The Accidental Republic is a concern for all industrialised countries, and China is no exception. To solve this problem, Workers’ Compensation Insurance (WCI) is a perfect option. The redemption of The Accidental Republic can be understood through the development of WCI. However, little attention has been paid to the development of Chinese WCI. Starting from labour insurance regulations promulgated in 1951, this research explores over 70 years of reform and development of Chinese WCI, explicitly dividing reforms into three phases – establishment and implementation, exploration and practice, and adaptation and formation – that aligned with stages of China’s economic development. Further, the insurance fund performance in the last decade is evaluated by Data envelopment analysis and Malmquist (DEA-Malmquist), through the static and dynamic results, yielding generally average results. Subsequently, five major problems of WCI are identified and discussed and five suggestions offered drawing on international comparison and the national situation. Lastly, the accidental and inevitable aspects of China’s WCI system during the redemption of The Accidental Republic are summarised.

This paper investigates how interest groups in France and Germany communicate information about Industry 4.0 technologies and approaches. Specifically, this explanatory study employs cutting-edge big-data-type tools and machine-based automatic text processing to delve into the topics, arguments, and postulates related to Industry 4.0 strategies by trade unions and employers’ organisations. The goal is to determine which of these factors have been pivotal in shaping social dialogue in France and Germany. The findings reveal that social partners in both countries are involved in similar digitalisation-related initiatives and express predominantly favourable viewpoints regarding Industry 4.0 technologies. Key themes in the dialogues of both France and Germany centre around workers’ rights, working conditions, and skills training.

Workplace bullying literature has focused mainly on actions of individual targets of mistreatment, undertaken to address the problem, and on analyses of the effectiveness of responses. Less attention has been paid to the efficacy of state regulation in establishing a climate of prevention as well as redress. We examine the role of the Dutch Working Conditions Act as a means of mitigating workplace bullying from the perspective of legislative intention, processes and outcomes. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in creating, influencing and implementing the Act are analysed thematically to highlight how contextual, employer and phenomenon-specific factors affect the effectiveness of legislation with regard to workplace bullying. The findings indicate that state involvement, organisational commitment and collective action are all important contributors in reducing workplace bullying, but that even in the context of neoliberalism, the role of the nation-state is of critical importance, notwithstanding initiatives by employers.

Australian labour market and industrial relations policies are poised for fundamental change. A combination of political and macroeconomic factors has created a historic opportunity to turn away from the individualised, market-driven labour market policy that has prevailed since the 1980s, in favour of a more interventionist and egalitarian approach. Factors contributing to this moment include the breakdown of bipartisan consensus around key neoliberal precepts; growing public anger over inequality, insecure work and stagnant wages; and a weakening of macroeconomic conditions. Australia’s labour market is now marked by underutilisation of labour in various forms, a deterioration in job quality (especially the growth of insecure and precarious work) and unprecedented weakness in wages. The deterioration in job quality and distributional outcomes is the long-term legacy of the post-1980s shift away from Australia’s earlier tradition of equality-seeking institutional structures and regulatory practices. The current malaise in labour markets should be confronted with a comprehensive strategy to both increase the quantity of work available to Australian workers and improve its quality. The major components of such a strategy are identified, and their prospects considered, in light of the economic and political forces reshaping Australia’s labour market.

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.

This is an edited version of the 2015 Fay Gale Lecture soon after the author’s retirement as Director of the University of South Australia’s Centre for Work + Life. It begins with the author’s personal work reminiscences as a touchstone for reflecting on continuity and change in women’s working lives. A first job in sheep-shearing sheds illustrates the insecurity and hard physical and emotional labour associated with manual work. Despite strides in Australian women’s qualification levels, discrimination is being ‘refreshed and remade’. Examples include recent Australian reversals in paid parental leave policy and the role of sexual harassment in patrolling work boundaries. The institutional basis of unequal pay and inflexible work/family time allocation is demonstrated in the Productivity Commission’s 2015 Workplace Relations agenda. This recommends reduced Sunday penalty rates that will disproportionately affect feminised, low-paid retail and hospitality work and rejects any strengthening of parents’ statutory right to request flexible work arrangements. Three remedies are proposed – creative approaches to research, campaigning and political action.

Throughout the English-speaking world, collective bargaining has commonly been considered to be an option for workers discontent with the default system of management-determined conditions of work. In this article it is argued that, as a universally acclaimed human right, collective bargaining should be considered a minimum condition for everyone employed under standardised conditions of work. The government policy of offering workers a choice to bargain or to refrain from bargaining, in effect in countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, does not meet that standard. Just as the equity goal of governments is the absence of inequality based on traits such as sex and colour, the government bargaining policy goal should be universal collective bargaining. Anything short of universality should be considered a social problem in search of a more effective policy solution.

