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Employment Relations in Australia
... Australia's political economy is generally classified as liberal, but its construction sector was partly coordinated until the 1990s. Thereafter, weakened coordination over industrial relations and the marketization of training by allowing private providers to compete with state colleges for government training funds became defining features of Australia's liberalized skill-sourcing system, which reflected employer preferences for greater labor market flexibility (Toner 2008;Wright and Kaine 2021). This enhanced employer control over training content and delivery but inhibited the ability of the VET system to address skill shortages. ...
In this article, the authors examine the role of labor immigration as a source of institutional change. They use a “most different systems” comparative case study analysis of the Danish and Australian construction sectors to examine the impact of increased labor migration on skill-sourcing practices in countries with distinct national skill formation and industrial relations institutions. Drawing on 73 interviews with industry stakeholders, the authors find that labor migration has produced liberalizing pressures in both Denmark and Australia, albeit in ways that differ from each other. The article contributes to comparative institutional scholarship by illustrating how labor migration can promote or support institutional change in a liberalizing direction by disincentivizing coordinated skill formation. Findings suggest that while national institutions mediate external pressures, such as labor migration, such pressures may affect the incentive structures that can either maintain or erode national institutions.
Across the world, many workers have experienced prolonged wage stagnation and insecure working conditions. At the same time, employers face challenges with staff shortages and low productivity. Sectoral and multi employer bargaining that covers broad segments of the workforce can help to solve these challenges and can bring positive outcomes to workers, firms and wider society. This King’s Business School Research Impact Paper examines different types of institutions to support high collective bargaining coverage. It reviews systems with high union density and employer density, different types of state intervention that extend the agreements to all workers within a sector and instruments that allow unions to establish multi employer agreements to safeguard against outsourcing.
This year's annual review of women, work and industrial relations marks an important milestone. Nearly 10 years have elapsed since the introduction of the Fair Work Act 2009, which enshrined important new rights for the progression of gender equality. It is also 10 years since the Journal of Industrial Relations commenced this annual review. In addition to focusing on developments affecting women and work in 2018, this review provides a broad summary of key events over the past decade. We explore trends in women's workforce participation, union membership, economic security and pay equity, as well as major changes pertaining to work–family policy settings, workplace sexual harassment, and family and domestic violence leave. We conclude that although policy and employment frameworks have created a foundation on which to build gender equality, policy development has been sporadic and the context for women in Australian workplaces remains far from equal.
Despite global attention to worker rights violations experienced by temporary
migrants, we lack a clear evidence base to understand the extent and nature of these
abuses. This article presents findings from a pilot of a Migrant Worker Rights Database.
This pilot measures rights abuses of former Temporary Work (Skilled) visa (subclass
457) entrants to Australia from 1996 to 2016. This visa was the key formal temporary
visa into Australia over this period. The pilot codes all available court cases that 457 visa
holders brought before the national workplace relations tribunal, the Australian Fair
Work Commission and relevant state and federal courts and tribunals, to capture legally
recognised rights abuses that migrant workers experienced on the ground. It also codes
coverage in three daily newspapers of these rights violations. This combined evidence
base generates a series of rights violations, or ‘events’, that are then analysed to present
patterns of rights abuses of migrant workers on the 457 visa. Key findings are that ethnic
background and occupational status of migrants appear to inform the level of reported
rights abuses. Further, legal representation of migrant workers assists in successful
outcomes, particularly through the Fair Work Ombudsman – a government body
empowered with enforcing compliance with workplace laws.
Throughout 2017, public interest, parliamentary debate and academic research about women, work and industrial relations centred around a few key themes: pay and income inequality, health and well-being at work and the intersection of paid and unpaid work. These themes were identified in three related yet distinct mediums: the media, parliamentary debate and academic literature. Automated content analysis software was used to assist in the thematic analysis of media articles and the House of Representatives Hansard, supplemented by a manual analysis of relevant academic publications. A thematic overlap was evident across the three datasets, despite the time lag associated with academic research and publication. This is a significant finding, emphasising that the inequalities experienced by women in the labour market are long term and entrenched.
The National Temporary Migrant Work Survey is the most comprehensive study of wage theft and working conditions among international students, backpackers and other temporary migrants in Australia. The survey draws on responses from 4,322 temporary migrants across 107 nationalities of every region in the world, working in a range of jobs in all states and territories. Its unprecedented scope indicates the breadth, depth and complexity of non-compliance with Australian labour law.
