Australian Geographer, Vol. 34, No. 3,pp. 281–296, November 2003

Re-placing the Pilbara’s Mining Unions

BRADON ELLEM, University of Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the attempt by mining management in Western Australia’sPilbara to replace mining unions—quite literally—by removing them from the processes ofrepresentation and bargaining. It analyses the way in which those unions have tried to re-placethemselves, in the senses of transforming themselves in those spaces in which they were alreadyoperating and reviving themselves where they were not. Where unionists have succeeded inthese engagements, it has been by working at a range of geographical scales, using the ‘powerof place’ in the Pilbara and reshaping traditional geographies of union organisation. It issuggested here that many of these emergent outcomes are the result of the embeddedness ofgeographically specific historical structures along with new intersections of nationally andlocally scaled labour politics.

KEY WORDS Scale; place; community; industrial relations; unions; iron ore; Pilbara.

Introduction

Since late 1999, the Pilbara has been the site for a significant remaking of work relationsin the massive iron operations of the world’s two largest resource companies, BHP-Billiton and Rio Tinto. In November of that year, BHP Iron Ore (BHPIO) offeredindividual contracts to its workers with the stated intention of bypassing union involve-ment in negotiations over workplace change. Over the summer of 1999–2000, unionactivists, together with officials of the Australian Council of Trade 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, 2 years after the conflictbegan, would win a new collective award. In 2002, Rio Tinto sought to transfer theregulation of its workforce at Robe River and Hamersley Iron from individual agree-ments to non-union collective agreements at the federal scale. After a short campaign,most workers voted against these agreements. By the end of the year, unions and theirlocal sympathisers had begun a campaign to represent workers at these sites for the firsttime in a decade.

The Pilbara is rich terrain for those interested in the changing geographies of workrelations. In this space, as in so many other resource regions, mining companies havelong sought to establish locally specific labour control regimes (Jonas 1996). Forinstance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the mining companies established companytowns as they began their operations. In the 1990s, they increasingly turned to‘fly-in/fly-outs’ for new and smaller mines and for strategically significant groups ofworkers such as train drivers. In 1999–2000, the management at BHPIO argued that

ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/03/030281-16 2003 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc.

DOI: 10.1080/0004918032000152384

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individualisation and de-unionisation were purely local matters with no necessaryimplications for workers in other parts of this global organisation. Ironically, as thispaper will show, both this company and Hamersley Iron would turn to the nationalscale to try to maintain control over these local labour conditions. Throughout theseyears, companies (and others) argued that the Pilbara was as unique as it was isolated,a kind of profitable but autonomous space from which no lessons—and certainly noindustrial precedents—could flow. One of the tasks of this paper is to unpack thesediscursive and organisational strategies about place consciousness and, in particular, toexamine how unions and their supporters have countered them. The paper thereforebegins by contextualising the analysis, first conceptually and then spatially. It then turnsto the conflicts around the two resource companies, examining union renewal atBHPIO and emergent revival at one of Rio Tinto’s sites, Hamersley Iron.

Re-placing, re-scaling unionism

This section concentrates upon the most useful insights in recent scholarship forunderstanding current changes in union form and purpose. These insights build uponthe claims that space is socially contested, made and remade; like time, it is aninescapable feature of all social structures and relationships (Massey 1984). The centralconcerns for this paper are four-fold: the relative mobilities of capital and labour; thelocally specific sites (both public and private) where they meet; the ‘fixing’ and ‘scaling’of resistance and intervention; and a related literature about one form of labourorganisation, namely community unionism.

Firstly, one of the geographical concepts which researchers in other disciplines,notably some labour historians and industrial relations scholars, have drawn upon isthat based in the relative mobilities of capital and labour. In general, it is argued thatcapital’s mobility is a source of power whereas immobility is a weakness for labour. Thisis familiar enough in discourses about globalisation, ‘jobs flight’ and the growth ofoutwork. However, other authors have pointed out that the rootedness of labour can bea source of power because, over time, working people and their families may createdistinctive local communities and cultures. It is therefore argued that particular formsof ‘place consciousness’ and local politics may emerge, including—most obviously fromlabour’s perspective—that of the ‘union town’ (Storper & Walker 1989; Beynon &Hudson 1993; Ellem & Shields 2000, 2001). That these forms of consciousnessconstitute sources of power (or weakness) is a central element in this paper’s argumentabout Pilbara unionism. As mining is one of those industries in which specific opera-tions (though not necessarily companies themselves) are place bound, local circum-stances are therefore likely to be one of the most important determinants of the fate ofunionism. Mining companies, such as those in the Pilbara, have sought to establishtheir own forms of place consciousness and, as has already been suggested, localisedregimes of control.

Secondly, the sites (both physical and conceptual) where capital and labour meet arelabour markets, workplaces themselves and regulatory regimes. For Jamie Peck, the keysites are local labour markets. Building upon Doreen Massey’s work (1984), hegrounds this case in the concept of ‘uneven development’. He argues that particulareconomic geographies emerge ‘as capital seeks the local conditions most conduciveto profitable production’ (Peck 1996, p. 13). Under conditions where there are fewsites of potential accumulation, and where they are distant from large urban labour

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markets—as is precisely the case in the mining of iron ore—capital might be seen as thesole agent creating labour markets. Yet workers do not arrive in such spaces withoutvalues and aspirations, nor do they remain as atomised individuals. Peck’s insistencethat productive ‘space’ and social ‘place’ together establish local labour markets remains,as this paper shows, a powerful insight. So it is that ‘geographies of labour are formedat this intersection, where flows of capital accumulation collide with the structures ofcommunity’ (1996, p. 15).

