The Pilbara: From the Deserts Profits Come

When the biggest boom in mining history came along, it unfolded across a Pilbara landscape very different from a generation earlier. Starting in the 1980s, the companies fought back, defeating the unions and remaking the Pilbara. The managers were now the prophets, with new ways of organising work and managing workers. With millions of tons of iron ore shipped to China, the Pilbara is a media staple, through stories of mining companies' profits, the earnings of fly-in-fly-out workers, and the wealth of new entrepreneurs. And it appeared that the Pilbara might be the site of a novel kind of unionism, with workers winning not only high wages but control of the places where they worked and the towns where they lived. In those days, the Pilbara excited both hope and dread about its workers and their power. The Pilbara, a large, thinly populated region in the north of Western Australia, has become central to the Australian economy and imagination. The boomtime stories do not reveal much