The aim of the article is to analyse the functions that dividends perform in contractual relationships between public companies’ executives and shareholders. The author analyses the income function of dividend, but also considers its sociological aspects. Talcott Parsons' social system theory is the main point of reference, especially, the concept of contract institution. The article justifies the thesis on the relevance of dividends in shaping the equilibrium of power, information policy and the composition of shareholders in a joint-stock company. Dividend policy has a great regulatory potential, which is important in the face of various crises occurring in contemporary capitalism.

This study addresses the question of whether self-identified LGBT status has some power to explain differences between the earnings of male LGTB workers and their occupational counterpart non-LGBT male workers in the Pakistan labour market. The Pakistan labour market is known to be ‘traditional’ in the sense that its operations and the attitudes of participants reflect the confluence of various sociological, political, religious, cultural and patriarchal systems. However, the quantitative significance, if any, of overt sexual orientation and its correlation with earnings remains unclear. This study addresses that question. We find that employed male workers in our sample who are known to be (or thought by employers to be) members of the LGBT community experience significant earnings disadvantages relative to counterpart heterosexual workers.

Despite its greatly weakened condition, could organised labour again be counter-hegemonic to and ultimately transformative of capitalism? Or is the current crisis, a crisis of collapse of manufacturing and wages and under-consumption due to the loss of redistributive power by key socio-political agents, possibly the final crisis of unionism, as argued by Wolfgang Streeck? Some on the political left, such as Streeck, argue that a new phase has been reached where redistributive and oppositional power of organised labour has been not just defeated but destroyed, with enormous consequences for the future of workers and capitalism itself. This article rejects such an overly pessimistic interpretation and asks what the possibility is of the labour movement’s again playing its historic role of transforming capitalism. It explores the potential role of organised labour in re-embedding the economy within democratic society, as Karl Polanyi argued, and building a socio-economic structure that is both stable and enhancing of social and environmental health. This problem is approached through a critique of the theories of Polanyi and Streeck and an examination of the unfortunate embrace of labourism and accommodation to neo-liberalism in the Australian labour movement.

I count it a great privilege to contribute the opening essay to this issue of The Economic and Labour Relations Review, which is celebrating its first 20 years. Over that time, the journal has been an outlet for independent and outspoken, often unfashionable views, upholding traditions steeped in the thoughts of Michal Kalecki and Maynard Keynes, and some of Australia’s wisest economists. (Even Karl Marx gets a mention.) I am most grateful to the editors for asking me to be their opening bat.

The Swedish industrial relations system has undergone significant changes in the past decade, as employers have vigorously pursued a strategy to decentralise the collective bargaining process. Issues of co-worker agreements and pay equity dominated the 1993 bargaining round, with employers seeking to limit the unions’ role to the enterprise level. Union membership levels, however, have remained high and there has been greater cooperation between blue and white collar union groups. The return of a Social Democratic led Government may see greater support for national agreements and representative forms of participation.

This article addresses the potential of the Fair Work Act’s good faith bargaining provision to enhance good faith bargaining and employment relationships, using New Zealand’s good faith provisions under the Employment Relations Act 2000 as a comparative frame of reference. It explores the limitations of the Fair Work Act’s compliance-based approach to good faith, which consists mainly of the parties presenting a legally defensible appearance of not acting in bad faith. In contrast, the New Zealand legislation aims to suffuse good faith with considerable content and definition, enabling parties to the employment relationship to extend good faith well beyond bargaining. In contrast to the Employment Relations Act, the formalistic, procedural approach promoted by the Fair Work Act is unlikely to encourage a significant cultural change towards meaningful good faith principles and practices.

One of the biggest challenges faced by India today is to generate quality employment. Even in areas of rapid per capita income growth, typified by the Gujarat model of neoliberal state-sponsored technological development, there is a substantial and increasing decent work deficit. Across India more generally, the decent work deficit is, in fact, growing along several dimensions, leading to ‘growth without development’ or ‘non-inclusive growth’. This article analyses quality of employment in India across subnational spaces – among states and between rural and urban locations – using three International Labour Organisation decent work dimensions: ‘employment opportunity’, ‘social security benefits’ and ‘social dialogue’. The analysis is based on published government data, for the period 1993–1994 to 2011–2012 – the period covered by the liberalisation experiment. The conclusion is that economic growth has not contributed significantly to employment quality. Although employment opportunity is significantly higher in the developed states, coverage of social security benefits and scope for social dialogue among regular salaried/wage workers are significantly less in these areas than in underdeveloped regions. Indeed, employment opportunity is significantly higher in rural areas, and the condition of workers in urban areas is not significantly better than in rural locations. Furthermore, over time, the difference in quality of employment across subnational spaces has either increased or remained stagnant.

