Beyond Employment: The Legal Regulation of Work Relationships (original) (raw)
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Comparative Political Economy: Regulation eJournal, 2020
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Over the last f ifteen years, Australia’s labour relations system has been totally transformed – from a highly centralised system based primarily on the determination of wages and working conditions through industrial tribunals, to one centred on decentralised bargaining at the workplace or enterprise level.1 In the early stages of this transition, ‘enterprise bargaining’ remained overwhelmingly collective in nature. Increasingly, however, it has taken on an individualist orientation. These changes, and the move away from Australia’s traditional approach to regulating employment relations through prescriptive ‘awards’ and the conciliation and arbitration of industrial disputes, have been facilitated by legislative reforms at both Federal and State levels. Conservative (or ‘Coalition’) and Labor governments alike have sponsored the reform process, although the Coalition has driven it more vigorously and more radically – especially since its election to Federal Government in 1996. Thr...
Introduction: workplace relations in Australia
Australian Workplace Relations
Our field of study was for a long time referred as industrial relations or labour relations, and in Australia these designations remained unchallenged until the early 1980s, when employer organisations-particularly the then newly formed Business Council of Australia (BCA) and later right-wing think tanks, such as the HR Nicholls Society-challenged what they regarded as the anachronistic and obstructionist collectivist/class conflict paradigm of the 'industrial relations club' (Stone 2006). In Australia, possibly the most influential and coherent critique was that provided under the auspices of the Business Council of Australia (BCA) (1989). The BCA posited a model of employee relations that looked very much like an Australian version of strategic human resources management (SHRM) (Beer et al. 1984), and this led the BCA to advance two key propositions: first, that the key to enterprise success is in finding competitive advantage; and second, that in the relationship between employer and employees, there is no room for third parties. In other words, in employment regulation unions, industrial tribunals-and even employer associations-were a distraction, or at worst an interference. While the term 'employee relations' continues to have currency in the Australian academic literature, its usage does not imply endorsement of a particular reform agenda; rather, it emphasises the shift in focus to the employment relationship. In Australia more recently, the term 'workplace relations' has emerged to describe the changing field of study to which this book is devoted-for example, issues associated with monitoring and surveillance and employee voice are very much workplace relations issues rather than institutional aspects of the workplace in the twenty-first century. Significantly, the term 'workplace relations' has also found favour with both of the major political parties. A useful feature of terms such as 'employee relations' and its derivative, 'employment relations', is that they explicitly place our study in an international context, and thus open the way to a consideration of the impact of both international competition and the financial sector. Indeed, far from international political economy being peripheral to the study of workplace relations, Chapter 1 demonstrates the centrality of the global economy. Another attribute of these newer usages is that they place employment relationships at the centre of the study-though this focus increasingly has to be recast, as we explain a little later, and this opens the way to a consideration of the literature on the nature of work and work organisation. Such studies are truly cross-disciplinary, being informed by the disciplines of politics, sociology and even anthropology. Returning to the issue of the employment relationship and its limitations, it has widely been acknowledged that, while most people in Australia still perform paid work under the terms of a contract of employment, self-employment-whether genuinely on 'own account' work or as a 'dependent' contractor-is an increasingly common form of paid activity in Australia and many other places. Indeed, in many developing economies, waged (time-based) work is not the dominant form of employment relationship. For example, in Vietnam-a country with close connections to Australia-it is estimated that the informal economy accounts for more than 82 per cent of all jobs (Cling, Razafindrakoto & Roubaud 2010). While many people