Industrial Relations in the Latrobe Valley: Myths and Realities

Abstract

In this paper we examine attitudes towards work, employment and industrial relations in the Latrobe Valley region of South East Victoria, Australia. The Latrobe Valley is an old industrial area of Victoria, 150 kilometres south east of Melbourne, based on power generation connected to open cast brown coal mining. The formerly stated-owned power generator (SECV) was broken up and privatised in the 1990s with devastating employment and social impacts on the locality. Before privatisation, the area in general, and SECV in particular, had a reputation for militant union organisation, leading to the joke that SECV stood for Slow Easy and Comfortable. Despite a radical restructuring of work and employment in the region, and a flurry of academic studies which suggested that the old image of the region as a hotbed of militancy was unwarranted, it is believed in some quarters that the old image of the region deters inward investment on the one hand and local entrepreneurial activity on the other. This paper draws on two pieces of work; firstly an ongoing study of the impact of locality on workplace organisations (see Rainnie & Paulet 2005), and secondly a project on industrial relations in the region (see Rainnie et al. 2004). The project, commissioned by a Victorian State Government Taskforce on the region, was designed to investigate what employers, trade union representatives and most importantly, inhabitants of the Latrobe Valley thought about the image and reality of work, employment and industrial relations in their region. This was in the context of an attempt (the most recent of many) to construct a new non-conflictual image of the Valley that would aid restructuring. Drawing on the work of people such as Bradon Ellem, Ray Hudson and Doreen Massey, we argue instead that attitudes to work, employment and locality revealed in the study point to a more complex and conflictual construction of place. While not denying the possibility of short term, local boosterist, place marketing strategies that promote a collaborative image of place, uniting unions, local employers and government institutions, we point to conditions which also allow for the (re)emergence of a more conflictual future. Unions have drawn on the history and conception of the locality to organise in new and often hostile environments.