Abstract
Recent scholarship has charted the dramatic social impact of mining booms and busts on local communities. Yet scant research addresses how mining economies shape different professions. This article ethnographically traces the careers of a doctor, a lawyer and a journalist during Western Australia's mining boom in the early 2000s. For vocally opposing a politically popular mining operation due to public health concerns, they were subject to backlash, which led to disillusionment and career changes. Their narratives share a pivotal shift: each expert initially conceptualised their role through a welfarist, liberal-democratic lens, underpinned by a moral imperative to disrupt imbalances of power, fight injustice and ‘help people’. Yet the mining boom revealed and exacerbated the neoliberalisation of their respective disciplines, in which profits were maximised, businesses treated leniently and worker protections calculated dispassionately. These stories illuminate the lived experience of neoliberalisation, and the limits of individual professional resistance in a pro-mining political economy.
Introduction
From the gold rushes of the 1890s through to the mining boom of the early 2000s, the state of Western Australia (WA) has often been resource-reliant and its socio-economic fabric susceptible to change with the rise and fall of mining activity. Social scientists have emphasised how the state's mining prosperity and reliance at the turn of the 21st century impacted many facets of social life, including the impact of boom-and-bust economics on regional community wellbeing (Tonts et al., 2012); the heightened visibility and mockery of well-paid labourers – or ‘cashed up bogans’ (Pini et al., 2012); and the social consequences of fly-in-fly-out work (Mayes, 2019). However, scant attention has been paid to the broader impact that mining booms can have on other professions outside of the mining sphere, such as medicine, the law and journalism. In this article, I ethnographically examine how individual experts internalise or resist pro-mining logic during a mining boom, and the extent of their capacity to question the status quo. To do so, I zoom into a health conflict relating to a mine site, specifically tracing the lived experience of three experts who vocally advocated for workers who alleged they had contracted workplace chemical injuries.
The article is structured in five parts: First, I examine the relationship between mining and neoliberalism and how they interact in the Western Australian case. Second, I review the literature regarding the impact of neoliberalisation on professions and career identities. Third, I outline the Kylanta mine site case study and my research methods. Fourth, I trace each expert's career, situating it within global neoliberal shifts in their professional roles. Finally, I analyse these career narratives to examine two key questions: (a) the extent to which the mining sector is further empowered by the neoliberalisation of medicine, the law and journalism; and (b) the extent to which professionals concerned about the health and safety impacts of these processes have the capacity to change or subvert them. The article thus advances conversations about how economic rationalism became embedded in the culture of Canberra (Pusey, 1991) and, more broadly, how neoliberalism is sustained and empowered through subtle everyday processes (Mirowski, 2013). Taking this further, the Western Australian case study contributes a nuanced portrait of how neoliberalism becomes embodied, resisted and reinforced in a pro-mining political economy.
Mining and neoliberalism in Western Australia
Given Australia is so resource-reliant and WA has a rich depository of minerals, the state's extractive industries are often heralded as pivotal to the national economy (Ellem, 2015: 323). This reliance on WA's mining sector has been heightened during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the national economic downturn caused by the pandemic, export tonnages and export revenues have continued to grow, which has further fuelled the perception that the Western Australian mining sector is supporting the rest of the nation (see, for example, Figure 1).
West Australian front cover, 23 July 2020
The relative wealth of mining corporations in WA means they have had significant leveraging power with respect to decisions about zoning, environmental and health regulation, and industrial relations (Ellem, 2017). The flipside of this is that the success of their business is also contingent on access to local resources, which means that local politics tend to matter more to mining companies than to other multinational corporations (Ellem, 2015: 325). The result is a politico-industrial complex in which mining companies and local decision-makers are mutually reliant. When the state is so ‘ideologically wedded to resource-led growth’, this grants the mining industry political licence to operate, downplaying potential social and environmental impacts (Brueckner et al., 2014). In this context, barriers to mining expansion (also known as ‘bureaucratic red tape’) tend to be lowered or withdrawn (O’Faircheallaigh, 2008).
