This article deals with the rehabilitation of economies in post-conflict states, paying particular attention to the role played by the state in this process. Using the example of Cambodia and its policies on rice production and export, the article shows the prominent role that may be played by the state in prioritised areas of economic development where there has been market failure. In the Cambodian case, the government targeted rice production and export as these had great potential for promoting the major aims of national development policy – economic growth and poverty alleviation. Using a whole-of-government approach and a combination of direct involvement and the creation of an enabling environment, the government appears to have contributed to vastly increased rice production and export.

Japanese car makers were able dramatically to expand their share of the US car market in the seventies and eighties. This was partly the result of their own efforts and partly fortuitous. This paper examines why the US car makers of this period were vulnerable and how the Japanese were able to exploit their own technical and organisational strengths. An understanding of this key period in the history of Detroit’s ‘Big Three’ indicates why some two decades later the US companies found themselves on the brink of corporate ruin.

This paper identifies a model of enterprise bargaining which has recently been advocated by some Australian employer groups. Under this ‘autonomous enterprise’model, ‘genuine’ enterprise bargaining is supposed to produce comprehensive agreements which set terms and conditions of employment which are company-specific. The experience of enterprise bargaining in the Australian domestic airline industry is then compared with that model. It is found that, contrary to the model, the two major airlines have negotiated enterprise agreements which are remarkably similar, with wage increases and workplace reforms following strong industry-wide trends. The explanation offered for the lack of enterprise autonomy focuses on both institutional factors and structural features of the industry’s product

Should the Australian labour movement pursue a system of statutory union recognition? The experiences of the UK and Canada illustrate that such a system can address some of the worst breaches of freedom of association under the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (Cth). However, the influence on union density and collective bargaining coverage is likely to be modest. It may also constitute a structural impediment to multi-employer bargaining, boxing unions into a system of fragmented bargaining, and results are sensitive to institutional design so there could be serious consequences if the system was re-engineered towards the US model in the future.

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is currently being negotiated between the US, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Peru, Chile, Vietnam and Malaysia. The TPPA is intended to multilateralise the bilateral legally binding agreements the US has with four of these countries, including Australia, as the building block for a legally binding Free Trade Agreement in the Asia Pacific area. The TPPA re-opens many of the issues debated in the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement in 2004. These include pressures from US industry groups for changes to Australian regulation like the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, regulation and labelling of genetically engineered foods and local content rules for Australian media. The paper analyses the endurance of the agenda despite the changes of government in the US and Australia since 2004, and discusses the contradictions and uncertainties of the strategy in Australia and in the Asia Pacific.

Government contracts for services typically include terms requiring contractors to comply with minimum labour standards laws. Procurement contract clauses specify reporting procedures and sanctions for non-compliance, implying that government contracting agencies will monitor and enforce minimum labour standards within contract performance management. In this article, the case of school cleaners employed under New South Wales government contracts between 2010 and 2011 is the vehicle for exploring the effectiveness of these protective clauses. We find that the inclusion of these protective clauses in procurement contracts is unnecessary in the Australian context, and any expectations that government contracting agencies will monitor and enforce labour standards are misleading. At best, the clauses are rhetoric, and at worst, they are a distraction for parties with enforcement powers.

Which tasks workers perform in their jobs is critical for how technological change plays out in the labour market. This article critically reviews existing measures of occupational task content and makes the case for rethinking how this concept is operationalised. It identifies serious shortcomings relating to the theoretical content and the empirical implementation of existing measures. Based on survey data from European Union countries between 2000 and 2015, it then introduces novel measures of routine task intensity and task complexity at the International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988 two-digit level that address these shortcomings. The indices will contribute to a more theoretically informed understanding of technological change and benefit both labour economists and sociologists in investigating the nature of recent technological change.

The increase in precarious forms of work has been extensively investigated by scholars. However, the implications of precarity for workers’ education have not been adequately explored. There is a great need for an approach to workers’ education that will advance the social and economic interests of precarious workers and other marginalised communities who are becoming a major segment of the workforce. Based on in-depth interviews, this article identifies education regarding wages, women and work, working conditions, labour laws and practical skills like public speaking, reading and writing as core elements of a curriculum for the education of precarious workers. Given that precarious workers tend not to be organised in formal structures, non-governmental organisations and trade unions will have to reach out to them to make sure that they provide alternative structures able to craft educational programmes that can build the confidence of precarious workers so that they can challenge their precariousness.

