B Ellem
Biographic Data
| ID | 58056 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Ellem |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Ellem |
| SIGNATURE | ELLEM B |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6394-2327 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
An improbable driver of “just transitions”? Union power in the coal heartland of Western Australia‘s energy shift
Much scholarship in the nascent field of climate crisis and labour assumes that trade unions can readily become agents of “just transition” to post‐carbon energy systems but simply lack a willingness to do so. We investigate this problem more deeply by asking: under what precise circumstances might unions drive “just transitions”? Drawing upon a case study of one union's effort to build a just transition in the energy generation sector of one fos…
Remaking the socio-spatial fix: Actors, time and crisis in two iron ore towns
The 'spatial fix' has been central to economic geography for nearly 50 years, examining capitalist development through both stability and change. Harvey's original conceptions of the fix prioritised capital's capacity to fix space to accumulate and forestall crisis. We continue this by considering the ' socio-spatial fix', allowing closer investigation of who makes the landscapes of capitalism, and how actor choices and actor inter- and intra-rel…
Explaining Union Decline: Remaking Power Relations in the Pilbara Iron Ore Industry
How have scholars tried to explain marked union membership decline in the Global North, and how have they assessed consequent "union renewal" strategies? In this journal in 2020, Bowden argued that most accounts of unionism failed to explain decline, relied too much on state policy as causation and were too optimistic about those renewal strategies. One way to respond to these important general claims is to assess, as this article does, a strikin…
Argyle: The Impossible Story of Australian Diamonds
Raymond Arthur Markey (1949-2022)
Labour, History and Labour History: Writing from a Business School
Warring Brothers: Constructing Komatsu's and Caterpillar's Globalization
We detail how the world's two largest engineering machinery firms, Japan's Komatsu and the us's Caterpillar, actively managed geographical concerns to become global actors. We argue that their globalization was not a teleological given but had to be proactively made. Both the state and organized labor played significant roles in shaping their geographical evolutions, as did their efforts to outmaneuver each other spatially. Their globalization, t…
Temporality and the evolution of GPNs: Remaking BHP’s Pilbara iron ore network
Global production networks (GPNs) exist across time as well as space, an idea that is underplayed within GPN theory. To consider how time influences the remaking of the network and region, the paper explores the temporal development of one iron ore GPN in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Its emphasis is on temporality and, drawing upon evolutionary economic geography (EEG), the paper shows that GPNs are created over and with time. This ma…
The global commodities boom and the reshaping of regional economies: The Australian experience
Since the publication of Fagan and Webber’s Global Restructuring in 1994, Australia has experienced one of the most significant commodities-led economic booms in its history. Increasing global demand for iron ore, natural gas, coal and a host of other resources from the early 2000s contributed to a period of sustained economic growth, low unemployment and rising per capita incomes. While popular and political discourses have tended to focus on th…
Geographies of the labour process: Automation and the Spatiality of Mining
Productive ways of thinking about work have emerged from the recent engagement between scholars in employment relations and human geography without any sustained attention to the spatiality of the labour process itself. Arguing that where work literally 'takes place' is important, this article explores the spatial nature of the labour process through an examination of automation in one of the world's largest transnational mining companies, Rio Ti…
Resource Peripheries and Neoliberalism: The Pilbara and the remaking of industrial relations in Australia
How mining companies overcome the problems faced by the fixity of resources and how they might come to exercise influence in societies which appear to be mostly post-industrial are complex questions of political geography. This is not least the case for a region such as the Pilbara—an iron ore site isolated from metropolitan centres—in Australia—a country isolated from many global centres and markets. At the same time, local struggles in this res…
Robe River Revisited: Geohistory and Industrial Relations
In August 1986, the new owners of the Robe River mining company locked out the workforce to begin one of the most high-profile industrial disputes of the 1980s. For all the immediate controversy the conflict generated, Robe River had faded from public attention by the middle of 1987, the unions apparently brought to heel and managerial control re-asserted. The dispute continued, however, for some years in Robe’s worksites and the Pilbara’s towns,…
