This article examines Chinese immigrant engineers’ navigation in the highly flexible information technology (IT) industry in the United States and their strategies of utilizing the high-velocity labour market to their advantage. Flexible employment has grown both in prevalence and prominence in the study of the American IT industry. What flexibility theorists fail to attend to, however, is the ethnicised demission of the high-velocity labour market in the IT sector. To address this vacancy, the researcher conducted a 13-month ethnography at a leading internet-services firm in the United States and 66 additional interviews with engineers from eight leading tech companies. The ethnographic work showed that inequality that emerged within the tech firms (e.g. ‘bamboo ceilings’) disadvantaged Chinese engineers’ career development. The ‘bamboo ceiling’ stimulated Chinese immigrants to use the high-velocity labour market to normalize their job-hopping practices, in order to circumvent their career disadvantage. To facilitate their job-hopping, Chinese engineers developed university-based networks. This study concludes that, with help of their university network, Chinese immigrants became the most mobile group in the US tech industry, which further preserved the industry’s flexibility.

The Your Rights at Work Campaign in the lead-up to the 2007 Australian federal election successfully mobilised a groundswell of community opposition to the radically anti-union Work Choices employment relations legislation of 2005. There were hopes that its successor, the 2009 Fair Work Act, would usher in a new regime of good-faith workplace relations, support for collective bargaining and vulnerable workers’ access to enforceable labour rights. Major gaps are the failure to address workplace power imbalance, especially in small workplaces, and lack of support for employee participation and voice mechanisms. A case is made for the inclusion of such mechanisms in legislative National Employment Standards. The article concludes by arguing that it is a mistake for unions to expect too much from legislation, rather than investing in the pursuit of the sort of community alliances which, after all, have made a restoration of Work Choices untenable.

This paper examines the structure of Australian multi-employer awards. It suggests that these awards do not exhibit occupational, industry or representational concentration and thus follow no clear rational principles. The hybrid award system is sub-optimal and can be explained by employer associations’ neglect in the formative period of arbitration. Multi-employer awards are in need of reform if Australia is to become and remain internationally competitive.

The increase in regular wage employment in the Indian economy between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012 was accompanied by a significant deterioration in job security; more workers found themselves on short-term and insecure contracts – a continuing trend. Insecurity of tenure results in a significant wage penalty for short-term workers, compared with those with longer term contracts. This article estimates the negative effect of short-term contracts on the wages of Indian regular wage workers all along the income distribution – unlike earlier studies – using the method of unconditional quantile regressions on data from the 68th round and the 61st round of the National Sample Survey Organisation on Employment covering the period 2004–2005 and 2011–2012. It finds that the wage penalty due to short-term contracts is higher for high-wage workers than for low-wage workers, with the maximum impact felt by median wage workers, and has increased for higher paid workers from 2004–2005 to 2011–2012. The spread of informal employment arrangements within India’s formal labour markets has resulted in an increasingly unequal distribution of workers’ access to the benefits of growth, reflecting a shift in power in favour of capital. These findings, specific to a developing economy like India, stand in contrast with studies in European countries, where high-wage workers do not face as much of a penalty for short-term contract work as low-wage workers.

The primary aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the merits of enterprise bargaining by providing a wideranging overview. It provides a comprehensive definition of enterprise bargaining which enables a broad range of perspectives to be encompassed and helps to structure the discussion of the immediate context and the wider policy settings of the debate. The paper demonstrates that enterprise bargaining is not new. It identifies a number of current or proposed systems of enterprise bargaining the present federal system, the New South Wales model the BCA proposal the Federal Liberal/National Party approach, and the New Zealand model. These are then evaluated, making use of a simple conceptual framework. The analysis indicates that each system has its advantages and disadvantages, its supporters and critics. Its findings suggest that positive and negative features of all models should be taken into account, not only in the continuing debate on enterprise bargaining, but also in the improvement of existing enterprise bargaining systems and in the design of new models.

In a recent article appearing in this journal, Burgess (1992) argues the case for the immediate introduction of a public sector job creation scheme. He claims that on “both efficiency and equity grounds there is a strong case for public sector job creation schemes (PSJCS)” (p. 116). In this short note, we show that it is extremely unlikely that PSJCS can promote any substantial net job creation which will be sustained beyond the short-term. Moreover, we argue that such schemes typically promote less efficient outcomes. In effect, the case for PSJCS boils down to the equity effects. However, even here the case remains relatively weak given there are considerable doubts whether PSJCS actually impart valuable skills to participants or enhance their employment prospects.

