified systems theory', now referred to as 'requisite organisational theory', based on flattening management structures while arming the remaining management with significantly enhanced managerial prerogatives.¹⁷ Jaques' theory also provided a 'scientific' basis for task assignment, by matching individual capability with the accountabilities and responsibilities associated with particular jobs located within an organisational hierarchy. While Jaques' work with CRA in the 1980s did not involve deunionisation, it nevertheless provided a solid platform from which management were able to launch their system of 'staff' employment which had the effect of deunionising most of their Australian operations during the course of the 1990s.

In 1985 Dr Ian Macdonald, a psychologist and former student and colleague of Elliott Jaques at the Brunel Institute of Organisation and Social Studies (BIOSS) at London's Brunel University, commenced working in a consulting capacity with CRA/Rio Tinto. It was Macdonald, working closely with senior CRA executives, who developed the program and rationale for the company's abandonment of collective bargaining and the promotion of 'staff' employment as a means of deunionisation.

In order to avoid the negative public image of being a 'union buster', as well as to pacify employee resistance, the company consistently stated that 'staff' employment and union membership were certainly not incompatible, but more importantly, management was completely indifferent to the issue of unionism. Publicly, there was never any evidence that CRA/Rio Tinto objected to its employees being union members. Thus, Tony Filmer, Comalco's Managing Director, was very clear in stating: 'Union membership is a private issue of no concern to us. I presume that some of our employees are union members. That's their right'.¹⁸

Likewise, the company has repeatedly stated that its employees have the right to engage in collective bargaining if they so wish. Thus, Comalco's former Chief Executive Officer stated that employees should have '[f]reedom of choice as to both the nature of the employment regulation desired by the individual employee and whether they wish to become or remain a member of a trade union'.¹⁹

These proclamations tell only half the story. The company has, since 1991, embarked on a strategy designed to undermine collective bargaining and to win their employees' allegiance away from unions. Against a background of mass lay-offs and the offering of significant financial inducements, the company has introduced a system of employment in competition with that provided by the unions based on collective bargaining. In the absence of any provisions under Australian labour law requiring parties to engage in 'good faith bargaining', CRA/Rio Tinto was able to provide an appearance of bargaining with unions while all the time actually promoting its preferred 'staff' contract system as the way for workers to immediately receive pay increases and improved job security. Given a choice between these two systems, eventually most workers chose 'staff' employment, and inevitably then decided that maintenance of their union membership was no longer necessary. Only in the coal sector has collective bargaining and unionism successfully resisted the offer of the company's preferred system of employment.²⁰

Both Karl Stewart, Managing Director of Comalco Smelting, and Macdonald, the company's management consultant, provided detailed defences of the individualisation of the employment relationship through the use of staff contracts in evidence before the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (the Commission) during the Weipa and Boyne cases. Some of their arguments flowed naturally from the logic of Jaques' 'requisite organisational' or 'stratified systems theory'; however, many rested on their own theoretical innovations. Reflecting a unitarist philosophy, rejecting traditional pluralist assumptions about the nature of the employment relationship, their arguments centred on the idea that workers on 'staff' contracts were more productive than those whose terms and conditions of employment were determined by collective bargaining.

This was the most formalised and articulated argument against collective bargaining ever waged by a company operating in Australia, with its century old traditions of recognition and support for collectivist industrial relations. Thus, 'staff' contracts were seen as a mechanism for achieving cost reductions. In evidence before the Commission during the Boyne case on 14 November 1995, Stewart stated that as early as the mid-1980s it was recognised within CRA that 'the real gains in cost competitiveness would come when the entire workforce of the organisation was behaving in a way which was demonstrably much more committed to the objectives of the organisation'.²¹

By the early 1990s, CRA had concluded that such a commitment was not possible under a system of collective bargaining. Thus, the company explicitly rejected the idea that workers could demonstrate an allegiance to their union while also being committed to the goals of the company – an idea encapsulated by the notion of dual commitment.²² In rejecting the idea of dual commitment, Stewart pointed to the difference between the system of employment under collective bargaining, where workers are paid for their time, and under 'staff' contracts, where they are paid for their work. According to this view, collective bargaining encourages inefficiency as workers, acting rationally, are inclined to inhibit productivity in order to obtain access to overtime as well as preserving jobs. Alternatively, under a system of staff contracts Stewart argued: 'it is both expected and it is demonstrated that people seek to – wherever they can – in fact work themselves out of work'.²³ The idea that one of the benefits of 'staff' employment is that workers would willingly and enthusiastically 'work themselves out of work', is certainly a strange notion. In the company's view, even where improved performances are achieved under collective bargaining arrangements:

what you do not see is the continued reduction in that particular performance measure which comes as a result of the development of a one to one working relationship between each individual member of the organisation and his or her leader and that fundamentally is the difference.²⁴

Stressing the importance of the leader/subordinate structure, Stewart distinguished between two and three-party relationships:

It is the difference between a collective, which in essence is a three party relationship, collective/individual/manager, and what we refer to as staff conditions of employment which are fundamentally a two party relationship and it is a reality of human existence that we behave differently in two party relationships than we behave when we are in three party relationships, because in a three party relationship at all times we have to – all of us in that relationship have to take into consideration the wishes, desires, aspirations, likes and dislikes of the other two parties and that is very different from the requirements which are upon us when we are in a two party relationship.²⁵

Arguing that continuous improvement is not possible under collective bargaining conditions, Stewart stated:

if we ask, what is sensible for a person or a group of persons who are in a collective where there is collective negotiation for an improvement in salary or some other benefit, what is sensible for them to do in relation to ideas for improvement? And it is sensible that they be held for subsequent bargaining ... The circumstance in a two-party relationship which is functioning correctly is that those ideas for improvement are discussed as they occur and dealt with as they occur, and implemented as soon as they can be. [emphasis added]²⁶

Consistent with this view, the company's position was that, due to the improved performance of individuals on 'staff' contracts as well as the additional risks involved in a 'staff' relationship operating outside the protection of collective bargaining, they were entitled to additional remuneration.²⁷ Thus financial inducements accompanied the firm's introduction of 'staff' contracts at all of their operations. This clearly created a dilemma for some Australian unions, since opposing 'staff' contracts led them to effectively oppose the salary increases accompanying them.

Armed with a peculiar management ideology, providing theoretical support for enhanced managerial prerogative and 'staff' employment, the company nevertheless, needed other conditions – political, legal and economic – in its favour, before being able to launch its deunionisation campaign. In 1990–91, a congruence of such factors emerged in Tiwai Point, New Zealand, at the company's NZAS operations.

