A number of well-publicised submissions advocating a ‘Job Creation Levy’ were made to the Committee. In its report, however, the Committee is lukewarm in relation to this option. The case for a levy in the form of an income tax surcharge can be made in terms of conventional welfare economics criteria and considerations of equity. The main case against the levy is that it will merely reshuffle the dole queue and, at the same time, create ‘artificial’ jobs at the expense of ‘real’ jobs. Moreover, there may be some undesirable implications for aggregate labour supply.

Regulatory agencies, the financial community and the investing public need to be aware that more effective investment recommendations and decisions require human capital analysis. It is important to the work of securities analysts, their clients and their industry. Bassi, Lev, Mcmurrer and Sissfield (2001) suggest that non-financial insights, particularly human capital related insights, make up a large proportion of investment decisions. More rigorous qualitative human capital analysis can illuminate the working of an organisation in a way that primary financial data on its own cannot achieve need. A model for outlining the human resource drivers of sustainable human capital is introduced and discussed in response to this need. In essence, an integrated approach is needed for the purpose of making more transparent investment recommendations. In Australia the Regulatory Agency, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission can assist in the adoption of this integrated investment process through the Training of Financial Product Advisors, Licensing Policy Statement 146.

Although collective bargaining is essentially a communication process, the role of language (as distinguished from discourse) in bargaining exchanges has received little attention from industrial relations scholars. Building on the work of Karl Popper, this article proposes a decomposition of language into functions and values and analyses their relevance when parties to a collective bargaining encounter engage in an integrative process. The proposed framework provides labour negotiators seeking integrative outcomes with linguistic guidelines and scholars with a tool to analyse bargaining exchanges.

This paper examines the nature of the ‘convergence of vision’ that is said to have existed within mainstream macroeconomics prior to the ‘global economic recession’, and which has been the subject of strong criticism in recent times from Nobel Laureates such as Krugman, Akerlof and Solow. The nature of a proposed ‘Keynesian revival’ is also examined, and it is concluded that while the required changes in theoretical content and methodological perspective are substantial, the most significant obstacle to be overcome is to be found in what Keynes had referred to as the ‘metaphysical principles’ upon which laissez faire has been founded.

The gender pay gap, the difference in earnings of men and women, has remained remarkably resilient over the past two decades in Australia and a number of other countries, despite a range of legislative and policy initiatives aimed at narrowing this difference. Drawing upon industry-wide data and an organisational case, this analysis of professional business services examines the nature of pay equity within and beyond organisational boundaries. We conclude that ‘success’ in gender and pay equity terms has been constrained by minimum government compliance requirements and limited attention to the role labour markets play in contributing to gendered patterns of pay.

While the 1980s saw major changes to the Australian tax system which sought both to reduce avoidance and evasion and to reform the base structure of income tax, there are design deficiencies in some of these changes which must be attended to. Also a much closer approach to comprehensive and consistent taxation of investment income should be attempted. On the side of indirect tax the replacement of the wholesale sales tax by a broadly based value added tax is highly desirable, but is unlikely to be achievable politically unless lpart of a strategy which combines sales tax reform, tax mix change and income tax reform. In any case, meaningful and durable reform of the tax system requires a basic community consensus which cuts across sectional interest groups and political parties.

The part played by unemployment in the rise to power of Hitler weighed on the minds of leaders in Western democracies. There was a determination to create a world in which large-scale unemployment was abnormal and at worst only a temporary phenomenon. The war had shown that this was possible in a community united to pursue a common goal and the aim was to create such a community in a world free from the horrors of war, by creating communities in which the welfare of every person was important. Australia was remarkably successful in achieving this for 30 years. Its success depended on governments responding to any sustained increase in unemployment by undertaking large increases in public sector expenditure supported by accommodating monetary policy and tax cuts if desirable. In bad times as well as good, there was a determination to ensure that both the incomes and prices paid for necessities by the less well-off did not force anyone to live in poverty. The biggest obstacle to achieving this today is the growth of neoliberalism with its emphasis on ‘freedom’ or giving individuals the ability to act as they please with minimal constraints and an ideological commitment to small government.

Analysis suggests that the higher the replacement ratio, that is the level of unemployment benefit relative to average earnings, the higher the level of unemployment is likely to be. This effect comes about in two main ways. The replacement ratio will influence both the rate of inflow into unemployment and the period for which people remain unemployed. The empirical evidence supports these propositions although the sensitivity of unemployment to changes in the replacement ratio is fairly weak. In the light of equity considerations reducing unemployment benefits as a policy weapon to counteract unemployment is thus not a viable option. Changing the rules relating to part-time earnings and unemployment benefit however could reduce long-term unemployment.

This paper evaluates the impacts of 2017’s labour law liberalisation on labour market flexibility in Lithuania. While employment did grow rapidly in 2017–2019, there was little change in labour market flexibility. Against expectations, part-time employment declined as labour relations continued to be administered under path-dependent institutional inertia inherited from previous decades. The prevalence of full-time, dual-earner employment was shaped by the country’s socialist legacy and was reflected in high employment rates and permanent open-ended contracts for both men and women. Analysis also showed that the revised labour law lowered the probability for women with family care responsibilities to be hired. Once hired, they were offered permanent employment albeit with the reduced protections that such contracts now provide. Impacts of the new labour law on shaping what is considered to be ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’ in Lithuania are discussed.

Over several decades Liberal-National Governments have encouraged Australian Public Service (APS) employers to uphold managerial prerogative by offering individual employment arrangements to employees. During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Morrison Liberal-National Government’s Workplace Bargaining Policy reinforced this agenda. In place of collective bargaining, APS agency heads were encouraged to determine pay rises and new employment conditions for employees using Section 24 of the Public Service Act (PS Act) 1999. Workplace determinations did not need to be negotiated with public sector unions and some 85,500 employees across 57 APS agencies, or approximately 63% of the APS workforce, had accepted pay increases via workplace determinations by 31 December 2020. The widespread adoption of workplace determinations in the APS poses significant challenges for public sector unions and for the future of APS collective bargaining.