If, as Peck insists, labour markets ‘are socially regulated in geographically distinct ways’(1996, p. 106, original emphasis), is it also the case that workplaces and regulatoryregimes have spatial specificities? For writers such as Massey (1984), Jonas (1996)and Andy Herod (1997), the answer is a forceful ‘yes’. Although it is a commonplacethat, in order to understand union membership levels, their relationship with modesof labour regulation must be explicated, this is rarely discussed at scales other thanthe national. Jonas (1996, pp. 325, 328) has tried to address this by pointing tothe geographical distinctiveness of a ‘local labour control regime’, by which hemeans:

An historically contingent and territorially embedded set of mechanismswhich co-ordinate the time–space reciprocities between production, work,consumption and labour reproduction within a local labour market … Itencapsulates … the gamut of practices, norms, behaviours, cultures andinstitutions within a locality … through which labour is integrated into pro-duction.

This, then, leads to a third issue, the ‘fixing’ and ‘scaling’ of resistance and intervention.Herod argues that for workers, just as for capital, the ability to ‘manipulate geographicspace in particular ways is a potent form of social power’ (1997, p. 3). The centralchallenge, he says, is to understand precisely ‘how workers seek to make space inparticular ways’ (1997, p. 3, emphasis added). In contestation with capital, labour seeksto generate its own set of ‘spatial fixes’ (cf. Harvey 1982) in ways that are notnecessarily confined to the workplace or the union meeting room. As this paper shows,these struggles may also be intra-class conflicts. Furthermore, the issues are notnecessarily confined to the workplace either. This suggests that local processes andoutcomes cannot necessarily be read off from national or aggregate industry settings.An awareness of the range of ways in which, historically, workers have sought to maketheir own senses of place only confirms this.

Building upon these literatures is a set of work applying concepts of geographicalscale. Scale—about which there is a significant and growing literature—is a powerfulanalytical tool to explain struggles over forms of labour representation. For thepurposes of this paper, there are two particular insights in this literature. Firstly, it mustbe understood that scale is pre-eminently relational and social, rather than simply agiven, a quantity or a level (Howitt 1998; see also Marston 2000). It differs markedlyfrom those positivist conceptions of social relations in which ontologically given ‘levels’underpin the analysis. It is not, then, a product of, or constraint upon, single socialagents or physical geography. Secondly, scale is contested in struggles, and thesestruggles are both material and discursive (see Fagan 1991, 1997). Understanding scalein this way draws attention to how these apparently given levels of social action—be theypolitical forms and structures or the bargaining mechanisms and structures of industrialrelations—are actually constructed. One of the agents in making and shifting scale canbe labour itself.

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These insights do not merely provide new ways of understanding labour struggles;they also have a demonstrable strategic significance for labour. The work of Sadler andFagan (2004; see also Fagan 2001) makes this clear. In their path-breaking analysisof the differing fates of waterside workers and coal miners in recent high-profiledisputes with major corporations, they show that the outcome of these disputeswas in large part contingent upon the ability of unions to construct both strategyand argument at particular scales. Attempting to understand how scale is con-structed as local labour movements struggle with global capital is a central concern ofthis paper.

Finally, there is a small but developing work around community unionism. Thisdebate is not the primary concern of this paper. However, there are significant parallelsbetween these academic arguments and actual changes driven ‘from below’ in thePilbara as spatially specific and place-conscious union strategies have emerged. Therehas been an intermittent interest in local union strategies amongst some labourhistorians and industrial relations writers. (For examples, see Patmore 1997; Thornth-waite 1997; and a thematic section of Labour History 2000.) Most analyses have focusedon ‘labour–community coalitions’, rather than community unionism as such. Drawingmainly on literature from the USA (see especially Craft 1990; Craypo & Nissen 1993),it has been suggested that unions can build successful alliances with other groups inparticular places around particular issues, most notably service delivery and plantclosures (Patmore 1997; Thornthwaite 1997).

In general, there has been considerable scepticism about the viability of moving fromissue-based coalitions towards community unionism—a new form of unionism andpolitics. In part, this reflects a view of ‘community’ as something external to unionsrather than as a social structure in which unions are (or can be) embedded (cf. Craft1990). It is also because these studies have not looked at the more innovativedevelopments which are actually emerging. By contrast, more recent work (e.g. Pastor2001; Tufts 1998; Wills 2001; Wills & Simms 2002), has pointed to signs of anemergent rethinking of labour politics more broadly. For understanding the Pilbara, themost significant development is in the literature on community unionism itself. JaneWills (2001) argues that non-union workers and, in some cases, the groups to whichthey belong can be mobilised, and that ‘community’ groups may be a better way toorganise such workers. This is suggestive, then, of the emergence of a new union type,namely community unionism itself.