Relaxing environmental, health and heritage protections in order to enable corporate activity is a key feature of neoliberalisation. Neoliberalism is a political ideology in which it is deemed that human wellbeing is best maximised through economic growth, which in turn will be best achieved by facilitating market capitalism and free trade, ensuring economic efficiency, and privatising public goods and services (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Ward and England, 2007). Neoliberal logics rationalise and reinforce advanced capitalism, promoting the market as the tool for achieving the liberal ideals of ‘freedom’, ‘individual choice’ and minimising state control. Importantly, neoliberalisation has been adopted and resisted differently in various socio-cultural and historical contexts (Brady, 2014), yet some patterns are nonetheless identifiable. Neoliberal ideology tends to frame individuals as formally equal and able to take responsibility for their own wellbeing, which justifies the state retracting welfare regimes (Wacquant, 2012). The shift from welfarism to a less protectionist form of governance does not mean that the state's role is reduced, but is rather reconfigured as one of facilitating the market economy and enforcing the compliance of neoliberal subjects (Wacquant, 2012).
Theories about neoliberalism have been critiqued for being overextended and contradictory (e.g. Bell and Green, 2016). While an uncritical application of a neoliberal lens is certainly problematic, neoliberal ideology has undoubtedly shaped Western Australian mining policy since the 1980s (Ellem, 2015: 323–5). Moreover, a local, situated reading of how neoliberal policies are experienced, internalised and resisted by individuals promises useful insight into how neoliberalism actually works in practice and why it has been so tenacious. This aligns with Mirowski’s (2013) call for researchers to better understand everyday neoliberalism. Mirowski highlights that the neoliberal market is not a monolithic entity or a self-acting discrete force. Rather, it is ‘the product of struggles over truth’ (2013: 74). We therefore need to specify exactly how neoliberal ideologies come to be embodied and enacted, stretching from the ‘elusive executive committee in the capitalist class’ to the ‘shopper in Wal-Mart’ (2013: 75). In this article I contribute to the project of charting everyday neoliberalism in an Australian context. Specifically, I illuminate how neoliberal policies trickle down into everyday professional culture and shape individuals’ career experiences in the context of a mining boom. First, however, the ways in which neoliberalism has broadly influenced professions and careers requires a brief overview.
Career identities in neoliberalised professions
The prioritisation of economic growth, laissez-faire markets and the privatisation of public goods and services under neoliberalisation have markedly impacted most professions on a global scale. Public services tend to operate using more market logic than a not-for-profit model (Gray et al., 2015), which has increased metricisation and managerialism in the workplace (Hall and McGinity, 2015). Professional practice has become less about the use of independent expertise and the provision of welfare or assistance, and more about the mitigation of risk, the measurement of performativity, and the gate-keeping of limited resources (Laffin, 2018).
Neoliberal changes to professions are not always policy-driven and top-down; the strength of neoliberalism lies in the way it also functions laterally as a set of discourses – a governmentality – which can be internalised by professionals and used to regulate their own and their colleagues’ behaviour (Sugarman, 2015). Concomitantly, the capitalist labour market has led to the casualisation of employment and significant competition for secure, full-time jobs, while developments in technology have contributed to obsolescence and redundancies (McGann et al., 2016). In such a context, those who do not comply with workplace norms, or do not adapt easily to transition, are at greater risk of losing employment, which heightens the impetus for workers to comply and to normalise. In other words, the system rewards and fosters neoliberal governmentality in the workplace.
Within this climate, individual careers are increasingly capricious – often characterised by uncertainty, drift and change – and many human beings struggle to find purpose in profit-driven institutions (Sennett, 2007: 15–82). Career identity narratives have thus become crucial for people to cope in this climate (Fugate et al., 2004). Career identities denote the ways in which people ascribe meaning to their professional lives, skill-sets and job opportunties: ‘who I am and who I want to be’ (Fugate et al., 2004). Career narratives are inherently situated within – and are a window into – the historical, political and cultural context in which they occur (James, 2017: 65–70). In particular, a narrative approach to careers helps to pinpoint particular turning points in people’s careers, how these are experienced and framed, and what changes were motivated as a result (Wolf, 2019). In this article, I argue that career narratives are a useful insight into the ways professionals experience and respond to neoliberalisation in the context of a pro-mining political economy. Intimate ethnographic portrayals of careers – such as those of the ‘bureaucrats and bleeding hearts’ working in Indigenous health and policy in Australia (Lea, 2008) – illuminate the tensions that can arise between an idealistic notion of their career identity on the one hand and, on the other, the structural constraints within which they work. By analysing the careers of three individuals across the sectors of medicine, law and the news media, I examine how neoliberal reforms were variously embraced, internalised and resisted at the turn of the 21st century.
