'We're Solid': Union Renewal on the Pilbara
Bradon Ellem* charts the history of the Pilbara dispute, and finds a
revitalised grass-roots unionism challenging BHP's individual contracts
bulldozer
On Monday 2 July, the Western Australian Industrial Relations Commission
began to hear a union claim for a new award for iron ore workers employed
at BHP's Pilbara operations. This, of course, is no ordinary hearing. The
company found itself in a place it had been determined to avoid,
confronting a collective it had tried to crush over the previous twenty months.
In 1999, BHP Iron Ore set out to break the unions on the Pilbara. On 11
November, BHP offered the members of its Pilbara iron ore workforce a
considerable wage increase and massive cash pay-outs on accrued
entitlements if they would walk away from collective bargaining and sign
individual contracts, Western Australian Workplace Agreements, officially
know as WPAs but colloquially referred to, along with those who signed
them, as 'woppas' (or perhaps 'whoppers'). Later, company executives would
be quite clear about their motivation, one telling the Federal Court that
the key aim was 'the removal of the needs to negotiate change with union
representatives'. The existing enterprise agreement was undesirable
precisely because it required such negotiation.
Management confidence
The management of the company was entitled to be confident about the likely
uptake of these contracts. After all, the rest of the Pilbara had long been
deunionised following the high profile successes of employers at Robe River
in the 1980s and Hammersley Iron in the early 1990s. And the Pilbara itself
is isolated and, many would say, utterly different from the rest of the
country. The BHP sites were spatially diverse: from the mine at Newman to
the treatment plant and shipping facilities at the coast 450 kilometres
away at Port Hedland. As if these sorts of physical problems were not
enough, the unions themselves were divided, engaged in increasingly bitter
disputes with each other over coverage.
The company's management played its cards pretty well. Wage negotiations
had been stalled for some time and it was clear that management was trying
to edge out of collective negotiations. The company was reducing employment
levels, introducing workplace change, cutting back on union access and
stringing out the enterprise agreement talks. There were visits from
American management gurus and 'hug and tug' sessions to introduce the 'new
BHP' to the workforce.
Then came the contract offers, smartly packaged, posted to the workers'
homes just six weeks out from Christmas. At first sight they seemed
attractive, with huge pay-outs of sick leave and an apparent wage increase
of up to $20 000. These agreements would run for five years and, of course,
contained no provisions for union representation or defence.
As with other companies trying to de-unionise the workforce, BHP's devil is
in the detail. Union members argued that once bonuses and overtime rates
disappeared, the apparent wage increases would evaporate. Most importantly,
terms and conditions - and changes in them - would be governed by the Staff
Handbook, not the agreement itself. One train driver, John Radford, said
that you didn't need to be Einstein to work out what the WPAs meant: work
as directed, work when, where and how - and hope the company looks after
you. Of course, the WPA did not explicitly forbid unionism - that would be
quite illegal - but it excluded the union from any of the formal procedures
and in fact, just about excluded the employee from any say either!
Over the Christmas holidays, as many workers went away, the company's offer
began to bite. Workers started to drift away from the unions while new
starts were confronted with a stark choice: 'sign the WPA or look somewhere
else for a job'. Tensions between friends rose, community associations
became divided, families too began to split. The children of union
loyalists signed on to the contracts, desperate for a job. Like all
long-running disputes, there were immense personal as well as public costs;
workers for whom unionism was an article of faith wondered what they had
done to 'let down' the next generation. When 45 per cent of the workforce
signed contracts over the summer of 1999-2000, the union cause looked doomed.
Yet, after that there was little movement away from what those remaining
were now calling 'the collective'. In April 2001 when the company made a
further round of offers, with still more enticements to quit the union,
there was almost no uptake. Quizzed by ACTU officers in Melbourne, Ross
Kumeroa, one of the mining union convenors, assured them there would be no
further losses: 'We're solid'. By the middle of this year, the trend seemed
to have been turned right around - so much so that non-union workers from
the other Pilbara mine sites were holding meetings to begin their own union
revival. How did this happen?
BHP pressure
The pressing needs of the union loyalists were to hold the line after
management's initial success. The difficulties they faced were enormous, in
attempting to bury inter-union rivalries and then to resist the company's
attack on the union. The pressure continued over the summer and throughout
2000 and 2001: propaganda was mailed to the home, 'information sheets' on
WPAs were handed out on site. BHP established a WPA website and ran
advertisements on all local commercial television stations. On the job, the
company ran a 'no tolerance policy' towards those sticking with the union.
Union crews were disbanded, forced roster changes announced at the drop of
a hat and one unionist was sacked for calling another employee a scab -
offsite. (So far, no-one has been sacked for using the word 'woppa'.)
The union strategy would be fourfold, developing over time. The unions
quickly secured nationwide union solidarity; they used a legal strategy;
they worked with the ACTU and, above all, built an activist-led, grassroots
campaign tied into families and local communities.
The company's representatives insisted that what happened in the Pilbara
was confined to that 'unique' place and that the 'offer' of individual
contracts was a one-off. BHP coalminers were not so sure and in any case
made a special point of congratulating the Pilbara workers on their
resistance. Other BHP employees met and decided upon strike action at most
of the company's sites, including the single biggest, the steelworks across
the continent at Port Kembla in New South Wales.
