The increase in pension eligibility ages in Australia, as elsewhere, throws into relief the consequences of gender inequality in employment. Because of career histories in lower paid and more insecure employment, a higher percentage of women than men are dependent on the age pension rather than on superannuation or savings and investments, and so will be disproportionately affected by deferred access. Yet, fewer women than men hold the types of ‘good jobs’ that will sustain them into an older age. Women are more likely to be sequestered in precarious employment, with reduced job quality and a greater potential for premature workforce exit. This article counterposes macro-level data drawn from national cross-sectional labour force statistics and the longitudinal Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia survey, with case study analysis, based on interviews with 38 women in midlife insecure jobs, in order to identify the types of life course and labour market barriers that contribute to women’s reliance on the pension and the systemic disadvantage that will render them particularly vulnerable to any further erosion of this safety net. The analysis moves between this empirical evidence and a discussion, drawing on the theoretical literature, of the failure in equal opportunity endeavours over recent decades and what this means for later life workforce participation for women.

Theories of precarious employment based on the constructs of job quality and job stability have highlighted the issue of transitions, linked to gender and age, from long-duration employment in bad-quality jobs, into good-quality stable employment. This article uses Markov chain analysis to study the labour market transitions of South Korean women in different age groups. It shows the importance of differentiating the effects of contemporary labour market conditions, shaped by the forces of the moment, from conditions created by the institutional legacy of the past. Women’s traditional position in the labour market has resulted in age-linked gendered precariousness, while the conditions of the moment are generating a tendency towards less precarious employment. Transition matrices are developed for types of precarious employment defined by the combination of job stability and job quality, taking into account duration by age group, time period, and covariates. These matrices yield distributions of asymptotic prevalence, reflecting labour market conditions of the moment. The forces of the moment favour the predominance of stable good-quality employment, whereas observed prevalence at a given date is characterised by the polarisation of the labour market between stable good-quality and unstable bad-quality employment. Asymptotic prevalence reveals a steady increase in stable but bad-quality employment. Older women are observed mostly in unstable bad-quality employment, but labour market conditions are tending to attenuate this age cleavage over time, as the conditions of the moment are reducing the proportions of older women in stable bad-quality and unstable good-quality employment. The conclusion is an age-based polarisation, in which older women are faring badly, but where possibilities are now opening up to younger South Korean women, reflected in the sharp break between the situation inherited from the past and the conditions of the moment. But possibilities for younger women will be realised only through a reinforcement of government policies to support career breaks and work–family balance through decent part-time jobs.

Globally, fisheries and forestry have been characterised by substantial ecological and economic problems. Both sectors have become notorious for depleting the stocks on which they depend, eroding the value of harvested natural resources over time and having significant negative ‘by-catch’ impacts on non-target natural resources. Problems of resource overuse and potential ecosystem collapse inherently derive from poor decisions influenced by those with undue or excessive economic, political and labour market power. Solutions to problems of unsustainability of resource management will need to engage with these economic drivers and beneficiaries, and require strategies including better and more independent assessments of the status and condition of resources. Deep-seated problems caused by resource over-commitment need more robust approaches to resource assessment that (1) better account for uncertainty (including uncertainty resulting from stock losses due to disturbance), (2) avoid ratchet effects and (3) provide appropriate ecological parameters for resource harvest. The United Nations framework for environmental and economic accounting methods can help assess the economic and other contributions of different resource-based industries and inform decisions about trade-offs between competing interests. Finally, there is value in examining successful and unsuccessful industry restructuring, in which decisions to transition away from demonstrably unsustainable resource industries have been made.

Planning for a low-carbon future in Australia will need to address simultaneously three aspects of sustainable development: centralisation/regional development, mobility and communication. After reviewing existing roadmaps for low-carbon growth by 2050, the article identifies the importance for Australia of an integrated and mutually reinforcing set of measures, based on a bold approach to urban and regional planning. Taking account of national geography, the approach is based on the decentralisation of energy production, use and storage, and on new uses of communication, transport and the location of food, water and mineral resources. Revitalised regional centres could be connected, through new energy and transport solutions, by a national transport arc and electrified highways. The use of infrastructure funding to support low-carbon regional development would avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’, transcending incremental, cumulative approaches based on compensation and incentives for household, business and sectoral abatement efforts. It would generate long-term environmentally sustainable development.

The great recession of 2008/2009 had a huge impact on unemployment and public finances in most advanced countries, and these impacts were magnified in the southern Euro area by the sovereign debt crisis of 2010/2011. The fiscal consolidation imposed by the European Union on highly indebted countries was based on the assumptions of so-called expansionary austerity. However, the reality so far provides proof to the contrary, and the results outlined in this article support the opposing view of a self-defeating austerity. Based on a model of the input–output relations of the productive system, an unemployment rate/budget balance trade-off equation is derived, as well as the impact of a strong fiscal consolidation based on social transfers and the notion of a neutral budget balance. An application to the Portuguese case confirms the huge costs of a strong fiscal consolidation, both in terms of unemployment and social policy regress. The conclusion is that too much consolidation in anyone year makes consolidation more difficult in the following year.