The New Zealand experiment

The introduction of 'staff' contracts at Tiwai Point was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated campaign conducted over a five-year period, beginning in 1986 with the restructuring of the workforce. The Engineers Union, the main union on site during this period, recalled:

This included doing away with the position of superintendent and charge-hands, moving the operation managers from the administration building to a position near the smelter itself, and the decentralisation of the maintenance work group, which was seen to be the strength behind the unions.²⁸

The NZAS plant was 100 per cent unionised for the two decades prior to 1991. Notwithstanding New Zealand's (then) award system, wages and conditions were determined by a collective enterprise agreement, negotiated annually by four unions through the mechanism of a single bargaining unit. According to the company in 1988 management demonstrated a new-found resolve by agreeing to a miserly 2.9 per cent wage increase with the unions (who had campaigned for 25 per cent), while simultaneously granting its salaried staff a 5.8 per cent increase – twice that achieved by the unions.²⁹ Until then, previous practice had been for management to simply pass onto salaried staff any increase gained by the unionised workforce. This change to management practice represented a clear loss of face for the unions, demonstrating to the entire workforce a new-found resolve by management.

During enterprise bargaining negotiations in 1990, divisions amongst and between the local union leadership and the rank and file proved fatal to the survival of unionism at the plant. After reaching a tentative agreement with management over the terms of a new collective agreement, the union leadership faced rebellion by its members when around 300 workers voted down the agreement at a mass meeting on 26 November 1990.³⁰ Despite the rejection, management refused to alter their offer and the unions failed to press their claims with industrial action. Comalco's (then) Managing Director, Karl Stewart, recalled: 'The word on the shop floor was that there was going to be a strike. The workforce expected it, and we as management expected it also. We waited and waited, but nothing happened'.³¹

The following week, at a five-hour stop work meeting, attended by 700 workers, the proposed agreement was again voted down and a decision made to commence industrial action, if necessary.³² Following this second rejection of the company's offer, the unions found themselves being totally ignored by the company. Nevertheless, they continued to refrain from launching industrial action. No doubt the timing of these events, just before Christmas, may have worked in management's favour, but also, the fact that a number of seasoned local union leaders had recently stood down or ceased employment with the company, meant that the local union leadership team lacked experience.

After a further month of management 'staring down the unions' and a failure of the unions to take industrial action, a new union leadership team was elected, and on 25 January a meeting of 600 workers endorsed the largely unaltered composite site agreement.³³

This drawn out exercise had clearly demonstrated that the unions had little, if any power. Comalco's management had all but won the battle with the unions for the leadership of the workforce. This was before the company introduced 'staff' contracts.

Despite this victory, the company waited until other environmental factors were aligned before launching its deunionisation attempt. A company document – drawn from the diary notes of the NZAS General Manager, David Brewer – commenting on the introduction of 'staff' contracts, was obtained by the Engineers Union, some years later. The document acknowledges that two 'external' factors – the passing of the Employment Contracts Act 1991 and the downturn of the local Southland economy – helped the company enormously.

The offer of individual contracts was timed to coincide with the closure of the Ocean Beach freezing works at Bluff and the announcement in July 1991 that poor aluminium prices would force the smelter to lay people off.³⁴

In May of 1991 the Employment Contracts Act 1991 was introduced in New Zealand, abolishing both the award regime and the country's system of compulsory unionism. Having already demonstrated the strength of management and the weakness of the unions six months earlier, and with an environment of economic uncertainty, coupled with national union disarray under the new legislative regime, the company began introducing 'staff' contracts in July 1991. Despite the micro and macro factors lining up in management's favour, the workforce initially resisted the company's 'staff' contract offers, with a mass meeting of workers in August voting four to one to reject the individual contracts and instead pursue a new collective agreement. What the unions once more failed to do, however, was to take any industrial action to press their claims.

Throughout most of 1991, management proceeded to demonstrate its strengthened position, bypassing traditional communication channels with union delegates, increasing the use of external contractors and ultimately combining a 'carrot and stick' strategy to encourage the take up of the offer of 'staff' contracts. As Comalco's then CEO commented:

a voluntary redundancy scheme was offered concurrently with the offer of individual contracts. Nearly 200 people elected to take the package, a good number of whom felt exposed to the new winds of personal accountability and the absence of a collective shield.³⁵

In November 1991, management notified the unions that they would not be renegotiating the collective enterprise agreement and by the end of the month all but four workers had accepted 'staff' contracts, with most also resigning from their union.³⁶

In the face of decisive management leadership, the unions had been hesitant and ultimately impotent in defence of collective bargaining. The unions' response, or lack thereof, appears to have suffered from having a new inexperienced negotiating team at the local level at a time when the national leadership was confronting a 'war on all fronts' following the sudden abolition of New Zealand's awards and its unique system of compulsory unionism. Despite the alignment of a harsh political, legal and economic environment, the failure by the unions to take decisive action to pursue their claims, long before the offer of 'staff' contracts was made, was to prove fatal; ultimately leading to the eradication of any credible union presence at the plant, thereby encouraging the company to replicate this strategy throughout its much larger Australian operations.

How the West was Lost

Hamersley Iron Pty Limited (as it was then known) situated in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, has long been the 'jewel in the crown' and the most profitable of all CRA/Rio Tinto's Australian business operations.³⁷ The Pilbara is located thousands of kilometres from any major city in an extremely hot and harsh physical environment, with the summer temperature consistently above 40 and up to 50 degrees, in an area regularly struck by cyclones. Despite (or perhaps in part due to) this, in the early years of construction of the basic infrastructure and development of the mines – when the work was at its hardest and modern amenities for workers were scarce – a pioneering spirit is said to have permeated the workplace culture in the Pilbara, generating good relations between management and workers.³⁸ Whether this view is an accurate or sanitised description of the industrial relations climate or not, what is certain, is that prior to 1969 there was little or no industrial disputation, with problems apparently settled at the workplace level.

