Tom Bramble is a long-term socialist activist and author based in Queensland, Australia.[1] He is a senior lecturer in Industrial Relations at the University of Queensland. He holds a Ph.D. from La Trobe University in the same field and won the University medal in Economics from the University of Cambridge when he graduated with his BA (Honours) in 1982.[2] Bramble has been politically active since the late 1970s and a trade unionist since the early 1980s. He is a member of the National Executive of the Trotskyist organisation, Socialist Alternative (SA),[1] is a regular contributor to SA's website, magazine and journal [3][4][5] and writes a weekly blog on Australian television "Tom's TV picks - a view from the left" accessible at http://tomstvpicks.blogspot.com/.
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In 2010 Cambridge University Press published Bramble's book (with Rick Kuhn) Labor's Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class which traced the history of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from its formation through to the Gillard Government from a Marxist perspective. Australian journalist John Pilger wrote: "In cutting through the lantana of egos, power games and betrayals, Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn’s history of the Labor Party succeeds in rescuing a salutary story of political Australia that ought to be read by all generations". Australian National University academic Norman Abjorensen described it as "A veritable tour de force. Not since Vere Gordon Childe’s How Labour Governs, published nearly 90 years ago, has the ALP been subjected to such a searching analysis".[6]
In 2008 Bramble authored the book also published by Cambridge University Press: Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide, a controversial Marxist analysis of the Australian labour movement, attacking the trade union bureaucracy and the ALP.[7] Pilger said of the book: "Bramble has written an important and fluent reminder that nothing is gained without a fight. An essential read."[8]
In 2003 Bramble co-edited the book published by Ashgate Publishing: Rethinking the Labour Movement in the 'New South Africa' with Franco Barchiesi from the University of Bologna, which analysed the South African labour movement's reaction to the African National Congress post-apartheid. Patrick Bond of the University of the Witwatersrand said of the work: "Bramble and Barchiesi have gathered the toughest contemporary critiques and auto-critiques of the South African labour movement... in a manner that no scholar or activist interested in post-apartheid political economy dare ignore." Ben Fine of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies called it "the single most important contribution to an understanding of the trajectory of the South African labour movement."[9]
Bramble also edited the Victoria University Press memoirs of Jock Barnes, the New Zealand trade unionist[10] and has published many articles on the union movements in Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.[11] and global political economy.