Review: The rise and fall of union power in the Pilbara

Striking Ore. The rise and fall of union power in the Pilbara, Alexis Vassiley, Monash University Press 2025

If we are to rebuild a fighting working class capable of winning a society run in the interests of the many and not the few, then it’s essential to know and understand the history of class struggle, both the victories and defeats.

Striking Ore is an impressive contribution to such an endeavour. Focused on a key industry in the Australian economy, iron ore mining, it traces how rank-and-file militancy built nearly 100 percent unionisation in the harsh mining region of the Pilbara in northern Western Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. Through first-hand accounts of the unionists and extensive research, the book traces how the whole region was transformed for both the workers and their families. Then, it details the devastating impact of the class-collaborationist ACTU-ALP Accord (1983–96) which largely de-unionised the Pilbara and handed workplace power to the employers, as reliance on the courts and legality stripped workers of their power on the job. Finally, the book takes us to the results today, where a Fly-In-Fly-Out (FIFO) workforce, with only 5 percent unionisation (national rate is 12.5 percent), works punishing hours in poor conditions, while industry profits have boomed. Seeing the highest of the highs and lowest of the lows, Pilbara unionism mirrors Australia’s recent union history in an “exaggerated and time-compressed form”.^[1]

In concluding, Vassiley argues that strategies based on “both strengths and weaknesses…from the heyday of union power in the Pilbara mines…offer a way forward”. He discusses rank-and-file unionism, the role of the trade union bureaucracy, various union strategies such as the “Organising Model”, through to the need for a clear class politics to prepare us for the task facing us today. That is, to rebuild a layer of union activists committed to fighting for a militant class-struggle strategy within our unions.

Iron ore mining came late to the Pilbara. It wasn’t until the 1930s that large-scale mining and export were attempted, only to be halted over the potential war with Japan and predicted ore shortages.^[2] By 1960, when the scope of the deposits in WA’s Kimberley region was realised and Cold War pressures eased, the ban was lifted and the first shipment left the Pilbara in 1966.

At this stage, most of the power lay with management. Unlike the long history of union organisation in the rest of Australia, effectively unions had to start from scratch in the Pilbara. And they did.

The unions began by sending in organisers for weeks at a time, signing up members and establishing a branch to elect their own shop stewards. Where a job site was covered by a number of unions, combined union shop committees were also formed – a key development in building the solidarity necessary to tackle the employers. After this boost from Perth-based officials, it was then up to the local organisation to build the union. In the late 1960s, after Australian Workers Union (AWU) organiser Gil Barr “fronted the company” to get three workers reinstated, Mount Newman’s 400-strong workforce began to join the union. “From then on”, he says “we started to get membership as the guys could see the benefit of it”.

As well, the political and industrial situation was changing, both internationally and in Australia. Nationwide, by the late 1960s industrial action was ramping up, coming to a spectacular peak when there was a partial general strike over the jailing of tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea for refusing to pay a fine for striking. Western Australian unions, including those from three Pilbara mines, struck, pulling out up to 100,000 workers across almost all sectors. During 1969 disputes over sackings, working conditions and site allowances spread across Pilbara’s mines and ports, with industrial action largely run by the shop stewards and rank-and-file members. Strikes, lasting between one day and four months, delivered significant gains.

It was an ongoing battle though, with gains won in one mine having to be fought for in the next, but with each win setting a benchmark. To achieve that outcome, as Randall Grant, AWU shop steward at Hamersley Iron’s Dampier port, pointed out, “We had industrial muscle and we used it”. Their workplace meetings were more often about going on strike than discussing general union affairs. The result was that by the early 1970s these workers had curbed the worst excesses of management and through militant action won improved wages and conditions.

Workers and their shop steward and combined union structures had succeeded in shifting the always present workplace “frontier of control” between the bosses and workers, in the unions’ favour. Workers themselves decided recruitment, discipline and staffing matters, as well as enforcing safety standards, usually seen as management’s fiefdom. Union influence also spread to workers’ lives at home, turning company towns into union towns where housing, sporting facilities, food, health care and many other aspects of life thrived. AWU shop steward Harry Hoskin recalls: “The union was a big part of my life…some of the best years… The work…was just you turn up and crush rocks”, but the sports and other improvements in the townships “really made it for me”.

This grassroots union power, however, was a thorn in the companies’ sides and was a growing concern for the union bureaucracy as it sought a more rules-based, legalistic resolution of industrial relations.^[3] A major 10-week dispute in 1979 at Hamersly Iron saw clashes not just between the company and workers, but also between the Perth-based union officials and the ACTU and the grassroots committees which were running the dispute.

The dispute turned national after the state Liberal government, backed by its counterpart in Canberra, used anti-union laws to arrest workers and top union officials. Two million workers around the country held a 24-hour strike, which while it expanded support for the Hamersley Iron workers, shifted control of the dispute towards the union officials and the courts. The bureaucracy’s entry, as Vassiley notes, foreshadowed its increasing involvement in the region throughout the 1980s, magnified from 1983 when the class-collaborationist politics of the ALP-ACTU Accord led to the destruction of rank-and-file organising.