By the 1970s, however, industrial disputation throughout the Pilbara was rife, with workers taking industrial action over seemingly trivial matters such as shortages of ice-cream flavours.³⁹ The location of union head offices, thousands of kilometres away from isolated mine sites, coupled with the harshness of life in the Pilbara, no doubt contributed to a fierce sense of independence amongst local shop stewards. In management's eyes, at least, these local union leaders were 'a law unto themselves, and answerable to nobody'.⁴⁰

In 1986, at the nearby Peko-Wallsend Robe River mine, a radical union-busting exercise was successfully implemented by management, clearly driven by a rising 'New Right' agenda.⁴¹ During this period, however, management at Hamersley distinguished itself from this approach by continuing to accommodate unionism and engage in collective bargaining. The dominant union at Hamersley was the Australian Workers Union (AWU), a conservative union with a long history of negotiating deals with management to secure its coverage and maintain union membership.⁴² Some years later, Hamersley Iron's former Managing Director was highly critical of Robe River's management, declaring 'if management goes about cutting wages and conditions while intensifying work like at Robe River, this will simply drive workers back into the arms of unions'.⁴³ Nevertheless, the disintegration of unionism at such a nearby location no doubt encouraged management at Hamersley to begin to seize the initiative in industrial relations. By the late 1980s, as management began to assert increasing managerial prerogatives, the level of industrial disputation at Hamersley Iron began to decline markedly, leading to its complete cessation following the workforce's acceptance of individual contracts and the collapse of union membership in 1993.

The prime motivating force for the stronger management stance on industrial relations in the 1980s, can largely be attributed to the broad economic conditions, particularly predictions of future price movements in the resource sector which then existed. Given the primacy of the Japanese market for Australian iron ore, a key consideration in forecasting iron ore prices was expectations concerning the Japanese steel industry. In this regard, Swain in explaining the strategic choices concerning industrial relations made by the management of Hamersley, noted the changed market conditions between the 1970s and 1980s.⁴⁴ Whereas the 1970s had largely been a sellers' market, with Australia dominating world iron ore exports, by the 1980s, cost control and productivity improvements became critical for company survival.⁴⁵

Unlike manufacturing, where innovation, product differentiation and brand loyalty were important ingredients for maintaining and increasing market penetration, success in the resource sector depended almost exclusively on price competition. From the mid-1980s management at Hamersley Iron, and indeed all of CRA, were determined to focus their energies towards increasing productivity and reducing the costs of production. The following statements by former CRA CEO and two Managing Directors of Hamersley Iron and Comalco, interviewed in 1998, make clear the economic imperatives driving CRA's strategy at that time.

We had to achieve international best-practice in mining, if we were to remain competitive.⁴⁶

The only means of gaining a competitive advantage in the resource sector is through cost effectiveness and reliability of supply.⁴⁷

In this industry we don't have the advantages of product differentiation, which others have. Our competitiveness depends almost exclusively on controlling costs.⁴⁸

These statements confirm that cost minimisation was the prime motivation behind the company's strategy at this time, both at Hamersley Iron and more broadly across its Australian operations.

While initial efforts focused on effecting the structural changes and enhanced managerial prerogatives, in keeping with the advice of the organisational theorist/consultant, Elliott Jaques,⁴⁹ the opportunistic and successful implementation of 'staff' employment at NZAS in 1991 provided the necessary confidence for Hamersley's management to follow suit. In many respects, a changed legal environment – following the election of a conservative government in Western Australia – conducive to management being able to seize the industrial relations initiative, provided the necessary circuit breaker for the introduction of individual contracts, much as had occurred in New Zealand following the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act (1991).

Achieving industrial peace had long been seen as the justification for supporting compulsory unionism. In the 1970s when the Industry Award was replaced by enterprise based agreements, Hamersley agreed not only to the continued insertion of a union preference clause but to a provision requiring the management at Hamersley to supply shop stewards with details of new employees in order to ensure compliance with the preference clause.⁵⁰ In the 1974 Agreement, the standard preference clause was replaced by a new clause entitled 'Union Membership', which required the company to dismiss, on the grounds of misconduct, an employee who either refused to join a union or maintain financial membership.

These provisions continued until 1979 when the Liberal Government led by Court excluded preference and compulsory unionism from the jurisdiction of the Western Australian Industrial Commission (WAIC). As a result, the union membership clause was automatically removed from the new Hamersley agreements when they came up for renewal in 1982. This did not, however, signal the end of effective compulsory unionism at Hamersley because management continued, over the next decade, to act as if the clause was still in effect.

In the middle of 1992 a levy on members of the (then) Metal and Engineering Workers Union (MEWU) in support of an Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) Fighting Fund for the workers involved in the Associated Pulp and Paper Mills (APPM) dispute at Burnie in Tasmania, exposed Philip Beales, a mechanical fitter at Hamersley's Tom Price mine, as a non-unionist. On 12 June 1992 the metal workers convenor informed Beales that it was compulsory for workers employed by Hamersley Iron to be paid-up union members. After Beales' refusal to join the union, a metal workers organiser in the Pilbura reportedly rang the company and demanded they take appropriate action to ensure Beales either joined the union or was removed from the site. According to an affidavit presented to the Supreme Court of Western Australia, the union organiser reportedly told the company:

We know that Hamersley Iron terminate these people. They have always done so in the past. We go on strike and you apply to the Commission to get us back to work and then you dismiss the idiot as an undesirable. We want someone from the company to talk to this idiot and tell him the way that Hamersley Iron have handled these matters in the past and that he should join the Union. We don't want to stop a multi-million dollar business for the sake of one [expletive deleted] idiot ... and what's more if we lose so much as one minute because of this guy then we will not have him back into the Union.⁵¹

The company refused to adhere to the union's demands, and the ensuing strike action led to the effective closing of Hamersley's operations by 17 June 1992.⁵² Beales and two other workers defied the strike and continued working. Hamersley sought a compulsory conference before the WAIC on 18 June, but after the conference failed to resolve the dispute. Commissioner Fielding issued orders directing the unions to cease all industrial action and for the employees to return to work.⁵³ On 20 June, however, mass meetings of workers resolved to defy the WAIC order and to remain on strike. In the week that followed, while 2,000 workers remained on strike, 14 workers chose to cross picket lines and return to work at the Tom Price mine.⁵⁴

After ten days of strike action, with a large number of ships anchored off Dampier, but unable to load iron ore, on Friday 26 June the company wrote to the unions and their officials threatening them that the company intended to hold them liable for the financial losses being incurred as a result of the continuing industrial action.

In a hand delivered letter yesterday, Hamersley warned Metals and Engineering Workers' Union official John Mossenton he could face action to recover the losses. The company listed the damages as lost sales of 1.465 million tonnes of iron ore and shipping penalties running to millions of dollars. The company estimate of the cost of the dispute rose to $45 million yesterday when Hamersley lost its ninth shipment of iron ore.⁵⁵

No doubt worried by the threat of legal action, the union officials at Hamersley recommended a return to work on Monday 29 June.⁵⁶ However, the return to work did not signal an end to the dispute. Philip Beales had temporarily left Hamersley on leave and so was not working when the workforce returned to work.⁵⁷ The meetings of workers had reserved their rights to take further industrial action should Beales return to work. On the same day as the workers returned to work the company took decisive action, one which was to have a profound effect on the outcome of the dispute.

