Origins of Worker Mobilisation

Michael Quinlan is professor of industrial relations in the School of Management at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is also an adjunct professor in the School of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania and a visiting professor at the Business School, Middlesex University in London. Born in Sydney he divides his time between this city and Launceston, Tasmania where much of this book was written.

• 1. Reconsidering the Collective Impulse and the Colonial Context 2. Law, the Courts and Inequality at Work 3. Overview of Worker Organisation, 1788-1850 4. Analysing the Components of Organisation 5. Organisation in Transport and Maritime Activities 6. Organisation in the Rural and Extractives Sectors 7. Organisation in Construction and Building Materials 8. Organisation in Manufacturing and Related Trades 9. Organisation in Government and Community Services 10. Organisation in Commercial, Personal Services and Retailing 11. Peak and Political Organisation 12. Re-evaluating Worker Mobilisation

"This is a truly path-breaking study of the collective impulse among workers, with important pointers for the global historiography of labour."Terry Irving, University of Wollongong, Australia"Quinlan sees much in common with today’s world of work and the period he examines. He writes with the radical certainty that those who are oppressed can only redress their grievances by making those who rule uneasy, with even the smallest actions contributing to this unease. All of which, collectively and eventually, makes a difference. Overall, Quinlan’s book is testament to the possibilities and persistence of dissent and rebellion despite draconian and oppressive hegemonies that would have it otherwise – yesterday, today, and tomorrow."Rowan Cahill, Labour History MelbourneIn its own terms, Quinlan’s book is a major achievement, not least because it has thecapacity to propel the history of class structures here and overseas in new directions.Moreover, it is timely, as he points out, to consider this history in a period when precariouslabour and informal methods of struggle return, as the global working class’ reality,in the neo-liberal era.Terry Irving, University of Wollongong, Australia"Its major contribution will remain the depth of its inquiry into a period when unfree and free labour underpinned economic growth, in often extremely harsh working conditions, but tempered by the challenges that workers, individually and collectively, threw up to them"Mark Finnane Griffith UniversityThis is a remarkable, and remarkably useful, book. It is the outcome of an exhaustive project – over 30 years of excavating the history of workers’ struggles, exactly the kind of work that the neoliberal university has no time for. From those decades of systematic and comprehensive trawling through the colonial press and an enormous variety of official and personal records, Michael Quinlan has created an updateable data base (the empirical material on which the book is based) from which the earliest history of class struggle in this country can be fully appreciated.Diane Fieldes, Marxist Left Review"This is perhaps the most significant book published for some time on Australian labour history...This is the work of a scholarly career...Michael Quinlan’s documentation of labour resistance is formidable. As a historical work it will give some aid and comfort to those in the labour movement who believe that agitation does not require continuing organization in the form of unions."John Michael O’Brien, University of Sydney"[This work] by Quinlan in many respects constitutes an outstanding resource for coming to grips with the detail of the origins and development of Australian labour law specifically."John Howe, University of Melbourne and Richard Mitchell, Monash University