ABSTRACT
The relationship between Australia and Asia has changed from isolation and exclusion on Australia’s part in the nineteenth century to growing economic interdependence since the second half of the twentieth. Australian unions remain different from the (heterogeneous) forms across Asia, although, like those unions, the relationship with national states has been critical in their development. For the last forty years, most Australian unions have been contending with a crisis of diminished membership and power. In that time, the union movement has been transformed through mergers and has undertaken several strategic initiatives to reverse decline. Its membership base has changed, becoming feminised and public-sector based. Overall, crisis endures in numerical terms: the union movement once organised over 60% of the workforce but now claims less than 15%. Yet unions retain a measure of legitimacy and there are signs of innovation in response to economic and workplace change.
