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- Title
A "COSY RELATIONSHIP" IF YOU HAD IT: QUEENSLAND LABOR'S ARBITRATION SYSTEM AND UNION ORGANISING STRATEGIES IN ROCKHAMPTON, 1916-57.
- Authors
Webster, Barbara
- Abstract
Critics of the progressive decline in membership in Australian unions attribute the predicament to a failure to develop independent organizing strategies during decades of passive overreliance on preference clauses under a compulsory industrial arbitration system. To test the historical validity of these accusations, this article examines six major unions in Rockhampton during forty years under a state labor arbitration system. Using a broad definition of organizing - recruitment of members, fostering membership participation, and creating union awareness and presence in the workplace - this article reveals two fallacies about union "dependence." First, not all unions relied on arbitration for organizing: denied the privilege of preference or by choice, some adopted mobilizational strategies. Second, rather than being passively dependent on preference clauses, arbitrationist unions actively exploited the system. Through an intimate relationship between compliant unions and Queensland labor's apparatus, arbitration facilitated organizing for and empowered those unions.
- Publication
Labour History, 2002, Issue 83, p89
- ISSN
0023-6942
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/27516884