Next Public Meeting:

Industrial Democracy in the Dunstan Decade

A Labour History Society (South Australia) meeting, marking 100 years since the birth of Don Dunstan.

In the early 1970s, South Australia became the first state to formally embrace industrial democracy, as Premier Don Dunstan's reforming Labor government established a dedicated unit within the public service to pursue it. The Unit for Industrial Democracy represented part of a broader wave of interest in workers’ participation and control sweeping the Western world and borne from the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Unit set out to introduce worker participation and joint decision-making across both the public and private sectors, but this experiment was contested from the start: was it a genuine vehicle for union power, or a means of co-opting it? Was it a spur to productivity and efficiency, or an unworkable encroachment on managerial prerogative? Employer hostility hardened as the economy soured and the Unit was dismantled when the Tonkin Liberal government took office in 1979.

Join us as we look back on this experiment, and reflect on its legacy, with a panel of speakers who worked inside the Unit itself: Philip Bentley, Director of the Industrial Democracy Unit, Charles Connelly, and Stewart Sweeney.