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This article was downloaded by: [Tufts University]On: 10 December 2014, At: 07:30Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
Labour & Industry: a journalof the social and economicrelations of workPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlab20
Power, Place And Scale: UnionRecognition In The Pilbara,1999–2002Bradon Ellem aa Work & Organisational Studies, Faculty ofEconomics and Business , The University of SydneyPublished online: 10 Apr 2013.
To cite this article: Bradon Ellem (2002) Power, Place And Scale: Union RecognitionIn The Pilbara, 1999–2002, Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economicrelations of work, 13:2, 67-89, DOI: 10.1080/10301763.2002.10669264
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10301763.2002.10669264
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Power, Place And Scale: Union Recognition In The Pilbara, 1999-2002
Bradon Ellem
Abstract
Towards the end of 1999 BHP Iron Ore set out to reduce if not eliminate effective union presence from its operations in Western Australia's Pilbara. Early in 2002, its rival Rio Tin to, balloted its employees on a shift to non-union collective agreements. The empirical task in this article is to explain the nature of worker and union response to these developments. In both cases, these management strategies have been much less successful than earlier attempts to re-regulate industrial relations in ihe Pilbara. The article shows that union activists have constructed strategies which are explicitly informed by their own readings of local histories and geographies, and that arguments grounded in 'place consciousness' were a source of union power, as was the construction of disparate scales of action and discourse by unions. The central argument is that 'geography matters'. This article demonstrates exactly what this means in its examination of union power and weakness across particularly hostile terrain. It suggests that in general, too, the conceptual tools of space, place, and scale can enrich our understanding of contemporary union struggles.
This article examines the processes of union decline, recognition and renewal in a particularly hostile strategic and geographic environment, the iron ore mines and processing plants of the Pilbara in Western Australia. It draws upon the emerging conversation between industrial relations scholarship and human geography in two ways. Firstly, it points to the actual deployment of explicitly spatial strategies and discourses by the disputants themselves. Secondly, it argues for the importance of spatial concepts in explaining these conflicts over collective representation. In so doing the article aims to demonstrate not only that 'space matters' but to show specifically how and why elements of human geography can enrich our understanding of what at first sight appear to be very much ·mainstream' industrial relations issues.
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In late 1999, BHP Iron Ore (BHPIO) offered individual contracts to its workers with the stated intention of bypassing union involvement in negotiations over workplace change. For most of the 1990s, BHPIO was the only unionised mining site in the Pilbara, an area which had once been a union heartland. Any effective unionism had long been removed from the other main iron ore sites, Robe River and Hamersley Iron, in major, wellpublicised setbacks for unions. From the summer of 1999-2000, union activists, together with officials of the Australian Council ofTrade Unions (ACTU) drew upon new organising strategies and revamped local union structures at BHPIO. Just over half of the workforce stayed loyal to the unions and, two years after the conflict began, would win a new collective award. In 2002, a second managerial initiative in the Pilbara fell on its face. Rio Tinto, now the biggest stakeholder in Robe River and the owner of Hamersley Iron, sought to transfer the regulation of its workforce from individual agreements to nonunion collective agreements at the federal scale. After a short campaign, most workers voted against these agreements, as unions had asked. By the middle of the year, the management at the Rio sites which had voted 'no' was running surveys to find out what had gone wrong while, for their part, unions were planning ways in which to represent workers at these sites for the first time in a decade.
In examining worker and union responses to these management initiatives, the article argues that at BHP10 local unionists have succeeded by 'rescaling' the dispute on their own terms while articulating, and organising around, particular constructions of 'place consciousness'. Responding to Rio Tinto's attempt to rescale the formal regulation of its workforce, workers and union officials have had to address rather different issues, beginning with the company's control of space in and beyond the sites of paid labour. The article argues that these processes and emerging outcomes have been shaped by the relationship between government legislation at different scales and management strategy as well as by complex relationships within and between unions themselves. At BHP10, there have been unintended consequences, in the emergence of a spatially-based local unionism. This outcome, along with the continuing problems which unions face at the Rio Tinto sites, is in part the result ofthe embedded ness of geographically-specific historical structures.
The article opens with a brief sketching ofthe work ofhuman geographers which I believe has the most potential in conceptualising union decline and renewal in richer ways. The second section then establishes the physical, political and organisational contexts in which unions have responded to the management initiatives of BHPIO and Rio Tin to. The next two sections, which constitute the empirical core of the article, examine union resistance in each company. This resistance has begun to generate a fresh set of challenges for' workers and unions. This issue is touched upon in the conclusion which returns to the importance of scale and space for understanding industrial relations and, in this case, for explaining the contours of union strength and weakness, decline and renewal.
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Power, Place and Scale: Union Recognition in the Pilbara, 1999-2002 69
Place, Scale And Union Recognition
Although most industrial relations scholarship remains wedded to a-spatial or positivist conceptions of social relations, this thematic issue of Labour & Industry testifies to an interest in what might be called the geography of the social relations of work. The reregulation of work, itself in part a spatial process, and the creation of new spatial divisions of labour through 'globalisation' appear to have set the scene for this interest. A number of geographers have argued that geographical scales - and their material and discursive construction - is central to understanding the remaking of the regulation of work relationships. Given the treatments of scale in preceding papers in this volume, it is not necessary here to deal with the matter at length. I simply draw attention to the cQmparison with the onto logically given 'levels' of action found in the positivist frames of reference, of which Dunlopian industrial relations is one, and suggest that scale is a more useful tool (see Ellem and Shields, 1999). This article will attempt to show that scale is at once discursive and strategic, made in part by labour itself(see also Herod 1997: 18, 21-4; 1998: 6-12) and will return to these points in conclusion.
This section concentrates upon the most useful insights around the questions of space itself and the construction of geographical specificity. These insights build upon the axiomatic claim of human geography that all social relationships must be understood in spatial terms. Space is socially contested, made and re-made; it is not another 'factor' to be listed alongside other determinants of social action. Rather, it is, like time, an inescapable feature of all structures and relationships.