Labor geography and labor history: Insights and outcomes from a decade of cross-disciplinary dialogue
An enhanced dialogue between history and geography concerning the study of labor relations offers prospects for deeper insights and richer explanatory capacity in academic scholarship. Similar interdisciplinary activity linking labor geography and studies of labor relations has been underway for some time. In this paper, we identify problems that arise when geography remains implicit in the study of labor history. Building on work already conduct…
Less than zero’: Union recognition and bargaining rights in Australia 1996–2007
Strictly speaking, there has never been union recognition in Australia. Instead unions have for most of their history relied upon a de facto form of recognition granted to them by the system of compulsory conciliation and arbitration. When this system was forged, Australia was widely regarded as a progressive ‘social laboratory’. Amendments to this system in 1996 and then its effective eradication in 2005 by neo-liberal national governments saw u…
Jim Hagan and Apprentice Historians
The key things that were learnt from Jim Hagan by apprentice historians about being a historian are discussed. Details of what all was done by the apprentice historians along with Jim Hagan is highlighted
Anti-unionism, Employer Strategy, and the Australian State, 1996–2005
One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. Wh…
Trade Union Structure and Politics in Australia and New Zealand
This thematic and comparative analysis of more than 150 years of unionism in Australasia explores the similarities and differences in the economic and political contexts in which trade unions have sought to define themselves and represent their members. The state and employers have followed a similar path in Australia and New Zealand for much of that time, and in both cases that journey has been to the detriment of unions for the last generation.…
Books
Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality. By John Chesterman. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2005. Pp. 357. $22.95 paper. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity. By Jill Julius Matthews. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. Pp. 342. $32.95 paper. Conciliation, Compulsion, Conversion: British Attitudes to Indigenous Peoples 1763–1814. By Merete Falck Borch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Pp. 320. US$43 pap…
Beyond Industrial Relations: WorkChoices and the Reshaping of Labour, Class and the Commonwealth
The meaning of WorkChoices for labour, for organised labour, is problematical indeed given such a massive re-alignment of class and state power and ideology. The aims of the new Act are may require a concomitant re-ordering of the union movement and may prove to be the greatest re-working of employment regulation Australia has seen
Scaling labour: Australian unions and global mining
In recent years the ore-rich region known as the Pilbara, in north-western Australia, has been the site of intense struggles over the regulation of labour.Two of the world's biggest resource companies have been pitted against an oftendivided local labour force, but they have not had things all their own way. Drawing on the work of a number of geographers, the article shows how these disputes can be understood more richly than simply as another bo…
The All-Time Australian 200 Rich List
Hard Ground: Unions in the Pilbara
Peak Unions in Australia: Origin, Power, Purpose, Agency
Books
Domestic Service in Australia. By B.W. Higman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 358. $49.95 cloth. Our Bodies, Our Babies: The Forgotten Women's Movement. By Kerreen M. Reiger. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Pp. 335. $38.95 paper. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. By Warwick Anderson. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 352. $34.95 paper. Invisible…
Re-placing the Pilbara's mining unions
This paper examines the attempt by mining management in Western Australia's Pilbara to replace mining unions—quite literally—by removing them from the processes of representation and bargaining. It analyses the way in which those unions have tried to re-place themselves, in the senses of transforming themselves in those spaces in which they were already operating and reviving themselves where they were not. Where unionists have succeeded in these…
Geographies of the labour process: Automation and the Spatiality of Mining
Productive ways of thinking about work have emerged from the recent engagement between scholars in employment relations and human geography without any sustained attention to the spatiality of the labour process itself. Arguing that where work literally 'takes place' is important, this article explores the spatial nature of the labour process through an examination of automation in one of the world's largest transnational mining companies, Rio Ti…
Temporality and the evolution of GPNs: Remaking BHP’s Pilbara iron ore network
