For nearly 12 years from 1996, the Australian government pursued a neoliberal industrial relations agenda, seeking to break with structures based on collective bargaining and trade unions. In the name of choice and deregulation, this agenda involved unique levels of state intervention and prescription - and anti-unionism. In the last round of legislative change, the 2005 laws badged as Work Choices, the government overreached itself and in 2007 was defeated in a general election. As in the UK after Thatcher, the extent to which collective bargaining can be restored and trade unions regain a voice is problematical. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008.

Why are some unions unable to rebuild membership and bargaining coverage despite significant changes in strategy? We examine the trajectory of a key union in a vital sector, the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, calling into question aspects of the union renewal literature. Much scholarship sees members' associational power as a power resource that can cover the loss of other power resources, but we show that this assumption does not necessarily hold. To explain why members are not necessarily a resource in renewal, we argue that studies of renewal must more fully consider the interplay between different forms of power resources -institutional, structural and societaland locate union strategies within that dynamic. Critically, this interplay also shapes members' perceptions of their power, which may further limit a union's options as it responds to external threats.

One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. While some tactics have emerged organically through new management practices, the reconfiguration of employer strategies has been primarily state-led; legislative and non-legislative interventions have created opportunities, incentives and pressures for firms to adopt anti-union strategies.

T his paper focuses on union renewal and the nature and prospects of 'community unionism' as unions struggle to define and control the spaces in which workers and their families labour and live. It assesses the processes of union renewal in the iron ore industry in Western Australia's north-west, where the Pilbara Mineworkers Union, a new organisation, has appeared. This union aims to organise workers nominally covered by four mining unions and appears to be an emergent 'community union', in a social and spatial setting where work and community issues overlap. The new organisation has followed on from other Pilbara struggles in which the organising strategy of the Australian Council of Trade Unions has been seized upon with particular enthusiasm, meshing with local traditions and the needs of the present. These developments cannot be fully understood without thinking about the geographies of work, community and regulation which have been interconstitutive with unionism's Pilbara trajectory. Analysing this case begins to provide a specific illustration of how union structures and strategies actually do change, as opposed to merely recapitulating arguments about how unions should change.