During the past quarter century of neoliberal social, economic and political upheaval in Poland, the structure of workplaces has changed, and so have changes in worker attitudes to workplace and social solidarity. This article explores the links between changes to organisational and employment structures and shifts in worker attitudes, focusing on the implications of attitudinal shifts for the capacity for organised workplace resistance. It documents a loss of collective identity and a growth of individualism and social distrust. The analysis is based on publicly available economic and social statistics and the author’s own qualitative and quantitative research, drawn in part from computer-aided interviews in de-industrialising Lower Silesia. Evidence is provided that the extent and intensity of attitudinal shifts have varied according to changed workplace structures, based on privatisation and organisational size, and especially on the accompanying changes in workplace culture and climate. Increased individualism, based on formal decollectivisation, has been accompanied by attitudinal individualism and distrust of other people and social institutions. As a result, declining capacity for workplace resistance and an increased sense of powerlessness have increased workers’ susceptibility to right-wing propaganda.

In the context of the working-class backlash against free trade represented by Brexit, the recent surge of right-wing political parties in Europe and the 2016 US presidential election, it is timely to take stock of the threats to jobs and wages posed by recent negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The European Commission selectively relied on econometric analyses, predicting a positive impact of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Its proposed legal text on ‘Trade and sustainable development’ fell short of the European Parliament’s negotiating guidelines, which themselves failed to ensure protection of labour standards. The activities of corporate lobbies threatened the effective protection of workers’ rights. Major risks to workers’ rights are posed by discrepancies between US and European Union labour and social law and labour standards. The most recent legal text lacks compliance monitoring provisions and sanction mechanisms against member states failing to ratify core labour conventions. The investment court system does not resolve the problems of the discredited investor-state dispute settlement mechanism for which it is the proposed replacement. The year 2016 has provided a foretaste of the dislocation likely from trade and investment regulation that sees social and environmental standards and labour rights simply as barriers to corporate profits.

Despite its greatly weakened condition, could organised labour again be counter-hegemonic to and ultimately transformative of capitalism? Or is the current crisis, a crisis of collapse of manufacturing and wages and under-consumption due to the loss of redistributive power by key socio-political agents, possibly the final crisis of unionism, as argued by Wolfgang Streeck? Some on the political left, such as Streeck, argue that a new phase has been reached where redistributive and oppositional power of organised labour has been not just defeated but destroyed, with enormous consequences for the future of workers and capitalism itself. This article rejects such an overly pessimistic interpretation and asks what the possibility is of the labour movement’s again playing its historic role of transforming capitalism. It explores the potential role of organised labour in re-embedding the economy within democratic society, as Karl Polanyi argued, and building a socio-economic structure that is both stable and enhancing of social and environmental health. This problem is approached through a critique of the theories of Polanyi and Streeck and an examination of the unfortunate embrace of labourism and accommodation to neo-liberalism in the Australian labour movement.

When viewed against its ostensibly successful management of the global economic crisis between 2008 and 2013, growing electoral disenchantment with the Australian Labor Party government during that time defied standard explanations and calls for further analysis. A major reason for the party’s electoral loss in 2013 was arguably popular disappointment with its eschewal of social democratic principles. Notwithstanding some progressive measures initiated between 2008 and 2013, successive Australian Labor Party governments were constrained by neoliberal strictures, even when they chose to implement progressive policies. Whatever other reasons exist for its decline in popularity between 2007 and 2013, the Australian Labor Party’s unwillingness or inability to mark out a clear alternative to neoliberalism was fundamental. In making this case, this article uses the conceptual framework of ‘depoliticisation’, defined as the displacement of policy decisions from the sphere of democratic accountability and public debate, making them matters for regulation by technocratic experts operating according to supposed edicts of the market.

Much theoretical and empirical work by economists and psychologists has shown that the neo-classical approach is defective, and economists are now looking for an alternative. Evolutionary economics is the answer. It starts from the realistic premise that society and the economy are shaped by competition, but unlike neo-classical economics, it proceeds empirically by observing and analysing what has been happening to the economy and society. It does so on the premise that a process of social selection is taking place, analogous but not identical to that of biological selection. This dynamic approach requires a revival of economic history. By reporting on, and inviting debate over, what is happening and its implications, the adoption of an evolutionary approach should help restore the moral content of economics and the surrounding social sciences. Such a change in approach would be a paradigm shift, and will take time. That it will happen is likely: in the end facts kick.