This article examines employer organizations and labour immigration policy in Australia and the United Kingdom. Drawing on 102 elite interviews, it analyses employer organizations’ preferences and influence over recent reforms. The article builds on Culpepper's arguments relating to the significance of political salience and identifies the importance of various institutional factors, particularly social institutions, in shaping employer organizations’ decisions and engagement with the policy process. Political salience and social institutional legacies are critical for explaining why employer organizations played a central role in driving labour immigration reforms in Australia and a marginal role in the UK. Large intakes of workers from the European Union, which sustained immigration as a high salience issue and fuelled the Brexit campaign, also influenced the strategies of UK employer organizations.
For governments concerned with enhancing labour market efficiency, employer-sponsored temporary labour migration schemes have become increasingly popular. However, the equity implications of these arrangements, which constrain the mobility of migrant workers, have largely been ignored. This paper assesses the factors affecting the vulnerability of employer-sponsored migrant workers and addresses the question of whether these schemes comply with ethical principles relating to fair treatment. It draws upon migration ethics, political economy and socio-legal perspectives to evaluate visa schemes in Australia, Canada and Sweden. The paper argues that there is an ethically justifiable case for selectively restricting certain rights of migrant workers within clearly defined parameters. However, policies facilitating worker mobility, restricting sponsorship to higher-skilled occupations, promoting enforcement and worker representation, and providing accessible opportunities for permanent residency and citizenship help to ensure that employer-sponsored temporary labour migration schemes comply with ethical principles relating to the fair treatment of workers.
While previous studies indicate the commercial benefits for airlines from either ‘high road’ or ‘low road’ employment relations approaches, there is limited evidence of success among organisations utilising a ‘hybrid’ model involving differentiated arrangements with different workforce segments. In analysing the processes and outcomes associated with strategic change at Qantas Group, this article examines the reasons why organisations adopt hybrid employment relations arrangements and the outcomes associated with this approach. Drawing upon the strategic negotiations and employment subsystems frameworks, we find that hybrid strategies emerge under the influence of product market pressures and institutional forces. In the Qantas Group case, these factors combined to inhibit the capacity of management to pursue either low road or high road strategies, resulting in differentiated and fragmented arrangements. The case highlights the potential risks of hybrid employment relations strategies for worker commitment, workplace conflict and organisational performance, with implications for human resource management scholarship and practice.
Many of the key reforms of the past three decades that helped to strengthen the Australian economy were implemented during the operation of the Accord that existed between Australian Labor Party governments and the union movement. In order to address structural economic problems, unions agreed to moderate wage outcomes and to facilitate the transition to workplace bargaining in return for social welfare gains for workers, which successive governments have maintained. These reforms helped to improve labor market efficiency and allowed firms to integrate successfully into international markets, without substantially compromising the interests of workers and their families, which thereby allowed economic dislocation and social unrest to be contained. In contrast to the assertions of certain Australian employer groups, research has consistently shown that union involvement in workplace bargaining has a benign impact on business productivity. However, declining membership presents a significant challenge to the capacity of Australian unions to influence economic outcomes at the national and workplace levels in the future.
The changing structure of modern business poses challenges for employment regulation in Australia, which has historically relied upon an ‘implicit’ model of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (commonly associated with strong state-mandated protections). Traditionally, such regulation has privileged the direct employment relationship, but the dramatic expansion of insecure and non-standard employment arrangements, encouraged by the proliferation of complex supply chains, raises questions about the ongoing durability of this regulatory model to provide appropriate labour standards for a growing cohort of workers. In an attempt to preserve some semblance of implicit CSR, particularly the centrality of state involvement in determining and enforcing labour standards, some Australian unions have developed strategies to advance new forms of labour regulation. This article examines four such strategies based on the logic of ‘sustainable sourcing’ in the road transport, cleaning, textile clothing and footwear and aged care industries. Although these strategies can be understood as a broader form of implicit CSR transposed onto multiple firms in a supply chain, they represent a notable departure from traditional union regulatory strategies based on the logic of implicit CSR centred on the individual employer.
One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. While some tactics have emerged organically through new management practices, the reconfiguration of employer strategies has been primarily state-led; legislative and non-legislative interventions have created opportunities, incentives and pressures for firms to adopt anti-union strategies.