Importantly, some scholars have argued that the concept of neoliberal governmentality pays insufficient attention to agency, reducing subjects to submissive conduits of hegemonic discourses and denying their capacity for resistance (Bevir, 2011). Yet Mahmood (2005) has highlighted that agency should not be equated with resistance; rather, agency can be embedded ‘not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms’ (2005: 15; emphasis in original). In my examination of neoliberal governmentality, I am both conscious of agency, and follow Mahmood's call to provide a more nuanced analysis of different modalities of agency. As Mahmood notes, it is by examining these different modalities of agency that we can understand the ‘conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries’. In this case, rather than analysing how professionals either internalise or explicitly reject neoliberal changes to their profession, I am also interested in the ways in which they may implicitly subvert, or adapt, or sidestep those pressures. Further, this focus enables an analysis of the everyday struggles that occur when neoliberal logics about the mining sector clash with alternative political understandings.
Case study and methods
The Kylanta affair was one of several conflicts that I followed for my doctoral research project conducted during 2006–9, in which I investigated how chemical injuries are governed in the medico-legal sphere. I became intrigued by the topic after working on a casual basis for a personal injuries law firm that specialised in representing injured workers. I nonetheless sought a balanced account and invited people on all sides of the controversy to participate, including employers, insurers and experts renowned for sympathetic or sceptical opinions. My methods included participant observation at key events, semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of relevant legal, medical, parliamentary and media texts. Notably, Kylanta management refused to be interviewed, which may have been due to a combination of the political nature of the topic, perceived researcher bias, or their denial of the existence of the issue (and thus dismissal of the significance of the research).
My involvement in the Kylanta dispute was at the tail-end of a battle that had already lasted for over ten years. The dispute played out in a set of townships in regional Western Australia and Perth, the state's capital. In the early 1980s, Kylanta International, a multinational mining company, set up a mineral refinery at Forrestville, which is close to three neighbouring townships. (Kylanta and Forrestville are both pseudonyms, as are the names of individual participants herein. Key dates and newspapers in the dispute have also been changed to keep my promise to participants to attempt to ensure their anonymity insofar as is possible.)
A tall chimney flue installed at the Forrestville plant in the 1990s emitted plumes of smoke as a by-product of the mineral refinery process. Soon after its installation, a number of workers and local residents began to complain of illness. The company continually argued that the emissions from the chimneystack – though proven to be carcinogenic when emitted in the air – were not toxic to humans on the ground.
A handful of workers and residents were diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivity, or MCS. Also known as environmental illness, MCS is caused by long-term or acute exposure to toxins, and is a condition in which the sufferer experiences an extraordinary reaction to everyday chemicals that pose little problem for the rest of the population, such as deodorants, car fumes and recently painted walls (Cullen, 1987). The condition can be debilitating with symptoms including chronic fatigue, behavioural changes and dizziness. It is extremely isolating; the only proven remedy is to remove oneself from everyday environments such as workplaces, homes and recreational spaces in which the triggering chemicals are ubiquitous (Gibson et al., 2003). Yet MCS is also contested – there is significant debate within the medical community over whether MCS is a genuine physiological condition caused by toxins, or a psychosomatic condition related to paranoia about chemicals (Phillips, 2010). Kylanta always reinforced the sceptical science in order to deny its workers recognition and compensation, and promoted the perspective that they were mentally unstable.
The government departments responsible for occupational health and safety and industrial regulation largely supported the company's position for several years. Eventually, a local Greens politician agitated for a parliamentary inquiry, and the Department of Health held a consensus meeting among medical experts, detailed later. While these processes found the workers to be genuinely suffering, the Kylanta emissions were never explicitly linked to their injuries, and the subsequent recommendations were non-binding and scantily implemented (Phillips, 2015).
