This paper argues that the future direction for the development of Korean industrial relations will evolve through direct interaction between employers and trade unions (either conflictual or cooperative). The government is likely to play a less interventionist role in industrial relations, compared with the past, and to adopt the role of mediator between unions and employers. Characteristics of Korean industrial relations during the pre- 1987 period is firstly examined; four major factors are used to explain the industrial relations practice during this time. Changes after 1987 are also considered. Special consideration is given to interaction between the environment and the three major industrial relations participants, and the interactions between them. Both macro and micro aspects of industrial relations are examined. The special Presidential Address (26/04/1996), known as New Conception of Industrial Relations, is also analysed in terms of its implications for future industrial relations issues in Korea.

In the past decade there has been a retreat from full employment and a fundamental change in the labour market away from physical production work and towards the service sector. There have been changes in the structure of industry and the workforce, and changes in arrangements under which work is performed. There is emerging a secondary or marginal labour market in which both full-time and casual, temporary and part-time workers are confronted with a situation where they are required to decide whether or not to enter work arrangements geared to the flexible organisational needs of the business enterprise rather than their own needs. Tensions between employer demands for flexibility, and for a largely unregulated use of the workforce, and employee concern to ensure job security and minimal protection in employment (including health and safety) means that employment law today has to respond to organizational relationships in determining whether or not to intervene between the parties to new work arrangements. The question is whether or not the principles of traditional employment law are flexible enough to become the legal framework of a technological society.

Employer breaches of New Zealand’s minimum employer standards and other forms of worker exploitation have been increasingly recognised as a significant problem. This affects migrant workers in particular, and among them those working without documentation or on various types of non-resident visas. Exploitation has become particularly embedded in a number of industries: fishing, hospitality and tourism, and in some sectors of agriculture, particularly those dependent on seasonal labour. Initially, government action to mitigate these problems was slow and reluctant but over the last decade, culminating in the reforms of 2016, there has been a more focussed effort to provide a strong legislative framework to support minimum employment standards. This article describes the background to those reforms, analyses the reforms themselves and goes on to consider whether they are adequate to ensure access to justice by disadvantaged workers.

Direct participation in Denmark has been facilitated by agreements between employers and unions as well as a prevailing consensus about the value of cooperative arrangements. A revised Cooperation Agreement was achieved between the central union and employer organisations in 1986. It seeks to improve efficiency as well as enhancing employees’ welfare and security. This agreement has had a positive influence on the spread of participation in Danish industry. The paper examines, in greater detail, the experience of the banking and metal industries. Although Danish employers have generally advocated greater decentralisation, the Danish industrial relations system has retained a centralised framework within which direct participation has occurred.

The euro project is now at the threshold of disintegration as the fault-lines between the core/surplus countries and the peripheral/deficit countries experience a profound rupture. In the absence of political union or fiscal federalism, these centrifugal forces appear to be irreversible. It is difficult to envisage the current system, with its internal contradictions, surviving the crisis that now engulfs the entire eurozone. The present crisis is to a large extent the continuation of the longstanding neoliberal policies favoured by Germany, which have informed the creation of the euro. This article examines the historical context of the debt crisis and the institutional design of this flawed monetary edifice.

This paper examines a number of aspects of the economic impact of unions with particular emphasis on the exit/voice model proposed by Freeman and Medoff. It examines the reported effects of unions in quit rates and job tenure; productivity; wage dispersion and merit pay; employment; fringe benefits; technological change and profits.

The allocation of any benefit that arises from worker-generated innovation is complicated by the importance of three separate areas of law — employment law, intellectual property law and equity — and the distinction between those types of innovation that attract intellectual property rights and those types that do not (the latter being a category that is often referred to as ‘know-how’). The purpose of this article is to engage with the legal scholarship on the principles that are relevant to innovation. To date, the discussion has focused on two distinct approaches — what may be termed the economic and the fairness perspectives. The former may be seen as a justification for the current regime, while the latter has focused on the perceived needs of workers (in large part in opposition to the employers). Our argument is that these two approaches are both incomplete. In an attempt to get closer to a workable framework for the effective allocation of benefits, we offer a third approach; one that is based on the practices that are central to the employer-worker relationship.

This paper contains a survey of recent empirical research on the relationship between public capital and private sector production. The implications of these empirical studies for policy debates over the appropriate level of public capital are also examined.

The 1993 Congress endorsed extensive revisions to the ACTU’s rulebook including major changes to the ACTU’s decision making structure. Congress reaffirmed the importance of enterprise bargaining for wage fixation in conjunction with awards as safety—nets and the foundation for bargaining. This was the Congress that saw the bulk of members in twenty unions.