Conflicts over union recognition must, then, be situated in locally specific contextsas well as in the national and global settings with which we are, analytically, morefamiliar. By applying the themes and concepts discussed here to conflicts over unionrecognition in the Pilbara, it is possible to think more clearly about what makes thesestruggles different from, as well as part of, wider trends in the regulation of paid work.

Mines and towns in the Pilbara

A distinctive pattern of industrial relations emerged in the Pilbara from the early 1970sas iron ore mining developed. Capital’s drive to accumulate transformed what had mostrecently been an arid pastoral district into productive mining space. By the 1980s therewere both material and discursive senses in which the Pilbara had become ‘union space’with local union structures and distinctive work practices. After periods of more or lesssustained industry and union growth and the establishment of a degree of unionindependence from State union officials in Perth, iron ore workers—for all their

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physical isolation—found themselves at the centre of the New Right’s assault onunionism. In 1986, the Pilbara became ‘contested terrain’ with the militant anti-unionism of Robe River’s management bringing to an end an era of high wages andtolerance of unions. Six years later at Hamersley Iron, unions were effectively de-stroyed, with civil courts and industrial arbitration tribunals rendering considerablesupport to the companies in both cases (Dufty 1984; Thompson 1987; Thompson &Smith 1987a, b; Swain 1995; Read 1998, pp. 347–60; Hearn Mackinnon 2003). Asiron ore was the raison d’etre of these towns, and as each town served the miningoperations of one particular company, the collapse of unions in those mines meant theireffective disappearance altogether from the towns. These towns may not, in the legalsense, have been company towns but they were now most certainly non-union spaces.Unions simply became invisible; ‘community’ was constructed without reference to (orperhaps against) unionism. By 1993, BHPIO was the only unionised operation in thePilbara’s iron ore industry, under collective State awards and agreements.

Today, all mining and processing operations are owned and controlled either directlyor indirectly by the world’s two largest resource companies, Rio Tinto and BHP-Billiton. It remains a commonplace to imagine the Pilbara in terms, above all, of‘isolation’. Yet for all its physical isolation, it is thoroughly integrated with, and in largepart defined by, global economic forces and structures (see Massey 1994, pp. 138–9 fora discussion of this tension). Arguments about space and scale are thus no mereabstraction. Whether the Pilbara can be defined in terms of union space or companyspace is of central significance. Global corporations themselves face the conundrum ofscale because they are bounded by fixed and therefore localised ore bodies, workingwithin the frames of often contradictory national and State labour laws, raising capitaland selling commodities in global markets, while all the time dealing with localtraditions and needs. How unions and community activists should understand thescaling of their politics in this context is similarly vital.

The peculiarities of place in the Pilbara add to these problems for union strategists.It is easy to see the Pilbara as a unified space but, again, this is only partly true. Rather,there are immense internal distances and localised differences which have limited thepower of labour over this space. There have been four major dimensions to this: thediscursive and material command of specific parts of the Pilbara by the two companies;divisions between workers within each set of work spaces; inter-union sectionalism andrivalry; and the control exercised by the companies, especially Rio Tinto, over thetowns themselves.

Firstly, there are distinct mining regions which can be conceived of in terms of thespaces controlled by the two major companies. For example, BHPIO runs its mines inthe parts of the Pilbara centred on the town of Newman, with port and treatmentfacilities 450 km away at Port Hedland. For its part, Rio Tinto has mines at Paraburdooand Tom Price (run by Hamersley Iron, a wholly owned subsidiary) about 300 km tothe west of Newman and at Pannawonica (Robe River, in which Rio has the majorshare) nearer the coast. Each set of Rio Tinto mines has a rail link to its own ports (atDampier for Hamersley and Cape Lambert for Robe).

Secondly, workers and unions are divided across space in a number of ways, all ofwhich tend to enhance capital’s control of those spaces. The iron ore industry does notgather masses of workers to labour together at the same time and in the same place asdid the coalmines and factories which spawned the labour movements of old. There isnow a great deal of work showing that new workplaces and new forms of workorganisation appear to require new spatial strategies for union organisation (see, for

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example, Green & Tilly 1987; Savage 1998). This is clearly so when thinking of officeblocks as compared to factories, contract cleaning compared to labouring. However,any assessment of the geography of work in the iron ore mines suggests that unionstruggles remain at once and necessarily struggles over space in these sites too.

The ore mines are massive sites, with the open cuts several kilometres long andhundreds of metres deep. There are only a few workers engaged in the pit at any onetime: shovel operators, dump-truck drivers, drillers and blasters. At the crushing plants,maintenance depots and train-loading facilities, there are more workers concentratedtogether but, nonetheless, what is most striking is the lack of shared spaces at theseworksites. Fly-in/fly-out arrangements also tend to weaken the bonds of collectivismboth at work and in the local communities, as does the arrangement of time. The 12hour shift is the most obvious example but of equal importance is the great variety ofshift arrangements, rosters and starting times. All this tends to suggest that spatiallyconscious strategies are as important in these traditional areas of work as they are in theso-called ‘new economy’.

