2012
ISBN: 978-0-6465769-9-2
eBook (PDF download): $9.95
Paperback currently sold out.
How have employers in Australia’s meat-processing industry contributed to shaping their industry’s often turbulent industrial relations?
This book explores the choices employers have made and the reasons behind those choices in the context of the national economy, global meat trade and periodic severe booms and busts. The strong regional focus is due to meat-processing facilities spread far and wide often in remote locations. In particular, the book focuses on companies with plants location in regional centres of Portland in Victoria, and Townsville, Rockhampton and Murgon in Queensland.
Testimonials
“This study is well conceived and executed and makes an original and valuable contribution to the historical literature on Australian industrial relations. The narrative weaves together secondary, primary documents and oral sources in a manner that is generally effective and seamless. As such, in the best traditions of industrial relations scholarship, the study demonstrates very clearly the interconnectedness of the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’; the global and the local; the economic and the industrial.
The study’s particular novelty, though, lies in its very welcome focus on describing and explaining the role of employers and their organisations in the transformation of industrial relations in Australia. The detailed focus on developments in Queensland and Victoria since the 1970s is immensely illuminating of the strategic challenges, twists and turns that characterise employer attempts to reclaim lost ground from the industry union.
In essence, the study is both ‘gap-filling’ and corrective. As the authors note, Australian labour and industrial relations historians have tended to underplay the importance of employer agency in long-term industrial relations change and this study is a welcome addition to the relatively small body of high-quality empirical scholarship that has endeavoured to redress this institutional bias in the Australian literature.”
Professor John Shields
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
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