Australia's oldest national magazine, The Bulletin, in its first issue of 1988 focussed a double page spread on Australia's oldest continuously operating mining town - Broken Hill. It is a place, as Bulletin writer Tony Abbott puts it, 'where rock-rough miners clashed with flinty management in a struggle as uncompromising and remorseless as the surrounding desert.'
Despite its record of industrial trouble, Broken Hill is trying 'consultation, not confrontation', headlined The Bulletin.
'What has brought the lion to lie down with the lamb?' asks Abbott. Partly survival, he answers. Last year its rich silver, lead and zinc mines were losing two million dollars a week. A thousand jobs and hard-won work practices dating back 70 years had to go before the mines were once again profitable.
But there does, too, seem to be 'a genuine change of heart'. The Bulletin quotes Mayor Peter Black ('a left-wing Labour Party heavy') who attributes much of the change to a series of public meetings bringing together key union, management and civic officials, including many of the town's 'movers and shakers'.
The most recent of these was a one-day seminar on 'Industrial attitudes and participation', a highlight of which was a talk by Ron Roberts, a union leader from Port Pirie, 250 kilometres down the track, where Broken Hill's metal is refined and shipped out. Roberts said there had been 'a lot of bastardry' in Port Pirie's industrial relations, and that 'I arranged a fair bit of it'. A visit last year from Gwilym Jenkins, a trade unionist from the Llanwern British Steel plant in Wales had helped turn Roberts' efforts towards creating industrial participation.
Roberts, with one of his managers, studied participation at a course conducted by Melbourne industrial relations expert Tony Briscomb. Roberts and Briscomb spoke together in Broken Hill of the new working relationships they were creating as a result. Though Mayor Black has chaired these meetings, says The Bulletin, 'most of the organizing momentum has come from a low-profile lobby group cum Christian fellowship known as Moral Re-Armament.'
Mayor Black says of MRA, 'They are great net-workers, who can arrange the sort of expertise and encouragement we need to make industrial democracy a reality in Broken Hill.'
'Perhaps,' concludes writer Abbott, 'the men of Broken Hill have come to share MRA's view that only at the deeper level of the human spirit is lasting change affected.'
English
