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Scaling labour

Australian unions and global mining

The University of Sydney

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 bout of union recognition disputes. If physical geography – rich ore bodies and isolation from metropolitan centres – or the contest between global capital and local labour are important, they are only the starting points for a textured,‘spatialized’ understanding of capital-labour relationships.The article argues that space is made and argued over in many ways and that there are many scales in addition to the local and the global at which conflicts are constructed and resolved.

Key Words: globalization • Pilbara • place • scale • union renewal

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