This article considers the political economy of the Productivity Commission in industrial relations reform; in particular, its review of the industrial relations framework foreshadowed in 2013 and conducted in 2015. Following a history of the establishment of the Productivity Commission and its predecessor agencies, it argues that the concepts of third-party independence and third-party endorsement are important for understanding the role of the Productivity Commission. A review of the politics of industrial relations reform leads into the central analysis of the political economy of the Productivity Commission’s 2015 inquiry into the Australian workplace relations framework. The concepts of third-party independence and endorsement are applied in analysing some of the inquiry’s key recommendations. The conclusion discusses several difficulties in the political economy of the Productivity Commission and its relationships to government and, indeed, to evidence, when the latter contradicted its mainly liberal market stance.

Australian policy on paid parental leave (PPL) has been highly controversial in recent years. While a universal PPL scheme become operative in 2011 under the Australian Labor Party, alternative policies continued to be proposed by the leader of the Liberal Party. These ranged from an expanded, comparatively generous PPL scheme, to one which would maintain the status quo, to a scheme with lesser provisions than are currently available. This article examines the PPL policy which would have provided the most generous entitlements to employees, and considers how public servants may have fared had it been introduced. The proposal would have meant that public servants would no longer have been able to access PPL provisions in their industrial instruments, but would only have been entitled to the legislated provisions. This article assesses whether public servants may have gained or lost under such a change, and then considers the broader issue of the most appropriate avenues to regulate public sector employment conditions. While a rare opportunity for enhanced PPL has been lost, this may be the best outcome in ensuring that unions can continue to bargain collectively for this important provision and ongoing improvements to it.

Wage theft has emerged as a major problem for regulation of work in Australia. Yet, the state has done little to address the issue. In this context, this article considers why there has been recent growth in reported cases of underpayment of wages, particularly of temporary migrant workers, and why the state has failed to implement a strategy to adequately address this problem. The article examines the fragmented nature of employment regulation and visa categories constraining worker agency which, combined with widening avenues for temporary migration, have contributed to the underpayment problem. We also consider how conflicting imperatives of the state, business influence over the policy process and weak political incentives to address underpayment help to account for the state’s inaction.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought industrial relations policy to the centre of attention in many countries. In 2020, the Australian government convened tripartite bodies to address policy in several areas, one being for agreement-making to cover labour on ‘megaprojects’. This initiative revisited criticisms of unions for driving costs up and productivity down on these worksites, the most expensive of which had been Chevron’s Gorgon site, a liquefied natural gas project off the north-west Australian coast. Drawing on four usually siloed literatures – on industrial relations policy, megaprojects, the economic geography of resources and labour process – this article explains concerns about costs, delays and productivity in terms of project work itself. This approach leads to a different understanding of the merits of changing policy to address megaproject’s problems and productivity more broadly.

This is a study of the renegotiation of pay, employment security, and of the relationship between government and public sector unions, in an Australian state public service during and after the global financial crisis. It examines the extent to which this renegotiation of the ‘public service bargain’ was necessitated by austerity requirements, and the extent to which the crisis provided an opportunity for the deprivileging of public employment that has been an enduring feature of the neoliberal state. A case study of the different approaches of two Queensland governments to their relationships with public sector workers between 2009 and 2014, it tracks two key measures of wages and staff numbers, as well as the consequences of breaches of the trust relationships of the traditional public sector bargain. Given the moderate nature of Australia’s economic downturn, the implementation of public service austerity measures was less an economic necessity than an opportunity for a conservative government to alter employment policies and sever union relationships. This continuation of public sector employment relations favoured by previous conservative governments had electoral consequences.

The launch of Organising Works 20 years ago was a key event, not just in the history of Australian trade unions but on a global scale. It marked the beginning of what might be termed the ‘organising turn’, a shift across the international trade union movement towards the greater prioritisation of union organising. This article reviews the 20-year experience of the turn, reflecting upon three of its core attributes. The first is the origin of much activity at the apex of the official trade union movement and the consequences that flow from this point of origin. The second is the emphasis on diversity, with a particular priority in recent times in trying to organise low-wage migrant workers in precarious employment. The final attribute can be labelled ‘neo-syndicalism’. This term refers to a switch towards the ‘internal’ renewal of trade unions and in this regard can be counterposed to attempts at revitalisation that focus on rebuilding relations with government and employers. The article concludes by arguing that organising can and must remain central to union strategy for renewal in Australia and beyond.

L'objet de cet article est d'étudier l'impact de la répartition de la charge des dépenses sociales entre employeurs et employés sur le coût du travail et sur l'emploi. A cet effet, on utilise un modäle de négociations salariales, auquel on intägre une condition d'équilibre budgétaire des comptes sociaux. Il apparaît que l'incidence de la répartition dépend du degré de centralisation des négociations. Ainsi, si les cas polaires de décentralisation totale et de centralisation parfaite permettent de retrouver le résultat usuel de la littérature, à savoir l'absence d'effet de la répartition du financement des dépenses sociales sur l'emploi, la situation de centralisation partielle fait en revanche apparaître un impact de cette répartition. On montre alors qu'une augmentation de la part financée par les cotisations employeurs a un effet favorable sur l'emploi.