John Michael O’Brien (21 December 1945–10 January 2023)

John Michael O’Brien was an engaging university lecturer and a leading scholar of public sector employment relations and education union history who died in January 2023 following a lengthy period of ill health. John taught industrial relations from 1998 until 2010 at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Prior to this appointment he taught at the University of Canberra from 1987. Following his retirement, John became an honorary Associate Professor in the discipline of Work and Organisational Studies (WOS) at the University of Sydney.

John was born on 11 December 1945 into an Irish-Australian working class family in North Bondi, Sydney. Both of John's grandfathers had emigrated to Australia from Ireland. John's father, John Marson O’Brien, served as a member of the Australian Army Medical Corps in World War One. John's mother, Olive Murphy, was born in Gundagai NSW, and after moving to Sydney, worked as a negative cutter for Cinesound on some of the Australian film classics, directed by Ken Hall. John spent his early childhood in North Bondi. By the time he reached high school age, both sides of the O’Brien/ Murphy family had moved to war service or other social housing in western and southwestern Sydney. There, they were active members of local Australian Labor Party (ALP) and union branches, held a strong commitment to social justice, and worked during the 1950s to avert a Victorian-style defection of anti-Communist ‘Industrial Groupers’. This supportive political and social environment facilitated John's later development as a union and public policy activist. At the age of 15, he had joined the local ALP branch and became acquainted with leading members of the NSW ALP Left such as Tom Uren. Family members note however that by the late 1970s, he no longer shared what he saw as the party's shift to the right.

John completed an honours Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney where he developed his debating skills and aptitude for delivering eloquent speeches in university meetings. John later graduated with a Masters from Newcastle (by thesis) on the history of the Irish in nineteenth century Australia, debating whether their resistance was against the colonial system or against exclusion from it. He taught in public schools and became an active member of the NSW Teachers Federation. John was a member of the Eastern suburbs branch of the union and deployed his oratorical skills in NSW Teachers Federation council meeting debates on education policy. For example, John argued strongly against the streaming of working-class school children into alternative ‘relevant’ curriculum. John was also a committed defender of public education: for example, he played an active role in resisting the closure of the Dover Heights Boys High School in the early 1980s, including participating in an occupation of the School site. John was an early strong supporter of the formation of an autonomous women's network in the NSW Teachers Federation at a time when such networks were feared as ‘separatist’.

John enrolled in a PhD at the University of Wollongong in 1981 on the history of the NSW Teachers Federation since World War Two under the supervision of Professor Jim Hagan. John's first major publication in the field of industrial relations involved a book based on his PhD thesis entitled ‘A Divided Unity!’. The book was published in 1987 and examined the institutional, policy and demographic environment of NSW education in the post war period up to 1975 and the role of the NSW Teachers Federation in education reform. The book also highlighted the internal tensions and debates within the union over controversial topics such as state aid. According to David Worland in the Journal of Industrial Relations: ‘The book is particularly skilful in the way in which it captures the movements in the power arrangements within the federation and their causes and consequences… it is a book of immense substance and interest. It is made more appealing by its wider relevance: many of the winds of change being felt in New South Wales through that period were also present in other states…’.

Following the publication of ‘A Divided Unity!’, John was employed to teach industrial relations at the University of Canberra. In addition to his lecturing duties, John became heavily involved in the University of Canberra branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Division of the union. John's role as a local union activist and member of the NTEU's national executive enabled him to make good use of his negotiation and debating skills. John's oratory was often in evidence during his time as secretary of the ACT division of the NTEU. John was well known for his stirring speeches at the end of university staff industrial protest marches, at meetings of union members during industrial bargaining campaigns, or when confronting university vice chancellors.

Along with many Australian academics, John's research from the early 1990s focused on analysing industrial relations policy debates promoting the decentralisation of the Australian industrial relations system. A significant contribution to this debate was John's 1994 discursive analysis of the ideological underpinnings and policy prescriptions evident in three Business Council of Australia sponsored publications from 1989 to 1993 that promoted enterprise-based bargaining, an increased role for workplace management in Australian industrial relations and restrictions on industrial action published in the Journal of Industrial Relations. John provided an early critical commentary of the recommendations by Fred Hilmer and others commissioned by the BCA to reframe the language of industrial relations to employee relations and to marginalise the role of unions and conciliation and arbitration commissions. John emphasized the ideological influence of these publications on the policies of Labor governments and on the platform of the opposition Coalition parties prior to the 1996 election of the Howard Coalition government, despite limited evidence of productivity gains from these changes.

