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We're Solid

Extracted from WorkSite

Bradon Ellem charts the history of the Pilbara dispute, and finds a revitalised grass-roots unionism challenging BHP's individual contracts bulldozer

	Pilbara Action

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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.

Bradon Ellem, Work & Organisational Studies, University of Sydney. Thanks to many people in WA for their time and thoughts: in Perth, Janis Bailey, Sally Cawley, Tony Cooke and Mike Llewellyn; on the Pilbara, Curly Asplin, Ross Beggs, Maria Boyington, Brett Davis, Colin Gilbert, Johnny Johnson, Ross Kumeroa, Colleen Palmer, Terry Palmer, John Radford, Will Tracey - and Batman for the ride in the truck.

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  Issue 121 contents

»	Union Journo on Death List
»	First 'Lab Rats' in Bank Hold-Up
»	Monk's Mad Power Grab from States
»	Big Print Merger Threatens Jobs
»	Anger as Labor Staffers Shun Unions
»	Unions Are Well Advanced In Change Unions Tell ALP
»	Unions Step Up Organising Drive
»	Education, Call Centre Unions Sweep Awards
»	Bank AGMs Focus of Worker Anger
»	Gender Balance in Transport Concessions
»	Concern As Sydney Collapses
»	Bakers Seek More Bread
»	CFMEU Forces Re-Think On Asbestos
»	Call Goes Out for Union Summer
»	Twelve Weeks Parental Leave For Kiwis
»	Organiser of the Year Nominations Open
»	Activists Notebook

»	The Soapbox
»	Sport
»	Labour Review
»	Tool Shed

»	What's Wrong With Labor
»	Why I'm Quitting the ALP
»	Compo Flak
»	Union Democracy
»	Multi-Skilling Corrigan Style

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