Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/47360

Title

A case of mild anarchy? Job committees in the Broken Hill mines, c1930 to c1954

Author(s)

Kimber, Julie

Abstract

Job Committees, like shop committees in other industries, emerged in Broken Hill during the height of the Great Depression, thrived in the decade 1935-45, and all but vanished during the Cold War. The committees were a focal point for struggle and contestation between the various competing interest groups and ideologies vying for ascendancy in the local miners' union, the Workers Industrial Union of Australia. This study of job committees seeks to show that the dynamics of trade union behaviour are forged by a series of complex and contradictory human relationships. The processes associated with the success and eventual isolation of the job committees should not be seen as a failed attempt by the rank and file to democratise a bureaucratic leadership. Rather, they should be seen as an ongoing dialogue between various interest groups within the union whose orientations, expectations and priorities changed with the altered context of wage and employment levels, ideology, occupation, and location within the union hierarchy. In this sense job committees and their activist participants performed an intermediary role between leadership and membership.

Publication type

Journal article

Source

Labour History, No. 80 (May 2001), pp. 41-64

Publication year

2001

FOR Code(s)

160699 Political Science not elsewhere classified;  2103 Historical Studies

Keyword(s)

20th century history;  Activism;  Australia;  Broken Hill;  Community involvement;  Democracy;  Great Depression;  History;  Human relations;  Job committees;  Labour history;  New South Wales;  Mines;  Political activists;  Trade unions

Publisher

Australian Society for the Study of Labour History

ISSN

0023-6942

Publisher URL

http://asslh.org.au/journal/content/80.htm

Peer reviewed