One of the geographical concepts which industrial relations researchers and some historians have used is 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. This is familiar enough in discourses about globalisation, 'jobs flight', outwork and the like. However, other writers have pointed out that the rootedness of labour can be a source of power because distinctive local communities and cultures are made by working people and their families in distinct places, overtime. From this, it is argued that particular forms of 'place consciousness' may emerge, including- most obviously- that of the 'union town' (Storper and Walker, 1989; Beynon and Hudson, 1993; Ell em and Shields, 2000, 200 I). That these forms of consciousness are themselves sources of power and weakness will be a central element in the argument in this article about the path of Pilbara unionism. This is not to suggest that capital is always more mobile than is labour. Mining is one of those industries in which specific operations (though not necessarily companies themselves) are place-bound. This being the case, local - geographically specific -circumstances are likely to be one of the most important sets of conditions reflecting and shaping the fate of unionism. Historically, mining companies, such as those in the Pilbara, have sought to establish localised regimes of control in a range of ways, controlling, for example, the towns wh~re miners live or constructing their own spatial visions and forms of place consciousness. Often, as in the Pilbara, these visions are designed to promote the notion of separation and even uniqueness.
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Where, then, do these differing mobilities meet? What are the sites (both physical and conceptual) in which capital and labour meet? The vital intersections are the stuff of much industrial relations scholarship: labour markets, workplaces themselves and regulatory regimes. For geographers, these may have local specificities which cannot simply be read off from national or State scales, although, of course, they are all mutually constitutive. For Jamie Peck, the key sites are local labour markets. Building upon Doreen Massey's work (1984), he grounds his case in the concept of 'uneven development' through which particular economic geographies emerge 'as capital seeks the local conditions most conducive to profitable production' (Peck, 1996: 13). Under conditions where there are few such sites and where they are usually distant from large urban labour markets- such as in the mining of iron ore- capital might be seen as the sole agent creating labour markets. Yet workers do not arrive in such spaces without values and aspirations, nor do they remain as atomised individuals. Thus Peck's insistence that productive 'space' and social 'place' together establish local labour markets remains a powerful insight. So it is that 'geographies of labour are formed at this intersection, where flows of capital accumulation collide with the structures of community' (1996: 15).
If, as Peck insists, labour markets 'are socially regulated in geographically distinct ways' ( 1996: I 06, original emphasis), is it also the case that workplaces and regulatory regimes are regulated in spatially specific ways? For geographers such as Massey, Andrew Jonas and Andy Herod the answer is a forcefu I 'yes'. It is a commonplace that, in order to understand union decline, the relationship between unionism and changes in modes of labour regulation must be explicated. This is often enough discussed at the national scale but less so at other scales. Massey (1984) and others have argued that regulatory modes may indeed be found at the local scale. Andrew Jonas has pointed to the geographical distinctiveness of what he calls a' local labour control regime'. By this he means:
An historically contingent and territorially embedded set of mechanisms which co-ordinate the time-space reciprocities between production, work, consumption and labour reproduction within a local labour market ... It encapsulates ... the gamut of practices, norms, behaviours, cultures and institutions within a locality ... through which labour is integrated into production ( 1996: 325. 328).
This, then, leads to a final question - about how local labour markets and local labour control regimes are actually constructed. Andrew Herod argues that the central challenge which arises is to understand 'how workers seek to make space in particular ways' (1997: 3). He argues that for workers, just as for capital, the ability to 'manipulate geographic space in particular ways is a potent form of social power' (1997: 3). Following Marx on the making of history, he acknowledges that 'this does not mean that labor is free to construct landscapes as it pleases' ( 1997: 16), but he insists that labour does shape these landscapes, in contestation with capital. These processes are not confined to the obvious public sites of core industrial relations, such as the workplace and the union meeting room, as indeed this article shows for the Pilbara today.
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Power, Place and Scale: Union Recognition in the Pilbara, 1999-2002 71
Conflicts over union recognition must, then, be situated in these locally specific contexts as well as in the national and global settings with which we are, analytically, more familiar. Each of these themes is woven into the account of Pilbara union recognition which follows. Each helps us to understand the geographical and historical context in which these most recent struggles have been waged. The next section explores this terrain.
Locating Pilbara Unionism
To contextualise the analysis of the processes and emergent consequences of union renewal in the Pilbara, this section first explores the geographic peculiarities and historical trajectory of Pilbara iron ore unionism. It then briefly describes the political and managerial environment in which union strategies have been framed.
At once a mining area and outback tourist site, the Pilbara can readily be taken as emblematic of Australian landscapes, regional cultures and traditional, masculine workplaces, from cattle stations to mines, construction sites to ports. Its physical geography alone might claim to define it: isolation, distance, harsh climate, 'difference'. It is a massive space within Australia's biggest State, with a terrain of gorges, natural pools and stunning plateaux inland and seemingly endless plains nearer the coast and south to the State capital, Perth. In Tim Winton's evocative words: 'bluffs and peaks and mesas rise crimson, black, burgundy, terracotta, orange against the cloudless sky ... on scree slopes the colour of dry blood, the smooth white trunks of snappy gums suspend crowns ofleaves so green it's shocking' (200 I: 228).
This geography has most obviously been important for what lies below the Pilbara's red dirt: one of the largest sets of iron ore bodies on the planet. Since the 1960s, these ores have been exploited and the region transformed from what was, in terms of capital accumulation, mainly marginal pastoral land. Approximately 150 million tonnes are now mined each year, practically the entire industry total for Australia; the great bulk is shipped to Japan, China and Korea, with export income totalling over $3.5 billion (DRD, 2000). The Pilbara's mine sites and ports are physically isolated from the main centres in the State. That Perth lies I ,600 kilometres to the south has certainly contributed to the development of localised patterns of work, culture and unionism. Given that the citizens of Perth marvel at their own isolation and difference from the rest of Australia- that is, 'the east' -it is hardly surprising that the industrial relations researcher is drawn to the concept of'place consciousness' when making sense of the still more lonely Pilbara.
As commanding as it is, even the Pilbara's physical geography is not everything. There are important ways in which the Pilbara is neither isolated nor unified. Physical spaces have been used, made and contested by capital, competing managers and different groups of workers. Like all mining regions producing for export, the Pilbara is central to, not isolated from, the global economy. It is tied into circuits of finance capital and the product markets which make up the global trade in ores and its dependent steel industries. It is internally divided as a resource centre, most notably between BHPIO and Hamersley Iron. rivals in the product market. It might also be mentioned that, paradoxically, distance
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placed the Pilbara at the centre of Australian political discourse in the federal election year 200 I. It is tempting to think that the Pilbara's physical remoteness from the urban centres was a consideration in the siting of a detention centre for asylum seekers (in Port Hedland). Distance also impacted upon that national politics with the collapse of the Ansett airline- the only carrier to many Pilbara towns. These observations are significant in that they point to the problems in too glibly using metaphors of distance and isolation. It is, to reiterate the point, how space is made that is of most interest.
