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.

Financialisation and financial risk have become current buzzwords, but the connections between finance and labour are not well developed. Often labour is cast simply as the distributional victim of developments like shareholder value, the privatisation of public infrastructure and labour market reform. This article engages developments in the construction industry and locates a growing financial logic inside ‘production’ and work in that sector. Through the concepts of liquidity and risk, we identify causal connections, not just parallels, between financial innovation and the reorganisation of the logic and structure of work in the Australian construction and property services industry.

The process of financialisation has been cast as a major contributor to increasing inequality of wealth and income in a number of advanced industrialised economies, but the nature of the link requires precise clarification. In this article, we argue that financialisation in Australia has advanced inequality, but in a particular way. Charting several features of ‘financialisation of the macroeconomy’, we accept that this process has contributed to increased inequality in the sense that the wealthy have increased their wealth faster than households and individuals at the lower end of the wealth distribution. However, there is limited Australian evidence to suggest that income redistribution has occurred as a result of the ‘financialisation of the firm’. At the level of the firm, increased inequality of wealth can be attributed directly to financialisation if firm practices are oriented to increasing shareholder value at the expense of returns to other stakeholders such as workers or suppliers, and increased income inequality can be linked specifically to financialisation through increases in earnings to financial agents. We suggest several reasons for the relative absence of a firm-level dimension of financialisation but caution that such a trend remains possible, particularly if regulation of the labour market is weakened.

In the absence of government safety regulation in the field of nanotechnology, ISO standards are being used as the basis for establishing technical and management guidelines at an international level. There are more than 50 current ISO standards on nanotechnology. Some of these relate to the working environment and occupational risk management. In Latin America, entities that are members of ISO are enunciating national versions of the international standards. In this article, this context is analysed critically, starting from the Mexican standard on occupational risk management in the working environment. Even though risk management standards may guarantee better and safer working conditions, in the field of nanotechnology, they simultaneously unlock detrimental implications for workers and society. Reliance on such private and voluntary forms of industry self-regulation is identified as a by-product of global neoliberalism.

The rapid liberalisation of trade policies since the 1990s has brought additional attention to the role of trade as an engine of economic growth. Although an abundant literature addresses the relationship between openness and economic growth, the real effect of trade liberalisation is still ambiguous and undetermined. Most previous studies have ignored the selection effects of strict labour regulations on international trade. The main objective of this study is to measure the role of labour regulations in moderating the contribution of trade to economic growth among 30 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for the period 2006–2013. In doing so, we employ a one-step Generalised Method of Moments system estimation method. Our results reveal that openness to trade does not have a robust and significant effect on growth. However, the interaction of openness with strict labour regulations enhances the contributions of trade to growth.