Category Archives: Shields, John

2011 ASSLH conference – Activists in Aggregate: Collective Biography, Labour History, and the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, 1788-­1975

 

Activists in Aggregate: Collective Biography, Labour History, and the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, 1788-­1975

Andrew Moore, Yasmin Rittau, John Shields

Abstract

Despite the solid – if occasionally polemical – record of research and publication in the biographical genre by Australian labour historians over the past sixty years, there are hundreds if not thousands of labour activists whose lives have remained un- or under-documented; lost, for all intents and purposes, to both the established scholar and the enthusiastic student. The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement 1788-1975 represents an attempt to address these lacunae by publishing brief (300-700 word) biographical entries on some 2,000 activists about whom we have been able to discover at least a fragment of information and whom we consider to have made a significant but hitherto un- or under-recorded contribution to the movement’s history at the national, State, regional and/or local scale at some point down to the mid-1970s.   Continue reading

2001 ASSLH conference – The life and times of the Barrier Industrial Council: A study in local peak union origins, purpose, power and decline

Bradon Ellem & John Shields
Work & Organisational Studies, School of Business, University of Sydney

Abstract

The Barrier Industrial Council (BIC) is one of the best known examples of a powerful union peak body in Australia. Upon its establishment in the early 1920s, it oversaw a particular form of working class mobilisation and, for many years, exercised something like a hegemony both for and over its affiliates. Continue reading

2001 ASSLH conference – Theorising peak union formation, purpose and power: A discussion paper

Bradon Ellem & John Shields
Work & Organisational Studies, School of Business, University of Sydney

Abstract

Peak unions occupy a constantly moving point of intersection between two competing sets of forces: those of organisational unity and class solidarity and the forces of fragmentation and sectionalism. We suggest that for any group of unions to form a peak body a state of internal equilibrium of power balance must exist between the unions concerned. Continue reading