Global production networks (GPNs) exist across time as well as space, an idea that is underplayed within GPN theory. To consider how time influences the remaking of the network and region, the paper explores the temporal development of one iron ore GPN in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Its emphasis is on temporality and, drawing upon evolutionary economic geography (EEG), the paper shows that GPNs are created over and with time. This ma…
Scaling labour: Australian unions and global mining
In recent years the ore-rich region known as the Pilbara, in north-western Australia, has been the site of intense struggles over the regulation of labour.Two of the world's biggest resource companies have been pitted against an oftendivided local labour force, but they have not had things all their own way. Drawing on the work of a number of geographers, the article shows how these disputes can be understood more richly than simply as another bo…
Resource Peripheries and Neoliberalism: The Pilbara and the remaking of industrial relations in Australia
How mining companies overcome the problems faced by the fixity of resources and how they might come to exercise influence in societies which appear to be mostly post-industrial are complex questions of political geography. This is not least the case for a region such as the Pilbara—an iron ore site isolated from metropolitan centres—in Australia—a country isolated from many global centres and markets. At the same time, local struggles in this res…
Re-placing the Pilbara's mining unions
This paper examines the attempt by mining management in Western Australia's Pilbara to replace mining unions—quite literally—by removing them from the processes of representation and bargaining. It analyses the way in which those unions have tried to re-place themselves, in the senses of transforming themselves in those spaces in which they were already operating and reviving themselves where they were not. Where unionists have succeeded in these…
The global commodities boom and the reshaping of regional economies: The Australian experience
Since the publication of Fagan and Webber’s Global Restructuring in 1994, Australia has experienced one of the most significant commodities-led economic booms in its history. Increasing global demand for iron ore, natural gas, coal and a host of other resources from the early 2000s contributed to a period of sustained economic growth, low unemployment and rising per capita incomes. While popular and political discourses have tended to focus on th…
Labor geography and labor history: Insights and outcomes from a decade of cross-disciplinary dialogue
An enhanced dialogue between history and geography concerning the study of labor relations offers prospects for deeper insights and richer explanatory capacity in academic scholarship. Similar interdisciplinary activity linking labor geography and studies of labor relations has been underway for some time. In this paper, we identify problems that arise when geography remains implicit in the study of labor history. Building on work already conduct…
Anti-unionism, Employer Strategy, and the Australian State, 1996–2005
One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. Wh…
Robe River Revisited: Geohistory and Industrial Relations
In August 1986, the new owners of the Robe River mining company locked out the workforce to begin one of the most high-profile industrial disputes of the 1980s. For all the immediate controversy the conflict generated, Robe River had faded from public attention by the middle of 1987, the unions apparently brought to heel and managerial control re-asserted. The dispute continued, however, for some years in Robe’s worksites and the Pilbara’s towns,…
Trade Union Structure and Politics in Australia and New Zealand
This thematic and comparative analysis of more than 150 years of unionism in Australasia explores the similarities and differences in the economic and political contexts in which trade unions have sought to define themselves and represent their members. The state and employers have followed a similar path in Australia and New Zealand for much of that time, and in both cases that journey has been to the detriment of unions for the last generation.…
Making the 'Gibraltar of Unionism: Union Organising and Peak Union Agency in Broken Hill, 1886-1930
Broken Hill's reputation as a bastion of union organising and influence warrants close reconsideration since even here the pattern of union growth and development was anything but unilinear. During its first half century, the town experienced four distinct cycles of union growth, decline and renewal. Each phase of growth saw the local unions learn from organising experience, but each also involved new contexts, constraints and opportunities along…
Making a 'Union Town: Class, Gender and Consumption in Inter-War Broken Hill
Broken Hill is one of the few localities in Australia in which a local working class managed to establish 'hegemony' over the local social and political structure. While many of the ideas, institutions and practices which were to underwrite working-class control were evident in earlier years, it was only in the inter-war period that this control was effectively asserted and consolidated; it was only then that Broken Hill became truly a 'union tow…