Confronted by a marked decline in trade union density, the union movement in Australia bas responded by promoting the restructuring and amalgamation of trade unions. As a result, the number of active trade unions in Australia has fallen markedly since 1990. Despite this, the decline in trade union density accelerated during the 1990s, leading some analysts to suggest that the union amalgamation process may actually have been counterproductive in terms of overall trade union membership. This article tests this hypothesis using panel data collected as part of the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. A regression model of changes in union density in the period 1989/90 to 1995 is developed and estimated. The results indicate that while declining union numbers have been associated with the decline in union density, none of the blame for the fall can be traced to the amalgamation process.
Despite decades of intervention to promote equal pay, the gender wage gap in Australia persists. A key explanation is that equal pay strategies have had limited capacity to address the subtle, historical undervaluation that keep wages low in highly feminized areas of employment, especially where care work is performed. In this article, we examine a recent attempt to address the undervaluation of care work through a test case of the expanded equal remuneration clause in the Fair Work Act 2009. A highly feminized area of employment, the social and community services industry proved a strategic context for the case. We discuss three significant aspects of the case: the recognition given to the undervaluation of care work; the divergent interests of non-government sector employers and business associations; and strong contestation over who should pay, arising from the government’s third-party role as purchaser of social and community services.
Historically, Australian trade unions played a significant role in the monitoring and enforcement of minimum employment standards, an important aspect of unions’ regulatory function under the conciliation and arbitration system. In contrast, federal government enforcement was historically under-resourced, a situation that was sometimes justified on the ground that unions and the government inspectorate were ‘partners in enforcement’. Under the Howard Coalition Government, legal support for trade unions’ enforcement functions was significantly undermined, while Work Choices heralded an unprecedented emphasis on federal government enforcement. The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) maintains this emphasis on government enforcement, to be undertaken by the Fair Work Ombudsman, and restores some of the protections for trade unions lost during the Howard years. However, the new emphasis on good faith enterprise bargaining and the continuation of restrictions on right of entry suggest that unions may become the junior partner in the new enforcement regime, making a more tripartite and collaborative approach to enforcement less viable.
The decline of institutional industrial relations has led to a major reassessment of the way that traditional industrial relations actors operate. Yet, the debate about institutional change has been characteristically asymmetrical in as much as some institutional actors have figured extensively while others have been much less prominent. Historically, employer coordination has not captured the attention of the industrial relations community and there are relatively few contemporary studies of the activities of employer associations. The purpose of this article is to review and critique the literature on employer associations and explain how the traditional concept of countervailing power can be developed to reconceptualise employer coordination. We then argue for a research agenda to re-examine employer associations in light of ongoing changes to employment relations systems that require these bodies to revise the ways that they coordinate employer interests.
In this article we draw on personal narratives to study the identity work conducted by ride-share drivers to make sense of their occupational identity that is made problematic by the ambiguity of their legal classification and the precarious nature of their material conditions. Our contribution is twofold. First, we reveal the specificity of the identity work conducted by gig workers in comparison to other groups of workers such as employees and independent workers. We uncover the narratives that gig workers use to construct a coherent discourse that accommodates the trade-offs that their occupation involves. Second, we provide an understanding of the experience of gig workers. We adopt the term ‘sub-entrepreneur’ to refer to a type of independent contractor who experiences less freedom than those with true entrepreneurial scope and autonomy in their work. This definition assists in our reflection on our findings in relation to the future of gig workers, gig work and gig platforms.
This book focuses on zero hours and on-call work as an extreme form of casual and precarious employment. It includes country studies of the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Ireland, where there has been increasing concern about the prevalence of such work, and working time uncertainty, as well as varying levels of public policy debate on regulation. The book incorporates a comparative review of zero hours work based on the findings of the country studies. This pays particular attention to state regulatory responses to zero hours work, and incorporates the sociological concepts of accumulation and legitimation functions of the state.
Exploring the regulation of zero hours work beyond individual countries, the book includes an analysis of external regulation of zero hours work at the supranational level, namely the European Union and ILO.
Further, it assesses the implications of zero hours for workers in new sectors of economic activity, particularly the impact of the platform or ‘gig’ economy on the fundamental nature of the employment relationship. It also considers the societal implications of zero hours work and the ethical responsibilities of employers and governments towards workers as citizens.
There is a storm brewing over the roles of unions and collective bargaining in Australian employment relations. Unions, frustrated with what they see as practical and legislative restrictions on protection of workers’ rights, seek to ‘change the rules’. Employers, on the other hand, have been successful in restricting or rolling back bargaining rights, supported by their associations, the Coalition government and an assertive interpretation of the Fair Work Act. Add to this the impending federal election and the scene is set for a tempest that could bring industrial relations back to the centre of Australian politics in 2019. The review explores the various elements contributing to the coming storm, including trends in union membership, structure and strategy. It also surveys trends in the number and coverage of collective agreements, wage outcomes and industrial disputes. Two idiosyncractically Australian versions of collective agreement making are also discussed: cooperative bargaining facilitated by the Fair Work Commission and non-union collective agreement making.