Largely unable to maintain employment, the workers eventually filed a legal action for a total and permanent disability payout from Kylanta. On the eve of the trial after an almost five-year battle, Kylanta negotiated an out-of-court settlement. The workers were placed under confidentiality agreements and the company publicly maintained that their operations were harmless. Not long after the settlement, a billion-dollar-plus expansion of Kylanta's operations was approved by the state government (although later jeopardised by the global financial crisis).
In this article, I examine the Kylanta conflict afresh, with the analytical framework of the career narrative. I trace the professional experiences of a doctor, a lawyer and a journalist who became embroiled in the saga. The data for each narrative is drawn from 90-minute interview(s) with each professional between 2006 and 2008 – ranging from one (with the journalist) to four (with the lawyer) – in which they were asked about, and reflected at length on their career experiences. Second, I contextualise their narrative with other relevant interviews, texts and observations arising out of the research.
Narratives – though inherently interpretive and partial – can tell us a lot about how people experience and make sense of the world. There are, however, some notable limitations to the narrative approach. There is limited generalisability from a small number of case studies. Further, the case studies presented here centre on a small demographic: the three profiled individuals were all relatively privileged settler-Australian men, which prevents using a comparative gender, race, or class lens to contextualise their experiences.
Moreover, these are all acute case studies of neoliberalisation and resistance. The three individuals here were chosen because their careers were strongly shaped by their vocal stance on Kylanta and MCS. By contrast, I spoke to a significant number of professionals who had made more mainstream career decisions, by either sympathising with Kylanta and other mining companies, or at least not actively opposing their operations. However, carefully chosen critical examples or outliers – which examine and test extremes – can be a particularly revealing type of research (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Critical examples or ‘dramas’ often reveal what happens when someone has breached the rules - and thus give unique insight into the status quo (Turner, 1980).
The Kylanta narrative needs to be understood within the context of a controversial and medically contested illness. Yet at the same time, the stories of professional whistleblowing and backlash outlined below are typical of health disputes regarding multinational mining companies, even with respect to more medically accepted conditions such as childhood leukaemia clusters (Brown and Mikkelsen, 1997) and asbestos-related deaths (Phillips, 2015). As such, industrial disputes over chemical injuries are in many ways a perfect site for examining the material impacts of struggles over neoliberal market logic (Pearce and Tombs, 2012) – as the stories of the doctor, lawyer and journalist profiled below illuminate.
Neoliberalisation and professional resistance in a mining boom
Heightened economic rationalism has had stark impacts on the fields of investigative journalism, occupational medicine and personal injuries law. In this section, I sketch the global politico-economic changes to these disciplines, before zooming in to its particular local manifestation in my participants' career narratives.
The journalist
The role of the media – and of investigative journalism particularly – has been understood by media scholars in two different ways (Carson, 2014). The liberal-democratic perspective conceptualises the media's role as an important social critic that scrutinises concentrations of corporate and political power, whereas the political economy perspective characterises the media as a tool for elites which is used to ideologically reinforce the capitalist system (e.g. Miller, 2003). With respect to the latter, the free market has enabled a number of transnational media entities to accrue more media outlets, monopolise the dissemination of ideas, and to do so in a way that principally serves the interests of media owners and corporations (Phelan, 2014). One side effect of these changes has been a decline in investigative journalism aimed at detecting and exposing corporate transgressions (Phelan, 2014), albeit with an upswing in reporting on corporate crime after the Wall Street scandals of the global financial crisis (Carson, 2014). This is not to suggest that there have not been alternative news outlets and high-profile investigative journalists who have continued to agitate the status quo. However, the story of Clinton Bracks starkly emphasises the difficulties that were experienced by journalists who were seeking to expose corporate wrongdoing during WA's mining boom in the early 2000s.
