Introduction
In September 2018, the School of Management at the University of New South Wales (UNSW; Sydney, Australia) was proud to host a conference to celebrate the scholarly career and contributions of Emeritus Professor Michael Quinlan (Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; FASSA), recently retired. Conference speakers presented papers about research areas that were dear to Michaelâs heart and to which his own work has contributed so much â labour history, occupational health and safety (OHS) management and regulation, and workplace disasters. Although specifically asked to refrain from laudatory comments by Michael, speakers disobeyed orders and made a number of links between their own research endeavours and the many ways in which Michaelâs work had both inspired and assisted their thinking and writing. Some of these speakers, as well as other colleagues who were unable to be there on the day, have contributed extended versions of their presentations to make this book in honour of their friend and colleague.
When the School of Management at UNSW nominated Michael for an emeritus professorship in mid-2018, he had been a full professor in the school since arriving from Griffith University (in Brisbane, Australia) in July 1994. From then until 2000, he was Head of the (then) School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour (now, together with other schools, merged to form the School of Management). For a number of years, he was also Director of its closely aligned Industrial Relations Research Centre and, since 1996, an editor of the Centreâs journal, The Economic and Labour Relations Review. During nearly 40 years of service to Griffith and UNSW, he successfully supervised more than 40 honours, masters and PhD students. At the time of his retirement in July 2018, Michael had authored/edited 10 books, over 20 research monographs/reports, 103 refereed journal articles and 26 book chapters. He has not slowed this prodigious output since retiring!
In recent years, Michael has been intensely engaged in OHS policy and practice in the wider community. He has undertaken numerous investigative and research reports for governments and submissions to governments on OHS regulation and legislation and the impact of work arrangements on workersâ health and safety. Governments have commissioned him to do research and report on the mining industry, construction, migrant-dominated workplaces, textile clothing and footwear work, long-haul trucking, home-care work and aircraft maintenance. In particular, much of this work concerns itself with the deleterious health effects of subcontracting, supply chain structures, non-standard employment, the importance of worker voice, the experiences of victimsâ families and the historical antecedents of worker organisation (see, for example, Quinlan, 2001, 2009; Quinlan and Wright, 2008).
Michaelâs contributions, collaborations and standing have become increasingly international in recent decades. This is evident in the list of authors in this book. At the time of his retirement, he was a member of the editorial boards of seven OHS and work journals. He has also served as investigator, advisor or reviewer of large competitive grants in Europe, New Zealand and North America. He was a writing team member of the International Employment Conditions Knowledge Network that prepared a report on employment conditions and occupational health for the World Health Organisation (WHO) and was invited to participate as a panel member in the âClosing the Gapâ conference based on the broader project undertaken by WHO Commission for the Social Determinants of Health. In 2010â11, he was appointed as an international expert for projects undertaken for the European Commission and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. In 2013, Michael was part of a team that produced a report on OHS in small business for the International Labour Organisation (ILO). He also prepared a report for the ILO on non-standard patterns of employment and OHS (Quinlan, 2015).
The other chapters in this book illustrate how Michaelâs research has had national and global impacts, especially in OHS. His research on how changed work arrangements and/or regulatory regimes affect OHS and well-being has been especially influential. He has also made important contributions on pattern causes of workplace fatalities, Australian IR history, contemporary IR policy and the hitherto neglected area of the impact of traumatic workplace death on families. During his time at UNSW, he was a chief investigator or principal investigator on a number of successful large competitive grant applications including five ARC Discovery Grants, two Australian Research Council Linkage Grants and three grants awarded by the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission. He was an associate investigator on a large National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grant on health inequalities. In 2015, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia elected him as a fellow (FASSA).
The rest of the book largely concerns itself with the areas of Michaelâs contributions since joining UNSW in 1994; most of the chapter authors also began their collaborations with Michael during this time. While his UNSW years account for his most notable academic and public prominence, his involvement at two other universities â the University of Sydney and then Griffith University in Brisbane â very much shaped the trajectory that brought him to UNSW and which he has developed since. Much of this development drew on his close collaborations with teachers and colleagues. As our intention here is to present information and argument that complement rather than repeat what the other chapter authors provide, this chapter will particularly focus on how Michaelâs formative and developmental experiences at Sydney and Griffith shaped his trajectory as an academic and how he, in turn, helped shape those environments. In doing this, we largely focus on his journey to become Australiaâs pre-eminent social scientist in the field of OHS. We then provide summaries of the other chapters in the book.
