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Work Choices in Overview: Big Bang or Slow Burn?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Andrew Stewart
Andrew Stewart*
Affiliation:
School of Law, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA, 5001
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Abstract

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The Work Choices legislation represents a concerted attempt to tilt the balance of labour regulation in favour of employers. It does this by allowing them to offer agreements that reduce or eliminate award or statutory entitlements, by making it harder for both workers and unions to contest management decisions, and by sidelining the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. It also seeks to ‘move towards’ a national system of regulation by providing that the majority of employers will be exclusively subject to federal rather than State regulation, at least for some purposes. Yet for all the radical nature of many of the changes, this is not the ‘big bang’ it might have been. Many features of the old arbitration system have been retained and there are genuine compromises at the heart of some of the changes. It also remains to be seen just how quickly employers will move to exploit the opportunities the new legislation offers, given its complexity, opposition from unions, and indeed the natural pragmatism or conservatism of many managers — and whether this will prompt further intervention by a government that appears uncomfortable with leaving it to employers to make their own choices.

Type
Work Choices: A Critical Analysis
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2: Work Choices: A Critical Analysis , May 2006 , pp. 25 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2006

Footnotes

*

Parts of this article have previously been published on the Federation Press website (http://www.federationpress.com.au) as a Supplement to Creighton and Stewart's Labour Law.

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