On Monday 29 June the company filed a Writ against the unions and their officials in the Supreme Court of Western Australia seeking damages of almost $49 million, as well as unspecified damages.⁵⁸ This action in tort represented the largest common law action ever taken against unions in Australia's history. Alongside the damages claim, the company sought an injunction against further industrial action.

Whereas injunctions are normally sought to end existing industrial action, the return to work by the unions resulted in the company adjusting its injunction application, in a novel manner, to an injunction quia timet, to prevent threatened industrial action.

With Beales scheduled to return to work on 3 July, and the likelihood of further strike activity, the company's injunction application came before Justice Walsh of the West Australian Supreme Court the day before, on Thursday 2 July 1992. As with all applications for interlocutory relief, it is not a question of enforcing 'rights', but rather of the courts exercising a discretion, on the balance of convenience.

The unions' counsel challenged the company's lawyers to provide an example of a precedent, where, in the absence of any existing industrial action, a superior court had granted an injunction against future industrial action. Bob Meadows, counsel for Hamersley, responded by referring to a case involving an advertising company (then controlled by Jeffrey Kennett, later to become Premier of Victoria), JGK Nominees and the Printing and Kindred Industries Union (PKIU) (JGK Nominees 1976). In that case, which was incidentally also a dispute over union membership, the PKIU had threatened to impose a ban on copy produced by non-union labour employed by JGK Nominees. Although no bans were currently in place, the Supreme Court of Victoria granted an interlocutory injunction quia timet, to prevent threatened industrial action. No doubt influenced by this precedent, Justice Walsh granted the injunction sought by Hamersley. The injunction restrained the unions from using industrial action to cause Hamersley to breach Part 6A of the Industrial Relations Act 1979 (W.A.), by dismissing or threatening to dismiss any employee on the grounds of their refusal to join a union. The unions were also restrained from taking any action to prevent Beales from returning to work or to discriminate against non-unionists in any way.⁵⁹

Hamersley management then began to seize the industrial relations initiative, thereby taking advantage of the weak legal position the unions now found themselves placed – being unable to enforce union membership with industrial action. Then CRA advocate, Allen cites a number examples of how the company began to assert managerial prerogatives in a number of key areas.⁶⁰

Firstly, management was quick to dismiss a number of union militants for allegedly harassing non-unionists and successfully defended a number of claims for their reinstatement. Secondly, Hamersley refrained from all but purely formal contacts with unions. Thirdly, in keeping with the CRA philosophy, Hamersley abolished the distinction between work done by staff and that done by award employees; a union application to stop staff performing work of award employees was dismissed by the WAIC. Fourthly, as a gesture of good faith to its workforce, an enterprise based wage increase – which had been in the process of being negotiated between the company and the unions prior to the strike – was passed on to the workforce, with the formal approval of the WAIC. Fifthly however, and perhaps of greater long-term significance, was the company's decision to reduce the size of its workforce, and to do so in such a way as to rid itself of union militants or 'the hard men'. 'Seeing the writing on the wall, many of those with the wrong attitude left'.⁶¹ This reference to the importance of ridding themselves of the 'hard men', was an expression used by a number of senior executives and managers I interviewed, across the CRA/Rio Tinto group of companies in 1998 and 1999. It was clear that management recognised the importance of 'chopping off the head' of local union organisations, so that 'its body' would die.

On 7 December 1992, Hamersley management took advantage of the unions' weakened position by announcing job cuts of 13 per cent.

the company called for volunteers willing to accept early retirement or redundancy. But it warned that it would retrench workers if it did not get the job cuts it needed.⁶²

At the time, the Metal Workers Union assistant secretary, Jock Ferguson, claimed Hamersley was using the cuts to target convenors and shop stewards.

Mr Ferguson said on the job representatives had been told they had been picked as candidates. He claimed the company was intent on smashing unions involved in the operation: 'It's just sacking by another name', he said, 'those that are selected and don't go, they will be forced into redundancy'.⁶³

With the departure – as a result of either jumping or being pushed – of a good many of the most committed unionists, the backbone of union militancy was now broken. Quite apart from the selective redundancies which management undertook, the unions suffered from the fact that the older workers, with the most industrial experience, had the most to gain from accepting redundancy packages, thus robbing the union movement of many of its local leaders. Perhaps the role of the state – whose industrial relations framework was still predicated on the protection of collective bargaining – was the only factor which now stood in the way of the introduction of the company's system of 'staff' contracts of employment.

The election of the Liberal Government in Western Australia in February 1993, however, opened the way for 'staff' employment contracts with the enactment of its Workplace Agreements Act 1993 (WA). Hamersley management successfully used most of 1993 to prepare their workforce for the eventual offer of staff contracts through an intensive process of direct communication with the workers, thus by-passing traditional union channels. In the period leading up to the legislation becoming effective, all employees received personal letters inviting them to interviews with their managers at which offers of staff employment were made. Acceptance of these offers took the form of employees signing individual workplace agreements, as per the requirements of the new legislative conditions. A deadline for formal acceptance was set at 17 December 1993, and after a sudden flood of acceptances on the last day, around 90 per cent of employees took up the company's offer.⁶⁴ Those signing on to staff employment received increases in salary, improved security and access to the company's health insurance scheme as well as the superior staff superannuation scheme. Given the union's hostility to individual staff contracts, this result represented a rejection of the union's leadership, or lack thereof, which quickly manifested itself in a collapse of union membership at Hamersley Iron.

While much of the blame for the ineptitude of many local, state and national union leaders can no doubt be directed at the AWU (the dominant union on site), the evidence at Hamersley reveals a deeper malaise, thus far not acknowledged by the wider union movement. The fact is, when union membership collapsed at Hamersley and workers en masse (except a small handful) accepted the company's offer of 'staff' employment, they did so across the board, deserting even militant left-wing unions such as the Federated Engine Drivers & Firemen's Union (FEDFU) (now part of the CFMEU) – though they did retain a small membership – and the Amalgamated Metal Workers &Shipwrights Union (AMW&SU) (now the AMWU) as well as the right-wing AWU, the main union on site.

