The Australian economy has increasingly come under the influence of international factors. This has placed greater pressures on Australian businesses to be more competitive. This requires changes in both management and union practices, and changes in the institutional arrangements in which industrial relations are conducted. The paper argues the case for the general movement to enterprise bargaining. This will necessitate a major overhauling of bargaining structures and of trade union and employer association structures and practices. The award restructuring brought about by National Wage Case decisions provides but a preliminary step in the movement to an enterprise focus which will be critical to internationally competitive industries.

There has been much debate about the role of carbon prices in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. However there has been far less attention paid to the evaluation of complementary and other non-price policies designed to accompany the carbon price. The purpose of this article is to develop a framework for considering the case for, and effectiveness of, the wide range of existing and proposed complementary policies that are designed to accompany the carbon price in the effort to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The article concludes that an effective evaluation of complementary policies should include identifying the market failure the policy is aimed at correcting. The complementary policy should work in conjunction with, not opposition to, other polices aimed at reducing emissions. It should be complementary with the policies of other levels of government and it should also consider issues of efficiency, equity, accountability and adaptability.

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.

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.

The problem of long-term unemployment has, at last, taken centre stage in the policy debate with the publication of the Green Paper Restoring Full Employment. While economic growth will reduce the general level of unemployment, to return the long-term unemployed to work will require increased training and reduction of labour costs. More recently the concept of a ‘training wage’ whereby employers would be allowed to pay below the current award wage to previously long-term unemployed has received some support. The Green Paper did not give much attention to training wages, preferring instead to focus on wage subsidies. In this paper the case for wage adjustments is discussed and evaluated.

Imagine a country that is inward looking and rarely notices the world beyond its own borders. Imagine a country with double-digit inflation and unemployment and a poor record of economic growth. Workers and their bosses are at each other’s throats, the country leads the world for working days lost due to industrial disputes and productivity (and how to improve it) is rarely talked about. Industry shelters behind prohibitive tariff walls (thinking only of the domestic market), the exchange rate is fixed every morning by officials of the central bank and the Treasury and international trade is an afterthought. Shop hours are regulated, domestic monopolies run most industries, and foreign entrants (in areas such as banking) are prohibited. Tax is high (and therefore evaded and avoided); expenditure untargeted and budgets in deficit. There are few foreign tourists, or many foreign students on university campuses. There are few restaurants around and licensing laws are restrictive. This country is at the bottom of the global premiership table in terms of economic performance despite its bountiful wealth.

This study addresses the effectiveness of the fiscal stimulus package announced by the Turkish government in 2009 in terms of its particular gendered outcomes, with a special emphasis on employment policies. Through an analysis of the package’s components and the policies of the Public Employment Agency of Turkey (Iskur), this article demonstrates the public sector’s reluctance to take a leading role in generating employment and the insufficiency of its efforts in addressing the stated goal of increasing women’s employment. Active and passive employment policies in Turkey are instead shown to be accommodating the country’s gender-segregated labour markets and discrimination against women.

Relative to the rest of the population, Indigenous Australians are disadvantaged across a number of outcomes. Not only is income lower, but so is life expectancy. Furthermore, the incidence of a number of chronic conditions is much higher (especially after controlling for the younger age profile). There are a number of interrelated historic, social and economic reasons for these poorer outcomes, but one important factor is likely to be substantially lower education levels. That is, Indigenous Australians are much less likely to finish high school, and for those that do, less likely go on to university or other studies. This paper looks in an empirical way at the relationship between education and health for Indigenous Australians, comparing it to similar associations for the non-Indigenous population. Using probit model estimates on data from the 2001 National Health Survey, two traditional health outcomes (self-assessed health and chronic conditions) as well as a set of health risk-factors are examined. For all health measures used, those with lower education levels have significantly worse health outcomes. Interestingly, education is found to have a significantly different magnitude of association for some measures across Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Much more is learned in the workplace than efficient skills. We have rather few concepts with which to theorise the ‘counter-cultural’ nature of much workplace learning. In leading off four articles that address this gap, this introduction dips into Australian labour history to open a discussion aimed at making visible some of the other learning that occurs at work. It asks why most workplace learning researchers have not acknowledged or extended such learning, and suggests that changing working conditions within universities may change this.

