Dialectics of Scale: Global Capital and Local Unions in Australia’s Iron Ore Industry

For over five years, Western Australia’s Pilbara iron ore mining region has been the site of a series of intense struggles over worker representation. Thus far, unions have avoided a repeat of defeats suffered in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, new forms of local interaction have emerged alongside new kinds of union structures. To explain these developments, this article goes beyond mainstream industrial relations scholarship and draws from the work of human geographers. By focusing on the making of space, it is possible to make clear the meanings of these particular intersections of the local, State, national and global scales. In so doing, three dialectical tensions are addressed: those within the ‘local-global’ structuring of this productive space; those within the interplay of national and local union settings; and also between these processes. Neither scale nor space itself is hierarchical. No one scale - local or global - can be accorded priority. Nor can any one space - the workplace or the town - be thought of without the other.