Once exposed as impotent in the face of a hostile legal environment – both unable to mount successful legal challenges and lacking the willingness or ability to confront the law 'head on' and conduct industrial action under those circumstances – the union movement at Hamersley quickly found itself in disarray. The workforce, which only a year earlier had 'lined up' strongly behind the leadership offered by the unions, now switched allegiances, choosing instead to accept the strong leadership now provided by management. Understanding how an apparently committed unionised workforce could 'change sides' seemingly overnight, requires an acknowledgement that prior to 1993, unionism had never been challenged by management. Unions at Hamersley had never had to fight for recognition or legitimacy.

As with the NZAS experience, more than any other factor, a recognition of the changed balance of power in favour of management, seems to have been the key ingredient in the take-up of individual contract offers and the subsequent collapse in union membership at Hamersley's operations. Flushed with the successful implementation of its strategy at its New Zealand plant and now its prized Australian iron ore operations, CRA management soon began rolling out its now proven template for deunionisation throughout its bauxite mining and aluminium smelting operations up and down the east coast of Australia.

For Whom the Bell Bay Tolls

In late 1995 a strike of national maritime workers and miners brought Australia-wide attention to the company's deunionisation campaign at its bauxite mining operations at Weipa in far north Queensland. However, it was in the very south of the country, at its Bell Bay aluminium smelter in Tasmania, that Comalco first introduced its 'staff' contract system in Australia.

As early as January 1992, management at Bell Bay began preparing for the by-passing of unions – the main one being the Federation of Industrial Manufacturing and Engineering Employees (FIMEE), which became subsumed under the umbrella of the AWU – by ending its customary policy of enabling payroll deductions for union membership as well as the issuing of union membership application forms to new employees. Soon after this, the site union delegates made approaches to the company for the purpose of commencing enterprise bargaining. The company's position was to reject the idea of negotiating with union officials on the ground that this effectively shut out the direct participation of employees themselves.⁶⁵ Throughout most of 1992, union attempts to commence enterprise bargaining negotiations were unsuccessful, even after the unions dropped their demand for the participation of union officials, arguing instead that employee participants in the negotiations be union members.

What makes the Bell Bay experience particularly insightful is how the company was initially frustrated in its attempts to deunionise its operations by the country's national labour laws, still predicated, at this stage, upon an encouragement of collective bargaining and an award system. Initially, the company sought to take advantage of the new non-union enterprise agreements introduced by the Labor Government.

In March 1993 management proposed a non-union enterprise agreement to its workforce, containing a number of conditions of employment already applicable to employees on 'staff' contracts, with the added option for employees to 'opt out' of the agreement entirely and enter into 'staff' contracts. This proposal was mailed to all employees and a secret ballot then conducted by the Roy Morgan Research Centre, at which 70 per cent of eligible employees voted, of whom 83 per cent voted against the company's proposal.⁶⁶

The company continued throughout 1993 and early 1994, in a number of hearings before the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (the Commission), to maintain that enterprise bargaining must involve a process of 'working directly with employees', thus by-passing union involvement, and clearly repudiating the legitimacy of collective bargaining.

Just as legislative change had assisted management's deunionisation agenda in New Zealand and at Hamersley, so too did new labour laws make it easier for the company to push through its non-union employment system. Utilising the provision for non-union enterprise agreements contained in the Hawke Labor Government's Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 (Cth), the company proposed to seek an Enterprise Flexibility Agreement (EFA) directly with its employees. However, even this proposed EFA was a smokescreen, delaying once more a new enterprise agreement. Having successfully stalled enterprise negotiations for some two and a half years, the company now began offering individual 'staff' contracts. By 1 July 1994, all but 22 of the company's 430 eligible employees had signed 'staff' contracts. Most then chose to resign from their unions.

The unions responded with legal recourse, arguing before the Commission that the 'staff' contracts were in breach of Bell Bay's paid rates award. At first, the unions appeared to have a major victory over the company when, after a series of hearings, the Full Bench of the Commission found against the company and declared:

The establishment of conditions of employment at an enterprise level through a system of individual contracts between a company and each of its employees is one at variance with our system of industrial relations ... The company's actions in deliberately seeking to eliminate the role of unions at the workplace through the establishment of individual contracts, is inconsistent with the central role that registered organisations are given under the IR Act.⁶⁷

This apparent union victory was short lived, however, as the company refused to accept the defeat of its chosen non-union path. After a series of actions in the High Court and (Federal) Industrial Relations Court, it was not until May 1996, after settlement of the Weipa case (see below) that the dispute was finally resolved in the company's favour with Commissioner Mahon approving a non-union EFA.⁶⁸

The final decision of the Commission coincided with a changed political environment; a conservative Federal Government was now in power and big business confidently began to challenge many received norms of industrial relations, particularly the role of trade unions. Crucially, however, the Commission's decision recognised the fact that after more than four years of trying to negotiate a collective agreement with Comalco, the vast majority of workers had eventually decided to accept the company's 'staff' contracts, no doubt concluding that this was the only way of securing any pay increases which were now , long overdue.

Like NZAS, the failure of the unions to confront management's deunionisation agenda with decisive industrial action, merely demonstrated the unions' weakness in the face of strong and resilient management. It was in far north Queensland that the company first faced some direct organised resistance to its deunionisation program.

War at Weipa

While national strike action broke out late in 1995 over Comalco's introduction of 'staff' contracts, at their Weipa bauxite mine site, located in far north Queensland, the seeds of this dispute were laid as early as 1991. Fearing a strengthened union presence from an impending amalgamation between the Federated Engine Drivers and Fireman's Association (FEDFA) and the United Mine-Workers Federation, to form the militant and powerful CFMEU, in 1991 Comalco management supported the more compliant AWU in extending its membership rights, thereby effectively shutting the CFMEU out of Weipa.

Having successfully legally removed the representational rights of the militant FEDFA, thereby shoring up the membership of the conservative AWU, the company then commenced to undermine the position of unionism generally at Weipa. As happened at NZAS, Hamersley and Bell Bay, management began bypassing union delegates, communicating instead directly with its workforce.

In mid-1992, the Weipa Industrial Site Committee (WISC) began negotiating with management for a new enterprise agreement, initially focussing on the company's nearby Kaolin operations. While negotiations were in place, the company offered 'staff' contracts to its clerical employees and by January 1993 they were all on 'staff' contracts.

In August 1992 the company presented a draft Kaolin Enterprise Agreement (KEA) to its employees, the WISC and unions. Despite initial resistance to many of the draft agreements terms, particularly annualised salaries based on performance evaluations by superintendents, on 2 April 1993 a meeting of Kaolin employees approved the draft KEA, subject to acceptance by the respective unions. The unions, chiefly the AWU having principal coverage of the site, took a further six months to respond to the proposal before eventually rejecting it in September 1993. This lengthy delay was to prove a decisive factor in paving the way for the introduction of 'staff' contracts. As at Hamersley and at Bell Bay, the AWU appeared to have no strategy at all for dealing with the company's use of individual contracts.

