In spite of the upturn in the economy and in employment that has been observed in the EU since 2013 to 2019 (and after COVID-19 crisis), the gap between the figures for indicators of economic growth and those for the trends in domestic living conditions continues to be very wide; growth and newly created jobs are not resulting in a generalised improvement in the welfare of the population. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the recovery period after the Great Recession has not been one of truly inclusive recovery and to provide tentative explanations for this. We focus on the five main EU countries before Brexit. We conclude that the incidence of poverty associated with part-time work is now somewhat greater (‘in-work poverty’) and also that there has been strong containment of wages in the leading countries of the EU over the period under study, and even falls in real wages. At least, redistribution policies have shown themselves to be effective in reducing poverty.

Indigenous employment has attracted an increasing focus in recent decades from policy-makers, in the context of the gap between national rates of Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment. Non-Indigenous businesses are implementing a series of workplace and recruitment policies to enhance their rates of Indigenous employment, yet there is limited research demonstrating the impact of these policies. This paper uses primary survey data from a representative sample of Australian-based non-Indigenous-owned businesses to detail how Indigenous-focused workplace and recruitment practices are associated with Indigenous employment and retention. Descriptive analysis reveals that businesses with a workforce with 3.8% or more Indigenous employees (3.8% being the most recent Indigenous population proportion estimate) are more likely to maintain a series of Indigenous-specific workplace and recruitment practices, including celebrating NAIDOC, having a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), and cultural competency training, compared to businesses with fewer than 3.8% Indigenous employees. Businesses with higher Indigenous employee retention rates similarly demonstrate a higher likelihood to maintain these policies; however, the clearest delineation for businesses with 3.8% or more Indigenous employment and high Indigenous staff retention, is the presence of Indigenous management within these businesses. Revealingly, probit regression models demonstrate that Indigenous manager/s in a business are associated with a 50–60% higher probability of maintaining an Indigenous employment rate of 3.8% or above and an 11–16% lower probability of having poor Indigenous staff retention. Therefore, this paper reveals the importance of having Indigenous people in positions of organisational influence within non-Indigenous organisations, more so than implementing isolated workplace strategies.

This longitudinal and empirical study compares Australian labour enforcement, predominantly between the New South Wales (NSW) and Commonwealth jurisdictions. It documents the volume of enforcement litigation, inspection and arrears recovery within an Australian state for the first time. These enforcement activities are then compared to equivalent Commonwealth labour enforcement over time, with a particular focus on the activities of the federal inspectorate since the Commonwealth takeover of industrial relations in 2005. This comparison enables three significant claims. First, that contemporary labour enforcement activities have not kept pace with those conducted by inspectorates in the early to mid-twentieth century, most of which were performed by the States. Second, that enforcement has always been a significant part of the Australian industrial relations landscape, reinforcing the conciliation and arbitration system, particularly within the States. And third, those high levels of regulation and labour enforcement played a role in reducing social inequality throughout the mid-twentieth century.

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.

Many countries use employer-sponsored visas to regulate migrant worker recruitment. By tying each sponsored migrant to a single employer, employer-sponsored visas have contributed to problems of workers being underpaid and mistreated. Through a critical assessment of temporary visas in Australia, particularly the Temporary Skill Shortage visa, and an analysis of relevant Australian and international literature, we argue that employer-sponsored visas are fundamentally flawed in their design and should be replaced. We consider various alternative options to employer sponsorship for regulating migrant worker recruitment before proposing the creation of a ‘mobility visa’, which would allow migrant workers to move freely between employers. We argue a mobility visa is a superior model for protecting worker equity and voice while also helping to address labour market needs.

This paper draws on Marxist scholarship concerning the law's emancipatory potential to shed new light on the history of UK trade unions, and their relationship with law. It traces the historical development of UK trade union law from the nineteenth century to the present day with a view to illustrating the importance of considering not just the content, but also the form, of law, in explaining the role of law in shaping the development of the trade union movement, and in understanding the limits of law, including human rights law, when it comes to realising the emancipatory potential of trade unions in society today. It concludes with some observations about how legal and social actors might make use of their understanding of the legal form when it comes to harnessing the law as part of their political strategies.