Clinton Bracks was a young investigative journalist at the Perth Times – a tabloid newspaper owned by a multinational media company – when he first heard about the Kylanta affair. Quite by chance, he was sitting in his chief of staff's office when he noticed a hand-written letter on his desk and, curious as ever, strained to read it. It was a plea for help from an elderly resident named Silvia, who was living beside the Forrestville plant. She was concerned about the smoke billowing from Kylanta's chimneystack and flowing into neighbouring houses. The workers were falling ill and nearby livestock were allegedly dying. Silvia herself had been diagnosed with MCS, which Clinton had never heard of. Clinton asked his chief of staff what he was going to do about the letter, but his boss said he would probably discard it. The chief of staff reluctantly allowed Clinton to visit the woman. As Clinton explained, he drove down to see Sylvia that afternoon accompanied by a photographer: went to see her and just listened to the story. […] Anyway, she's pulled out all this stuff, background information for me, you know, from the company and that. I thought, wow this is incredible. I got out of the car and I was like, hell, I can smell it from here you know? A heavy wet, chemical-type smell. I was like, shit, these people are living in these fumes.
It was a career-changing moment for Clinton. Silvia had given him so much information that he ‘followed it up and followed it up and followed it up’, eventually working on little else but investigative articles regarding Kylanta's activities over the next two years. Other journalists from competing newspapers began to follow suit.
Early headlines from Clinton and his journalistic colleagues were often hard-hitting. ‘[Management] Memo told of Kylanta health risks’, ‘Kylanta scare tactic works’, and ‘Legal doubt on Kylanta breaches’. Clinton sought to problematise the relationship between Kylanta management and the government departments who were supposed to be regulating them: ‘Department of Environmental Protection reassures on plant emissions’, ‘Ministers accused of ducking health talks: we want people with muscle, say Kylanta accusers’ and ‘Govt. not serious about Kylanta health problems says [Greens Member of Parliament]’.
Clinton was careful and strategic about his journalism on the health impacts arising out of the Kylanta minesite, given that MCS was a contested and scarcely understood condition.
You can’t just go splashing in with MCS does this and this, because [the public] will just get overwhelmed and they’ll go, ‘oh it's too hard. I’ve read too many acronyms or too many long words’ … and they give up. I was starting off from scratch, you know when no-one knew anything the hell about [the situation] … [pretending to be a member of the public ] ‘what? Kylanta, what? What do they do? Emissions, do they have emissions? Where's Forrestville? Who? Sick? What?’
Thus, knowing the pitfalls of reporting on a scientifically complex topic, Clinton introduced the concept of MCS into his articles gradually and systematically.
by the end of it, just the average reader of the Perth Times would have read a few of my stories […] they now know Kylanta produces [a mineral which] produces a lot of serious shit out of the smoke stacks that blows through those towns down there and makes people very sick […] and Kylanta hasn’t done much about it. [The company]'s basically thrown a bit of money the way of some of the workers, you know, and have been absolute bastards about the whole thing.
Clinton and other journalists covered the legal conflict over the worker's claims to disability payouts very closely. One headline declared, ‘Sick locals still waiting for compo […] corporation digging its heels in to avoid pay-outs’. Another article asserted that: A Kylanta worker who is suing the company for making him sick says he was pressured to drop the case by a company executive just days before it was due in court.
Writing articles that criticised Kylanta was controversial in the pro-mining climate of Western Australia at the time. Newspapers (including Clinton's) continued to print company press releases that counteracted the negative press, for example, ‘Kylanta denies emissions link to failing health’, ‘Kylanta health cleared’ and ‘Emissions at safe levels: Kylanta’. Moreover, according to Clinton, his editor was receiving almost daily threats from Kylanta management regarding his articles. Clinton was thus asked by his superiors to provide substantiating evidence for each of his claims.
[it was] not just, like, every line I’d have to justify, I used to have to justify every word. For example the word, ‘toxic’, right? I used to use the word toxic ’cause these things are toxic. And I’d be in there with my editors and they’d say, ‘oh well the Kylanta people say that it's not toxic’ . . . we’d get out definitions of toxic, you know, and I’d prove that it was toxic. Toxic things make you sick or it's harmful or if you have enough of it, it will kill you. We’d get it out, we’d go through it, we’d agonise and then my lawyers were trying to get me to take the word toxic out …
The struggle over the word ‘toxic’ here epitomises how everyday neoliberalism plays out in practice in a pro-mining economy. What this means for investigative journalists is that they are granted less creative freedom by their editorial teams when it comes to mining corporations, which restricts their word choice. This censorship became increasingly difficult for Clinton, and it began to take its toll on his work satisfaction. Pressure from above felt like a direct threat to his journalistic freedom.
