Australian Trade Unions and the Politics of Scale: Reconstructing the Spatiality of Industrial Relations

Abstract

In this article, we explore responses of trade unions to the reconfiguration of the Australian industrial relations system in the 1990s. We argue that a major characteristic of these changes is the way in which they were socially constructed as necessary imperatives of globalization and new modes of production. Our interpretation focuses on the importance of geographic scale. We contend that a relational sense of scale is consistent with an analysis of the situatedness of labor practices and that Australia has witnessed a particularly striking use of “globalization” as political narrative. We then detail key features of the new industrial relations environment in Australia that have transformed a system that was once exceptional in its degree of nationally centralized negotiation and collective bargaining. The implications of two important confrontations related to the 1996 Workplace Relations Act are explored in detail: the conflicts between transnational mining giant Rio Tinto and the mineworkers' union over reform in the Australian coal industry and the waterfront dispute over working practices and relations in Australian ports. In conclusion, we draw out some of the broader lessons from these events in the context of rescaling processes.

Towards resonant places: reflections on the organizing strategy of the International Transport Workers’ Federation

“…The campaign went as far afield as Jamaica and Switzerland in an attempt to put pressure on the business interests of Marc Rich, the secretive financier who was the plant's ultimate owner. A range of other examples illustrate a similar pattern, whether it relates to garment workers in Guatemala (Armbruster-Sandoval, 1999); bus drivers, commercial cleaners and UPS workers in the USA (Anderson, 2009;Banks & Russo, 1999;Burgoon & Jacoby, 2004); mine workers in Australia (Sadler & Fagan, 2004) and auto plant workers in Brazil (Anner, 2011). And as the Ravenswood campaign itself makes clear, this pattern is not specific to struggles within TNCs.…”

“…As the UPS case in particular demonstrates, disputes such as these are effective at drawing in diverse forms of solidarity from far afield (c.f. Banks & Russo, 1999;Sadler & Fagan, 2004). Moreover, these struggles can become resonant because fundamental struggles for labour rights communicate very effectively across space, radiating political energy outwards.…”

The New Global Labour Studies: A Critical Review

“…Another segment of strategy-focus scholars thus turned to case studies of transnational campaigns to gain a more empirically accurate view of the new labour transnationalism. These case studies included: the United Steelworkers' dispute with the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation in 1995, in which consumer boycotts and political demonstrations by unions in twenty-eight countries aided the Steelworkers' victory (Herod, 1995;Juravich and Bronfenbrenner, 1999); the 1996-1998 dockers' dispute in Liverpool, in which solidarity strikes at ports around the world demonstrated maritime unions' power to disrupt global commerce (Castree, 2000;Carter et al, 2003); the Teamsters' successful 1997 strike against UPS, which featured transnational union cooperation coordinated through the UPS World Council (Russo and Banks, 1999;Mazur, 2000); the transnational alliance launched in 1998 in an attempt to get mining giant Rio Tinto to abide by ILO conventions on labour rights (Goodman, 2004;Sadler and Fagan, 2004); countless new union-activist alliances forged in the heat of the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle; and dozens of anti-sweatshop campaigns led by coalitions of unions, students and NGOs in Asia and Latin America (Johns and Vural, 2000;Anner, 2009). …”

Hospitality unionism and labour market adjustment: Toward Schumpeterian unionism?

“…Most important, campaigns and bargaining are increasingly multi-scalar as local initiatives are linked to global struggles in complex ways. Geographers have contributed their own theoretical and empirically assertions as debates are largely focussed on the appropriate scale to organize workers (see Tufts, 2007aTufts, , 2007bSadler and Fagan, 2004). As Savage (2006, p. 650) succinctly notes, however, the mechanisms creating multiple scales of organizing are rarely painless transitions:…”