A large and increasing share of economic activity in modern rich economies can be shown to lie outside what mainstream neoclassical economics itself says it can be applied to: according to neoclassical economics, such activities are unsuited to markets. Since World War II rich economies have de-industrialised, shifted to services. Since the 1970s neoclassical economics has come to dominate policy advice. This worldview justifies state interventions when there is remediable market failure, but it ignores irremediable market failure, where its theory says that markets cannot work efficiently (such as where there is joint production or own consumption). Servicisation, this article argues, has increased and is increasing the extent to which neoclassical economics is, in its own terms, ‘knowably ignorant’. This is because, where service provision is subject to irremediable market failure, neoclassical economics, in its own terms, is inapplicable. The GDP [Gross Domestic Product] share of sub-sectors serving diverse human needs, such as aged care and education, is large and rising. Such sub-sectors are dominated by joint production, manifest as diverse outputs (complex and inter-related changes in the welfare of their diverse clients). Setting aside questions of the wider ‘scientific’ validity of neoclassical theory, the article focuses on its assertion that markets cannot generate economically efficient outcomes in such activities. Arguing that the constrained optimisation of its conceptual world cannot happen in the case of joint production and own consumption of service outputs, neoclassical theory reports itself as unable to determine optimal resource allocation, and so by implication cannot fulfil its role as the foundational basis of state economic policy. Yet the literature shows that the coverage of this theoretical result is not publicised – it is ‘knowable’ but not widely known. The article concludes that, as neoclassical economics is foundational to contemporary state policy, both GDP data and neoclassical theory show that it, and markets, are knowably and increasingly inapplicable. Therefore, mainstream policy thinking continues to face an increasing ‘state of ignorance’, and the cognitive foundations of state policy are correspondingly weak.

Conventional poverty and inequality measures, based only on comparisons of financial resources, may underestimate gender differences in living standards. The value of time spent in household work by oneself and partner, and the value of leisure are key elements that need to be considered in measures of living standards. This article develops a method for measuring wellbeing at the level of the individual, rather than the household. Following the tradition of Australian models of ‘full income’, the final measure of wellbeing includes the value of time in leisure and unpaid work along with individual income, the benefits accruing from the social wage and the welfare gains from the ownership and use of assets. The article then compares the conventional income distribution and the ‘full income’ distribution to identify population subgroups disadvantaged on each of these measures. The results show that gender inequalities in living standards may be underestimated by conventional income measures, and that inequalities in personal income and time use contribute most substantially to gender inequality in the full income distribution.

Although workplace death is known to have profound social and psychological effects on families, the economic consequences have not been explored. This pioneering study investigated families’ financial situations following fatal workplace injuries. An online survey explored the impact of post-death financial change on 142 participants from Australia, Canada, the USA, and the UK using a scale from the economic strain model. Half of the participants experienced financial loss, and the proportion struggling financially increased from 24% to 62% after the death. Workers’ compensation claims were made by 74% of participants, but they reported problems with delays, levels of entitlement, and satisfaction with the scheme. Other key sources of assistance were family and friends or support groups and services. Participants who were older, next-of-kin, and partner/spouses were significantly more likely to experience financial loss as were those whose deceased relative worked 51+ hours per week, possibly because the deceased was self-employed or worked significant overtime not covered by compensation settlements. Those experiencing financial loss sought short- and long-term financial help, accessed social security, re-entered the workforce, acquired mental disorders, and experienced declines in physical health, at significantly higher rates than participants without financial loss, and their children developed mental health problems significantly more often. Findings highlight the detrimental, and potentially intergenerational, effects of financial loss on the health and wellbeing of families bereaved by traumatic workplace deaths. Policy issues flowing from the results are discussed, including how this informs wider debates on refashioning regulatory protection.

A great deal of the research into the determinants of labour market outcomes has focussed on the role of human capital and the structure of the labour market. Relatively little attention has been paid to the role of social capital. This paper investigates the extent to which an individual’s social capital relates to their labour market outcomes. The relationships between social capital and labour force status and social capital and job search method are explored using data collected from a national random sample of Australians. Both a network and typology approach to measuring social capital are used.

In the absence of government safety regulation in the field of nanotechnology, ISO standards are being used as the basis for establishing technical and management guidelines at an international level. There are more than 50 current ISO standards on nanotechnology. Some of these relate to the working environment and occupational risk management. In Latin America, entities that are members of ISO are enunciating national versions of the international standards. In this article, this context is analysed critically, starting from the Mexican standard on occupational risk management in the working environment. Even though risk management standards may guarantee better and safer working conditions, in the field of nanotechnology, they simultaneously unlock detrimental implications for workers and society. Reliance on such private and voluntary forms of industry self-regulation is identified as a by-product of global neoliberalism.