Peak union bodies in Australia have a long and influential history, and most recently have developed an approach to union revitalisation based on community-based campaigning strategies. In responding to labour market changes, declining union membership and hostile governments and employers, peak union bodies have developed new ways to strengthen the collective ability of their affiliated unions to successfully represent members at the workplace level. They have embraced local-level strategies that tap into community concerns and are aimed at capacity building across the labour movement. The resulting grass-roots organisations have the potential to shape both the workplace and the public domain. We explore one example of this approach: the establishment of Local Union Community Councils by Unions NSW. We argue that although peak bodies are well placed to spearhead community campaigning, the grass-roots councils being created will need to progress through several stages of development, if they are to become self-sustaining organisations, contributing effectively over the long term to community mobilisation and stronger, more coordinated union campaigns.

The Howard government’s WorkChoices legislation appeared set to irremediably remake industrial relations in Australia by prioritising individual agreement making (through AWAs) at the expense of Australia’s traditional award systems based on collective bargaining. That government explicitly intended these changes to reduce labour market rewards to, and protections for, low paid and more vulnerable employees. Yet, it also deployed a rhetoric of individual choice in advocating these changes, promoting, in particular, a notion that individual bargaining and agreement making under WorkChoices empowered individual employees by opening opportunities for integrative (mutual gains) bargaining. This article asks what these changes really meant for bargaining between individual employee and employer. We analyse crucial elements of WorkChoices to highlight how its main structural mechanisms intensified employee bargaining weakness in individual bargaining. As well, we use negotiation theory, especially in relation to integrative bargaining, to evaluate the government’s own published advice to individual employees on how to bargain for an AWA. We find that the government explicitly sought to disempower employees through WorkChoices’ additional legal and institutional impediments and also through the concerted attempt at coaching employees to choose a losing path in their AWA negotiations.

Non-compliance with labour standards impedes enforcement of workers’ rights in human resource supply chains. Despite governments’ efforts to improve labour standards and encourage employer-centred voluntary compliance programmes, infringements of workers’ rights are widely reported. Using a qualitative socio-legal study of Chinese seafarers’ workers’ compensation rights, we investigate whether shipping companies and their crewing agencies comply with their legal obligations following workplace injuries and fatalities. Through 74 semi-structured interviews and analysis of crew management policies from 7 shipping companies, we identify a failure of most shipowners’ internal policies to comply with legal obligations. Furthermore, multinational shipping companies use crewing agencies to evade their liabilities to injured seafarers. We propose the establishment of a joint liability mechanism between employers and labour intermediaries to fill this compliance gap that exists in global human resource supply chains.

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.

An integral component of public management reform in Korea has been e-government, a field in which Korea has been a pioneer and in which it is the world leader. This article examines the Korean model of public management reform in the context of the developmental state and democratisation to describe and explain the emergence and expansion of e-government practices. The growth of e-government is tracked and the crucial role of the Ministry of Public Administration and Security delineated. Also covered are Government for Citizens initiatives, the provision of particular services, the mushrooming use of smart phones and emerging patterns of citizen participation, especially as related to local-level governance. The article demonstrates how much can be achieved in e-government and provides a model from which other countries can choose appropriate practices.

Based on the material obtained from focus group interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the article analyses the mechanisms used by employers towards employees, as well as the adaptation strategies applied by those in precarious employment in Poland. The authors’ considerations refer to anti-worker changes introduced under the pretext of the pandemic in the capitalist labour market: layoffs and cuts in wages, manifestations of discrimination against precarious workers and the potential attitudes of employee self-defence. The authors conclude that it is almost certain that under the conditions of post-pandemic capitalism, the number of the precariat will grow and the neoliberal system will want to retain as many of the anti-worker solutions introduced in the shadow of the pandemic as possible.

This article assesses the historical political economy of the Australian automotive industry alongside the paradigmatic policy shift in economic policy away from protection towards neoliberalism and globalisation. It focuses on the politics of policy change and government assistance, providing a detailed historical narrative of the development and decline of the Australian automotive industry. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s, policy-makers oversaw the decline and fall of the Australian automotive industry. The process of decline occurred within a long-term cycle of new assistance, declining protection, new investment, inadequate restructuring, weak profitability, declining market share, and new assistance. Each cycle, however, was unable to stave off renewed crisis and eventual demise. Over the same period, Australian policy-makers transformed the economy from one of the most protectionist in the developed world to one of the most open. The article outlines the impact of neoliberalism on the automotive industry and analyses what the decline of the industry tells us about how the neoliberal policy structure operates in the ‘actually existing’ political economy. It argues that while the burgeoning neoliberal policy structure in the 1980s and 1990s acted to restrict the range of policy choices available for restructuring the industry, the domestic politics of industry assistance acted to restrict the neoliberal colonisation of the policy agenda. Neoliberal governance has had to contend with political imperatives for continuing assistance, while, at the same time, those political imperatives have been increasingly shaped by neoliberalism.