Thirdly, there have been organisational and spatial fragmentations on labour’s sidewhich have only exacerbated capital’s command over space. Tensions within unions,between Pilbara activists and State and national officials remained a problem atBHPIO, the only remaining union site in the Pilbara’s iron ore industry. These tensionswere overshadowed through 1998 and 1999 by tensions between unions which turnedout to be vital in the lead-up to BHPIO’s move against the unions. In October 1998,there had been defections from the Australian Workers Union (AWU) to the Construc-tion, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). The briefest account of thiscomplex saga is to say that the State Industrial Commission awarded right of coverageto the AWU and in its decision of September 1999 criticised what it saw as the personalagenda of former AWU officials. Nothing could make clearer the costs of unionsectionalism: as the unions bickered, the management assault was now only 8 weeksaway (Workforce 1183, 9 October 1998; 1184, 16 October 1998; 1189, 20 November1998; 1228, 24 September 1999; 1199, 26 February 1999; Australian 1 October 1998;Ellem 1999, pp. 146–7).

Fourthly, in the inland mining towns, community and family life has become evermore difficult as population numbers have shrunk, with shops and schools closing,sporting teams and clubs disappearing and hospital facilities under immediate threat.The increasing preference for contractors and fly-in/fly-out arrangements has cut aswathe through the towns and demoralised locals. In particular, Hamersley Iron’smineworkers in the small towns of Paraburdoo and Tom Price have seen massive dropsin population over the last decade or more. Paraburdoo, once perhaps the most vital ofall the mining towns in the Pilbara’s inland, now has only 600 people and has lost itshigh school. Population decline has broken up the traditional physical intimacy of thesespaces as houses have been deserted or demolished. The supposed norm of the chatover the back fence or a cup of tea with the neighbours is not so easy when there aretwo or three empty houses or vacant lots between the occupied ones (author’s focusgroups 2002; Stewart Edward 16 November 2002; anonymous small business owners,Paraburdoo 16 November 2002).

Physical geography and the social use of space by capital and labour, together withthe history of local unionism, meant that the unions faced great difficulties whenBHPIO set out along the road to individualisation and when Rio Tinto attempted tore-scale regulation at what were already non-union sites. The next two sections examinethese developments.

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Workers at BHP Iron Ore: scales and places of resistance

Throughout 1999, the management of BHPIO prepared the ground for a shift toindividual contracts for its workforce of 1100 people. Senior managers had becomeincreasingly alarmed at the efficiencies and flexibilities of its main local rival, HamersleyIron, and had come to the view that BHPIO needed to exclude unions and shift to anindividualised scale of workplace governance (FCA 2001: especially paras 87–8, 96–100, 118, 176). Managers initiated many of the standard measures of union avoidance.They stalled negotiations for a new collective agreement (a process aided by inter-uniondivision), reduced the levels of employment while offering attractive redundancypackages to high-profile activists, and ran a series of ‘one-on-one’ meetings with workers(author’s interviews, Will Tracey 27 June 2001; Paul Asplin 28 June 2001; Rock Solid;for more details, see Ellem 2002a).

On 11 November 1999 BHPIO began to offer Western Australian WorkplaceAgreements (WPAs), a variety of individual contract introduced by the State conserva-tive government in its Workplace Agreements Act, 1993. WPAs set aside awards andcollective agreements, allowing the management of BHPIO to effect its stated aim: ‘theremoval of the needs to negotiate change with union representatives’ (quoted in RockSolid 1; FCA 2001, para. 187; see also paras 98, 102–3). The WPAs themselves weremerely skeletal, for, as was standard, the detailed terms and conditions of employmentwere set out in a separate contract of employment and in the Staff Handbook. The ‘StaffContract of Employment’ provided all the details pertaining to employees’ duties, hoursof work, remuneration, leave entitlements and the like. The contracts read as a textbookcase in enhanced managerial control achieved through different forms of flexibility.They gave the managers temporal flexibility, requiring employees to ‘work outside …normal hours’ or to move from night to day work or from one shift to another asdirected. The contract also delivered cost flexibility: salaries were to be reviewedannually and ‘adjusted at the company’s discretion’. Finally, there was spatial flexibility:employees could be required to move between Newman and Port Hedland. Anydisputes were to be handled by an ‘Issue Resolution Process’. Only after a complainanthad met with the President of the Company would the matter be referred to the State’sIndustrial Commission for external judgment (BHP Iron Ore 1999, clause 9.1; thissummary is drawn from copies of rejected contracts kindly made available to me by thecombined unions; author’s interviews, Will Tracey 27 June 2001; Paul Asplin 28 June2001; Brett Davis 26 June 2001; Derek Schapper 18 October 2001).

For unions, of course, representation was the core of the problem: they argued thatthis was a process intended to thwart the complainant and remove any effectivecollective representation, while underwriting the power over the workforce which thecontract afforded to the management. For workers themselves, the contract offersseemed attractive enough, with significant wage increases and access to accrued sickleave (often as much as $20 000). (For details on company strategy and vision, see BHPWebsites, especially the Workplace Change page at www.bhp.com … /iron ore; see alsoevidence given in the Federal Court summarised in FCA 2001, paras 84–110.)However, the money did not tempt those most loyal to the union. This was not simplydue to collective loyalty but rather because of concerns about the scope of managerialprerogative. According to one of the train drivers, ‘you didn’t need to be a rocketscientist’ to work out that in return for the immediate gain, employees were giving awayany control on the job (author’s interview, ‘John’, train driver; author’s observation ofdelegates’ meetings, Newman and Port Hedland).