Falling membership numbers and declining union density are issues of concern for many Australian unions. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that between 2005 and 2008, trade union membership declined from 22.4% to 18.9% of the workforce. Studies and statistics consistently show that union membership and density are lowest in Western Australia, despite trend reversals elsewhere. Using the Western Australian branches of two ‘blue-collar’ unions – the Australian Rail, Tram and Bus Industry Union, Western Australian Branch and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, covering a range of transport, metal working, printing and manufacturing trades – as examples, this article examines whether privatisation has contributed significantly to falling trade union density and membership in this state. These unions represented large public sector workforces. In order to test the hypothesis that privatisation has adversely affected union membership and density, the article examines three areas: changing policies in the Australian Labor Party, the breaking down of union culture and changes in trade training, and concludes that privatisation is a significant factor in the recent decline of these two unions.

This historical paper analyses the distributional consequences of computerisation on the wage share of income in United Kingdom (UK) workplaces in the first decade of this century. The reasons why computerisation might increase a firm’s income but reduce the share assigned to wages are still not well understood. The uniquely rich Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004–2011 includes firm-level measures of the main production inputs and outputs, and thus allows an analysis of the main mechanisms through which increased computer usage influenced the wage share of income in UK workplaces over this period. This analysis shows that the proportion of employees using computers impacted the wage share in ways that were at odds with two mainstream views: that computers complement capital, and that labour can be easily replaced by capital. The results show that the proportion of employees using computers reduced the wage share by disproportionally increasing the productivity of the least skilled employees, who were not proportionally compensated for their increase in productivity. The stability of the wage share, over the period of interest, is explained by the rise in a workplace’s share of professional employees and by a rise in work effort. This positive contribution to the wage share was counteracted by an increased share of employees using computers and by a reduction in the share of employees whose pay was negotiated by unions, thereby contributing to a decline in the wage share of firm income.

The ‘gig economy’ uses digital platforms to bypass many of the regular responsibilities and costs of employment. Ambiguity as to whether gig-economy workers are independent contractors, dependent contractors or employees allows the undermining of traditional labour standards governing minimum wages and other legislated employment conditions. Labour law and institutions need to catch up to the new reality of this form of work and develop new tools to protect and enhance minimum standards for workers in digital platform businesses. Unions, business and government all have a role to play in the long term. Meanwhile, direct engagement between these new firms and workers’ advocates can also help to mitigate the risks posed to labour standards by digital business models, by addressing regulatory gaps. This article is a case study of innovative negotiations between one platform business (Airtasker) and Unions New South Wales, a peak trade unions body in New South Wales, Australia, in order to establish agreed minimum standards for engagements negotiated through this platform.

This article presents an historical and comparative analysis of the bargaining power and agency conferred upon migrant workers in Australia under distinct policy regimes. Through an assessment of four criteria – residency status, mobility, skill thresholds and institutional protections – we find that migrant workers arriving in Australia in the period from 1973 to 1996 had high levels of bargaining power and agency. Since 1996, migrant workers’ power and agency has been incrementally curtailed, to the extent that Australia’s labour immigration policy resembles a guest-worker regime where migrants’ rights are restricted, their capacity to bargain for decent working conditions with their employers is truncated and their agency to pursue opportunities available to citizens and permanent residents is diminished. In contrast to recent assessments that Australia’s temporary visa system is working effectively, our analysis indicates that it is failing to protect temporary migrants at work.

Every year, there are over 200 traumatic deaths at work in Australia. A government safety inspector usually investigates each incident. The investigation may lead to prosecution of the employer or another party deemed to have breached relevant legislation. However, little systematic research has examined the needs and interests of grieving families in this process. Drawing on interviews with 48 representatives of institutions that deal with deaths at work (including regulators, unions, employers, police and coronial officers), this article examines how they view the problems and experiences of families. Notwithstanding some recent improvements, findings indicate ongoing shortcomings in meeting the needs of families regarding information provision, involvement and securing justice.