For employers and employer associations, 2018 was in part a year of submissions to government inquiries, the 4-yearly modern wage review and the minimum wage review. Issues of numerical flexibility, including casual work, the gig economy and labour hire, also consumed much attention. It was also a year in which public discontent with the business world, particularly with big business, in relation to industrial relations and broader socio-political issues, and the questioning of its social licence to operate have escalated. In examining the major issues that concerned employers and their associations during the year, this article also discusses the pressures building for them in expressing and promoting their industrial relations agendas in response to a looming federal election, dynamic trade union campaigning and growing public discontent with the industrial relations system in its current form.
This chapter examines on-demand (or ‘on-call’) work in Australia, understood as work arrangements in which the worker agrees to be available for work and is called into work as and when she/he is needed by the employer. We focus on the two main types of on-demand work: (a) zero hours work arrangements; and (b) minimum-hour work arrangements. Both are highly precarious forms of work, linked to negative consequences for workers. On-demand work has been neglected in much employment relations research in Australia, but it embraces a substantial minority of the workforce and constitutes a significant challenge for research and policy. The chapter outlines the emergence of on-demand work within regulatory gaps associated with casual work and permanent part-time work. It summarizes what is known about on-demand work and on-demand workers, drawing both on secondary labour force statistics and on case-study evidence in selected industries and enterprises. It concludes by noting the surprising lack of effective regulatory responses and by suggesting principles for future reform.
This current controversy analyses the legal impediments to taking lawful strike action for workers in Australia, reviewing the components of the regulatory system that combine to restrict access to strike action for Australian workers. The discussion explores the flaws underlying the enactment of the right to strike, the limitations surrounding the definition of industrial action, the prerequisites to lawful strike action including the problems that arise from the pre-strike ballots regime, the grounds on which lawful strike action can be stopped, and the consequences of getting it wrong. The picture presented by the legal regime for strike action is that the impact of the regime is greater than the sum of its parts – making it very difficult to strike even for the most seasoned industrial players. It is possible that strike regulation in Australia has reached a tipping point whereby the costs associated with getting it right may now be so high that simply abandoning the lawful path and engaging in unlawful strike action may be more appealing than complying with the law. © 2019, Australian Labour and Employment Relations Association (ALERA), SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC.
The history of domestic servants in Australia offers a provocative challenge to the prophets of the digital gig economy. Like home-based service workers today, 19th-and 20th-century domestic servants worked without the protection of minimum wages or hours, unions or independent arbitration and endured perpetually porous boundaries between their work and non-working time, low status and pay. This article argues that digital platforms are instruments of a fundamental shift in the governance of home-based service work, from a system of ‘dyadic’ to one of ‘structural’ domination. Intermediaries played virtually no role in the operation of the former system, but they play a fundamental role in the latter, as aggregators of data about workers’ responsiveness and speed that enable market-based disciplinary mechanisms to operate without reference to public law and across a much larger spatial context than was previously possible. Short-termism and the fungibility of workers are pre-eminent features of the gig economy model, processes which are inherently corrosive to quality caring relationships that demand an atmosphere of trust and non-instrumentality. The historical analysis that is advanced gives rise to a number of implications for the regulation of digital platforms, union responses and industry planning in the future. © 2018, Australian Labour and Employment Relations Association (ALERA), SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC.
This book has both empirical and theoretical goals. The primary empirical goal is to examine the evolution of industrial relations in Western Europe from the end of the 1970s up to the present. Its purpose is to evaluate the extent to which liberalization has taken hold of European industrial relations and institutions through five detailed, chapter-length studies, each focusing on a different country and including quantitative analysis. The book offers a comprehensive description and analysis of what has happened to the institutions that regulate the labor market, as well as the relations between employers, unions, and states in Western Europe since the collapse of the long postwar boom. The primary theoretical goal of this book is to provide a critical examination of some of the central claims of comparative political economy, particularly those involving the role and resilience of national institutions in regulating and managing capitalist political economies. Essential reading for researchers and students interested in comparative politics and industrial relations. Argues that liberalization of industrial relations has been a universal tendency among European countries over the last thirty-five years. Offers a comprehensive description and analysis of what has happened to the institutions that regulate the labor market, as well as the relations between employers, unions, and states in Western Europe since the end of the 1970s.