Built in part on physical isolation, a distinctive pattern of industrial relations and a geographically specific set of union cultures and structures had emerged by the 1980s. This history is important and complex- and, it might be added, little investigated- but for the purposes of this article the vital considerations tum upon the uses of these spaces. Here it can only be remarked of the Pilbara's recent history that by the 1980s there were both material and discursive senses in which the Pilbara had become a 'union space'. After periods of more or less sustained industry and union growth and the establishment of a degree of union independence from State union officials in Perth, iron ore workersfor all their isolation- found themselves at the centre of the assault by the 'New Right' on unionism. The Pilbara was the site of militant employer anti-unionism in 1986 at Robe River when a change of ownership and management brought to an abrupt end an era of high wages and management tolerance of unions. Six years later at Hamersley Iron, unions were effectively destroyed. In both cases, the feelings of many State union officials and local activists were a complex amalgam based on both difference and isolation; at once independence and resentment. They felt betrayed by the 'wise men from the east' in national union offices and at the ACTU. (For general background see Dufty, 1984; for Robe River, see Swain, 1995; Thompson and Smith, 1987a, 1987b; Read, 1998: 347-60; the 'betrayal' claim is drawn in large part from the focus group discussions described below and the author's discussions with a number of officials and activists in response to Ell em, 2001a; it is hinted at in Swain, 1995: 288-90.)
By the early 1990s both Robe River and Hamersley, once closed shops, were nonunion sites, with just a handful of union loyalists retaining their membership out of principle. Both subsequently came under the ownership of Rio Tinto, in Hamersley's case as a wholly-owned subsidiary (Swain, 1995; Thompson, 1987; Thompson and Smith, 1987a, 1987b; www.riotinto.com.) As the paper will show, the implications of this went far beyond the work sites themselves. As iron ore was the raison d'etre of these towns and as each town served the mining operations of one particular company, the collapse of unions on those mines meant their effective disappearance altogether from the towns. Unions simply became invisible. These towns may not have been company towns in the formal and legal sense but they were now non-union spaces nonetheless. By 1993, BHPIO was the only unionised operation in the Pilbara's iron ore industry, its workers still working under collective State awards and agreements.
If events at Robe and Hamersley had shown to local workers that isolation might be a source of weakness, the geography of work and industrial relations would demonstrate that distance and fragmentation within the Pilbara, too, were decisive in shaping the
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Power, Place and Scale: Union Recognition in the Pilbara, /999-2002 73
contours of unionism. The iron ore industry does not gather masses of workers to labour together at the same time and in the same place as had the coalmines which spawned labour movements of old. Both workers and unions are divided across space in a number of ways, all of which tend to enhance capital's control of those spaces. That struggles over unionism are at once and necessarily struggles over space is particularly clear in this case, just as in the so-called 'new economy'. There is a great deal of work now published to show that new workplaces and new forms of work organisation appear to require new spatial strategies for union organisation (see for example Green and Tilly, 1987; Savage, 1998). This is clearly so when thinking of office blocks as compared to factories, contract cleaning compared to labouring. However, any assessment of the geography of work in these mines suggests that control of space and, for unions, spatially-driven strategies are no less important.
The spatial structuring of the mining company sites itself presents logistical difficulties for unions and for organising campaigns. The sites are spatially impressive but immensely fragmented. In the case ofBHPIO, the main mine at Newman is 450 kilometres from the treatment plant and shipping facilities on the coast at Port Hedland. In between these major sites and towns are 'satellite mines' which are run by contractors and which are hard to access, being off the few major roads in the area. The sites now owned in whole or in part by Rio Tinto (Robe and Hamersley) are similarly spread across space. The Hamersley mines at Tom Price and Paraburdoo are linked to the ports at Dampier and Cape Lambert by about 300 kilometres of rail. Newer, smaller mines are also proliferating around the older sites. Unlike BHPIO, these are not usually contract mines, but they are distinct in another sense- many are run on a 'fly-in/fly-out' basis, staffed by workers living as far away as Perth who stay in cabins and quarters while at work.
Furthermore, the size of the minesites, the implications of mechanisation and arrangement of work all tend to fragment labour. The ore mines are massive sites, with the open cuts several kilometres long and hundreds of metres deep. Up 'on the hill' (as the actual mining area is commonly known) there are but a few workers at any one time: shovel operators, dump truck drivers, drillers and blasters. Down at the crushing plant, maintenance depots and train-loading facilities, there are more workers concentrated together but, nonetheless, what is most striking is the lack of shared spaces at these worksites. If fly-in/fly-out arrangements also tend to weaken the bonds of collectivism both at work and in the local communities, so too does the working of twelve-hour shifts as the sites run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
At the same time, organisational and spatial fragmentation on labour's side has only exacerbated capital's command over space in the Pilbara. Historic internal union tensions between the Pilbara on one hand and State and National officials on the other were still present, although overshadowed through 1998 and 1999 by inter-union tensions. These were vital in the lead up to BHPIO's move against the only remaining union site in the industry. In October 1998, there had been defections from the Australian Workers Union (A WU) to the Construction Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). The briefest account of this complex saga is to say that the State Industrial Commission awarded right
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of coverage to the A WU. In its September I 999 decision, the Commission criticised what it saw as the personal agenda of former A WU officials and argued that the A WU had performed adequately. The management assault was now imminent (Wor/iforce 1183, 9 October 1998; 1184, 16 October 1998; 1189,20 November 1998; 1228,24 September 1999; 1199,26 February 1999;Austra/ian, I October 1998; Ellem, 1999: 146-7).