A month later in October 1993, the company began offering individual contracts, based largely on the terms of the earlier draft KEA.⁶⁹ Despite 16 months of failed negotiations, remarkably only a handful of Kaolin workers took up the individual contracts and in November 1993, the unions conducted a six-day strike in protest at the company's use of individual contracts.

At year's end, however, the company responded by amending its offer to include full 'staff' conditions to both Kaolin and Bauxite employees. Over the early months of 1994, the company stalled negotiations with the unions while simultaneously signing up new employees on 'staff' contracts.

The unions responded in May 1994 by applying to the Commission for interim paid rates awards. In order to head off any possible difficulties – associated with paid rates awards (in light of the experience at Bell Bay) – in gaining legal recognition of the individual contracts being introduced, Comalco turned to the Commission and applied for the existing Aluminium Industry (Comalco Aluminium Limited – Weipa) Award 1982, historically a paid rates award, to be set aside. They then sought to replace it with two minimum rates awards: the Kaolin Operations (Comalco Aluminium Limited – Weipa) Award 1994 and the Bauxite (Comalco Aluminium Limited – Weipa) Award 1994. In a legal blunder, the unions surprisingly gave their assent to these new minimum rates awards, which were then approved by the Commission on 4 August 1994.⁷⁰ The creation of these minimum rates awards made possible the legality of 'over award' staff contracts being offered to employees.

Despite having assented to the new 'minimum rates' awards, the unions then realised – too late – that they would open up the possibility of individual contracts through an instrument of 'over award' payments. The unions then applied unsuccessfully to appeal the Commission's decision – the very one they had just accented too – while simultaneously applying for an interim paid rates award. With no success before the Commission, however, the unions' remaining award workers – some 75 out of a workforce of 450 – launched strike action in mid-October 1995, over what they claimed was discrimination against them, in terms of the differential being paid to those on 'staff' contracts versus those on the award. The industrial action was organised, not by the AWU, which had provided no leadership to the workforce throughout the company's de-collectivist campaign, but rather, by the more militant CFMEU, whose members (previously members of the FEDFA) had refused to join the AWU despite being directed to by the Commission.

To increase pressure on the company, the strikers took to the sea in a flotilla of small boats forming a floating picket line, blocking access to tugboats, thus preventing the company from moving its bauxite from the port at Weipa. As had been their strategy at Hamersley, the company responded to this industrial action by seeking writs for damages against 50 workers and three unions. Ultimately, it was the company's use of the common law which provoked the intervention of the ACTU and the massive escalation of the dispute.

Once the ACTU took effective control of the union campaign, the national significance of the dispute soon became apparent. With the enthusiastic backing of the powerful left-wing CFMEU and Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), the ACTU, led by newly elected President Jennie George, decided to switch from legal manoeuvres (which had thus far been unsuccessful) to a frontal industrial attack on the company. In launching the national industrial campaign against CRA, the Secretary of the ACTU, Bill Kelty, declared:

These are heroes these people at Weipa ... because they have said on behalf of working people in this country, we won't have a bar of individual contracts ... We cannot afford to leave those workers isolated, we cannot afford to lose this battle. It is a battle that we have fought for close on 200 years and some would say longer. To be beaten on this issue is to be beaten as a trade union movement.⁷¹

Faced with the nation-wide escalation of the dispute, the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, intervened, convincing the company to drop its common law actions and he attempted to broker an agreement between the company and the ACTU. When such an agreement was clearly not reached, the Commission called a compulsory conference of the parties before an emergency session of the Full Bench on Saturday 18 November 1995. The ACTU surprised the country by announcing the former Prime Minister and one-time President of the ACTU, Bob Hawke, as its chief advocate before the Commission.

In finally settling the dispute, the Commission found that the company had discriminated against award workers, by paying them $16–20,000 less than workers doing the same jobs on 'staff' contracts, as well as by denying them a range of 'staff' conditions. In part, the Commission reported:

the evidence supports a conclusion that the policy of the company was to treat award employees less favourably than those under staff contracts ... this policy we conclude is unfair and discriminates against the award employees concerned based solely on their choice to enter into collective bargaining through their respective union, rather than 'negotiate' one to one on the basis of the company's two party staff system.⁷²

The Commission then ordered the company to pay its award employees back pay of several thousands of dollars and to extend its 'staff' conditions of employment to award workers on the condition that they – directly or via their unions – conveyed their willingness to comply with the flexible working conditions required of those on 'staff' contracts.

While most attention at the time focused on the role of the company and the Commission in legitimating the spread of 'staff' contracts, there was little acknowledgement on the unions' side of their own poor leadership and inability to achieve a collective agreement. It was not really until the 'horse had bolted' that significant industrial action took place. At every stage of the dispute, the main union, the AWU, had been on the back foot, simply reacting (and all too slowly at that) to Comalco's initiatives. While Timo, himself a one-time AWU organiser, correctly argued that demarcation problems between the unions at Weipa contributed to their weakness, he failed to comment on the particularly poor leadership provided to the workforce by the AWU.⁷³ Importantly, he failed to acknowledge that when resistance to Comalco's deunionisation program was launched, it was organised, not by the AWU, but by a union without any formal representation rights, the CFMEU.

The absence of any coherent strategy by the AWU assisted in transferring the leadership of most of the workforce to the stronger, more decisive and more consistent leadership provided by management. As was the case at NZAS, Hamersley and Bell Bay, most of the workforce, including long-time unionists, responded to the apparent shifting of the balance of power in management's favour by accepting 'staff' contracts and subsequently allowing their union membership to lapse.

Lessons Learnt

While there is little doubt that at the beginning of the 1990s, CRA/Rio Tinto – facing falling commodity prices and predictions of further falls – were motivated to deunionise their New Zealand and Australian operations as a means of pursuing cost-minimisation, the reasons for their success in traditionally highly unionised sectors are more complex. If unions today are to be better prepared to defend collective bargaining, then a close examination of the factors assisting management's triumphalism during this period would seem vitally important in developing defensive or offensive union strategies. So how did the company implement their non-union agenda?

Firstly, the years immediately preceding the deunionisation push, were, in each case, used by the company to incrementally strengthen managerial prerogatives and weaken the authority of unions in the eyes of the workforce.

