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The Fair Work Act: As Good as it Gets?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Alison Barnes  and
George Lafferty
Alison Barnes
Affiliation:
Department of Business, Macquarie University
George Lafferty
Affiliation:
School of Management, University of Western Sydney
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Abstract

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The Your Rights at Work Campaign in the lead-up to the 2007 Australian federal election successfully mobilised a groundswell of community opposition to the radically anti-union Work Choices employment relations legislation of 2005. There were hopes that its successor, the 2009 Fair Work Act, would usher in a new regime of good-faith workplace relations, support for collective bargaining and vulnerable workers’ access to enforceable labour rights. Major gaps are the failure to address workplace power imbalance, especially in small workplaces, and lack of support for employee participation and voice mechanisms. A case is made for the inclusion of such mechanisms in legislative National Employment Standards. The article concludes by arguing that it is a mistake for unions to expect too much from legislation, rather than investing in the pursuit of the sort of community alliances which, after all, have made a restoration of Work Choices untenable.

Keywords

Australian industrial relationscollective bargainingdiscriminationemployee voiceFair Work Actlabour-management relationslabour lawlabour rightslow-paid workersunion-community campaigns
Type
Symposium: Assessing the Fair Work Act
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , October 2010 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010

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