This article provides a brief introduction to a research program which has been under way since 2007 to examine, using data from a large-sample panel survey, whether jobs in Australia are becoming more or less skilful over time. It redefines the debate on deskilling which ran through the 1970s and 1980s by expanding the focus beyond simple job quality to issues of current policy interest, notably the contribution of skill to innovation and productivity. To map this kind of dynamism it is necessary to use a metric capable of capturing change over short periods. This is achieved by adding a third dimension, skill-intensity, to Spenner’s classic definition of skill in terms of two loosely related constructs, worker autonomy/control and substantive job complexity. Data drawn from the first eight waves of HILDA are analysed to demonstrate that this metric is capable of capturing statistically significant change in the average skill content of jobs over much shorter periods than was possible with the metrics used in earlier decades. The broadly parallel aggregate trendlines for skill-intensity and autonomy/control suggest that these two dimensions are linked in the way Spenner suggests, even though major discrepancies appear between them in some industries and occupations.

Sweden has adopted an Active Labour Market Policy as a means of transitioning out of the economic crisis created by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The approach is to a significant extent reminiscent of that adopted following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The article examines the effectiveness of active labour market policy in Sweden over the period 2007–2012. By analysing these earlier policy outcomes, the aim is to assess the success of active labour market policy more broadly. The hypothesis that greater labour market flexibility allows the labour market policy to be more efficient is evaluated. With a focus on the labour supply, possible reasons for the reduced efficiency of state interventions are outlined using regression models. Conclusions derived from the models point to the failure of earlier Swedish active labour market policy towards the vulnerable groups of the unemployed, unemployed women and men aged 15–19 years and the long-term unemployed.

Mainstream economists argue that unemployment must be tackled with ‘flexibilisation’ or ‘labour market deregulation’. The public policy application has been the principle of ‘flexicurity’, with mixed labour market outcomes and limited success. Central contributions to theoretical and empirical economics writing on unemployment issues still espouse ‘flexibilisation’ as a general approach and warn about the detrimental effects of systematic deregulation under expectations of outcomes such as lower unemployment. Departing from a review of this literature, we take a step further from the ‘flexicurity’ prescription, to follow the capabilities approach of Sen and others, and develop a concept of social capabilities – based flexicurity for a learning economy, arguing that labour market performance must be targeted in an approach that includes a strong commitment to social well-being.

This article uses Loïc Wacquant’s concept of the centaur state to analyse symbolic framings of the meaning and future of work in the Australian policy response to COVID-19 in 2020. In contrast with historical conceptualisations anchored in rights and social security, contemporary Australian social welfare policy discourse is dominated by political representations of the imperative to work. For people currently outside of the labour market, self-reliance through paid work is a primary objective of social security policy. In 2020, economic impacts of national lockdowns were ameliorated by large transfers from the state to businesses and individuals. Concurrent announcements of plans for a ‘business-led’ post-pandemic economic recovery centred the message that the meaning of work lies in its individual and social utility. Prior to the pandemic, transformation of the modes of organisation of work had already brought into question normative claims about the meaning of work, and what is comprehended by the term ‘job’. Analysis of key ‘economic recovery’ policy initiatives illustrates that they combined considerable corporate welfare with a construction of job seekers as having unrealistic expectations of meaningful work, for which there could be no room in the institutional machinery driving economic recovery. In the policy trajectory of the Australian centaur state, the future of work for people currently unemployed is to serve as a resource to fuel the business-led recovery.

The title of this article is a riff off a publication of G. C. Harcourt’s 1974 piece, ‘The social consequences of inflation’. He wrote this in a period of the global economy that bears some strong similarities to our own contemporary phase when inflation is suddenly back in the global headlines. There is at least one significant difference: at that time, Harcourt highlighted inflation as the outcome of an excess of total demand in real terms over available supplies of goods and services when the potential workforces and existing stocks of capital goods were fully employed. Current inflationary pressures, by contrast, arise from the combination of specific sectoral supply bottlenecks, rising profit margins in oligopolistic global markets for food and fuel and financial speculation in these markets.

This article provides information concerning various aspects associated with industrial disputes or strikes in Australia in the years 1980 to 1990. Losses to production and output from other sources are compared to those that result from industrial disputation. Australia’s strike record is compared to that of other OECD countries. An explanation is developed concerning Australia’s propensity for a high proportion of short strikes, and disputes which end with a resumption of work without negotiations. The article also explores reasons for the decline in the level of industrial disputation which occurred in Australia during the decade of the 1980s.