I’d be fighting to keep [the controversial details] in. ’Cause I’d be saying, look we can’t sugar coat this. […] that's what they want us to do, water the whole thing down so it's meaningless, right? […] I believe that [Kylanta] are harming people […] and I’m out to prove it. So I’m not going to back off it, because I reckon I’ve got the evidence. And isn’t it what newspaper is and what journalism should be all about?
The conflict came to a head when, according to Clinton, Kylanta's US legal representative arranged a meeting with his superiors at the newspaper. It was after this meeting that Clinton's editor asked him to stop writing about Kylanta and find another story to investigate. Clinton felt that the reasons for which he had become a journalist – which align with the liberal-democratic perspective outlined above – were no longer part of his job description. He articulated his disappointment to me as a feeling that his journalistic integrity was jeopardised. In disgust, he left journalism altogether and joined a family business.
In the early stages of his career as an investigative journalist, Clinton was permitted to act as a social critic and agitator, ultimately speaking out against what he perceived as the negative impacts of a powerful multinational corporation. Yet when his critique became overly threatening to the politically embedded corporation, he was pressured to rein in his critique. The fact that he resigned, rather than being terminated, highlights the power of neoliberal governmentality. Rather than blunt top-down sanctions or totalitarian censorship being imposed on Clinton, he was simply pressured to change his line of questioning. When WA is ‘ideologically wedded’ to resource-led growth (Brueckner et al., 2014), the virtues of extracting resources are normalised to the extent that it becomes almost taboo to question it. Moreover, Clinton was made to feel that there was no space within the profession to resist this increasingly normalised pro-mining logic. Thus, the modality of agency he exercised was not to comply with that style of journalism nor to stay and resist it – rather, he simply quit. His experiences reinforce the notion that the media – particularly in the context of Western Australia's politico-industrial complex around mining – is often used as a tool for legitimising the status quo.
The doctor
Neoliberalisation changes how medical practitioners are expected to engage with patients, especially in the context of legal disputes over injury. According to neoliberal logics, the goal of insuring employers against workers’ injury is to promote employment and enable business. In this profit-driven climate, medical assessment of workers’ injuries becomes less of a welfarist exercise (providing care, treatment and advocacy) and more about identifying malingerers, policing access to payouts and returning claimants to work quickly (Ericson and Doyle, 2004). Many doctors do of course remain caring, politically engaged and socially critical in spite of these pressures. However, neoliberal shifts have unassailably redefined the contours of medical care and the capacity of doctors to advocate for individual patients – particularly in the field of workers’ compensation, and particularly when the defendant is a large multinational mining company. This change was acutely felt by Dr Ryan Hall.
Dr Ryan Hall was an occupational physician who had a peri-urban practice outside of Perth, where he assessed and treated people for potentially work-related conditions. Ryan had developed a specialisation in chemical injuries. He assessed the Kylanta workers with MCS, and found them to be suffering from toxogenic conditions as a result of workplace exposure at the Forrestville site.
At first, Ryan invested significant emotional energy in working with people with chemical injuries. When I asked him about his motivations, he explained that he saw his role of helping people who he believed genuinely deserved it: it's like distilled whisky. It's pure. You see the patient who is not phony, who is not trying to manipulate the system, who is not dishonest, who has got an absolutely genuine problem, who has got something which is not their fault, and who is receiving all sorts of opposition to getting what any normal person under calm circumstances would feel is the logical, right thing to do; namely, help someone who is sick. If you are affiliated with the industry which is under scrutiny in that particular case, you will say there is not a [health] problem. If you are independent of it [you will say] there is a problem.