The immediate political and regulatory context which unions faced was no more encouraging than the historical and geographic environment. In Western Australia, unions had fared worse than in most other States in the 1990s. Density had fallen by 16 percentage points to just 21 per cent in the seven years to 1999 when BHPIO made its move (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1994, 1996, 1998, 1999; Bailey and Horstman, 2000). With State and Federal elections some way off, the unions could see no immediate relief in terms of regulatory reform. There seemed to be nowhere to hide: both the federal Workplace Relations Act and the State Workplace Agreements Act had limited unions' ability to organise and to support each other, whereas they offered employers a range of ways in which to individualise work regulation and de-unionise workplaces. Even the election of a State Labor government in February 200 I did not immediately alter this situation, although, as the article will show, it was to have a significant impact in time.
In all, then, the iron ore sites were spatially fragmented and the workers organisationally fractured. Physical geography, the social use of space by capital and labour and the history of local unionism meant that the unions faced great difficulties when BHPIO set out along the road to individualisation, the path already trodden by its local rivals. The next section analyses union resistance to this before going on to explore the impact of Rio Tinto's attempt to rescale regulation at what were already non-union sites.
'The Last 500': Union Recognition At BHP Iron Ore
Throughout 1999 the management ofBHPIO prepared the ground for a shift to individual contracts for its I, I 00 strong workforce. The company's senior management, which had toyed with idea of a merger with Hamersley Iron, was increasingly alarmed at the efficiencies and tlexibilities of its local rival. Managers came to the view that BHPIO needed to exclude unions and shift to an individualised regime of workplace governance (FCA, 200 I: especially pars 87-8, 96-100, 118, 176). Management stalled the negotiations for a new enterprise agreement (a process aided by inter-union division), reduced the levels of employment and introduced a series of changes at work. While union officials and activists felt that they were being frozen out, the company welcomed others. In particular, there were 'hug and tug' sessions to introduce the 'new BHP' to the workforce (author's interview, Will Tracey, 27 June 2001; author's interview, Paul Asplin; various issues of Rock Solid; for more detail, see Ellem, 2002).
BHPIO moved against unions at its Pilbara sites on II November 1999. The chosen instruments of the new regime of regulation were Western Australian Workplace Agreements (WPAs) which had been introduced by the conservative government under
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its Workplace Agreements Act in 1993. These individual contracts set aside awards and collective agreements, allowing the management ofBHPIO to effect its stated aim: 'the removal of the need to negotiate change with union representatives' (quoted in Rock Solid I; FCA, 3, 2001: par 187; see also pars 98, 102-3). The WPA itself contains six clauses: a naming of the parties (BHP Iron Ore and the individual employee); the term of the agreement (five years); the terms and conditions of employment; dispute resolution procedures; a note that unfair dismissal claims may be referred to the state Commission; and an acknowledgement that no threats have been made. There is no detail in these agreements: all that is said under 'terms and conditions of employment' is that these terms are 'set out in the Employee's contract of employment and the Staff Handbook as amended from time to time'. Similarly, the 'Dispute Resolution Procedure' allows for referral of unresolved disputes through the chain of supervision and, where necessary, to the Commission. However, this procedure r.efers only to disputes 'about the meaning or effect of the Agreement', not the contract of employment.
The 'Staff Contract ofEmployment', then, is the more important document. It provides all the details pertaining to the employee's duties, hours of work, remuneration, leave entitlements and so on. The contract reads as a textbook case in enhanced managerial control via different forms of flexibility. It gives management temporal flexibility: 'circumstances [sic] may require you to work outside your normal hours to ensure that the full requirements of your role are met'. The management also 'reserves the right', to move employees from night to day work or from one shift to another. The contract also delivers cost flexibility: salaries will be reviewed annually and 'adjusted at the company's discretion' after assessment of company and individual performance. Finally there is enhanced spatial flexibility: in some cases employees may be required to move between Newman and Port Hedland.
When disputes arise, the employee is referred to the Staff Handbook for guidance on the handling of grievances. This handbook has a five-step 'Issue Resolution Process'. If matters remain unresolved after discussions with the relevant supervisor, then the issue moves up the hierarchy, through a superintendent, followed by a manager and then a vice-president. Finally, 'the employee may discuss the matter with the President of the Company' (BHP Iron Ore, Staff Handbook: clause 9.1). Only then may the matter be referred to the Commission. Unions argued that this was a process intended to thwart the complainant and remove any effective collective representation. (This summary is drawn from: BHP Iron Ore, Staff Handbook; copies of rejected contracts kindly made available to me by the combined unions; author's interviews, Will Tracey, 27 June 200 I; author's interview, Paul Asplin; author's interview Brett Davis; author's interview, Derek Schapper.)
How did workers respond to the contract offer at first? The contract offers seemed attractive enough, with apparent wage increases of up to $20,000. In addition, employees were given the opportunity to have accrued sick leave (often as much as $20,000) paid out. These terms were, of course, conditional upon signing the WPA and agreeing to the contract. (For details on company strategy and vision, see BHP websites, especially the Workplace Change page at www.bhp.com ... /iron ore; see also evidence given in the
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Federal Court summarised in FCA, 200 I: pars 84-11 0.) The money did not tempt those most loyal to the union. This was not simply collective loyalty but rather because of concerns about the scope of managerial prerogative. According to one of the train drivers, 'you didn't need to be a rocket scientist' to work out that in return for the immediate gain, employees were giving away any control on the job (author's interview, 'John', train driver; author's observation of delegates meetings, Newman and Port Hedland). Union loyalists believed that those nearer to retirement or with debts might be more susceptible to the contract offer, again a reflection oflocallabour market conditions. Grievances with the company lay in work organisation issues and the negotiating process itself, not so much earnings. The work sites and towns (and in some case families) were immediately divided between what the union members called 'the collective' and 'the woppas', the latter an ingenious term quickly developed for both the WPAs and those who signed them.
The unions' organisational response to the BHPIO offer was threefold. The unions undertook a legal strategy at the national scale; the national peak body; the ACTU, oversaw a local campaign based in workplace revitalisation and community groups; and unions operated at the State scale, too, to secure a new award for union members.