Early Academic Influences and Development: The University of Sydney Years
Michael grew up on the northern beaches of Sydney, and after completing Beacon Hill High School, he spent the year 1971 working as a cadet financial journalist at The Australian newspaper. He had by then also enrolled in a Bachelor of Economics degree at the University of Sydney, and while majoring in economics and accounting as well as industrial relations (IR), he completed his honours year in IR in 1975. He started his PhD there in 1976 and completed it in 1983. During the mid- and late 1970s, the newly established Department of Industrial Relations was an especially lively intellectual environment that reflected and responded to industrial, political and intellectual ferments in the world of work, including rising union radicalism, in Australia and abroad. It was something of a high point of labour collectivism, given greater impetus by the reforming zeal of the Whitlam Labor government (1972â1975) and the nature of its removal. That stimulating external ferment â and the job and career opportunities that this was creating â brought the Departmentâs IR programs substantial undergraduate and postgraduate enrolments.
The Departmentâs small group of academics brought together diverse disciplinary backgrounds and concerns: institutional IR, including studies of compulsory arbitration and of collective bargaining; labour economics; organisational psychology; labour law; industrial sociology; labour history; and workersâ participation and control. Malcolm Rimmer was particularly influential. Having recently arrived from Britainâs leading IR research centre, at the University of Warwick, Rimmerâs stimulating teaching and supervision highlighted historically and sociologically informed perspectives. His lectures and seminars brought to life theoretical and policy debates from the contemporary flowering of British academic IR at Oxford and Warwick. Rimmer was then actively interested in understanding informal as well as formal union organising, autonomous rank-and-file militancy and its relationship to formal union hierarchies. He had published on shop stewards in Britain as well as race and workplace conflict, questions that Michael subsequently investigated in Australia.
Rimmerâs thinking and guidance profoundly influenced Michael and some of his honoursâ cohort â and close friends â particularly future IR academics Margaret Gardner and Paul Sutcliffe. These three then became influential research postgraduates and sessional tutors in the department. Michael was the most boisterous of this very lively, enthusiastic and close-knit group which expanded to include graduates from successive honours cohorts such as Tina Jackson, Trevor Craft and Peter Sheldon. In a small, new and very pluralistic department, they felt few top-down constraints on what and how to research and teach.
The political ferment of the time and academic and peer-group support encouraged big-picture thinking and ambitious, path-breaking research. By the mid-1970s, the departmentâs research students were undertaking theses on, for example, gender and IR, migrant workers and IR, and rank-and-file militant union organisation. In 1976, the arrival of internationally renowned Professor H.A. (Bert) Turner from Cambridge as a visiting professor injected a new dynamic. Among Turnerâs motivations for coming to the University of Sydney was to carry out a major research project for Britainâs Foreign office on the future of IR in Hong Kong (ahead of its âindependenceâ). He hired Michael, Margaret Gardner and full-time staff members to travel with him to Hong Kong, dividing some of the project up among them. Michaelâs first publication (Morris and Quinlan, 1978) came from that project. Based on his many interviews with local civil servants, it gave Michael an opportunity to do deep research on a very different society to that of mid-1970s Sydney. It opened him further to thinking about social dynamics in different contexts.
This was propitious. Michaelâs (very large) PhD â with Rimmer as supervisor â focused on the then overlooked phenomenon of worker activism and mobilisation within some of Sydneyâs larger post-war migrant communities, particularly from Italy and Greece. He was interested in both what they did for themselves and how this, at times, integrated with the strategic action of unions. Already demonstrating a striking capacity to publish early in his PhD studies, Michael soon produced a second article (Quinlan, 1979). Another Rimmer-supervised research postgraduate and tutor, Ron Callus, was also researching migrant workers in Sydney, and the three collaborated on a report for government on migrant workersâ working lives (Callus, Quinlan, and Rimmer, 1979). The work of another department member, Geoff Sorrell, a distinguished, iconoclastic labour lawyer, also spurred Michaelâs longstanding thinking on the role of different regimes of legal regulation, and in particular, the role of the masterâservant construct which Michael later extended through his research on colonial history.
Through his doctoral ...