Moreover, he was concerned about the strategies used by corporations to deny liability: the whole area of chemicals-as-a-cause-of-illness is a hot potato […] it's at the heart of the financial profit of so much of industry. […] And industry fights to the death to prove that their chemical is not the problem. I think it's outrageous. I think it's criminal. I think it's absolutely antisocial. I think it is exclusively financial for the benefit of the employer. I think it shows a weakness of our government to stand up for the community who has voted it into power, because all they’re doing is doing what the company says. I have a commitment to trying to help them and doing what I can and knowing that I’ve done what I can. And then I try and let it go. Because if I don’t, I’ll sink, because I see one person, two people, three people, twenty people, etcetera and they all have difficulties.
Ryan's experiences as a doctor must be understood within the context of the neoliberal changes that occurred to medical insurance schemes at the time. Ryan felt increasingly isolated as legal decision-makers repeatedly favoured corporations and employers rather than his patients. Like Clinton's, Ryan's story also illustrates the subtle and diffuse ways in which neoliberal power works and the limited modalities of agency available to professionals in an increasingly neoliberalised climate. Rather than an authoritarian power that physically took away his licence or stopped him from practising in his field, instead his energy for resistance was gradually ground down and de-radicalised. This demotivation makes him a more compliant neoliberal subject or, at least, silences his dissent. It also makes space for doctors with a more transactional mindset to steer the discourse about workers injuries in the mining sector in ways that are likely to be more amenable to employers. This story illustrates how workers’ safety and protections in the mining sector were not only being diminished at the policy level – through the tightening of medical insurance schemes – but also trickled down to various layers of everyday decision-making, all of which have changed the culture of the medical profession.
The lawyer
The neoliberal trope of ‘efficiency’ has been used to justify legislative ‘reforms’ to workers’ compensation apparatuses throughout the globe (McCluskey, 1997). In an Australian context, this has broadly meant a prioritisation of economic considerations, a focus on ‘incentives’ for workers to return to work, and a winding back of workers’ entitlements (Purse et al., 2004). Coinciding with Western Australia's mining boom, the state government introduced a number of legislative changes to workers’ compensation schemes in an attempt to reduce the number of workers accessing common law processes, which were framed as costly and inefficient (Phillips, 2015). Injured workers are increasingly funnelled into a much more limited workers’ compensation tribunal, in which legal advocacy is restricted and compensation is capped. This has made it increasingly hard for plaintiff lawyers in the personal injury field to obtain adequate compensation for their clients, as illustrated through the story of Jeff Carlson.
Jeff Carlson first heard of MCS in 1990 when a woman approached him in desperation, after numerous other solicitors had declined to take up her case. Her husband had been employed for 17 years in the mineral sands industry, where he had used heavy industrial chemicals in a poorly ventilated workshop. He had been sent to a psychiatrist and prescribed shock treatment to the brain and, after experiencing severe mental deterioration and memory loss, he committed suicide. After a three-year legal battle, Jeff succeeded in negotiating compensation for the widow, although the money was minimal compared to the loss she had suffered. For nearly twenty years after that first case, Jeff Carlson represented people with chemical injuries. They were often referred to him by word of mouth, and many of them were in the mining industry.
When the Kylanta workers were diagnosed with chemical-related conditions, they approached Jeff Carlson for his help. He successfully served an injunction on the company, which meant that the chimneystack was out of operation for several months. During this period, the company retrofitted millions of dollars worth of anti-pollution equipment intended to reduce the emissions from the stack. However as soon as it started up again, the health complaints reappeared almost immediately.
Jeff's motivation to accept cases like the Kylanta one on a no-win, no-fee basis was a belief in the law as a tool for achieving justice. He felt chemically injured plaintiffs were deserving because they were always: up against large corporations and insurers behind them […] and [the corporations] tended to fight, not necessarily for the truth, but fight every single technical point and attempt to burn off each individual accident victim. I was incensed about that and I had a passion for justice and I enjoyed fighting on behalf of genuinely injured people. we’ve been paid poorly, if at all, for the work that we’ve done in chemical injury. So to that extent, there's been some impact on my lifestyle. But I’m not the slightest bit troubled about that because money doesn’t bring happiness.
Jeff was reflective about the changes he witnessed in personal injury law throughout his career. Over the course of my research project, I witnessed his idealism about his profession diminish. In our last interview in 2008, for example, his physique was visibly deflated. I asked what he would advise me to do if I were a worker from a mine site who suffered from a chemical injury. His faith in the law had waned: My recent experience has been so grim of the law and the way it worked […] So now I’d have to reconsider advising anybody to do anything but ignore the law altogether and try to get as much quality of life as they can through medical treatment.