Firstly, there was an attempt to use the national courts. The unions argued in the Federal Court that BHPIO had contravened the Workplace Relations Act, by 'injuring' workers in their employment and offering 'inducements' to resign from a union. On 3 I January 2000, the Court delivered an interlocutory decision in the unions' favour, instructing the company to offer no further individual contracts pending a final decision (FCA, 430, 2000). That decision was not handed down until I 0 January 200 I. The Court cleared the company of any unlawful behaviour, ruling that the offer of individual contracts did not mean that the company was seeking to remove workers' rights to belong to a union. In essence, the Court distinguished between what it saw as two distinct issues: the management's desire to exclude unions from discussion over workplace change and workers' rights to belong to a union. It ruled that the company was within its rights to pursue the former and had not interfered with the latter (FCA, 3, 200 I; see also Dabscheck, 200 I). The significance of this national legal strategy was that it bought unions some invaluable time on the ground. Over the summer of 1999-2000 as the Federal Court held its hearings, the numbers signing up to the 'woppas' had increased. Many union officials feared that they were facing a replay of the disasters encountered at Robe River and Hamersley Iron. By the end of the summer, about 45 per cent of workers had signed individual contracts. There were desultory talks about a new collective agreements, a couple of outbreaks of picket line violence and some heavy-handed policing but it was clear that 2000 would be a year of attrition, with the issue to be decided at local scale. (This paragraph draws upon author's interview with Troy Burton, ACTU organiser, 21 December 2000; Australian Financial Review, II February 2000; Sydney Morning Herald, I7 March 2000; Workforce 1247,3 March 2000; 1249, 17 March 2000; 1259,2 June 2000.)
Secondly, national peak council initiative and grassroots activism intermeshed. The ACTU offered support in a particular form, through the application of its organising program as set out' in unions@work and overseen by the new Organising Centre (ACTU
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1999a). The key proposals for understanding the geography of this set of conflicts lie in the first section of unions@work, 'Strength in the Workplace' and the final. 'A Strong Union Voice'. The argument about workplace activism draws upon A WIRS data (Callus et a/, 1991; Morehead eta/, 1997) and the work of scholars such as David Peetz ( 1998: 114-34), which demonstrate the critical role that active delegate structures play in maintaining union presence. 'A Strong Union Voice' recommends that a 'campaign capacity' be developed to cover both bargaining and recruitment issues and calls on unions to tap into local communities and media. As in any strategy, there are tensions within the ACTU's organising model. The significant issue for this study is that as unions@work is a 'topdown grassroots' union strategy and a nationally scaled one at that, then conflict between full-time officers (see for example, Cooper, 200 I) and between unions is not unlikely. Given that the company had seized the initiative and that locals had deep reservations about the ACTU, this would be a difficult local test of this national union strategy. On the other hand, local activism and community networks were a Pilbara tradition, although one not as strong as it had been. (For a more complete discussion of this, see Ellem 2002. This and the following paragraphs are drawn from: ACTU 1999b; author's interviews with Will Tracey, 17, 19 September 200 I, Ross Kumeroa, and a large number of interviews with Newman and Port Hedland delegates who preferred to remain anonymous.)
From late 1999, with the help of ACTU organisers, local union structures and organisation were transformed. In December, a series of ACTU-sponsored campaign planning meetings was held. These meetings analysed the strengths and weakness of union and management as well as specific worker concerns. Within a few months, a delegate structure had been established with activist-to-member ratios of between oneto-five and one-to-ten. This network underpinned everything else that was done. Meetings of the combined Mining Unions Association, which were held fortnightly with about 30 convenors and delegates, became the main forum to plan campaign strategy. Members of the five mining unions- the A WU, CFMEU, Transport Workers, Australian Manufacturing Workers, and the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing- worked for the most part in harmony, their delegate structures based on worksite mapping and effective networking across occupational lines. At the same time, to counter company propaganda, the activists had their own 'one-on-ones', set up a website and published a weekly newsletter, Rock Solid. One of the most popular contributions to the website was a poem entitled 'The Last 500' by Nancy Missler, a shovel-operator on the Newman mine. The opening verse spoke of both isolation and determination:
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.
In this local renewal, it is important to emphasise the role of individual responses to the BHPIO plan. Obviously, without the decisions and actions of individuals, the collective would not survive. Individual workers began with symbolic gestures: at first wearing
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union stickers and then union shirts. Morale grew as these, and higher risk, tactics were deployed. At the worksites, as confidence grew, they copied the card system of football referees. There was the warning card- yellow of course- and then the red card shown to overly persistent supervisors who tried to talk them into signing contracts. On the mines, in the treatment plants, in homes and at meetings, humour was a key tool. Union loyalists made bonfires with the letters offering them contracts. On another occasion, they raffled them off to raise funds. Humour and political insight ran through the language of resistance too. Calling other workers scabs could lead to dismissal but there was nothing wrong with referring to those who had signed the WPAs as 'woppas'. Sometimes unionists were the 'woppa stoppers'. Cleverest of all perhaps was the implication that the contracts themselves were 'whoppers' -the big lie. Increasingly at meetings and in Rock Solid, the word 'collective' was used rather than 'union', signalling a fresh start and unity built at work and in the towns, not from 'on high' or Perth - or the east.
The workplace was by no means the only site of workers' resistance. A network of women was quickly established in January 2000 after Western Australian police launched a major assault on pickets at Newman. (This was during an early campaign to try to restart negotiations over a new collective agreement.) As a result of this televised violence, there was much anxiety about what might happen next at the Port Hedland sites. Some of the women on the Hedland picket line, wives and partners of the strikers, began to talk about forming a women's support group. Within a week they had gathered 80 women and their partners for a meeting and barbecue in the town and had established their own group, Action in Support of Partners (ASP). Many of the women involved in the groups were engaged in at least part-time paid work themselves and they brought these skills- typically as office administrators- to bear on the organisation of a very effective group. ASP established its own website and newsletter, ran speaking tours and sent delegates to Perth. It also joined the combined union meetings with full voting rights (author's interviews, Colleen Palmer, Maria Boyington). The relationship between the union and other groups changed as well. Two weeks out from Port Hedland's local council elections in May, the unions decided to run candidates under the slogan 'to ensure families, communities and workers are represented on council'. Paul 'Curly' Asp lin of the A WU and Arthur Gear were elected; ASP's Colleen Palmer just missed out. Perhaps nothing made so clear the power of place: the notion, that despite the many setbacks suffered by unions from Robe River in 1986 through to November 1999, the Pilbara was- or should be - a union space.