In recent migration research temporality has become a prominent figure. Focussing on temporality allows to shed light on some aspects of labour mobility that enlighten our understanding of work-related conflicts. Especially with view to labour market inclusion, migrants often experience the (assumed) temporal limitation and unpredictability of migration projects, work and residence permits, as well as employment relationships. Correspondingly, labour policies, sector-specific company structures and management techniques also have a temporal dimension (time limits, seasonality, outsourcing schemes), which have effects on conflicts in and around work. Furthermore, one has to situate labour and labour migration within its context of social reproduction in order to better understand, how paid wage labour is embedded in social activities and networks such as households, families and communities, and shaped by the social, developmental and migratory policies that condition workers’ labour market inclusion. This conceptual paper argues that for migrants in particular, the (assumed) temporal limitation and unpredictability of migration projects, work/residence permits, and employment relationships is of great importance when it comes to analysing conflict-ridden negotiations over labour relations and working conditions.

The article raises questions about how the economic crisis is being played out ‘in place’, taking an embodied, generational and gender perspective. ‘Place’ is used in a political context by examining how global realities are experienced in place, and the author argues the need to look at the everyday realities of the crisis from a gendered ontological perspective in order to counter grand narratives of gloom and doom where women (whether old, young, migrant, heterosexual or otherwise) are particular victims. By discussing local contexts of the gendered realities of the crisis in three southern Europe areas, the author shows the possibility of changing the crisis narrative from one of overwhelming paralysis to one of potential transformation. The focus is on the rise of resistance, solidarity economies and new types of communities in the search by women in southern Europe for alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.

The 1989 Green Paper Transforming Industrial Relations in New South Wales, advanced 99 recommendations across a range of concerns. Some were quite prosaic, such as the scope for legal representation in tribunal proceedings and redrafting the regulations to the enabling legislation. Other measures, such as those to do with union amalgamations, OH&S in small business, and pay equity addressed problems specific to a system that was, at that time, the least reviewed in Australia. A third group of recommendations, which are more interesting in the current Australian policy climate, addressed the key design features of how an industrial relations system could be best made fit for purpose in a competitive world.

Most of the proposed changes were implemented, either through ministerial actions or through two pieces of legislation: the Industrial Arbitration (Enterprise Agreements) Act 1990 and the Industrial Relations Act 1991. By applying a green paper process, these changes followed periods of submission taking and considerable consultation, with extensive debate.

The driver of the current crisis is the collapse in domestic aggregate demand, originating from international factors. It is important, therefore, to consider potential areas where aggregate demand can be expected to increase in order to understand the possibility of recovery. The current crisis was preceded by an unprecedented increase in the level of household debt, which will hinder the recovery of consumer expenditure. Consumption is also being affected by uncertainty with respect to both income and employment. Similarly, the outlooks for investment and net exports suggest that they are unlikely to contribute to the initial phase of recovery. This leaves the important area of government expenditure. It is argued that government expenditure, particularly in infrastructure and capital, is particularly important as in the short run it contributes directly to demand, while, in the longer run it boosts growth and productivity. Finally, approaches to financing the implications of increased government expenditure are examined.

Since 1993 and the removal of the separate award system for the Australian State of Victoria, many Victorian workers have been on five minimum conditions and on pay levels well below that of employees in other States. Despite attempts to rectify the situation (with Victorian common rule awards), issues of coverage and employer compliance remained. The implementation of WorkChoices legislation in 2006 posed a further challenge to Victorian low-paid workers. Our research found that the impact of WorkChoices on the Victorian low-paid has been largely insidious, surfacing primarily as an increased wage-effort ratio, with people working more unpaid hours and at an increased pace. The implications of this are that these hidden effects are more likely to linger, even with the replacement of WorkChoices with the Fair Work Act, 2009. Furthermore, it appears that employer compliance with minimum conditions requires more adequate enforcement by the Federal Government.

