Justice, Rationalism and Factory Closures in Australia

Abstract

Closures are often represented in public discourse as events that are determined by forces beyond the capacities of human agency, while much of the scholarly literature on closures concentrates not on the question of political contestation and representation but instead examines the immediate causes and the labour market consequences of closure. Moreover, neo-liberal political interventions situate factory closures as a further opportunity to advocate unhindered managerial prerogative and to attack the presence and role of trade unions. These perspectives, either intentionally or inadvertently, tend to reinforce a sense of fatalism that limits resistance and agency, a fatalism that was evident in ethnographic research on worker response to the closure of a white goods factory in Australia. This paper attempts to explore an alternative theoretical approach, which politicises closures through grounding these events in the dynamic of capital accumulation characterised by the acceleration of mergers and acquisitions on a global scale.