There was, then, a significant turnaround at the local scale in the time afforded the unions by the Federal Court hearings. The 55 per cent of the workforce staying loyal to the union formed a solid and experienced base which was unlikely to be eroded thereafter. The best measure of how far the unions had come was provided after the Federal Court's final decision. In April200 I, the company made a further round ofWPA offers but there was almost no uptake. By now, people were beginning to say that Missler's poem could be re-titled in the spirit of its final couplet:
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A watershed across this land,
We're the FIRST 500 and here we stand.
Thirdly, the unions pursued a collective award for their loyalists. This must be understood not only as a material reward for the members but also as part of the renewal strategy. Thus, the issues in the award claim were used to reflect, and build upon, matters of concern to workers themselves. On 2 November 200 I, the Western Australian Industrial Relations Commission handed down the new award to regulate the pay and conditions of employment of the union workforce. The award granted an immediate wage rise of 14 per cent with 6 per cent in twelve months. It was greeted as a triumph and represented an extraordinary morale boost for the unionists affected and indeed for others in Western Australia. The award gave the company's management more scope than under previous collective agreements to introduce workplace change but it also compelled the management to recognise collective bargaining rights (W AIRC, 200 I; see also further reasons and decisions reached on 21 June 2002 at W AIRC, 2002).
In the two years prior to this, then, unionism at BHPIO had survived in the face of employer power and local crisis. This development has begun to have effects at other sites in the Pilbara (as the next section shows) as well as in union structure and politics in and beyond the Pilbara. This revitalisation has drawn upon Pilbara traditions of local independence and activism but it has been different from past patterns in form and implication in two important, and related, respects. The first is the burying of union sectionalism and the emergence of a de facto single union at BHPIO. This happened as a direct consequence of the focus on the organising model on broad-based delegate participation. Secondly, this has challenged existing union structures. Despite State union funding for ACTU initiatives in the Pilbara and the drive for a State award, the State scale was not central to union strategy in the resistance to BHPIO. Rather, it was the intersection of national unionism, with ACTU intervention, and the local scale, with the workplace and delegate focus of the organising model, that was crucial. These issues will be re-visited in the conclusion. As the unions regrouped at BHPIO, new challenges and problems emerged at BHPIO's major Pilbara rival, Hamersley Iron.
'Rio Tinto Territory': Union Recognition At Hamersley Iron
This section will examine the logic and outcomes of Rio Tinto's strategy of rescaling its labour control regime before turning to the difficulties faced by unions in countering it. Finally, it will try to explain why the majority voted 'no' to the Rio Tinto plan to shift to non-union federal collective agreements and what the result means for union renewal and recognition in 'Rio territory'. As with the conflict at BHPIO, worker and union response cannot be fully grasped without the geographers' tools which this article has introduced. Workers and union officials had to confront the company's control of space in and beyond the sites of paid labour. In such 'non-union spaces', particular strategies were developed which reflected, and were sensitive to, those spatial constraints. This section
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is necessarily less comprehensive than the account of change at BHPIO. It deals only with the Hamersley iron ore sites, where, unlike Robe. River, workers voted against the company. It is also somewhat more speculative than the earlier account because at the time of writing all parties involved were rapidly re-thinking their strategies. Outcomes were unclear and emergent.
In 2002 Rio Tinto, now the biggest stakeholder in Robe River and the owner of Hamersley Iron, sought to transfer the regulation of its Pilbara workforce from individual contracts to non-union collective agreements at the federal scale. These agreementsknown as 170LK agreements, after the relevant section of the Workplace Relations Actwere enthusiastically promoted by the management. On 5 April, the result of the ballot was released. It was surprising enough to many participants and observers, including many in the union movement, but it was a real shock to most managers. In the words of one experienced observer, it was 'head-in-the-hands, staring-at-the-floor kind of shock' (Bachelard, 2002; see also Treadgold, 2002). The ballots resulted in a 'no' vote at most of Rio's sites. At Hamersley Iron, nearly 60 per cent voted 'no'; Argyle Diamonds (in the Kimberley) and Dampier Salt also voted against the company's proposed non-union agreement. The only 'yes' vote was recorded at Robe River but even there the one town where the union had had some ground level presence voted 'no'.
At Hamersley Iron, which was one of the first major companies to take advantage of the WPA regime, there had been, in effect, no union recognition since 1993. The reason for the management's decision to abandon the regime of individual contracts was not employee disaffection with either that regime or working conditions. Rather, it lay in the State's political context and what were, at that stage, proposed changes in the industrial relations regulatory framework. The immediate spur was the State Labor government's move, after twelve months in office, to rewrite the industrial relations legislation.
This managerial response was a particularly striking example of the importance and complexity of the political environment in two ways. First, the management was responding not to a legislative change but merely to a proposed change; it is not unlikely that they, and their allies, were attempting to pressure Labor. Since the election of the State Labor government in February 2001, the mining companies and their collective voice, the Australian Mines and Metals Association, had consistently argued that the proposed changes would make WPAs unworkable, re-instate union influence and deprive managers of the tlexibilities secured under individual arrangements. Second, the victory of the federal coalition government in November 2001 and the maintenance of its regulatory regime meant that the company could, as some geographers have it, 'jump scales' andreregulate employment at the national scale. Rio's management argued that the best way forward was to seek a non-union collective agreement, under the federal Workplace Relations Act (see, for example, Australian, 6 March, 2 April 2002). A Rio Tinto spokesperson explained why the company was not seeking federal individual contracts, Australian Workplace Agreements, by arguing that the making of a federal collective agreement was 'just more efficient' (Australian, 6 March 2002). Nonetheless, the Workplace Relations Act required that any proposed agreement would have to be put to
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a ballot - and this would allow the unions a more public profile than they had had for years in the towns where Rio Tinto workers and their families lived.
The unions were thus placed in a difficult tactical position, urging Rio Tin to workers to vote to stay on the individual contracts to which unions were in principle opposed. However, the proposed legislation which had driven the change in management strategy would provide unions with the possibility of organising these non-union sites. Acceptance by workers of the section 170LK agreements would close off that opportunity for the foreseeable future.
These tactical difficulties were much less a problem than the spatial and logistical difficulties that unions would face. For many years the mine sites had been non-union spaces and, as the article has shown, the problems of capturing these spaces were acute enough even in unionised sites. More than this, the towns themselves were non-union sites: there was little more than the occasional union notice board across the entire range of towns where the Rio Tin to workers were living. Across towns and mines, workers retaining union membership or beginning to express an interest in unionism were very careful, if not fearful, of any public activity. In contextualising this discussion, I suggested that the claims that new forms of work require new spatial strategies need to be extended to, and tested in, more 'traditional' (and once union heartland) sites. Events in this case suggest that, ifthere is anxiety on one hand and little if any union presence on the other, then even in this 'old economy' industry, new spatial strategies are indeed required.
