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How have scholars tried to explain marked union membership decline in the Global North, and how have they assessed consequent "union renewal" strategies? In this journal in 2020, Bowden argued that most accounts of unionism failed to explain decline, relied too much on state policy as causation and were too optimistic about those renewal strategies. One way to respond to these important general claims is to assess, as this article does, a striking and important local instance of decline and unsuccessful strategy – Pilbara unionism, once an archetype of mining workers' power – and to do so over the entire history of an industry. In explaining the fall of the Pilbara mining unions, which for 20 years until 1986 had seemed so strong, "power resources" and geography itself were remade by capital in ways that were entwined with, but did not always rely on, state action. This argument recasts debate about decline in two ways: by drawing on a longer timeframe than is common in industrial relations scholarship and by adopting a more theoretically explicit, and inter-disciplinary, framing than is usual in the labour historiography addressing these issues. The explanation offered here shows how, after just 20 years of mining, union power in the Pilbara unravelled. Employer strategy, the precise nature and timing of state intervention, and the geographically textured nature of employer and union power explain the rise and fall of these unions.

Productive ways of thinking about work have emerged from the recent engagement between scholars in employment relations and human geography without any sustained attention to the spatiality of the labour process itself. Arguing that where work literally 'takes place' is important, this article explores the spatial nature of the labour process through an examination of automation in one of the world's largest transnational mining companies, Rio Tinto. To read the labour process in spatial terms, work must be understood in the context of global production networks, the peculiarities of national 'space economies' and arguments about the claimed 'hyper-mobility' of globalized capital as well as labour geography itself. In this case, automation and a reworking of the geography of the labour process in an industry often seen as constrained by physical geography have implications for assessing labour's agency and power amid more general changes to the spatiality of work.

In 2010, under pressure from newly unionised rail workers, the multinational mining company Rio Tinto agreed to bargain collectively with a union for the first time in its Australian iron ore operations since 1993. This re-unionisation of part of Rio Tinto was, for unionists, an impressive feat but, in itself, the campaign was familiar enough. What makes this empirically significant is the 'titanic' nature of the struggle in this vital sector. Its wider significance lies in a contribution to debate about 'successful' campaigns and in highlighting the importance of both national regulation and local context to these outcomes. More broadly still, this successful campaign poses questions about how we relate such episodes to ongoing failures elsewhere.

In recent years the ore-rich region known as the Pilbara, in north-western Australia, has been the site of intense struggles over the regulation of labour.Two of the world's biggest resource companies have been pitted against an oftendivided local labour force, but they have not had things all their own way. Drawing on the work of a number of geographers, the article shows how these disputes can be understood more richly than simply as another bout of union recognition disputes. If physical geography – rich ore bodies and isolation from metropolitan centres – or the contest between global capital and local labour are important, they are only the starting points for a textured,'spatialized' understanding of capital-labour relationships.The article argues that space is made and argued over in many ways and that there are many scales in addition to the local and the global at which conflicts are constructed and resolved.

For over five years, Western Australia's Pilbara iron ore mining region has been the site of a series of intense struggles over worker representation. Thus far, unions have avoided a repeat of defeats suffered in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, new forms of local interaction have emerged alongside new kinds of union structures. To explain these developments, this article goes beyond mainstream industrial relations scholarship and draws from the work of human geographers. By focusing on the making of space, it is possible to make clear the meanings of these particular intersections of the local, State, national and global scales. In so doing, three dialectical tensions are addressed: those within the 'local-global' structuring of this productive space; those within the interplay of national and local union settings; and also between these processes. Neither scale nor space itself is hierarchical. No one scale - local or global - can be accorded priority. Nor can any one space - the workplace or the town - be thought of without the other.