Michael is Emeritus Professor in the School of Management and Governance at the University of New South Wales and is internationally renowned in the fields of labour history, industrial relations and work, health and safety. For over three decades he has been researching and cataloguing workers' resistance from the start of the Australian colony into the 19thcentury. This has resulted in three books: The Origins of Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1788-1850 (Routledge, 2017); Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation Australia 1851-1880, (Routledge, 2020) and, with Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Unfree Workers Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860, (Springer Nature, 2022). Michael is himself a lifelong trade unionist.