Court decision
The unions also decided upon a legal strategy, hoping to emulate the MUA's
success against Patrick Stevedores in 1998. They argued in the Federal
Court that BHP had contravened the Workplace Relations Act, by 'injuring'
workers in their employment and offering 'inducements' to resign from a
union. On 31 January 2000, the Court delivered an interlocutory decision in
the unions' favour, finding that there were grounds for a full hearing to
examine whether the freedom of association clauses in the Act had been
breached. In the meantime the company was instructed to offer no further
individual contracts.
As it turned out, the real significance of this legal strategy would be
that it bought the unions some invaluable time. For after what seemed like
a very long wait, the final decision of the Court came down on 10 January
2001. The Federal Court cleared the company of any wrongdoing, ruling that
the offer of individual contracts did not mean that the company was seeking
to remove workers' rights to belong to a union. The ACTU's official
response cannot really be improved upon: this was like saying you could
belong to a golf club but not use the course.
The dispute would, then, be determined on the ground, in the Pilbara
itself, as ACTU support and local activism merged. An early and vital
turning point came on 19 January there were several arrests at Port Hedland
and a major assault on pickets at Mount Newman by Western Australian
police, an assault which brought widespread condemnation of both BHP and
the police service. The nationwide television coverage suggested much more
clearly than such confusing and dramatic footage usually does that the
attack had been unprovoked.
Picket supporters
The violence had an immediate impact on those involved too. Watching on TV,
workers and their families in Port Hedland wondered what would happen there
at their own picket lines. Partly for these reasons as well as a desire to
deal with low morale and uncertainties among the families, two Port Hedland
women, Colleen Palmer and Rachel Cosgrove, joined the picket line and began
to talk to friends and acquaintances to establish a women's support group.
By the following Saturday, they had done enough to gather 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).
From the very beginning the Pilbara's own and independent way of doing
things had been asserted. Union members insisted that they would not be
relying on the courts 'to fix the dispute', as Gary Wood, the president of
the combined unions bargaining unit, put it. Rather, the industrial
campaign would continue until BHP came to the table to negotiate new
agreements with the unions. What was new was the nature of the support that
these workers received and then how they built upon that to do the job
themselves. In the past there had been - and the residue is still strong -
immense suspicion of the ACTU. When the Robe River dispute blew up, the
union movement was in thrall to the corporatist, national scale strategies
of Accordism and cooperative relationships at the workplace. What to do
with rogue employers, though? But now there was an ACTU leadership at least
talking the talk of membership involvement. Would this work on the Pilbara?
Would the new 'organising model' work in the face of an attack on unionism
by one of the biggest companies in the country?
The unions' activists and leaders decided that this time they would seek
ACTU aid. So, a combination of national support and local action began the
fightback. The ACTU sent in a kind of 'trouble-shooting organiser', Troy
Burton, for an initial assessment. Soon after, there were organising
workshops in delegate training, something lacking in the past. In November
2000, a full-time organiser, Will Tracey, was sent in for an initial period
of 12 months. Local structures and organisation were transformed. The
worksites were mapped for signs of strength and weakness; the traditional
mass meeting was all but abandoned in favour of regular delegates meetings
and pre-shift meetings. In a remarkable change, meetings of single unions
gave way to combined meetings of the MUA, the Mining Unions Association.
Union co-operation
These changes meant that entirely new structures were being built. It was
not simply a matter of trying to revive an old model of unionism based on
reliance on organisers, convenors and court deals. Within a few months, a
delegate structure had been established with ratios of activists to members
of the order of one to five. Combined union meetings are now held
fortnightly with about 30 convenors and delegates attending along with
representatives from the women's group, ASP. At the same time, to counter
company propaganda, the activists had their own 'one to one's' with members
and published a pointed and powerful weekly newsletter, Rock Solid. Arising
from these meetings and the generally improved communications, the unions
began to run small industrial campaigns over the issues of most concern to
workers.
Looking at all these changes, though, is only part of the story. The
renewal of unionism was about the action of individual workers, about
growing confidence that the so-called 'Big Australian' could be made to
listen to the working Australian. So, union members and their families have
bounced back from the shattering times of November 1999, growing in
confidence about what 'the collective' means. They began with small
gestures to signal union pride: at first wearing union stickers and then
union shirts. These simple actions - decried by some officials at first as
not fair dinkum unionism - boosted morale and suggested that although
knocking over the company would be hard, it might be fun too.
Listening to stories of the dispute, this is perhaps the most impressive
thing about it all - the good humor, the fun of it in the face of a tough
de-unionisation drive. So, the union loyalists made bonfires with the
letters and publicity blurbs offering them contracts. On another occasion,
they numbered them and raffled them off as a fund-raiser. At the worksites,
they copied the card system of football referees. There is the warning card
- yellow of course - and then the red cards shown to overly persistent
supervisors who try to talk them into signing contracts. They have sent
letters to BHP refusing to sign a contract at any time: 'Which part of NO
don't you understand?'. They have sent memos: 'Did you hear my message? No
thank you!' The point is that these and other tactics have come from the
workers themselves.
The role of the union in a community has 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.' Even with so little time to prepare
they were successful: Paul 'Curly' Asplin and Arthur Gear were elected out
of a slate of five.
What we have here, then, is no ordinary story of industrial relations, no
mere 'case study' of union renewal but much more. The 'working Australian'
has stood firm in the union against the 'Big Australian'. Researching and
writing about this successful resistance is to share in an inspiring set of
stories from a great bunch of people, the flesh and blood, heart and soul
of what genuine unionism is about on the Pilbara and a sign of what
unionism might be in other places too.
http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/wos/worksite/pilbara.html