One of John's major academic contributions involved his analysis of decentralised bargaining in the Australian Public Service (APS). John highlighted how Australian governments needed to reconcile the tensions in their roles as employer, policy maker and manager of government finances as they introduced enterprise bargaining. Government policy favoured the decentralisation of industrial relations bargaining to the workplace level. But governments, as the ‘ultimate’ employer, also sought to maintain control over their own employees and to contain the cost of government expenditures. At the federal level from the early 1990s, governments had increased the ability of workplace managers to negotiate industrial agreements. Coalition governments from 1996, and Labor governments from 2007, developed guidelines for agreement-making for line APS agency managers that required agency agreements to be consistent with the government's overall industrial relations policies and to be funded within APS agency appropriations. These guidelines enabled both decentralised bargaining and tighter central government control over agency managers. This approach to decentralised bargaining placed restrictions on the ability of public sector unions to respond in a coordinated manner leading to a fragmented union response and ongoing challenges in maintaining workplace union organisation across APS agencies and departments.

In addition to decentralised bargaining, John's research explored changes to the public sector labour process. John examined the impact of purchaser-provider arrangements introduced by the Howard Coalition government in the form of Centrelink on frontline staff. John's research (with Michael O’Donnell and Anne Junor) found that staff experienced more intensified workloads, increased management controls and increased customer aggression from Centrelink clients. These additional workplace pressures resulted in increased absenteeism by Centrelink frontline employees that was interpreted as a form of collective ‘guerrilla’ resistance that led to management efforts to control employees’ use of personal leave entitlements. John viewed the enhancement of public sector managers’ prerogatives as a central outcome of public sector restructuring in Australia from the 1970s onwards.

John's interest in public sector employment relations extended to comparative analysis of similarities and differences between Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). John co-authored a book entitled Unions and Globalisation: Governments, Management, and the State at Work in 2012 with Peter Fairbrother, Michael O’Donnell and Anne Junor among others. John and his coauthors argued that both Australia and the UK followed different paths to arrive at similar destinations in terms of the neo-liberal reforms introduced into the public sectors of both countries. A combination of Labour and Conservative governments in the UK enhanced workplace managers’ prerogatives and controls and increasing labour flexibility from the 1980s. Under Labor governments in Australia there were initial experiments with industrial democracy that proved short lived, while Coalition governments also increased agency managers prerogatives by introducing individual employment contracts and by restricting the ability of federal public sector workers to take industrial action. John ensured that the book included an historical examination of administrative reforms in Australia at the federal level from the early 1970s and a brief history of the formation of the CPSU from 1989. John and his coauthors also documented how the CPSU experienced challenges maintaining membership levels and delegate structures under Coalition governments and actively participated in the ACTU's ‘Your Rights at Work ‘ campaign that led to the election of the Rudd Labor government in 2007.

Following John's retirement from UNSW in 2010, he focused on writing a history of the formation of the NTEU. This book was published in 2015 following extensive archival research and interviews with activists and the union's leadership. The book highlighted that the NTEU was formed from divergent academic and professional staff associations. The possibility of an amalgamated higher education union representing academic and professional staff became possible following the creation of a national higher education system following the Dawkins reforms in the 1980s. The NTEU retained a highly decentralised structure, that became even more decentralised when union organisers and industrial officers were located within NTEU branches while financial controls were increasingly centralised in the union's head office in Melbourne. John's book documented debates over pay and conditions during enterprise bargaining negotiations between the union's national executive and individual union branches and major industrial campaigns by the NTEU to achieve 26 weeks parental leave and the union's campaign against the Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements of the mid 2000s. The books also documents a range of campaigns by the union to improve pay and working conditions for university staff while resisting efforts by university management to gut enterprise agreements in response to Commonwealth government policy and legislation. The book was reviewed by Paul Adams in Labour History who noted that ‘Particularly rewarding are the final chapters, which deal with the NTEU's various diverse constituencies, and the examination of the union's Indigenous Committee, Women's Action Committee and Queer Unionists in Tertiary Education, which shows the lengths to which the union has gone to incorporate diversity from the very beginning into its structures…’.

John had a lifelong interest in classical music and opera and sang from a young age. As a boy soprano, John appeared on Sydney radio station 2SM and performed at Sydney's Tivoli Theatre alongside his sister Susan, a dancer. In later life, John became an enthusiastic member of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian choir and performed in numerous stage musical performances with the choir. He was an active supporter of Sydney's New Theatre, and of emerging performers and artists.

John will be remembered for his effective union activism, his scholarship on the history of the Irish in colonial Australia, on education unions and on public sector employment relations and for his lively and eloquent contributions to union and university meetings and to local and international academic conferences.