An improbable driver of “just transitions”? Union power in the coal heartland of Western Australia‘s energy shift
Much scholarship in the nascent field of climate crisis and labour assumes that trade unions can readily become agents of “just transition” to post‐carbon energy systems but simply lack a willingness to do so. We investigate this problem more deeply by asking: under what precise circumstances might unions drive “just transitions”? Drawing upon a case study of one union's effort to build a just transition in the energy generation sector of one fos…
Less than zero’: Union recognition and bargaining rights in Australia 1996–2007
Strictly speaking, there has never been union recognition in Australia. Instead unions have for most of their history relied upon a de facto form of recognition granted to them by the system of compulsory conciliation and arbitration. When this system was forged, Australia was widely regarded as a progressive ‘social laboratory’. Amendments to this system in 1996 and then its effective eradication in 2005 by neo-liberal national governments saw u…
Beyond Industrial Relations: WorkChoices and the Reshaping of Labour, Class and the Commonwealth
The meaning of WorkChoices for labour, for organised labour, is problematical indeed given such a massive re-alignment of class and state power and ideology. The aims of the new Act are may require a concomitant re-ordering of the union movement and may prove to be the greatest re-working of employment regulation Australia has seen
The Origins of the Labor Party in the Southern Wheatbelt of New South Wales, 1891-1913
In Women's Hands? A History of Clothing Trades Unionism in Australia
Working Lives: A History of the Australian Railways Union (NSW Branch)
Ideology and Union Purpose: The Federated Clerks' Union in New South Wales, 1946–58
The Fremantle Labour History Walk
For those willing and able to see out the Perth Conference, the local Branch organised a final rite, the 'Fremantle Labour History Walk', which actually consisted of a bus tour, museum visit and the guided walk in Fremantle itself. We began, mercifully perhaps, by simply being seated as the bus carried us around the city. A very special mention must be made of Stuart Reid's commentary which provided unique insights for the visitors. We signalled …
Normal: Women's Rights and Industrial Relations Under the Postwar Compact in Australia
In summing up and commenting upon a series of articles which examined the “postwar social contract” in International Labor and Working-Class History, Charles S. Maier observed that one theme which the authors raised but did “not systematically scrutinize [was] the role of gender differences” in the making of that contract.Charles S. Maier, “The Postwar Social Contract: Comment,” International Labor and Working-Class History 50 (1996):150. This ar…
Making a 'Union Town: Class, Gender and Consumption in Inter-War Broken Hill
Broken Hill is one of the few localities in Australia in which a local working class managed to establish 'hegemony' over the local social and political structure. While many of the ideas, institutions and practices which were to underwrite working-class control were evident in earlier years, it was only in the inter-war period that this control was effectively asserted and consolidated; it was only then that Broken Hill became truly a 'union tow…
Retooling the Class Factory: Response 1 Making Sense of Institutions? Class, Space and Labour History
The opening observations in Elizabeth Faue's challenging and often moving paper paint a picture familiar to writers and readers of Australian labour history. What, she asks, do we 'make of the road ahead'? In this landscape, be it imagined in Australia or the United States, the road itself is often unclear. To some observers it will seem that there are too many destinations; to others that there are none. My brief in this symposium was to respond…
Refashioning the Rag Trade: Internationalising Australia's Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Industries
Making the 'Gibraltar of Unionism: Union Organising and Peak Union Agency in Broken Hill, 1886-1930
Broken Hill's reputation as a bastion of union organising and influence warrants close reconsideration since even here the pattern of union growth and development was anything but unilinear. During its first half century, the town experienced four distinct cycles of union growth, decline and renewal. Each phase of growth saw the local unions learn from organising experience, but each also involved new contexts, constraints and opportunities along…
Books
Domestic Service in Australia. By B.W. Higman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 358. $49.95 cloth. Our Bodies, Our Babies: The Forgotten Women's Movement. By Kerreen M. Reiger. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Pp. 335. $38.95 paper. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia. By Warwick Anderson. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 352. $34.95 paper. Invisible…
Re-placing the Pilbara's mining unions
