The United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) has recently incorporated driver pay into its guidelines on the promotion of safe and decent work in road transport. ILO guideline 73 states that ‘the remuneration of … CMV [commercial motor vehicle] drivers should be sustainable and take into consideration the attractiveness and sustainability of the industry’. In the spirit of this, we explore the relationship between truck drivers’ relative income and intrastate motor carrier safety performance. We utilise the United States (US) Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage data for heavy and tractor-trailer truck driver median annual incomes and the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimates of median household incomes to construct county level relative income ratios for truck drivers. This information is merged with public safety data to analyse the relationship between truck drivers’ relative pay and motor carrier safety performance. We find that, all else constant, carriers located in counties where driver earnings are relatively high tend to experience fewer crashes. This provides evidence that safety performance is better when driver pay is more attractive in the truck driver labour market and, consequently, validates the ILO’s assertion under guideline 73.

Indigenous-owned businesses in Australia are strong employers of Indigenous people, maintaining rates of Indigenous employment that are not seen across the breadth of the Australian economy. Despite an increasing focus from governments and private organisations to improve rates of Indigenous employment, there is limited evidence to suggest that substantial improvements are being made. Despite acknowledgement from government of the crucial role played by Indigenous employers in creating Indigenous employment, there has been little focus on what may be learned from the Indigenous business sector in informing public and private Indigenous workplace and recruitment policies. Given the significantly strong levels of Indigenous employment in Indigenous-owned businesses, it is important to interrogate the extent to which this employment differs from that in non-Indigenous businesses and the potential explanations for such divergence. Using data from Supply Nation (2,291 Indigenous-owned businesses) and a survey of 680 non-Indigenous businesses, this paper finds that Indigenous businesses employ Indigenous people at a rate 12 times higher than non-Indigenous businesses. Regression analyses and Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions reveal that these divergent employment outcomes cannot be explained by the broad characteristics of the two sectors (such as industry, location, or profit status). These findings help confirm that the unique workplace practices of Indigenous businesses may explain their strong Indigenous employment and, therefore, provide the template for all Australian businesses to be better employers of Indigenous people.

Commercial motor vehicle driving is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. The production of most trucking services takes places on public roadways, which makes commercial motor vehicle safety a topic of concern for industry stakeholders, supply chain operations, policy makers, and the general public. This study explores the relationship between new employee driver compensation and for-hire interstate truckload motor carrier crash incidence. The results suggest that, all else constant, higher benefits are associated with fewer crashes. While mileage pay rates predict crashes, we find that higher mileage rates can be correlated with either higher or lower crash frequency – depending on the carrier’s existing starting pay level. This may be due to pernicious incentives created by piece-rate pay structures, because drivers who have more unpaid non-driving work time may earn a slightly higher mileage pay rate, which only partially compensates them for unpaid labour time. Regardless, these results suggest that compensation is an important predictor of safety and the existing pay practices in the industry may be unsafe. It also suggests that the role of compensation in motor carrier safety performance deserves further exploration with better quality data–especially full documentation of hours of work and pay rates.

This article argues for domestic legislative regulation of global value chains to protect offshore workers. First, it outlines the policy reasons necessitating such legislation. Empirical evidence confirms that global value chains are a dominant feature of the global economy. It is contended that lead firms wield influence in global value chains in a manner which leads to poor outcomes for offshore workers. Second, the article sets out the minimum steps necessary for a domestic state to attribute the responsibility for transparency of global value chains to lead firms. Then, it proceeds to explore the possibilities and limits of the proposed scheme of regulation. Despite some complexities with implementing the scheme, it is argued that if domestic legislative regulation of global value chains strengthens even to a small extent the monitoring of global labour issues, it is worth pursuing.

This article introduces a Special Collection of four articles that highlight responses by working women collectively and individually to forces accelerated by the recent global crises. It draws out common themes from accounts of African women’s responses to harassment at work, of the links between union representation and pay equity in Brazil and South Africa and of Australian women’s quest for flexible and fair work/family arrangements. From these perspectives, the article sets out a five-point research agenda to help empower women’s collective and individual agency in response to working conditions shaped by global economic and social forces.

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.

There exists a gap at the intersection of Australia’s immigration and employment laws that has serious implications for employees, employers and policy. Australia is host to a large and growing population of immigrants working without authorisation, described as the most significant problem facing Australian immigration authorities. These undocumented workers are often exploited by employers through wage theft, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions. Yet, they are not entitled to protection under Australia’s employment laws. In addition to the implications for workers, there are broader policy concerns arising from the current system of regulation that effectively rewards employers who are equally in breach of immigration law. Left uncorrected, current regulation may in fact be encouraging a ‘race to the bottom’ for employment standards and increasing undocumented immigrant work. As well as highlighting the inadequacy of the existing regulatory framework, potential avenues for addressing this are explored.

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.