Rate My Professor Bradon Ellem

Bradon Ellem is Senior Honorary Research Fellow in the University of Western Australia Business School, Management and Organisations. He is Emeritus Professor of Employment Relations in the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney Business School, where he served in a continuing professorial appointment from 2013 to 2025, as Associate Professor from 2003 to 2012, Senior Lecturer from 1999 to 2002, and earlier roles from 1997. He chaired the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies for two terms from 2011 to 2015. Prior positions include Lecturer in the School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour at the University of New South Wales from 1990 to 1997, and roles at the University of Wollongong Department of History and Politics from 1986 to 1987. He has held visiting positions at universities in Sweden, Norway, the UK, and the USA. Originally trained as a labour historian, Ellem maintains a long-standing interest in labour geography.

Ellem's research specializations include unions, regions, and industrial relations policy, examining how global economic changes and national regulatory frameworks shape local work and industrial relations, particularly in the resources sector encompassing mining locations such as the Pilbara, Queensland coal mining, and northern Sweden. His work addresses union strategies, climate politics, just transitions, and global production networks. Key publications feature the book Work and Industrial Relations Policy in Australia (Bristol University Press, 2025, with Wright, Clibborn, Cooper, Flanagan, and Veen), The Pilbara: From the Deserts Profits Come (UWA Publishing), and In Women's Hands? A History of Clothing Trades Unionism in Australia (1989). Recent articles comprise 'Explaining Union Decline: Remaking Power Relations in the Pilbara Iron Ore Industry' (Labour History, 2024), 'Industrial relations as power, place and time: the case of Queensland coal mining' (Labour & Industry, 2024), 'Remaking the socio-spatial fix: Actors, time and crisis in two iron ore towns' (Environment and Planning A, 2024), and 'An improbable driver of "just transitions"? Union power in the coal heartland of Western Australia's energy shift' (Energy Research & Social Science, 2024). He received ARC Linkage funding (2013-2017) for 'Engineering service work, global production networks and employment relations in Australian mining'. Ellem contributed editorially as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Industrial Relations (2006-2021) and Associate Editor of Labour History (1998-2016).