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The unions’ organisational response to the BHPIO offer was three-fold—and multi-scalar. The unions undertook a national-scale legal strategy; at the State scale theysought a new award to cover union loyalists; most importantly, national unionism andlocal activism intermeshed through ACTU and community and workplace interven-tions.

The national court strategy attempted to emulate the successful claim of maritimeworkers in 1998 that they had been dealt with unlawfully. This failed but it bought vitaltime for union regrouping. The unions argued in the Federal Court that BHPIO hadcontravened the Workplace Relations Act by ‘injuring’ workers in their employment andoffering ‘inducements’ to resign from a union. On 31 January 2000, the court deliveredan interlocutory decision in the unions’ favour, instructing the company to offer nofurther individual contracts pending a final decision (FCA 2000). That decision wasnot handed down until 10 January 2001 when the court ruled that the company waswithin its rights to offer WPAs and had not specifically interfered with workers’ rightsto belong to a union (FCA 2001; see also Dabscheck 2001; this paragraph also drawsupon an author’s interview with Troy Burton 21 December 2000; Australian FinancialReview 11 February 2000; Sydney Morning Herald 17 March 2000; Workforce 1247, 3March 2000; 1249, 17 March 2000; 1259, 2 June 2000.)

The response at the State scale was also traditional, although in this instance moresuccessful. The unions pursued a collective award for their remaining members. Therewas, however, one significant difference in the process, with the claim being shaped inpart by the need to organise around locally identified issues as part of the drive torebuild unionism. On 2 November 2001 the Western Australian Industrial RelationsCommission handed down the new award which granted an immediate wage rise of 14per cent with 6 per cent in 12 months, matching the increases which WPA workers hadbeen given (WAIRC 2001; see also WAIRC 2002).

It was the meshing of national peak union initiative and grassroots activism which setthis union revival apart and where new geographies of labour were most apparent. TheACTU’s support took a particular form, namely its organising program as set out in thenew strategic document, unions@work (ACTU 1999a). The key proposals for under-standing the geography of this Pilbara campaign lie in the first section of unions@work,‘Strength in the Workplace’, and in the final, ‘A Strong Union Voice’. The argumentabout ‘Strength in the Workplace’ draws upon data from national workplace surveys(Callus et al. 1991; Morehead et al. 1997; Peetz 1998, pp. 114–34) which demonstratethe critical role that active workplace structures play in maintaining and developing aunion presence. ‘A Strong Union Voice’ recommends that a ‘campaign capacity’ bedeveloped to cover both bargaining and organising. It calls on unions to tap into localcommunities and media in a more systematic way.

The Pilbara would be a difficult local site at which to apply this national strategygiven that the company had seized the initiative and that many local workers had deepreservations about the ACTU’s motives and power after earlier union defeats. On theother hand, there remained powerful traditions of the workplace activism upon whichthe strategy would rely. (For a more complete discussion of this, see Ellem 2002a, b.This and the following paragraphs are drawn from: ACTU 1999b; author’s interviewswith Will Tracey 17 and 19 September 2001; Ross Kumeroa 26 June 2001; Newmanand Port Hedland delegates, anonymous.)

From late 1999, local union structures and organisation were transformed. InDecember, a series of ACTU-sponsored planning meetings was held. These meetingsanalysed the strengths and weakness of union and management as well as specific

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worker concerns. Within a few months, a delegate structure had been established withactivist-to-member ratios of between 1�5 and 1�10. Meetings of the combined MiningUnions Association, which were held fortnightly, became the main forum to plancampaign strategy. Members of the five mining unions—the AWU, CFMEU, Trans-port Workers, Australian Manufacturing Workers, and the Communications, Electricaland Plumbing Union—worked for the most part in harmony, their delegate structuresbased on worksite mapping and effective networking across occupational lines. Activistsran their own ‘one-on-ones’, set up a Website and published a weekly newsletter, RockSolid.

It is important to emphasise the role of responses at the individual scale in thiscollective renewal. For, obviously enough, without such individual decisions andactions the collective would not survive. Individual workers began with symbolicgestures: at first wearing union stickers and then union shirts. Morale grew as these,and higher risk, tactics were deployed. At the worksites, as confidence grew, theycopied the card system of football referees. There was the warning card—yellow ofcourse—and then the red card shown to overly persistent supervisors who tried to talkthem into signing contracts. Union loyalists made bonfires with the letters offeringthem contracts and raffled off others to raise funds. If humour was a key tool, so toowas language. Increasingly, the word ‘collective’, rather than ‘union’, was used, sig-nalling a fresh start and a unity built at work and in the towns, not from Perth—or ‘theeast’.