A meaningful discussion of the role and effectiveness of fiscal policy is not possible within the context of the antiquated textbook models, which in their current and likely future form (the ‘New Neo-Classical Synthesis) have been used to endorse the deflationary bias in macroeconomic policy formulation during recent decades. This paper present a critique of the ‘mainstream’ textbook modelling of fiscal policy, and suggests a more meaningful framework in which to consider the role of fiscal policy; a framework which in particular recognises the realities of endogenous money and interest rate targeting by central banks.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the present reconfiguring of corporate purpose, there is an opportunity to realign actions focused on prolonging working lives. We put forward a transformative agenda concerned with workforce ageing that aligns with contemporary expectations regarding sustainability, inequality, and emerging conceptualisations of management. In this article, the new concept of Common Good human resource management (HRM) is utilised as a potential means of encouraging business responses focused on grand challenges such as population ageing. We suggest how these principles might be applied to the issue of managing age in workplaces, to recast debate about issues of age and work, to be used as an advocacy tool encouraging employer engagement, while providing a framework that might direct organisational leadership.

India’s phenomenal service-led growth in recent decades has generated debate on the role of services vis-à-vis manufacturing as the engine of growth. With the rapidly increasing importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in global production systems since the 1990s, there have been claims of services having developed a growth dynamism similar to manufacturing. This article examines the role of services in India’s growth process using the concept of inter-sectoral linkages to make comparison with the role of manufacturing. Input-Output linkages and time series analysis reveal that services have been much less integrated in India’s production structure than manufacturing. They were also less important in generating indirect employment spillovers through sectoral linkages, compared with manufacturing. Service sector growth is found to be autonomously driven by final demand and therefore less dependent on its interconnections with the rest of the economy from the production side. The findings also indicate that service sector growth has stimulated manufacturing growth but not vice versa. However, the impact of services on manufacturing from the demand-side is neither sustainable nor desirable going forward. India is in urgent need of strategically developing its manufacturing sector through integrating dynamic services like ICT and internalising productivity gains. At the same time measures to address India’s inequality are critical to broaden the country’s demand base and make the growth process more sustainable and inclusive. In this sense, inequality reduction is a prerequisite for growth and should not be seen as an alternative to it.

It is a characteristic of platform capitalism that struggles to re-embed digital platform work within institutionalised forms of employment have been set in motion by new labour actors (i.e. self-organised, grassroots unions). Contrary to the view that these new actors signify the decades-long decline of traditional unions, evidence increasingly highlights their continued relevance to the labour–capital relations of platform capitalism. We argue that dynamic interactions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ labour actors in platform capitalism are influenced by national union traditions that emerge more vividly when struggles to re-embed labour relations require the transition to more institutionalised forms of labour resistance. We develop this argument based on a longitudinal qualitative study of labour struggles in the food delivery sector in the city of Bologna, Italy. We pay particular attention to the dynamics of intra-labour actor relations that have unfolded in the sector across different temporally based events of contention in the city. As we illustrate, synergies between the two were prompted by the self-organised workers’ need to rely on partners with an ‘official’ status when re-embedding procedures required; yet, collaboration was also favoured by what we describe as a ‘posture of respect’ developed by the traditional union vis-à-vis the self-organised informal union, particularly with regard to their quest for autonomy from traditional union structures. We interpret this approach of the established labour actor in line with its traditional orientation as ‘class’ actor, whose actions look beyond the membership so as to expand solidarity to all workers, including in new productive (platform) sectors.

This paper defines job sharing and explores its potential benefits. An overview of its origins and growth in Australia and overseas is followed by discussion of management issues. Organisational issues concern aspects of planning, implementation and operation. Issues for job sharers include finding an appropriate job share partner, maintenance of the job sharing relationship, protection of voluntary participation and preservation of pro rata benefits and other working conditions. A process for facilitating effective liaison between management, job sharers and trade unions is proposed. Job sharing is uncommon in Australia but may assist workers to balance work and family responsibilities or pursue interests outside work while avoiding many disadvantages of precarious work. For employers, it may facilitate retention of valued staff, reduce turnover, enhance recruiting or reduce staff costs. These propositions have not been rigorously tested, however, and avenues for future research are therefore explored.

The welfare reform debate is proceeding against a background of high unemployment and rising inequality. In Australia, the blueprint for reform of the social security system developed by the McClure Report is built around the notion of mutual obligation — the idea that those who receive support from government should be required to ‘give something back’. Public opinion is supportive of requiring mutual obligation of some groups of the unemployed, but it also supports the view that solving unemployment generally is the government’s responsibility. Although welfare reforms introduced in the US and UK have reduced the welfare rolls, their impact on wages and the labour market must also be considered. If welfare reform in Australia is to avoid the low wages and extreme poverty that are features of the US, welfare reform will need to be accompanied by reform of the labour market.

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.