This paper examines the attempt by mining management in Western Australia's Pilbara to replace mining unions—quite literally—by removing them from the processes of representation and bargaining. It analyses the way in which those unions have tried to re-place themselves, in the senses of transforming themselves in those spaces in which they were already operating and reviving themselves where they were not. Where unionists have succeeded in these…
The All-Time Australian 200 Rich List
Hard Ground: Unions in the Pilbara
Peak Unions in Australia: Origin, Power, Purpose, Agency
Books
Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality. By John Chesterman. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2005. Pp. 357. $22.95 paper. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity. By Jill Julius Matthews. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. Pp. 342. $32.95 paper. Conciliation, Compulsion, Conversion: British Attitudes to Indigenous Peoples 1763–1814. By Merete Falck Borch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Pp. 320. US$43 pap…
Beyond Industrial Relations: WorkChoices and the Reshaping of Labour, Class and the Commonwealth
The meaning of WorkChoices for labour, for organised labour, is problematical indeed given such a massive re-alignment of class and state power and ideology. The aims of the new Act are may require a concomitant re-ordering of the union movement and may prove to be the greatest re-working of employment regulation Australia has seen
Scaling labour: Australian unions and global mining
In recent years the ore-rich region known as the Pilbara, in north-western Australia, has been the site of intense struggles over the regulation of labour.Two of the world's biggest resource companies have been pitted against an oftendivided local labour force, but they have not had things all their own way. Drawing on the work of a number of geographers, the article shows how these disputes can be understood more richly than simply as another bo…
Trade Union Structure and Politics in Australia and New Zealand
This thematic and comparative analysis of more than 150 years of unionism in Australasia explores the similarities and differences in the economic and political contexts in which trade unions have sought to define themselves and represent their members. The state and employers have followed a similar path in Australia and New Zealand for much of that time, and in both cases that journey has been to the detriment of unions for the last generation.…
Anti-unionism, Employer Strategy, and the Australian State, 1996–2005
One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. Wh…
Jim Hagan and Apprentice Historians
The key things that were learnt from Jim Hagan by apprentice historians about being a historian are discussed. Details of what all was done by the apprentice historians along with Jim Hagan is highlighted
Less than zero’: Union recognition and bargaining rights in Australia 1996–2007
Strictly speaking, there has never been union recognition in Australia. Instead unions have for most of their history relied upon a de facto form of recognition granted to them by the system of compulsory conciliation and arbitration. When this system was forged, Australia was widely regarded as a progressive ‘social laboratory’. Amendments to this system in 1996 and then its effective eradication in 2005 by neo-liberal national governments saw u…
Labor geography and labor history: Insights and outcomes from a decade of cross-disciplinary dialogue
An enhanced dialogue between history and geography concerning the study of labor relations offers prospects for deeper insights and richer explanatory capacity in academic scholarship. Similar interdisciplinary activity linking labor geography and studies of labor relations has been underway for some time. In this paper, we identify problems that arise when geography remains implicit in the study of labor history. Building on work already conduct…
Resource Peripheries and Neoliberalism: The Pilbara and the remaking of industrial relations in Australia
How mining companies overcome the problems faced by the fixity of resources and how they might come to exercise influence in societies which appear to be mostly post-industrial are complex questions of political geography. This is not least the case for a region such as the Pilbara—an iron ore site isolated from metropolitan centres—in Australia—a country isolated from many global centres and markets. At the same time, local struggles in this res…
Robe River Revisited: Geohistory and Industrial Relations
In August 1986, the new owners of the Robe River mining company locked out the workforce to begin one of the most high-profile industrial disputes of the 1980s. For all the immediate controversy the conflict generated, Robe River had faded from public attention by the middle of 1987, the unions apparently brought to heel and managerial control re-asserted. The dispute continued, however, for some years in Robe’s worksites and the Pilbara’s towns,…
Political science (30 works) · Economics (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (18 works) · History (14 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Australian History and Society (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Economic history (10 works)