Precarious Employment and Individual Contracts in an Australian Mining Company

Abstract

Strong union organisation and activity has been a hallmark of labour relations in the metalliferous mining industry. However, since the 1980s, a number of mining companies such as CRA/Rio Tinto have sought to restructure their labour relations along ‘HRM’ or ‘trust based’ managerial strategies that have as an objective the removal of unionism. The deconstruction of collective labour relations and the reformulation of an employee relations system through the introduction of party-to-party contractual relations through individual contracts is seen by some managers as a key in linking HRM/IR strategy to broader profit strategies. At the core of this reframing of labour relations is the linkage between precarious employment practices and cost minimisation strategies achieved by use of contracts. Contracts allow unilateral managerial decisions about work to go unchallenged and allow labour to become a commodity in a broader ‘asset management’ approach to the bottom line. This paper is a case study of CRA/Rio Tinto, which successfully introduced unitarist managerial strategies in Australia and New Zealand with the objective of removing third parties from the employment relationship.