If you’ve got muscle and you want to use it’ : power and control in the Gladstone Power Station plant control room, 1975 to 1985

This paper examines the industrial nature and actions of plant control room operators in Queensland’s largest power plant, Gladstone Power Station, during its first decade of production. Drawing on historical evidence from documentary and oral sources, the research examines operators’ participation in their own industrial campaigns, those of the electricity industry and of the wider union movement. Articulating with various ideas about union strength and power, control and resistance in the employment relationship, the paper demonstrates that Gladstone operators possessed great industrial power. They used that weight to secure and defend their interests within the station, from the state electricity authority and from the Queensland government in a sustained power struggle that, within the station itself, did come to a complete end with union defeat in 1985.