The workplace was by no means the only site of workers’ resistance. A network ofwomen was established in January 2000. Within a week, the Port Hedland women hadgathered 80 partners for a meeting and barbecue in the town and had established theirown group, Action in Support of Partners (ASP). Newman soon followed. ASPestablished its own Website and newsletter, ran speaking tours, sent delegates to Perthand had delegates attend the combined union meetings (author’s interviews, ColleenPalmer 28 June 2001, Maria Boyington 29 June 2001). The unions’ fightback alsoinvolved the local public sphere when it was decided to run candidates in councilelections. On short notice, two out of five union candidates were successful in PortHedland. Perhaps nothing made so clear the power of place: despite the many setbackssuffered by unions from Robe River through to November 1999, the Pilbara was stillimagined as a union space. Indeed, the remaking of the mining unions began to haveother local impacts. When workers at two large hotel-motels raised a series ofgrievances, they received the support of miners. The hotel workers’ rights to bargainwere recognised and the workplaces unionised (author’s interview, Will Tracey 19September 2001; www.pilbaraunions.com/forum).

There was, then, a significant turnaround at the local scale in the time afforded theunions by the Federal Court hearings. Fifty-five per cent of the workforce stayed loyalto the unions, a solid base which was unlikely to be eroded thereafter. The best measureof union renewal came after the Federal Court’s final decision. In April 2001, thecompany made a further round of WPA offers but there was almost no uptake. In the2 years prior to this, then, unionism at BHPIO had survived in the face of employerpower and local crisis.

In summary, the key to understanding the unions’ strategy in this dispute lies in therealisation that the unionists’ strategy was multi-scalar. After the first managementmoves, it was unionists who took the initiative in the scaling of the dispute, dragging themanagement into courts and tribunals where it did not want to be. Nonetheless, thecentral rhetorical device in this strategy was to privilege the local in this fight against a

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global corporation. The BHPIO managers had themselves chosen this terrain, empha-sising the local challenge of Hamersley Iron. This, though, suited unionists, who drewon local traditions and resources, constructing scale as successfully as had the watersideworkers in 1998 (cf. Sadler & Fagan 2004). Union renewal was, however, differentfrom past patterns in that union division was brought to an end. In its place emergeda de facto single union. This was a direct consequence of the focus on the organisingmodel on broad-based delegate participation. The mapping of the worksites and thebuilding of a delegate structure were based solely on geography—that is, who happenedto work where on site, not on occupation or union coverage. Resistance lay in theintersection of unionism at the national scale, through ACTU intervention, andactivism at the local scale, through community and workplace interventions.

Workers at Hamersley Iron: place, community and union renewal

Hamersley Iron had been one of the first major companies in the west to take advantageof the WPA regime. There had been, in effect, no union recognition there since 1993.If local competitive pressure had driven BHPIO’s plan, what was to drive change atHamersley Iron (and elsewhere in Rio Tinto’s Western Australian operations) was theState Labor government’s industrial relations policy. After 12 months in office, itintroduced legislation which would phase out WPAs by March 2003. But the compa-nies had other options through which to maintain labour regulation. The maintenanceof the federal regulatory regime after the coalition’s electoral victory in November 2001meant that the company could re-regulate at national scale. This was because anotherform of individual contract, the Australian Workplace Agreement (AWA) remained anoption, as did non-union collective agreements known as 170LKs (named for therelevant section of the Workplace Relations Act). Early in 2002, Rio Tinto decided tore-scale the regulation of its entire Pilbara workforce from State-based individualcontracts to the national-scale 170LKs (believing this to be less cumbersome than anyavailable form of individual agreement). For the management, the immediate prob-lem—although no real concerns seem to have been voiced—was that the WorkplaceRelations Act required any proposed agreement to be put to a ballot. This would openthe possibility for unions to have the public profile which they had been denied fornearly a decade in the towns where Hamersley Iron employees lived and worked.

There was some evidence of emergent worker discontent in the months before theballot. This might have alerted observers to the possibility that, despite years ofnon-unionism and often sophisticated Rio Tinto management, there might be a solid‘no’ vote. Some union loyalists, officials and activists based at BHPIO and a handful ofHamersley workers had already begun to agitate for collective action. Among theseworkers there was a striking similarity of interpretation of the trajectory of workrelations at Hamersley. Regardless of their previous attitudes to unions, most workersfelt that in the early to mid-1990s, managers had been genuinely committed to a new,cooperative model of work. However, by 2001, they argued that there had been adiscernible change: shift systems were altered with little notice; hours of work wereincreased; real hourly rates of pay came down. In general, management style seemed tobe getting tougher. Much of the worker hostility arose not so much from the outcomesas from the processes of individually scaled regulation, in particular, grievance proce-dures. The company’s ‘Fair Treatment Procedure’ had become widely unpopular, ashad performance reviews. Meeting in small groups in homes, a core of potentialactivists began to emerge (Hamersley Iron n.d.; author’s interviews with anonymous

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Hamersley employees 2001; Will Tracey 19 September 2001; author’s focus groups2002).

