Deregulating Australian Labour Relations

Keith Hancock is honoured and celebrated in this work, following the significant contributions he made not only to academic research and teaching, but also to the practice of industrial relations, through the various roles he held as Professor, Vice-Chancellor, Senior Deputy President of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and author of major government reviews and inquiries.The workshop held in his honour included a number of commentators. More specifically, the following issues arising from the papers were actively debated:Whether a decentralised and less regulated labour marketing is a necessary condition for meeting the requirements of global competition The effects of labour market deregulation on employment and the nature of employment on income distribution on wage inequality, on productivity, on work stress and on job satisfaction The consequences of labour market deregulation for Australians' work/care regime The impact of labour market deregulation on trade unions Whether macro-economic, policy has been unduly restrained by the risk of inflation in a deregulated labour market How labour market deregulation has affected industrial relations as a field of study and research, and How the nature of rights and obligations of employers, employees and unions have been affected by the changes in labour market regulation. Contributors include Keith Hancock, Ron McCallum, Barbara Pocock, Peter Saunders, Ron Callus, Sue Richardson, RG Gregory, Rae Cooper and Willy Brown.

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The Employment Contract in Transforming Labour Relations provides a world-wide analysis of the changing role of the contract of employment in modern societies. The central question in this book is whether the contract of employment still serves its traditional purpose in a period marked by the so-called `globalisation of the economy' with the concomitant calls for flexibility in and deregulation of the labour markets in capitalist countries. Highly regarded authors from a number of European countries, as well as Japan, Australia and the United States, have contributed to this exciting comparative exercise which provides vital reading for anyone interested in the restructuring which labour relations must undergo to meet the demands of a newly emerging (post) industrial society.

This book examines how businesses manage their labour systems, and particularly how they manage the complex interaction of factors which give rise to instances of 'partnership' style relations between businesses and their employees. The book draws from the literature concerning 'Varieties of Capitalism' (VoC) and the different institutional and regulatory designs inherent in different types of political economy. The book is informed by a new and extensive set of empirical data from Australia that examines the activities of national and multinational business corporations, their outlooks and relationships with stakeholders, and relates these to new and evolving theoretical frameworks based in political economy and law. The book places the Australian regulatory model within this international debate, and assesses the extent to which the system does or does not fit into the general categorisation created in the VoC literature.

While legislation protecting employees exists in most advanced countries, the notion of who actually is an employee has become unstable. Moreover, the decentralization of traditional collective bargaining is clearly under way everywhere, and the all-important balance between workers' security and employers' flexibility continues to change radically, either retreating toward individual statutory rights or seeking new forms of employee representation. Labour Law in Motion reprints sixteen reports originally submitted to the seventh Comparative Labor Law Seminar (Tokyo Seminar) sponsored by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training in March 2004. Eleven expert authors describe the situation in their respective countries with regard to issues such as the following:criteria used to determine whether a person is an employee;what categories of non-employee exist, and what measure of statutory protection is afforded to such persons;variations in the concept of employee among labour law, tax law, and social security law;regulation of terms and conditions of employment; the forms and legal nature of employee representation;current trends in deregulation or `re-regulation' of labour laws;mechanisms permitting deviation from legal norms; and,the manner and extent of labour law intervention in the labour market. All eleven authors emphasize recent and ongoing changes in their countries' labour laws and evaluate the factors that have contributed to such changes. Each author concludes that reform of traditional labour laws is indeed necessary. However, the book as a whole clearly demonstrates that the content of such reform differs from country to country, particularly in the extent to which labour law entrusts the regulation of working conditions to the market. Offering as it does a clear and concise summary of the recent and current experience of labour relations in eight major industrialized countries, Labour Law in Motion is an essential resource for professionals and officials engaged in any aspect of labour law or regulation in any country.