Nonetheless, boom times in 1980–81 seemed to counter that trend as workers smashed through wages and conditions barriers. But 1982 saw one of the sharpest worldwide economic downturns, followed by a stampede of restraint by reformist forces to save capitalism from itself. The Accord promised wage moderation and social safety nets for workers while ensuring company profits would rise.

The shock of the downturn, the sudden defeats and the loss of working-class confidence, allowed the union bureaucracy to expand its influence on the job through such structures as industry plans managed by tripartite consultative bodies which undercut rank-and-file agency. The Pilbara Iron Ore Industry Consultative Council’s brief was to study international iron ore trade and Australia’s role. By exaggerating the economic challenges from countries such as Brazil, the IOICC corralled unions into endless meetings, overseas conferences and “fact-finding” missions, all emphasising the needs of profit, while constantly calling for workers’ industrial restraint to meet these challenges. Management’s “poisoned handshake” approach aimed to improve productivity and efficiency, was how one participant explained it. Amalgamated Metal Workers Union (AMWU) Convener Garry Kruger saw it as “a pile of shit… I think it was an appeasement by the companies… It was more of a talk shop, always reminded me of The Life of Brian”.

As the Accord policies were implemented, unions around the country were under attack from Labor and the top union layers. Small unions like the Food Preservers Union, glass workers and isolated abattoirs covered by the meatworkers’ union came under enormous pressure to toe the line on wages and conditions and giving up the right to strike. While unions were often threatened with deregistration, massive fines and the like, the government took the extreme step of mobilising the airforce to destroy the pilots’ union. Another of the damaging onslaughts was the deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in 1986.[4] With the backing of most of the union movement, the BLF was denied coverage – and its members’ jobs – because their flouting of the Accord’s restraint threatened Labor’s restructuring and revival of capitalism.

That same year, the Pilbara’s most militant workforce at Robe River was under siege. Between June 1986 and January 1987 says Vassiley, “union power was destroyed, hundreds of unionists had left, there were no full-time convenors and shop stewards were no longer recognised. Work practices built up over decades – ensuring safety, reducing work intensity and preserving jobs and good working conditions – were taken away”.

Even at the time, everyone knew that knocking off Robe River would mean unions were finished in the Pilbara. AWU Convenor Peter Hollow put it bluntly: “If they can knock off the Pilbara they’ll knock off everywhere else. And they did”.

New management by Peko-Wallsend, under the leadership of “New Right” ideologue Charles Copeman, confronted the unions head on. Conducting a four-stage operation, the company started with a major work restructure and a one-third cut in jobs, and all union agreements, formal and informal, were abolished. Wilfully ignoring Industrial Commission orders and agreements, Copeman then cut a swathe through the workforce, enforced redundancies, jumbled up work rosters and job descriptions, then sacked those who refused to do work they had no experience or qualifications for. Strikes at Robe River were only held in the very last period – and only then sparked off by a Federated Engine Drivers and Firemen’s Union (FEDFU) wildcat strike – when the ACTU promptly moved in to override the workers and sign off a “peace package” with Copeman. Striking was deemed to be playing into management’s hands, and solidarity action from others in the Pilbara and around Australia was rejected on the grounds of vulnerability to crippling fines. Instead of a retaliatory full-scale fightback by the unions, their leadership led workers down the path of management and court-brokered resolutions, public relations campaigns and lobbying governments. And defeat.

It could have been very different. Cape Lambert Electrical Trades Union (ETU) chair Graeme Haynes outlines the union’s strengths which could have beaten back Copeman:

[T]he real strength of the union movement is the rank-and-file membership, and it was never stronger at the time. We had close to 100 per cent membership, an excellent Combined Union Council, healthy strike funds, a long history of industrial action dating back to our first industrial agreement registered in 1972 – an agreement which became a Pilbara benchmark for other sites to progressively build on – a long history of industrial and financial support of fellow Pilbara unionists and their campaigns, and we had corresponding commitments from the other Pilbara Combined Union Councils at the commencement of the New Right attack on us.

Robe River was the beginning of the end, though not the final chapter. When Mount Newman management attempted a similar strategy two years later, using the very tactics rejected at Robe River, workers struck and defeated the anti-union drive. De-unionisation at Newman wasn’t achieved until 1999, though other mines fell earlier. And on it went through the 1980s and 1990s till the region became a bastion of individually contracted, non-union FIFO employees, a hell for workers again and a bonanza of profits for the companies.