Supply chain security presents numerous challenges to governments interested in defending against terrorist threats. While most approaches stress technological solutions, scholars and policy-makers tend to overlook economics, labour market issues, and industrial relations. Applying agency theory from behavioural economics, this article analyses threats to the US supply chain and opportunities for efficient solutions. Using data from a sophisticated web-based survey of owner-operator cost-of-operations, it shows that drayage drivers are among the lowest paid truck drivers and workers in the US. We provide evidence that low pay is associated with both safety and security risk. Low-wage labour and subcontracting present challenges to US and foreign supply-chain security because the market attracts workers who have few other employment options. In this environment, principals and agents currently make inefficient and inequitable contracts because markets do not reflect the complete costs associated with low-probability/high-impact events like cargo theft and transport security.

Casual employment in Australia is more prevalent than temporary work in most European nations, and casual employees have fewer rights and entitlements than comparable temporary employment categories in Europe. Yet, despite Australia’s long history of industrial activism and political representation of labour, there are fewer examples of social or political movements in Australia resisting precarious work than in Europe. This article provides a partial explanation of this puzzling lack of social resistance to casual employment. It begins from the idea, developed by the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory, that economic systems can create or sustain norms that conceal their more harmful social effects from public view. It then uses conceptual categories drawn from critical social theory to show how individual and social costs of casual employment have been overlooked or ‘reified’ in the workplace and in public political discourse. The study is based on existing qualitative research and on a new analysis of attitudes to work and economic organisation in Australian public discourse.

There are two discursive frameworks concerning ideology in Australian industrial relations. In many disciplines concerned with aspects of industrial relations, including political science, law and history, it is the traditional political ideologies of the industrial era which take centre stage: liberalism (classical, social and neoliberalism), socialism (Marxism, social democracy and labourism) and conservatism. By contrast, ideological issues in the discipline of employment relations are chiefly addressed in terms of Fox’s three analytical perspectives: unitarism, pluralism and radicalism. The disjunction between these parallel discourses goes largely unnoted in the literature of the relevant disciplines, which all tend to proceed using their own preferred approach without making reference to the other. This article critically explores the relationship between these two discourses and investigates the broader implications that the existence of the two different discursive traditions has for the analysis of industrial relations phenomena in Australia.

In investigating recent changes to the automotive industry production process, such as modularisation, our work emphasises the process of fragmentation of production as a configuring element of inter-firm power relationships, and as an explanatory element in working conditions. From a theoretical framework focused on power relations, we analyse by way of a selected case study how the capabilities of companies and their network positions, together with the agency of labour, shape the power relations that influence the evolution of working conditions. The study does indeed find relevant changes to inter-firm relationships, for example, within networks of assemblers and suppliers, but without a consequent re-balancing of power. This finding serves to explain differences in the evolution of working conditions between distinct companies, these conditions being fully functional to a strategy for profitability and thus difficult to reverse.

Irresponsible lending practices on the part of financial institutions and proliferation of tradable derivatives were key causal agents of the 2008 financial crisis. However, it is less clear why, historically, loose credit arrangements were so widespread. Somewhat misleadingly, much conjecture has laid blame at the feet of financial institutions themselves. While it is true that duplicitous and even corrupt lending practices were consequential antecedents of the crisis, a legacy commitment to certain – laudable – elements of New-Dealism created context for these elements to become established. To understand really what went wrong, it is necessary to look back before the 2000s and appreciate the interaction that was occurring between a long-term policy commitment to neoliberalism and piecemeal/fragmented application of approaches that aimed to assist financially disadvantaged people. Using the analogy of heart-attack pathology to guide some of its analysis, this essay argues for better policy-integration.