The workplace was not the only space in which discontent was evident. There werealso concerns which related directly or indirectly to the sphere of reproduction, tocommunity life in the mining towns. People were alarmed by falling population, lownumbers of locals employed, declining social life and facilities, and the impact offly-in/fly-outs and reliance on contractors. Of these issues, the one generating thedeepest and most immediate concern was that local people needed to be employed tokeep the mining towns ‘active’. These issues were never far from the surface andappeared to be growing in significance through 2001 and 2002 as rumours came andwent of new mines being opened. For many small business people, the companyappeared more and more insular—its focus on Perth or overseas—with a purelyrhetorical commitment to the community. When a new mine site was confirmed forParaburdoo, it seemed that all the workers would be fly-in/fly-outs and, worse for thetown, they would be housed in new purpose-built accommodation on the other side ofthe mine, away from the town itself (author’s focus groups 2002; author’s interviewswith anonymous Hamersley employees 2001; Stewart Edward 16 November 2002;anonymous small business owners, Paraburdoo 16 November 2002).

However, neither workplace nor community grievances necessarily translated intosupport for unions. In focus group discussions, workers who had voted ‘no’ wereadamant that the ballot represented a vote of no confidence in Hamersley Iron ratherthan a vote for unionisation. There were many reasons why workers remained hesitantabout, or suspicious of, unionism but what was most striking was the desire for aunified union structure grounded in local worksites. Three representative quotationsgive a feel for this almost uniform view:

If we had a union it would be a mining union … that’s what we need—oneunion for the whole lot … the people are looking for something new.

We spent years and years in the unions here in the Pilbara fighting eachother … if the union was ever to come back here, it would need to be anindustry union, everybody in the industry represented by the one union.

There used to be more infighting than anything else and among a lot of peoplethere would be that sort of concern.

The campaign for union renewal would have an unusual geography. Firstly, it lay in thetowns themselves. The first physical intimation of unions reclaiming space in theHamersley towns had come before the ballot was announced when, in August 2001, themining unions set up a stall at the Nameless Festival, a town fair in Tom Price. As theythemselves put it, this put unions back into ‘the heart of Rio Tinto territory’ (Rock Solid33). For people in these non-union towns, the vital space seemed indeed to be thetown, not the sites of production. Parliamentarian Jon Ford reported that many people‘said it was good to see a union presence in town’ (Ford 2001, emphasis added).Secondly, local fearfulness of any public activity meant that union officials, activists andsupporters urged a low-key approach to gathering support for the ‘no’ case, eschewingthe public rallies and mass meetings so central to union tradition. The home, not theworkplace or any public space, was the site in which any campaign would start (author’sinterviews with anonymous Hamersley employees 2001). Although the lack of work-place presence meant that the spatiality of the campaign differed from that at BHPIO,the reliance on grassroots networks was at least as important. The unions drew on

292 B. Ellem

workers from BHPIO and unionists from Perth as well as the emerging network ofpro-union activists across Rio Tinto’s operations. Small meetings were held and a seriesof ‘one-on-ones’ were held, following the model adopted at BHPIO (author’s interview,Troy Burton 16 May 2002).

The result of the ballot was released on 5 April 2002. The figures were astonishing,with a solid ‘no’ vote at almost all sites. At Hamersley Iron, the focus of most unionattention, nearly 60 per cent of the workforce voted against the proposed agreement.The result was surprising enough to many participants and observers, including manyin the union movement, but it was simply stunning for the management. In the wordsof one experienced observer, it was ‘head-in-the-hands, staring-at-the-floor kind ofshock’ (Bachelard 2002; see also Treadgold 2002).

After the ballot, both the management and the unions looked at their options, neitherquite sure what to do next. The company regrouped, organised its own focus groupsand one-on-ones. Throughout, it ran hard with the fallback position of ‘thanks for thewake-up call; we hear you’ and addressed some of the stated grievances (author’sinterview, Troy Burton 16 May 2002; Weekend Australian 6–7 April 2002). After atime, the company began to offer AWAs to the workforce well in advance of the expirydate (March 2003) of the old regulatory regime of State-based individual contracts. Fortheir part, the unions struggled with limited resources and with the need to maintaintheir position at BHPIO where the rumours (true as it turned out) began to circulatethat the workforce, or at least those on WPAs, would now be offered AWAs. They alsostruggled to develop a coordinated response which would recognise the clear signalfrom Pilbara workers that neither union rivalry nor the imposition from outside of oneparticular union would be acceptable (author’s interviews, Troy Burton 16 May 2002;Stewart Edward 16 November 2002).

By June 2002 the unions with interests in mining had agreed to combine through theACTU and fund an organiser to coordinate the Rio Tinto campaign. Based inParaburdoo, the new official oversaw a continuation of the town-based, low-keyorganising (author’s interviews, Troy Burton 16 May 2002; Stewart Edward 16November 2002). A local bulletin, The Anvil, was distributed under the banner ‘forginga better future for [Rio] families and communities’ and immediately called on thecompany to set up Community Consultation Groups to address the impact of corpo-rate decisions on the towns (The Anvil 1). Informal linkages with community groupswere quickly made.