The long history of the Accord years, with defeat following defeat and a downward trajectory of union membership, strikes, wages and conditions, may seem puzzlingly the opposite of the promises. After all, it was meant to strengthen workers and their unions, provide an economy that could reward and protect workers from the vicissitudes of capital’s boom and bust. And yet the rewards went to the ruling class while the workers found themselves de-unionised and experiencing real falls in wages and conditions, living a more precarious life.[5]

So why did it end up this way? And how can we turn things around? Striking Ore, with its detailed examination of the Pilbara region, is a crucial contribution to this discussion.

Throughout the Accord years, those who argued for militancy and solidarity were, like Graeme Haynes, called saboteurs, stooges of the New Right, risking the union’s finances, or worse, members’ jobs, even houses. These weren’t just abusive name-calling, they were part of a political battle to shut down and discredit the militants and entrench the power of the bureaucracy. As FEDFU official Dick Keegan argued, the rank and file “were of little use” in what was the rightful realm of the bureaucracy, who “are changed under the Industrial Relations Act with the responsibility of administering the award and all industrial activities on site”.

Members were told that the traditional ways were no longer suited to the economic policies of the day. Instead, as the Communist Party and Left Labor proponents argued, unions would be involved in the running of the economy through tripartite industry committees and the like. AMWU official Max Ogden claimed: “What we are witnessing is the development of the Australian union movement as a major political weapon…”.

In fact, the AMWU had spent some years beforehand systematically educating their shop stewards in the politics of Accord-like class collaboration through regular forums and a widely-distributed set of booklets. What was needed was political arguments and organisation against the Accord and here workers were ill-prepared. Where there was opposition, it was mostly limited to ad hoc, albeit militant, resistance and not through an organised political alternative to the Accord. Attempts to build an organised opposition were valiant, but came after the Accord was implemented and faced the combined weight of the union movement and a Labor government prepared to go to any length to enforce it.

Since the Accord years Australian unions have tried various – mostly top-down – models to rebuild. Some, such as the Organising Model, did recruit new members, but then didn’t develop those gains into more effective unions. Others, like the nurses, have held their numbers and a degree of militancy, while others fluctuate, gaining numbers when industrial action is taken, only to fall off as weak agreements are forced through. However despite being at record low levels, unionism is not dead in the Pilbara either, and the book rightly points to some of the rebuilding in the region. An inspiring success story is the Mining and Energy Union’s campaign winning over 93 percent coverage among the train drivers and sealing a deal in 2024 that locks in major improvements in wages and conditions. In the mines themselves a combined Construction, Mining and Energy Union-AWU partnership, the Western Mine Workers’ Alliance has not been as successful.

It means the last chapters in Striking Ore make for grim reading about working in the mines, with poor safety, wages and conditions, FIFO predominant and some shocking sexual harassment cases, all of which continue to today.

As detailed by Vassiley, the history of the Pilbara provides irrefutable proof of the success of rank-and-file organisation, where workers can shift the frontier of control in the workplace from the employer to greater worker control on the job. It shows how the interests of the union bureaucracy can move from backing and even leading workers in their struggles with the employers, to hog-tying the workers to legalities and the courts, stripping them of their industrial power. And why it is the officials’ fundamental loyalty as reformists to protecting the interests of capitalism, developing class collaborationist policies such as the Accord and supporting draconian anti-union legislation, which “cannibalises” their own organisations.[6]

Fundamentally Striking Ore is an argument about the working-class politics necessary to rebuilding class-struggle unionism and ultimately a revolutionary change to society. It joins a small cohort of Marxist analyses that are essential in arming us with the political arguments we need.

References

Bramble, Tom 2008, Trade unionism in Australia. A history from flood to ebb tide, Cambridge University Press.

Humphrys, Elizabeth 2018, How Labour built neoliberalism. Australia’s Accord, the labour movement and the neoliberal project, Haymarket Books.

Ross, Liz 2004, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. Builders Labourers fight deregistration, 1981–94, The Vulgar Press.

Ross, Liz 2020, Stuff the Accord! Pay Up! Workers’ resistance to the ALP-ACTU Accord, Interventions.

Vassiley, Alexis 2024, “Once more on the rank-and-file – union bureaucracy interplay: Mining unions”, Capital & Class, Sage Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03098168241240462

^[1] All quotes from Striking Ore.

^[2] At the time it was estimated that Australia had only 264 million tonnes of iron ore reserves, likely to run out within 25 years. Today the Pilbara is one of the biggest iron ore deposits in the world, with the 2025 discovery of a single record-breaking 55 billion metric tonne deposit worth $6 trillion.

^[3] At the height of rank-and-file control in the Pilbara, an organiser had flown in, talked to management and only called a members’ meeting the next day. In the pub afterwards one of the workers slapped down the price of a beer on the counter, telling the organiser: “That’s your fucking redundancy money, grab it and fuck off”.

[4] See Ross 2004.

[5] See Bramble 2008, Humphrys 2018 and Ross 2020 for further analysis of the Accord.

[6] Vassiley develops this argument in Vassiley 2024.