The use of part-time jobs is steadily increasing in most advanced economies. Previous literature has concluded that part-time workers suffer a wage penalty, but its magnitude varies across studies and countries. The part-time penalty is the otherwise unexplained element of the gap between full-time and part-time hourly earnings. One potential factor accounting for international differences in this penalty is the coverage of collective bargaining. This article outlines research examining wage differences between part-time and full-time male and female workers in Spain, a country with a very high level of coverage of collective agreements but very heterogeneous regional labour markets. Results are obtained using an econometric decomposition specifically adapted to matched employer–employee data. They show that intra-firm wage differentials for part- and full-time workers with the same characteristics are negligible. But results that are perhaps less expected are those based on the regional analysis – an unprecedented perspective compared with the previous literature. These results show that despite very significant differences in economies and labour markets, observed wage gaps between part-time and full-time workers in each Spanish region are also mainly explained by different endowments of individual, job and firm characteristics. Overall, our evidence highlights the over-riding role of wage setting mechanisms, specifically collective bargaining coverage, in minimising inter-regional differences in the wage penalty of part-time workers.

This essay is a review of and tribute to the life and contributions of Nina Shapiro, who passed away this year. Shapiro was an American Post-Keynesian economist, who was a bridge figure in radical economics, connecting Marx to Keynes, Schumpeter to Kaldor, the behavior of the firm to the dynamics of the macroeconomy, and the process of innovation to the organization of production and accumulation. She was seminal to important moments in the history of radical economics in the US, including the formation of the Hegel-inspired journal Social Concept in the 1980s and the Rutgers University’s Post-Keynesian circle in the 1980s and 1990s. Shapiro’s deeply philosophical and dialectical approach to firm behavior, innovation, and business cycles led her to theorize the “revolutionary character” of Post-Keynesian economics and to formulate a critique of the competitive neoclassical firm which, she argued, is at odds with the logic of capitalism in which firms seek to make profit and grow.

There is a substantial body of research that recognises the importance of analysing regional characteristics in employment and labour relations that occur in a given geographical context. However, this phenomenon has been scarcely studied from a spatial approach. This article uses a spatio-temporal panel data model to examine the spatial interactions between the gender employment gap and, some labour and socioeconomic characteristics of 727 municipalities of Andalusia, Spain, for the period 2012–2016. The results show that due to spatial diffusion mechanisms, a spatial spillover effect occurs in both the gender gap in employment and in some of the labour and socioeconomic characteristics considered. These findings may be extended to other geographic areas and can be of use for the implementation of regional policies aimed at narrowing the gender employment gap.

In spite of a growing body of literature on quasi-formal employment in the European Union (EU), there is still limited knowledge regarding the exact functioning of this illegal employment scheme. To fill this gap, we report data from the 2019 Special Eurobarometer on undeclared work, which reveals that 30.1% of European workers have higher income from employment than reported to tax authorities. Explicitly, 2.6% of registered dependent employees are entitled to cash top-ups to the official wage, for 7.8% of them the amount of supplementary payments depends on the work efforts, whereas 9.2% receive informal remuneration under multiple arrangements. In addition to these ‘regular recipients’, we also found that 10.5% of employees in the EU can be classified as ‘sporadic quasi-formal workers’. Besides showing that wage underreporting is far more pervasive than previously assumed, the study also offers a more nuanced insight into different manifestations of this illicit practice in the EU. Results of a two-level random intercept multinomial logit model reveal that women are less likely to receive fixed and variable cash-in-hand payments, whereas older individuals have a lower propensity to receive work-time-related income. The analysis also highlights that professionals, service sector employees, manual job workers and individuals whose jobs require travelling are more prone to variable wages compared to the rest of the population. Given a modest success in combating the phenomenon to this date, these findings will be particularly valuable for policymakers in their endeavours to devise tailored policy measures.

This extended Review Article assesses the changing role of the corporation in history, using the 2018 book by Oxford scholar Colin Mayer entitled ‘Prosperity’ as a basis for the analysis. This is a traditional review article centred around the Mayer book, but as we end we take our argument, albeit tentatively, to other related issues, beyond the Mayer argument. The corporation may be viewed in a positive sense as a creator of wealth and ‘prosperity’ for society in general, or as in a negative sense as generating ‘prosperity’ only for the few, shareholders and executives at the expense of the many, including workers, customers and future generations. Colin Mayer’s book visits both sides of this ‘prosperity’ equation and the title of the book derives from this recognition. Our argument is that even within the limits of contemporary neo-liberal global capitalism, corporations could be a force for more sustainable and balanced economic growth, as well as for social and environmental good. This requires a clarification of its ‘purpose’ as well as changes in the composition of its decision-making structures and revised mandates of its boards and sub-committees such as its remuneration committees that often have been given the power alone to determine executive pay. But we argue (albeit only suggestively) in the final section that the nature and variety of capitalism itself may have to be addressed alongside firm level changes for the long-term good and sustainability of a more equal society. Mayer shows that since its birth in Roman times, as an agency for promoting public works and the public good, the corporation has taken on many different roles, with varying purpose. Only in the last 50 years has the Milton Friedman doctrine, that companies should have only one role, of maximizing shareholder wealth, become the dominant explanation for the purpose of the corporation. We are not confident that corporations will voluntarily move in these progressive directions, especially given the continuing stranglehold of neo-liberal globalization. A push for broader social and economic change from below through struggle may be essential.