Wages in Australia have lagged behind the growth in labour productivity in recent years. This has been associated with a significant change in the distribution of income in favour of high‐income earners. Although a number of factors appear to have been involved in this development, an important explanation is also to be found in the change in the balance of power in favour of employers and against workers and unions. As changes in industrial relations laws have contributed substantially to this imbalance, a return to the earlier laws may be necessary to restore the institutional mechanism for wages growth.
This paper analyzes the uneven processes underpinning industrial relations policy liberalization in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. Drawing upon 140 elite interviews and building upon ideational comparative political theories, the paper highlights the role of ideas in the policy change process. It identifies how particular ideas can be used to construct policy problems, how these ideas can gain legitimacy through battles with competing ideas, and how policy legacies can influence whether ideas take root. The findings from the comparative case analysis expose a critical difference between “positive legacies” and “negative legacies” to account for different liberalization trajectories.
Low wage growth consistently featured as the main underlying characteristic of the Australian labour market in 2017. Overall economic conditions remained weak, although unemployment was fairly static. All indicators of average wage growth declined: average weekly earnings, the wage price index and the average annual wage increase in enterprise agreements. Collective bargaining coverage continued to decline. Although the 3.3% minimum wage increase represents a modest increase in real wages for low-paid workers, the Fair Work Commission decision to reduce Sunday and public holiday penalty rates for some award-reliant workers would put further downward pressure on workers’ incomes. There were more successful applications to terminate expired enterprise agreements, including those where wage rates were thought to be uncompetitive and unsustainable. The underlying causes of low wage growth remain contested. Despite some agreement that the regulatory framework is a contributing factor, firm proposals for regulatory change are yet to emerge.
Wage theft has emerged as a major problem for regulation of work in Australia. Yet, the state has done little to address the issue. In this context, this article considers why there has been recent growth in reported cases of underpayment of wages, particularly of temporary migrant workers, and why the state has failed to implement a strategy to adequately address this problem. The article examines the fragmented nature of employment regulation and visa categories constraining worker agency which, combined with widening avenues for temporary migration, have contributed to the underpayment problem. We also consider how conflicting imperatives of the state, business influence over the policy process and weak political incentives to address underpayment help to account for the state’s inaction.
JEL Codes: J58, J61, J81
Representative arrangements are widely employed in the governance of occupational pension funds, particularly in Australia where a sector of jointly employer/employee-sponsored ‘industry funds’ was established during the 1980s. The jointly governed industry funds are privately owned wealth-management businesses and have routinely outperformed the retirement-savings schemes run by the large listed for-profit providers. Seeking to understand why these examples of labourist ‘alternative organisations’ have outperformed more traditionally governed Australian wealth-management firms is the main purpose of this article.
The ‘gig economy’ uses digital platforms to bypass many of the regular responsibilities and costs of employment. Ambiguity as to whether gig-economy workers are independent contractors, dependent contractors or employees allows the undermining of traditional labour standards governing minimum wages and other legislated employment conditions. Labour law and institutions need to catch up to the new reality of this form of work and develop new tools to protect and enhance minimum standards for workers in digital platform businesses. Unions, business and government all have a role to play in the long term. Meanwhile, direct engagement between these new firms and workers’ advocates can also help to mitigate the risks posed to labour standards by digital business models, by addressing regulatory gaps. This article is a case study of innovative negotiations between one platform business (Airtasker) and Unions New South Wales, a peak trade unions body in New South Wales, Australia, in order to establish agreed minimum standards for engagements negotiated through this platform.
In 2016, Australian unions faced a mix of new and enduring challenges. A re-elected Conservative federal government made life difficult for unions, maintaining its hard-line approach to public sector bargaining and passing new laws to intensify regulatory scrutiny of union governance and tactics. Unions continued to secure wage premiums through enterprise bargaining, but the longer-term decline in the level of agreement-making and the number of workers covered by enterprise agreements continued. Disputation rose, although less than half of all disputes were caused by enterprise bargaining. Concern over ongoing membership decline saw unions explore and experiment with organisational reforms and initiatives as new, ‘union-like’ actors entered the field. However, our analysis of longer-term membership developments across union types suggests the outlook is alarming for all but those unions focused on occupational identity.