Secondly, the company allowed enterprise negotiations with unions to drag on for long periods of time, leading the workforce to become frustrated with the process of collective bargaining and eager for any result which would deliver their expected wage increases. During these lengthy enterprise negotiations, the company made a number of pronouncements that it was not anti-union, thus making the unions look weak for their failure to conclude a collective bargaining agreement.

Thirdly, management attempted to defeat the unions industrially prior to the introduction of non-union contracts. The success of this strategy meant that the company ultimately faced little resistance to its introduction of non-union contracts.

Fourthly, the introduction of 'staff' contracts coincided with announcements of impending large-scale redundancies. In such a hostile environment, with so much job insecurity, workers were clearly faced with little choice if they wished to remain employed with any sort of career prospects with the company. There is strong evidence that the company particularly targeted union delegates and activists for redundancy, with the aim of weakening the union organisation and dispiriting the remaining union loyalists.

Fifthly, where workers initially rejected the company's offer of non-union contracts, the company was not dissuaded from proceeding with further attempts at winning over the workforce. In each and every case, the eventual take-up of 'staff' contracts only occurred after the workforce had – in some cases several times – rejected the company's offer. The company persevered until they eventually wore down worker resistance to their chosen form of employment contracts.

Finally, the offers of 'staff' contracts included significant financial inducements. While the unions were unable to deliver wage increases through collective bargaining, the company made increases in salary and other benefits a key component of their non-union offers.

However, knowledge of the company's deunionisation template does not explain why it was so successful. These four cases reveal some important factors which greatly assisted the company in rolling out its deunionisation program. Management was armed with a unified ideology and organisational theory; a factor crucial in sustaining belief, consistency and resilience amongst managers, engaged in a long drawn out struggle. In addition, a political, legal and economic environment conducive to the introduction of individual contracts occurred against a background climate of fear and uncertainty amongst the workforce.

Finally, in all cases under examination, management's strength and decisiveness was met by hesitant, disorganised and ultimately poor leadership from the unions. In all the Australian cases, the main union was the moderate AWU, which never at any stage demonstrated a coherent strategy of union resistance. Only at Weipa – and even there, far too late – did the union movement, in this case led by the CFMEU, mount a serious challenge to the company's agenda. In the coal industry, CRA/Rio Tinto attempted to implement its individual contracts system, but was largely stymied, by a more strategic, resilient and committed union, the CFMEU, demonstrating that unions' destiny does not have to be shaped by the state, the wider environment, or management strategy, but rather they can be masters, to some extent, of their own futures. Space does not allow an examination of the coal sector here, but another article would certainly add to our understanding of how unions can successfully resist militant employer deunionisation campaigns.⁷⁴

What these cases reveal however, is that even in strongly unionised sectors, where management is determined, where there are legal avenues open to it, where the political and economic environment is conducive, and perhaps most importantly, where the union movement is complacent, that militant employer strategies of deunionisation can succeed. This is particularly the case in environments where management has traditionally accommodated unionism and collective bargaining, and importantly, where the union movement struggles to appreciate the ramifications of a changed employer agenda.

Bruce Hearn Mackinnon is a Senior Lecturer and Head of Management in the School of Management and Marketing at Deakin University in Melbourne. He was formerly a union organiser with the Building Workers Industrial Union (NSW), and an economist with the Commonwealth Treasury. His research interests are in union-avoidance management strategies, labour law and industrial relations and organisational theory. In recent years he has authored the annual review of 'Employer Matters' in the Journal of Industrial Relations.
<bhmackin@deakin.edu.au>

Endnotes

^*.� This article has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees.

^1.� In particular, management inspired deunionisation agendas have been explored in detail by T. Kochan, H. Katz and R. McKersie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, Basic Books, NY, 1986; J. Lawler Unionization and Deunionization: Strategy, Tactics and Outcomes, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1990; J. Logan, 'Consultants, lawyers and the 'union free' movement in the USA since the 1970s', Industrial Relations Journal, vol. 33, no. 3, 2002, pp. 197–214; T. Dundon, and D. Rollinson, Employment Relations in Non-Union Firms, Routledge, NY, 2004.

^2.� The non-union agenda of companies operating in Australia is detailed in D. Peetz, Brave New Workplace: How Individual Contracts are Changing Our Jobs, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006.

^3.� See M. Gardner, 'Australian Trade Unionism in 1985', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 28, no. 1, 1986, pp. 138–9; J. Kitay and R. Powe, 'Exploitation at $1000 per week? The Mudginberri dispute', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 29, no. 3, 1987, pp 365–400; H. Smith, and H. Thomson, 'Industrial relations and the law: a case study of Robe River', Australian Quarterly, Spring, 1987, pp.297-304.

^4.� A useful commentary on the importance in these disputes and their connections to the emerging 'New Right' is contained in C. Wright, The Management of Labour: A History of Australian Employers, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 198–99.

^5.� B. Hearn Mackinnon, Behind WorkChoices: How One Company Changed Australia's Industrial Relations, Heidelberg Press, Melbourne, 2007.

^6.� B. Ellem, 'New unionism in the old economy: community and collectivism in the Pilbara's mining towns, Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 45, no. 4, 2003, pp. 423–441.

^7.� Exemplified by the work of D. Peetz, Unions in a Contrary World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998; G. Griffin and S. Svensen, 'Trade unions: reasons for joining and membership satisfaction', Labour and Industry, vol. 9, no. 3, 1999; P. Gahan. and S. Bell, 'Union strategy, membership orientation and union effectiveness: an exploratory analysis', Labour and Industry, vol. 9, no. 3, 1999; P. Bodman 'Trade union amalgamations, openness and the decline in trade union membership', Australian Bulletin of Labour, vol. 24, no. 1, 1998.

^8.� A notable exception being Peetz, Brave New Workplace.

^9.� R. Cooper, C. Briggs, B. Ellem and van den D. Broek, 'The new Australian employer militancy, Perspectives on Work, Labor and Employment Relations Association, Summer edition, Illinois, 2007 and 'Anti unionism in Australia', International Union Rights, International Centre for Trade Union Rights, London, 2006.

^10.� P. Waring, Individualism and Collectivism in Contemporary Employment Relations: The Australian Black Coal Mining Industry Experience, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, 2000; P. Waring and M. Barry, 'The changing frontier of control in coal: evidence from a decade of enterprise bargaining in the Australian black coal mining industry', Australian Bulletin of Labour, vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, pp. 216–37

^11.� Peetz, Brave New Workplace, 2006.

^12.� D. Peetz, ''War is peace': employer strategies for decollectivisation', Paper presented at the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ) Conference, Queenstown, New Zealand, January, 2001, p. 3.