The emergence of an understanding of labour as the basis of value is traced from ancient Greek authors to classical political economy and Karl Marx, and the subsequent eclipse of the theory in neoclassical economics is then charted. While the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of labour as a measure of value, in Scholastic authors the notion was fixed that labour and cost of production determine value. Labour assumed a central role in Adam Smith, but it was with David Ricardo that a fully blown labour theory of value was achieved. Marx gave the concept its philosophical dimension, tying it to a critique of classical political economy. The labour theory of value came under attack in neoclassical formulations which in the end effected the analytical disappearance of labour in several ways. Labour became just another factor of production, with marginal productivity regulating its price. Then factors of production and final goods became analytically equivalent as sources of subjective utility, especially in the context of general equilibrium theory. In disutility models of labour supply, labour was substituted by its absence, ‘leisure’. Finally, attempts were made to explain the employment relationship as an application of agency theory, moving away from the pure commodity model of labour. Nevertheless, all these theories failed to account for what became the Achilles' heel of neoclassicism — namely the indeterminacy of the labour contract.

This historical case study demonstrates the importance of education to the diffusion of management ideas and strategies. The article explains how management and education came to be united in the pursuit of efficiency and how they came to use similar assessment techniques to ensure the achievement of this goal. Documenting F.W. Taylor’s interest in education, it reveals how scientific management, as promoted by management ‘gurus’, consultants, managers, educational administrators and related professionals, came to influence the early twentieth century reform of education and training in both the USA and Australia. It shows how Taylor’s methods, principles and philosophy were transformed into a scholastic program, and how this program was infused into the administration and content of teaching and learning offered in NSW schools, technical colleges, universities and adult education, with long-term implications for the training of managers, students and workers.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways in which core labour standards can be incorporated into the WTO. Though regarded by some as simply a vehicle for protectionism, the campaign for core labour standards is based on sound economics that extends the logic of trade regulation to the international dimension of labour. Getting agreement on core labour standards and enforcing them will be a difficult task, but one best conducted through the WTO using a joint ILO/WTO enforcement mechanism. It is argued that such a task will bring much-needed legitimacy to the WTO, and increase the chances that it can deliver a world of prosperous, open and fair trade.

The Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) brought down the first stage of the ‘Living Wage’ Case decisions on 22 April 1997. For the first time in nearly 30 years the decision was split. This article analyses the economic rationale for both majority and minority decisions and argues that the majority decision was overly cautious and conservative in its assessment of the economic constraints on the Commission’s capacity to award a pay increase to low paid workers.

For some time, the trade union movement has been facing the challenge of repositioning itself to attract and retain members, and to remain relevant, useful, and powerful. These difficulties have been exacerbated during the recent period of intense ‘globalisation’. The political embrace of neo-liberalism, de-regulation of labour and other markets, increased capital flows, interaction between national and regional economies, and innovation and growth of information and communications technology, have created a very different, and constantly changing environment for labour. Services work in particular is increasingly mobile as a result of huge developments in information and communications technology. The white collar service sector is thus creating a particular challenge for trade unions, as the developed world increasingly buys its services off-shore. This article examines the features, extent, and effects of white collar services off-shoring, before going on to examine the responses of trade unions to this phenomenon. It looks at action taken by a number of unions in the USA, Australia, Europe and India, as well as internationally, before drawing conclusions regarding appropriate directions for unions to follow.

The privatisation of economic infrastructure in Australia that began in the 1980s has continued to be actively pursued by state and federal governments. Evaluations of the effects of the change of policy, ownership, control and regulatory arrangements that have accompanied privatisation and their impact on the longer-term stock of infrastructure and the growth of the economy have received less attention than the immediate privatisation decisions. This article reviews some of the studies that have been carried out to evaluate the impact of privatisation, focusing on long-term impacts on infrastructure provision. In particular, it discusses the myopia created by the emphasis on commercial transactions and managing markets that continues to shape the debate about the provision of infrastructure to meet Australia's economic, environmental and other objectives. Objectives have become even more difficult to achieve as an increasingly extensive and complex regulatory framework is required to manage privatised activities. This adds to costs and limits the potential for the introduction of new initiatives to address pressing problems. The issue is increasingly relevant, given the current perceived shortage of infrastructure and the flow-on effects of the current international financial crisis on Australia. The slow-down in economic growth accompanying the financial crisis is putting pressure on government budgets and threatening to perpetuate the existing policy bias towards short-term solutions, exacerbating the longer run problem of ensuring an adequate supply of public economic infrastructure.