This attempt to reclaim part of the Pilbara for collectivism would be based on a newkind of unionism. This can be seen in both structural and organisational ways. Themost important structural development inspired by the BHPIO campaign was theestablishment, under ACTU auspices, of a new local body, the Pilbara MineworkersUnion (PMU). The PMU was not set up as a union but as a non-registered organis-ation to cut across existing demarcations. The initial publicity aimed to clarify thenature of the new body: ‘a grassroots organisation of Hamersley Iron workers that wantto have a voice in their workplace and their community … independent of, but [work-ing] closely with industrial unions’ (PMU n.d.) The most important organisationaldevelopment saw the unions now very publicly enter these non-union towns. Theunions ran an ‘organising blitz’ in the week beginning Monday 11 November (3 yearsto the day since the BHPIO contract initiative). In Paraburdoo and Tom Price this blitzwas undertaken by delegates from a range of unions all over Australia. About 20 suchdelegates descended on the towns, the biggest union presence since 1994 when, in thewake of Hamersley Iron’s successful contract offer and under threats of litigation, the

Re-placing the Pilbara’s Mining Unions 293

unions had shut up shop and disappeared. The ACTU provided officials and training,delegates from BHPIO came down to lend a hand and, over a week, two entire townswere doorknocked with very encouraging results. The delegates visited homes in pairs,often spending much time in discussions with mineworkers’ partners and in so doingdrawing out the localised concerns about schooling, healthcare and community socialfacilities to which the paper referred earlier (author’s interviews, Troy Burton 15November 2002; Stewart Edward 16 November 2002; Kathleen Galvin 15 November2002; author’s observation).

Thus it appeared that the way in which the ACTU’s national organising strategy hadplayed out in the Pilbara had become inseparable from local traditions and present localconcerns. Indeed, it seems plausible to suggest that local practice had effectivelydirected national union strategy—specifically with the formation of a single-union bodyas Hamersley activists drew on experience at BHPIO. The PMU’s aims and concernsexplicitly targeted community issues as well as workplace grievances from the verybeginning. Indeed, in spatial terms, its presence at first was solely in the town, on noticeboards and in homes, new meeting rooms and pubs. The challenges of building aworkplace and bargaining presence, securing a collective union award, and using otherscales to address the mining companies’ attitudes to ‘community’ remained. As thispaper was going to press, the depth of this challenge was made all too clear. Nationalofficials of one union, the AWU, broke ranks with the other unions to engage in directdiscussions with Hamersley Iron management to use the national award system thatlocal activists and other unionists had denounced, and in so doing threatened theviability of the PMU (Australian 1, 2, 23 July 2003). That scale and regulation are madeby struggles within, as well as between, classes was forcefully underscored.

Conclusions

In both the BHPIO and the Hamersley Iron disputes, the relationship betweenworkplace struggles and social space has been recast in what at first sight appear to besimple disputes over the nature of labour regulation. The scaling of these disputes hasbeen as important as its spaces. The unions’ multi-scalar strategy allowed them to seizeback the initiative in the dispute with BHPIO, drawing upon local activism and aparticular place consciousness, national union resources, national courts and Statearbitration. In the Hamersley Iron case, it was the management’s need to re-scale itslabour organisation and remake its regime of local control which posed both problemsand opportunities for unions. This was to lead to an explicitly geographical response.

Around the BHPIO sites at Newman and Port Hedland, family and communitygroups and local politics became spheres of union activity. Localised forms of placeconsciousness underwrote these interventions. At Hamersley Iron, where the landscapefor unions was still harsher, the activists knew that a new geography of organisationwould be needed. This perception defined the spaces in which union renewal began,with collectivism emerging slowly from homes to more public sites.

These strategies developed in some unanticipated ways with the rise of both singleunion forms and the emergence of a kind of community unionism. This latter develop-ment is in part due to the contradictions between physical isolation and economicintegration which have generated a specific and at times powerful place consciousnessin the mining towns. It is also, of course, because in these places the linkages betweentown and mine, between production and reproduction, mean that an effective unionismreally must engage with non-mine issues.

294 B. Ellem

Local histories and geographies—and local readings of them—have shaped this unionrenewal. Workers and their families have been engaged in the making of their own‘spatial fixes’ to win back some control over community and worksite. The physicalcharacteristics of the Pilbara’s iron ore sites—fragmentation and isolation—had beenexacerbated by the social relations of the industry which for years had seen workers andtheir unions fragmented across occupations and across space itself. If production andreproduction, town and mine, have been conceptualised as ‘separate spheres’, this hasbegun to change with the emergence of a new political geography of labour andcommunity.

Acknowledgements

In undertaking this research, I have received very considerable background help: thanksto Janis Bailey, Sally Cawley, Tony Cooke, Mike Llewellyn and Derek Schapper inPerth; Troy Burton, Michael Crosby, Justine Evesson and Shannon O’Keeffe inSydney. I wish to thank all the Pilbara people I interviewed, those who attended focusgroups, the many union activists who allowed me into their meetings and homes, andthe ACTU’s Pilbara organisers, Will Tracey and Stewart Edward. I have drawn onhelpful comments on earlier versions of this paper from many people: Marian Baird,Cathy Brigden, Iain Campbell, Rae Cooper, Andy Herod, Susan McGrath-Champ andDavid Peetz. I owe an immense debt to Bob Fagan, who has discussed many of theseissues with me at length and been very generous with time and ideas. Finally, thejournal’s referees helped me to clarify the argument, and for this I am grateful. With allthis help, it must be the case that errors are due to me.

Correspondence: Bradon Ellem, Department of Work and Organisational Studies, Schoolof Business, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: b.ellem@econ.usyd.edu.au

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