This article assesses the historical political economy of the Australian automotive industry alongside the paradigmatic policy shift in economic policy away from protection towards neoliberalism and globalisation. It focuses on the politics of policy change and government assistance, providing a detailed historical narrative of the development and decline of the Australian automotive industry. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s, policy-makers oversaw the decline and fall of the Australian automotive industry. The process of decline occurred within a long-term cycle of new assistance, declining protection, new investment, inadequate restructuring, weak profitability, declining market share, and new assistance. Each cycle, however, was unable to stave off renewed crisis and eventual demise. Over the same period, Australian policy-makers transformed the economy from one of the most protectionist in the developed world to one of the most open. The article outlines the impact of neoliberalism on the automotive industry and analyses what the decline of the industry tells us about how the neoliberal policy structure operates in the ‘actually existing’ political economy. It argues that while the burgeoning neoliberal policy structure in the 1980s and 1990s acted to restrict the range of policy choices available for restructuring the industry, the domestic politics of industry assistance acted to restrict the neoliberal colonisation of the policy agenda. Neoliberal governance has had to contend with political imperatives for continuing assistance, while, at the same time, those political imperatives have been increasingly shaped by neoliberalism.

In a recent article appearing in this journal, Burgess (1992) argues the case for the immediate introduction of a public sector job creation scheme. He claims that on “both efficiency and equity grounds there is a strong case for public sector job creation schemes (PSJCS)” (p. 116). In this short note, we show that it is extremely unlikely that PSJCS can promote any substantial net job creation which will be sustained beyond the short-term. Moreover, we argue that such schemes typically promote less efficient outcomes. In effect, the case for PSJCS boils down to the equity effects. However, even here the case remains relatively weak given there are considerable doubts whether PSJCS actually impart valuable skills to participants or enhance their employment prospects.

The primary aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the merits of enterprise bargaining by providing a wideranging overview. It provides a comprehensive definition of enterprise bargaining which enables a broad range of perspectives to be encompassed and helps to structure the discussion of the immediate context and the wider policy settings of the debate. The paper demonstrates that enterprise bargaining is not new. It identifies a number of current or proposed systems of enterprise bargaining the present federal system, the New South Wales model the BCA proposal the Federal Liberal/National Party approach, and the New Zealand model. These are then evaluated, making use of a simple conceptual framework. The analysis indicates that each system has its advantages and disadvantages, its supporters and critics. Its findings suggest that positive and negative features of all models should be taken into account, not only in the continuing debate on enterprise bargaining, but also in the improvement of existing enterprise bargaining systems and in the design of new models.

Sweden has adopted an Active Labour Market Policy as a means of transitioning out of the economic crisis created by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The approach is to a significant extent reminiscent of that adopted following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The article examines the effectiveness of active labour market policy in Sweden over the period 2007–2012. By analysing these earlier policy outcomes, the aim is to assess the success of active labour market policy more broadly. The hypothesis that greater labour market flexibility allows the labour market policy to be more efficient is evaluated. With a focus on the labour supply, possible reasons for the reduced efficiency of state interventions are outlined using regression models. Conclusions derived from the models point to the failure of earlier Swedish active labour market policy towards the vulnerable groups of the unemployed, unemployed women and men aged 15–19 years and the long-term unemployed.

Mainstream economists argue that unemployment must be tackled with ‘flexibilisation’ or ‘labour market deregulation’. The public policy application has been the principle of ‘flexicurity’, with mixed labour market outcomes and limited success. Central contributions to theoretical and empirical economics writing on unemployment issues still espouse ‘flexibilisation’ as a general approach and warn about the detrimental effects of systematic deregulation under expectations of outcomes such as lower unemployment. Departing from a review of this literature, we take a step further from the ‘flexicurity’ prescription, to follow the capabilities approach of Sen and others, and develop a concept of social capabilities – based flexicurity for a learning economy, arguing that labour market performance must be targeted in an approach that includes a strong commitment to social well-being.

The Howard government’s WorkChoices legislation appeared set to irremediably remake industrial relations in Australia by prioritising individual agreement making (through AWAs) at the expense of Australia’s traditional award systems based on collective bargaining. That government explicitly intended these changes to reduce labour market rewards to, and protections for, low paid and more vulnerable employees. Yet, it also deployed a rhetoric of individual choice in advocating these changes, promoting, in particular, a notion that individual bargaining and agreement making under WorkChoices empowered individual employees by opening opportunities for integrative (mutual gains) bargaining. This article asks what these changes really meant for bargaining between individual employee and employer. We analyse crucial elements of WorkChoices to highlight how its main structural mechanisms intensified employee bargaining weakness in individual bargaining. As well, we use negotiation theory, especially in relation to integrative bargaining, to evaluate the government’s own published advice to individual employees on how to bargain for an AWA. We find that the government explicitly sought to disempower employees through WorkChoices’ additional legal and institutional impediments and also through the concerted attempt at coaching employees to choose a losing path in their AWA negotiations.