A year after this interview, Jeff appealed another case regarding a mining-related chemical injury to the Supreme Court of Western Australia, about which he still held some hope. The panel of judges found 2–1 against his client. The case cost Jeff's small law firm approximately a quarter of a million dollars that would never be recouped. For fighting on their behalf, Jeff received deep gratitude from the injured workers for his professional martyrdom. One of his clients told me, for example, that Jeff was ‘one of the best blokes he knew’ and that he had ‘looked everywhere to find a lawyer who would do the kind of thing Jeff did’.
Jeff, however, felt frustrated and disillusioned at what he saw as a ‘gross miscarriage of justice’. He closed down his law firm, became a mediator specialising in family disputes, and no longer agreed to act on behalf of chemically injured litigants.
Discussion and conclusion
The fact that a doctor, lawyer and journalist experienced career changes and professional dissatisfaction in the neoliberal era is not in itself unique: many human beings are struggling to find meaning in this period of career turbulence (Sennett, 2007). However, the particular conditions in which Clinton, Ryan and Jeff underwent and understood their professional upheaval deserve further analysis. From their respective disciplinary standpoints, they were vocal agitators for strengthening workers’ protections and more stringently regulating resource extraction companies during Western Australia's period of mining prosperity. They conceptualised their professional roles through a liberal-democratic lens, which meant they initially sought to critique the neoliberal reforms for being unjust. Yet all of them faced significant sanctions for speaking out against the regime and were ultimately silenced: two of them felt pushed out of their careers altogether, while the other consciously reduced his emotional investment and time spent on the issue.
These stories offer two contributions to the literature. First, they reinforce the ways in which neoliberal governmentalities have been embodied and struggled over. These narratives show the lateral manifestation of neoliberal governmentality in the workplace – the way it shapes managerial and collegial decision-making such that profits are maximised, businesses are treated leniently and health risks to workers are de-prioritised. But this logic also constrains professional capacity at the coalface: it defines the contours of how doctors can care and advocate for their patients, lawyers can seek justice for their clients and journalists can report on corporate transgressions. Moreover, the tension between an individual's political imagining of their career through a welfarist lens on the one hand, and the neoliberal reality on the other, can have a deeply personal impact – causing damage to their career opportunities, their livelihoods and to their sense of hope and purpose in the world.
The second contribution is to highlight how a pro-mining political economy is both enabled by and exacerbates the neoliberalisation of other professions. Western Australia's love affair with resource extraction at the turn of the 21st century – which arguably continues as demonstrated in this article (Figure 1) – rendered market-driven changes to law, medicine and journalism particularly acute. It became hegemonic knowledge that the state's economy was reliant on extractive industries, which meant that the logic of prioritising mining profits over other considerations spread widely. In turn, this shaped which forms of knowledge were privileged and which were subjugated in medicine, law and the media. The silencing and de-radicalising of naysayers like Clinton, Ryan and Jeff enabled the system to continue relatively unquestioned. While the doctor, lawyer and journalist each enacted different modalities of agency – from vocal resistance, to trying to negotiate or adapt, to quitting the field altogether – it is noteworthy that in each case they were ultimately disempowered from challenging the status quo with respect to the mining industry. Their stories thus emphasise that the tenacity of neoliberalism (Mirowski, 2013) is not only due to powerful policy directives, but also the creep of neoliberal logic into everyday workplace practice and culture. Everyday neoliberalism can be more subtle, insidious and cumulative, taking the form of, for example, pressure from colleagues at conferences, gradual changes in managerial expectations, or the increased feeling of failure in helping clients in a changing system.
The concern, I suggest, is that the potential health and environmental impacts arising out of resource extractive industries are further enabled by the neoliberalisation of those professions that might have been best placed to contest it. Ultimately, the capacity of doctors, lawyers and journalists to fight injustice and campaign for workers’ rights is diluted in a neoliberal climate.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the participants who generously offered their time, emotional labour and intellectual engagement in this project.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.