^13.� World Competitive Practices (1999) 'OEA Case study – Peabody Resources (Ravensworth Mine)', Report of the Office of the Employment Advocate, Sydney, November, YEAR, p. 26.

^14.� D. Peetz, 'War is peace', p. 5.

^15.� In the period under review, Comalco, which operated bauxite mines as well as aluminium smelting operations, was a CRA subsidiary. It later became completely subsumed under the Rio Tinto entity.

^16.� Elliott Jaques broke with the Tavistock Institute in the late 1950s, in part due to his objection to its focus on the merits of teams. His life's work 'post Tavistock', was largely devoted to praising the benefits of properly constituted accountability hierarchies.

^17.� In particular, E. Jaques, Equitable Payment: A General Theory of Work, Differential Payment, and Individual Progress, Heinemann, London, 1961; E. Jaques, A General Theory of Bureaucracy, Heinemann, London, 1976; E. Jaques, Requisite Organization: A Total System for Effective Managerial Organization and Managerial Leadership for the 21^st Century, Cason Hall, Gloucester, MA, 1^st edn 1989, 2^nd edn 1996, 2^nd rev. edn 1999; Gower Publications, Aldershot, England; Arlington, London; and E. Jaques, The Life and Behaviour of Living Organisms: A General Theory, Praeger/Greenwood, Westport, CT, 2001.

^18.� T. Filmer, Managing Director, Comalco, interviewed 2 December, Brisbane, 1997.

^19.� N. Stump, 'Beyond Enterprise Bargaining', Address to Enterprise Bargaining Conference, December, Adelaide, 1992, in Hon. J.T. Ludeke, The Line in the Sand: The Long Road to Staff Employment in Comalco, Wilkinson Books, Melbourne, 1996.

^20.� See B. Hearn Mackinnon, 'Clash of the Titans: Rio Tinto vs the CFMEU', Current Research in Industrial Relations: Refereed Proceedings of the 15^th AIRAANZ Conference, vol. 1, Wollongong, January, 2001; and a more in depth analysis in Hearn Mackinnon, Behind WorkChoices.

^21.� Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Print M8534, 23 January, 1996.

^22.� This notion of 'dual commitment' was advocated by M. Gordon and R. Ladd 'Dual allegiance: renewal, reconsideration and recantation', Personnel Psychology, vol. 43, 1990, and S. Deery, P. Erwin. and I. Iverson, 'Union management co-operation, dual allegiance and organisational performance', Working Paper No. 89, Department of Management and Industrial Relations, University of Melbourne, 1995.

^23.� Australian Industrial Relations Commission, transcript, Print M8534, 23 January, 1996.

^24.�Ibid.

^25.� K. Stewart, Comalco's Managing Director, evidence in transcript, ibid.

^26.�Ibid.

^27.� It is worth noting, however, that in all its submissions to tribunals and courts, CRA/Rio Tinto executives have never succeeded in persuading these judicial authorities that individual contracts generated superior productivity to collective bargaining.

^28.� Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), quarterly newsletter, New Zealand, July, 2000.

^29.� K. Stewart, former Comalco Managing Director, interviewed 9–10 March, Melbourne, 1998.

^30.�Southland Times [New Zealand], 27 November, 1990, p. 1.

^31.� Stewart, interview, 1998.

^32.�Southland Times, 6 December, 1990, p. 1.

^33.�Southland Times, 26 January, 1991, p. 1.

^34.� D. Brewer, (former) General Manager, New Zealand Aluminium Smelter (NZAS), quoted in EPMU, 2000.

^35.� Stump, 'Beyond Enterprise Bargaining', 1992.

^36.�Ibid.

^37.� CRA/Rio Tinto Annual Report to Shareholders, various years, 1990–2000.

^38.� M. Griffiths, Of Mines and Men, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1998; and P. Swain, Strategic Choices: A Study of the Interaction of Industrial Relations & Corporate Strategy in the Pilbara Iron Ore Industry, School of Management, Curtain University, Western Australia, 1995.

^39.�Ibid., p. 49.

^40.� T. Palmer, Chief Executive Officer, Comalco, former Managing Director at Hamersley Iron, interviewed 11 January, Melbourne, 1998.

^41.� C. Wright, The Management of Labour, pp. 198–9.

^42.� See M. Hearn and H. Knowles One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union 1986–1994, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996.

^43.� Palmer, interview, 1998.

^44.� Swain, Strategic Choices.

^45.�Ibid., p. 56.

^46.� R. Carnegie, former Chief Executive Officer, CRA, interviewed 20 October, Melbourne. 1998.

^47.� Stewart, interview, 1998.

^48.� Palmer, interview, 1998.

^49.� See B. Hearn Mackinnon, 'The Weipa Dispute: ramifications for the spread of Australian Workplace Agreements', in A. Frazer, R. McCallum and P. Ronfeldt (eds), Individual Contracts and Workplace Relations, Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training (ACIRRT), Working Paper No. 50, 1997.

^50.�Western Australian Industrial Gazette, vol. 22, 1967, p. XX and vol. 52, 1974, p. 146.

^51.� Quoted in R. Allen, 'Agreements without unions', Proceedings of the XVth Conference of the HR Nicholls Society, November, 1994.

^52.�Australian Financial Review, 19 November, 1992, p. 5.

^53.�Ibid., 20 June, YEAR, p. 4.

^54.�Ibid., 23 June, YEAR, p. 16.

^55.�Ibid., 22 June, YEAR, p. 4.

^56.�Ibid., 30 June, YEAR, p. 11.

^57.�West Australian, 1 July, 1992, p.7.

^58.�Ibid., 30 June, p. 1.

^59.�Australian Financial Review, 3 July, 1992, p. 31.

^60.� Allen, 'Agreements without unions', 1994.

^61.�Ibid.

^62.�West Australian, 8 December, 1992, p. 5.

^63.�Ibid.

^64.� Allen, 'Agreements without unions'.

^65.� Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Print L7449, 8 December, 1994, p. 3.

^66.�Ibid.

^67.�Ibid., pp. 42–43.

^68.� Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Print N1679, 20 May, 1996.

^69.� Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Print M8600, Exhibit ACTU, 12, 21 January, 1996.

^70.� Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Print L4624, 4 August, 1994.

^71.�The Age, 14 November, 1995, p.1.

^72.� Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Print M8600, 21 January, 1996, p. 46.

^73.� N. Timo, 'The management of individualism in an Australian mining company', Employee Relations, vol. 19, no. 4, 1997

^74.� See Hearn Mackinnon, Behind WorkChoices..

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CRA/Rio Tinto in the 1990s: A Decade of Deunionisation