Abstract
This article evaluates Peko-Wallsend's controversial intervention into the management of Robe River, and its confrontationist policies with respect to Robe's workforce, its own on-site staff, unions and the WA Industrial Relations Commission.
Peko's tactics and strategies — or lack of them — are assessed by comparing them with the action of Hamersley Iron against restrictive practices and the power of the local unions — taken more than five years before the Robe affair. Hamersley's strategies had highly successful outcomes. Peko's did not.
Why? Peko did not take into account the personnel and human resources consequences of its highly legalistic industrial relations tactics and it failed to assess accurately its own power base to put effective strategies into place.
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