New Unionism in the Old Economy: Community and Collectivism in the Pilbara’s Mining Towns

Abstract

This paper focuses on union renewal and the nature and prospects of ‘community unionism’ as unions struggle to define and control the spaces in which workers and their families labour and live. It assesses the processes of union renewal in the iron ore industry in Western Australia’s north-west, where the Pilbara Mineworkers Union, a new organisation, has appeared. This union aims to organise workers nominally covered by four mining unions and appears to be an emergent ‘community union’, in a social and spatial setting where work and community issues overlap. The new organisation has followed on from other Pilbara struggles in which the organising strategy of the Australian Council of Trade Unions has been seized upon with particular enthusiasm, meshing with local traditions and the needs of the present. These developments cannot be fully understood without thinking about the geographies of work, community and regulation which have been interconstitutive with unionism’s Pilbara trajectory. Analysing this case begins to provide a specific illustration of how union structures and strategies actually do change, as opposed to merely recapitulating arguments about how unions should change.