Economists tend to have a bias towards faith in market forces. For many economists this is re-enforced by a libertarian social philosophy. Professional judgements made by such economists often reflect their social philosophy as much as the conclusions of purely economic analysis.

Internships are prevalent in new media industries and have become the focus of news reports and popular writings in recent years. This article addresses the gap between intern research and digital labour research. It asks: How are these interns working and living? What are the power dynamics behind interns’ experiences? To what extent can digital labour theories be applied to explore these experiences? Based on empirical research conducted at two Chinese Internet companies, this article shows that interns in Chinese Internet industries experience poor working conditions and difficult living conditions. These are caused by power dynamics within the companies, such as tensions between interns and full-time Internet workers, and power dynamics within Chinese society, such as those between Chinese universities and Internet companies involved in these internships. The article argues that such difficult conditions are caused by Internet companies and the Chinese higher education system, both of which engage in forms of coercion and alienation. Digital labour theories need to take greater account of intern labour and of interns’ experiences of precarious work in the new media industries.

Unemployment is a health hazard. There is increasing Australian and international evidence that people who are unemployed are more likely to have higher rates of mortality, morbidity (illness) and use of health services. The large numbers of people who are unemployed mean that the impacts of unemployment are just not felt at individual or family level but across the population as a whole. This paper outlines the evidence of the impact of unemployment on health and discusses some of the ways in which these health problems could be addressed through reorientation of health services, developing the skills of people who are unemployed, strengthening community action, creating environments that support people who are unemployed and their families, and the development of public policy. It discusses some of the difficulties in undertaking research in this area and calls for a more systematic approach to understanding the cost of unemployment.

The experiences of academics with disability have received modest but growing attention internationally, but virtually none in the Australian context. This article outlines research findings from a study examining their experiences at a large Australian university. The article uses a materialist framework to demonstrate how capitalist social relations shape and demarcate an ‘ideal university worker’, how disabled workers find it difficult to meet this norm, and the limited assistance to do so provided by managers and labour relations policy frameworks. The research findings point to a profound policy gap between employer and government disability policy inclusion frameworks and the workplace experience of academics. This breach requires further investigation and, potentially, the development of alternate strategies for workplace management of disabilities if there are to be inroads towards equity.

The degree to which legislation on labour relations and other societal institutions creates value and mitigates harm is explored in this article through a framework designed to guide both the authoring and the analysis of objects of such legislation. Creating value and mitigating harm are typically explicit in the objects of public policy and implicit in adjudication, administration and adherence under public policies. Although conceptually distinct, creating value and mitigating harm can be both complementary and detrimental to each other. This article reviews various combinations of legislative objects over more than a century of Australian labour and employment relations policy. The objects examined include the prevention of industrial disputes, the introduction of a social minimum wage, the expansion of enterprise bargaining, expansion or curtailment of tribunal powers by government and other developments. Questions of ‘for whom?’ value is created or harm is mitigated are key. As an inductive study, the article concludes with hypotheses to guide future research, including implications that reach beyond Australia and employment legislation.

This article aims to provide insight into the employment relations in China-based multinational companies internationalising to Europe, a still relatively unexplored topic. We investigate the transfer of work and employment practices from Foxconn’s manufacturing headquarters in mainland China to its subsidiaries in Czechia and the factors that influence the firm’s internationalisation of production. By drawing upon original ethnographic fieldwork, the study makes a two-fold contribution. First, it shows the analytical inadequacy of the ‘latecomer’ model which assumes that the Chinese firm is an asset seeker. Second, it illustrates the relevance of diversity of labour and non-institutionalised forms of workers’ agency for theorisation of internationalisation. These topics are still insufficiently addressed by the literature that favours managerial agency and the model of distinctive and stable national labour forces. The study contributes to the theoretical debates on internationalisation by illustrating the limits of the national institutionalist perspective, the importance of considering a multi-scalar analytical framework and the relevance of labour composition in shaping multinational employment relations.