The union strategies and emerging outcomes in the Pi.lbara suggest that local activists, some officials and delegates at BHPIO were aware of this. They urged a low-key approach to gathering support for the 'no' case, eschewing the public rallies and mass meetings so central to traditional forms of organisation. The home, then, not the workplace or even any public place like a meeting hall, was necessarily the space in which any campaign would start. Indeed, well before the ballot, some workers and their families had begun to organise meetings in their homes and had made contact with mining union officials at the BHPIO sites in Newman and Port Hedland. The secrecy of the meetings is indicative of the fear felt in the long aftermath of Robe River and the Hamersley deunionisation a few years later. However, that the meetings were happening at all demonstrated that there was an emergent reaction to both years of individualism and the recent example of resistance at BHPIO (author's interviews with anonymous Hamersley employees, 200 I; Ell em, 200 I b).
The unions' campaign was, then, very different to that which they had developed at BHPIO given that there was no organisational base from which to work and that the company's move in seeking the ballot on a new non-union collective agreement had come on surprisingly quickly: Beginning in late March, the unions had barely a fortnight in which to argue the case; they had practically no members, and their supporters were struggling to overcome the company's command of space at and beyond the mines. This situation meant that it would be difficult for unions to overcome the familiar claim that they were a malignant 'outside' influence, be it in the form of mining union officials, the State peak union body (UnionsWA), or even other workers from BHPIO. The unions
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organised a grassroots campaign as much as was possible, drawing upon these' external' agents but also upon the emerging network of pro-union activists across Rio's operations. Small meetings were held and a series of 'one-on-ones' were held, again following the model adopted at BHPIO (author's interview, Troy Burton, I 6 May 2002). Space profoundly shaped both power and discourse in the contest: in the 'company towns' and in the suspicion of outsiders.
How, then, can the result of the 170LK ballot be explained- and what are its likely implications? It must be recognised that there was evidence of emerging discontent in the months before the ballot. Some union loyalists and a small number ofHamersley workers had already begun to agitate for a revival of collectivism. Among these workers, there was a striking similarity of interpretation of the trajectory of work relations at Hamersley. Regardless of their previous attitudes to unions, most felt that in the early to mid-1990s managers had been genuinely committed to a new, co-operative model of work. Earnings and morale were high and rising. However by 200 I, they argued, there had been a discernible change: shift systems were changed with little notice; hours of work were increased; real hourly rates of pay came down; worst of all was the loss of control over hours and consequently personal and family time. Management style became much tougher. It was put to me in interviews that in response to grievances there was the soft version of management- 'well, you're still here aren'tyou?', or the hard- 'if you don't like it, then you can fuck off. Much of the worker hostility arose not so much from the outcomes as from the processes ofindividualisation, in particular, grievance procedures. The company's 'Fair Treatment Procedure' had become widely unpopular as had performance reviews which these workers felt to be arbitrary (Hamersley Iron, 'Conditions of Employment'; author's interviews with anonymous Hamersley employees, 200I; author's interviews with Will Tracey, I 9 September 200 I; Ell em, 200 I b).
In the months before the ballot there had been some public pronouncements alerting a wider audience to discontent with the Pilbara's non-union regime. For example, an Upper House member for the Mining and Pastoral Region, Labor's Jon Ford, used his inaugural speech in May 200 I to talk about 'the adverse effects on ... employees who [had] been coerced and bribed out of collective agreements' and of friends, families and communities divided (Ford, 200 I a). In October he told the Legislative Council of the 'waning' enthusiasm for agreements and the fears of employees that any association with unions would bring the company's wrath upon them. Many of these public suggestions of discontent were simply dismissed by the proponents of individualisation as union propaganda and wishful thinking- as indeed was the case in the Legislative Council with the interjection that workers would find that Labor would 'shove [unionisation] down their necks' (Ford, 200I b).
The first physical intimation of union recovery in the Hamersley towns had come in August 200 I when the mining unions set up a stall at the Nameless Festival, a town fair in Tom Price. As the unions themselves put it, in a telling spatial metaphor, this put unions back into 'the heart of Rio Tinto territory' (Rock Solid, 33). Unions claimed that about 200 people approached the stall to talk about Hamersley, while Ford himself spoke with about
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150 people in a day and a half. Many 'said it was good to see a union presence in town' (Ford, 200 I b, emphasis added).
To explain the nature of the simmering discontent is beyond the scope of this paper but it deserves some attention in order to explain the ballot result and, more importantly, to highlight the opportunities and problems which unions now face. The remainder of this section draws upon the findings of a number of focus groups which I conducted in June 2002 in the 'Hamersley towns', Paraburdoo, Tom Price, Dampier and Karratha. As earlier, less systematic research had suggested, it was in large part the processes in which work regulation was embedded that had caused worker discontent. The fair treatment system was regarded as too slow; one worker said that 'it's designed to wear you down'. Similarly, the annual assessment process was considered inconsistent and its processes unclear. On the face of it, the system appeared to defy all logic about how performance pay should be managed; many argued that it was more to do with profit (or favouritism) than with efficiency. Changes to shift arrangements and rosters were of great concern. One summary was forceful: they 'changed shifts more than undies'. While there were many other workplace issues and wage issues of concern, there were also anxieties which spoke of the impact of company policy on aspects of community life. This was expressed in a number of overlapping ways: falling population; low numbers oflocals being employed; declining social life and facilities; and the impact offly-inltly-outs and contractors.
These grievances did not, however, translate into support for unions, despite the fact that that the 'no' vote was what the unions had sought. In focus groups. workers who had voted 'no' were adamant that the ballot represented a vote of no-confidence in Hamersley Iron. It was not, in itself, a vote for unionisation. There were many reasons why workers remained hesitant about, or suspicious of, unionism such as unwanted strikes, intrusions from Perth and memories (and received wisdom) about Robe River. The most common, however, were factors central to the argument in this article, namely, the geography of union structure and memories of local and State-based inter-union rivalry on one hand and the need for a union presence in 'Rio territory' on the other. The latter point can be quickly dealt with. When workers and their families did see the officials and activists in town who had been involved with union renewal BHPIO, they were generally impressed. Many felt that simply seeing union officials in 'their' towns would help to alleviate cynicism about the motivations behind union action.
