David H. Plowman’s research while affiliated with University of South Wales and other places

This paper examines the structure of Australian multi-employer awards. It suggests that these awards do not exhibit occupational, industry or representational concentration and thus follow no clear rational principles. The hybrid award system is sub-optimal and can be explained by employer associations' neglect in the formative period of arbitration. Multi-employer awards are in need of reform if Australia is to become and remain internationally competitive.

Since the enactment of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act in 1904 the federal tribunal system has provided opting out mechanisms enabling parties to enter into their own bargaining arrangements outside the formal tribunal system. Thus, in theory, there has been the potential for a two-stemmed system: a tribunal or arbitation stream and a bargaining stream. The co-existence of an arbitration stream that is required to provide general industrial standards in the public interest, and of a bargaining stream that may enable parties to circumvent those standards, has created tensions that have been resolved in favour of the formal system. Historically, opting out provisions have been highly circumscribed and have not resulted in the development of a separate bargaining stream. This paper examines the operations of the opting out provisions of the Industrial Relations Act 1988. It suggests that the Act perpetuates the tensions inherent in the two-streamed approach. It also suggests that the Act has enabled the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to curtail the parties' capacity to opt out. The paper suggests changes that are needed if the legislation is to provide for genuine opting out and the development of a genuine bargaining stream.

This paper argues that public policy changes towards industry protection are the underlying causes of the major industrial relations changes that are currently taking place. The operation the tariff agencies and industrial tribunals gave rise to a New Protection environment that conditioned wage outcomes and employment relations. The reduction in industry protection has reduced the scope for New Protection processes and outcomes, and has necessitated a re-evaluation of wages policy and labour costs.

Recent years have seen Australian unions suffer major membership losses. Unions now represent only 46 per cent of the workforce and less than one third of the private sector workforce. The paper examines union membership trends and analysis the appropriate environment, structures and strategies for addressing union decline.

The major focus of contemporary industrial relations is award restructuring. This restructuring, with its potential to facilitate a better skilled, more flexible and more efficient workforce is integrally related to the National Wage determining process and the ACTU-ALP Accord. It is also a key to international competitiveness and the wellbeing of the manufacturing sector. In recent years the wage determination process has attempted to reduce those normative forces which industrial tribunals have institutionalized — in particular comparative wage justice and real wage maintenance. This attempt has created a number of tensions: control versus flexibility; cost of living versus productivity; centralism versus decentralism; paid rates versus minimum rates; supplementary payments versus over award payments; equity versus efficiency. The system's capacity to resolve these tensions without merely returning to established wage settlement practices will determine the efficacy of the restructuring exercise. It will also shape the contours of industrial relations for the next decade.

There is a substantial body of literature which suggests that employer associations are for Med to provide a countervailing force to trade unions. One for M of countervailing power is organisational parallelism, a situation in which associations' methods of organisation replicates that of unions. After examining the evidence, this paper concludes that the countervailing power thesis is inadequate in explaining the origins and development of employer associations in the Australian context.

This paper examines the contention that employer associations are reactive, rather than proactive institutions. The paper examines the role of Australian employer associations in both shaping the bargaining structures and in operating within those bargaining structures. It contends that associations have had a limited, and essentially negative, role in shaping the salient features of Australian bargaining structures other than in containing the range of issues over which bargaining takes place. It also suggests a number of reasons why employer associations generally adopt a reactive role within the industrial relations system. Finally, the paper suggests those conditions which may induce a proactive role on the part of employer associations.

National employer co-ordination has been prompted by three major factors: the need to counteract unions, compulsory arbitration legislation, and national arbitration test cases. The last has necessitated machinery to ensure that employer submissions are not at cross-purposes with each other. This paper reviews the development of transient co-ordinating machinery for dealing with unions in the 1890s, the federation of trade associations to counteract compulsory arbitration, and the test case machinery that has evolved since the early 1920s.