The impact of minimum wage legislation has been widely discussed and is a major concern among labour economists. This article investigates, from economic, legal, international political, trade, and social perspectives, the possibility of decoupling foreign workers’ wages from the minimum wage in Taiwan. The results show that foreign workers’ wages cannot possibly be decoupled from the minimum wage, and foreign workers should not be treated as a separate group of workers in Taiwan’s minimum wage policy.

Microeconomic reform dominated Australian economic policy from the early 1980s until the end of the 20th century. Despite strong claims of success, focusing on the economic expansion since 1992, and rapid productivity growth between 1993–94 and 1998–99, evidence of improvements in the performance of the economy as a whole is weak and inconclusive. For an adequate evaluation of the microeconomic reform period, it is necessary to distinguish several different phases of reform and to evaluate reforms on a case-by-case basis.

The past decade witnessed a wide range of industrial relations reforms in Australia. Employee participation and industrial democracy was espoused by the Labor government (1983–96) as a key element in its workplace reform program. It was also embraced by the trade union movement and, to a lesser extent, by leading employers and their associations. A case study of employee participation in the Ford Motor Company is used to illustrate the process of workplace reform in Australia during this period While Ford Australia provides a positive example of workplace change, it is argued that the promise of employee participation has not generally been fulfilled in Australian industry. Contributing factors identified in the paper include economic recession, the decline of trade union membership and a lack of ‘people’ skills in managerial ranks.

A number of reports have shown that workers with certain characteristics are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since these characteristics are associated with vulnerable workers, we hypothesise that the income distribution in the pandemic era will be polarised compared to the pre-pandemic period. This article compares the pre-COVID income distribution (February 2020) with the one that prevailed just after the hard lockdown (April 2020). Consistent with the hypothesis, the result shows evidence of polarisation. Disaggregating the analysis by worker characteristics, we find that the polarisation was stronger in vulnerable groups. Our decomposition result suggests that, apart from job losses, returns to gender and job characteristics explain the location and shape differences in the COVID-19 era income distribution. Although this analysis only looks at the short-term effect of the pandemic on income distribution, the result suggests that the structure of labour markets in developing countries is not conducive to a future of work where disruptions (or pandemics) may become more frequent.

The introduction of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) heralded a methodological innovation for the study of Indian labour, allowing the researcher to build panels tracking urban individuals over a year. Using two rounds of the PLFS covering the periods 2017–18 and 2018–19, we construct a pooled panel of urban Indian individuals aged 15–65 and focus on women’s experiences in the labour force. We find evidence of low dynamism in the Indian economy, with women facing significant difficulties regarding labour force participation. While a majority of women remain outside the labour force throughout the year, those who do participate face significant disadvantages. Job-finding rates for women are half that of men, indicating weak demand for women’s labour in the economy. Women face significant exits from both employment and unemployment, with nearly 18% of employed women leaving their jobs and moving to non-participation over the year. Women’s relative disadvantages persist even when age and education are considered, with the lowest job-finding rates seen for young and graduate women, and rates of labour force exit much higher than that of men. This paper highlights the importance of looking at demand side questions when it comes to examining women’s labour force participation.

By analysing the recent emerging labour movement of Korean digital game workers, this article seeks to explore a relatively novel issue – the importance of a politics of body in digital labour. By employing Elaine Scarry’s concept of ‘language of agency’ and ‘analogical substantiation’, the article first investigates how digital game workers express their work experiences and their embodied pain by analysing the mechanism of ‘crunch’ practice. Second, by examining ‘karoshi (overwork to death)’ and a series of suicides of digital game workers in Korea, it seeks to explore the problem of death as the final form of bodily pain – focusing on how these death events led workers to develop new forms of politics and solidarity by organising labour unions. Finally, by analysing the newly established digital game worker unions’ opposition to the violation of worktime regulation as a ‘struggle for recognition’, this research illuminates how digital game workers not only acquire self-respect but also achieve social recognition for their bodies as working labour. By examining this labour union organisation practice in Korea, the study ultimately argues that recognising the politics of body in digital labour offers the possibility that an emerging social category of precariat can actually co-exist and connect with the existing social class of proletariat.