As to the prospects of union revival, most workers who were likely to respond to a union drive argued that any such union would have to be based on the workers themselves, not imposed from 'outside'. What was perhaps most striking was that the desirability of a unified union structure grounded in local worksites seemed self-evident. Three representative quotations (from anonymous workers in focus groups) give a feel for this almost unifonn view:
If we had a union it .would be a mining union ... that's what we need- one union ti.Jr the whole lot ... the people are looking for something new. There used to be more infighting than anything else and among a lot of people there would be that sort of concern.
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We spent years 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.
In short, then, the multi-scalar response at BHPIO and the emergence of a spatially specific set of union structures which draws upon but also challenges Pilbara traditions have provided a blueprint for union renewal elsewhere across that space. Since the ballot, the company has been running hard with the common enough fallback position of 'thanks for the wake-up call; we hear you' (author's interview, Troy Burton, 16 May 2002; Weekend Australian, 6-7 April 2002). For their part, the unions have come together once again to fund an ACTU organiser based, this time, in Paraburdoo. The outcome thus remains undecided with two obvious factors ranged against each other: one is the next move by the management; the other is how well unions are able to build upon disaffection with management practice.
To sum up this rapidly changing scene: the context in which Rio Tinto changed strategy was not in the first instance shaped by anticipation of either union or employee action or reaction. It was shaped by State and national scale politics but it led to significant developments at the local scale in the Pilbara. At first the company move caught the unions by surprise but the results of the ballot laid the foundation for possible union renewal in Rio Tinto's operations. Union success owed much to an assessment of the company's power across space both at and beyond the workplace and in the construction of low key, worker responses. What began in November 1999 as an attack on the last bastion of a divided and besieged union movement could conceivably develop into a renewal across a whole set of sites in the Pilbara.
Conclusion
The notion of constructed scales and arguments around the making of place are the clearest lines of difference between a theoretically-informed geography and those traditions in industrial relations which draw upon systems theory and reduce the complexities of space to mere environment and pre-given 'levels' of action. These traditions obscure some of the most important theoretical and political questions about the social relations of work and struggles over union recognition. This article has tried to show that the nature and impact of union organising strategies cannot adequately be understood without reference to time and space, to history and geography. In the cases examined here, in Western Australia's Pilbara, it appears that deep-seated geographic and historic tendencies were a source of both power and weakness for workers. Bringing a number of the central tools of human geography to bear on these problems- space, place, scale- demonstrably enriches our understanding of these struggles over collective recognition. At the same time, it is clear that the gains which unions have made have been due in part to more or less spatially-informed strategies.
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The physical characteristics of the Pilbara's iron ore sites - fragmentation and isolation- have been exacerbated by the social relations of the industry which have seen workers divided and their unions fragmented across occupations and across space itself. When ACTU organisers and local activists joined forces in the face of the BHPIO antiunion onslaught, they agreed that inter-u~ion unity was a necessary condition for recovery. Since November 1999, traditional sectionalism has been so buried that in effect a single union has emerged at BHPIO. In part, the emergence of this spatially-defined union was an unintended consequence of the application of the principles of unions@ work. It has presented workers with a new model for renewal, one which workers at Hamersley Iron would appear to favour.
In both the BHPIO dispute and the more recent and still developing campaign over work regulation and representation at Hamersley Iron, the relationship between workplace struggles and social space has been particularly important. Around the BHPIO sites at Newman and Port Hedland, family and community groups, along with local politics, became spheres of union activity. This mobilisation of place consciousness underwrote union power in the campaign. In contrast, the landscape for workers at Hamersley Iron was harsher. This, the unions knew, was 'Rio Tinto territory'. Not only had unions been banished from the worksites, but they were also nearly invisible in the towns of Tom Price and Paraburdoo where the mining workers and their families lived. These difficulties defined the spaces in which union renewal began, with collectivism emerging slowly from homes and hotels to more public sites.
The scaling of these disputes has been equally important. For its part, BHPIO management's construction of the dispute was framed only briefly in global terms. It was more markedly constructed in terms of a local crisis in relation to its chief competitor. Yet this discursive scale suited the unions. They portrayed the 'local' -the Pilbara- as union space, despite the objective measures to the contrary. They drew on the lived experience of workers under individual contract regimes to reinforce local opposition to individualism. The keys to understanding this dispute lie in the realisation that the unions' strategy was multi-scalar and that they took the initiative in the scaling of the dispute. The unions did not privilege one scale of action over another. They drew upon local activism and a particular place consciousness, national union resources and courts and State arbitral power to try to thwart the company. Despite dealing with two of the largest multinationals in the world, the global scale has not, thus far, been especially important, unlike in some other recent disputes, notably on the waterfront in 1998. This may well reflect - in contradistinction to that dispute- the 'rootedness' of mining, but there is no a priori reason why discursive and strategic constructions might not be scaled globally in the future. Indeed this reminds us of one of the central claims of this article and the traditions upon which it builds: that space and scale are, like history itself, made in a range of frames and conflicts by working people themselves.
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Acknowledgements
In preparing and undertaking this research, I have received very considerable help: from Troy Burton, Michael Crosby, Justine Evesson and Shannon O'Keeffe in Sydney; from Janis Bailey, Sally Cawley, Tony Cooke, Mike Llewellyn and Derek Schapper in Perth. I thank all the Pilbara people I interviewed (listed in full in the references), those who attended focus groups and those who have commented informally during earlier presentations of this paper. I am especially grateful to the many union delegates and activists who allowed me into their meetings and homes in the Pilbara; to Will Tracey for time, introductions and the refeshing ale; to Nancy for the poem; to Batman for the ride in the truck. I also drew on helpful comments on earlier written versions of the paper from referees and from Marian Baird, Cathy Brigden, lain Campbell, Rae Cooper, Bob Fagan, Andy Herod, Susan McGrath-Champ and David Peetz. I acknowledge the support of the University of Sydney's Sesquicentenary Grant Scheme. With all this help, it must be the case that errors are due to me.
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