The increasing complexity of the employment relationship in supply chains poses chal- lenges to the protection of labour standards internationally. While there is significant research on labour standards in international supply chains, there is much less on domestic supply chains and public procurement. Furthermore, the role of government in supply chain labour standards is under-researched. This article uses the context of residential aged care in Australia and New Zealand to highlight the inadequacy of the current role of government in promoting decent labour standards in domestic supply chains. We argue that the role of government in the employment relationship needs to be reconceptualised in order to recognise its agency as an indirect employer, and its consumer power, in public procurement.
This article summarizes the effects of the Howard Government's `Work Choices' amendments to the Workplace Relations Act 1996, based on qualitative analysis of its impact on 121 low paid women workers. The main effects of the regulatory changes are on job security, income, voice, working time and redundancy pay. The analysis draws attention to the nexus between protection from unfair dismissal and security of working time and employee voice: many of those interviewed in the study had lost access to protection from unfair dismissal and as a consequence could no longer effectively influence their working hours, or request flexibility. Employer prerogative was perceived to have strengthened in many of their workplaces, with consequences for the intensity of work. The analysis suggests that improvements in minimum standards and job security are vital if low paid workers like those included in the study are to exercise voice over working time and avoid significant deteriorations in their pay and conditions.
We examine early evidence concerning the impact of the Workplace Relations Act on union structure and membership, and on union strategies regarding their core objectives of improving wages and conditions and protecting workers' rights. The object of the Act may be to provide a framework for cooperative workplace relations, but the purpose is to weaken unions, through: removing union preference; making it easier for employers to decollectivise employment relations; diverting union resources; encouraging fragmentation; and threatening the financial viability of unions. Union membership has continued to decline, though fragmentation effects have to date been limited. Changes to the roles of arbitration and awards, and provisions regarding sanctions and industrial action have affected union behaviour. The Act has had some unintended consequences as a result of the maritime union's innovative legal strategy in the waterfront dispute, but this dispute also underlined the gaps in the protections afforded by the Act and its weakness in guaranteeing freedom of association.
The wage inflation and unemployment in Australia during the 1970s have been analysed by many writers. With the benefit of hindsight, this paper examines the facts and assumptions of earlier writings in connection with various questions — whether centralisation of wage determination was a factor in the wage inflation, the circumstances leading to the wage indexation system, why the system failed, and whether reduced trade union density and enterprise bargaining after the 1990s were responsible for more moderate wage increases and reduced industrial strife. The paper notes the neglect in earlier discussion of the importance of trade protection and globalisation in the operation of the labour market.
Industrial Relations proved to be one of the dominant issues in the 2007 federal election campaign with the Government at first defending, and then moderating, their Work Choices legislation. The Labor Opposition benefited greatly from the successful Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) campaign against Work Choices and established a significant electoral advantage on the issue. Labor introduced its own IR policy alternative under the banner `Forward with Fairness' and then spent a good deal of 2007 trying to sell its policy to business. The final policy adopted by Labor, and set to become law over the next few years, represents something of a calculated political compromise. When the detail of the policy is considered the influence of the Work Choices laws is still very much apparent.
Trade union theory has a long history and a considerable quality, but it has rarely seemed to touch on the nature of Australian unions of the 20th century. While the unions of the late 19th century may have been a response to con ventional stimuli, those of the 20th have seemed to arise out of the needs of the industrial relations machinery, rather than to satisfy worker demands.
The Australian trade union can be regarded in general as an institution called into existence by a bureaucratic mechanism (the arbitration system) to enhance the functioning of that mechanism. Unions generally have not succeeded in carving out for themselves an industrial role that is independent of the arbitral system, and the efforts they have made in this direction have not been sustained. The trade union dependence on the arbitral system suggests that predictions about union behaviour derived from international experience may be based on quite irrelevant premises.
This paper offers an alternative framework for characterizing individualism and collectivism. This framework is constructed in terms of three dimensions of the employment relationship - who makes the rules; who is covered by the rules; and who enforces the rules. The value of the framework is demonstrated by applying it to the analysis of awards in Australia, revealing fundamental changes in the individualist/ collectivist character of awards over the last 20 years. © Australian Labour and Employment Relations Association SAGE Publications Ltd.
For nearly 12 years from 1996, the Australian government pursued a neoliberal industrial relations agenda, seeking to break with structures based on collective bargaining and trade unions. In the name of choice and deregulation, this agenda involved unique levels of state intervention and prescription - and anti-unionism. In the last round of legislative change, the 2005 laws badged as Work Choices, the government overreached itself and in 2007 was defeated in a general election. As in the UK after Thatcher, the extent to which collective bargaining can be restored and trade unions regain a voice is problematical. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008.
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