In the housing cycle which started in 1996, Australian house prices have risen more than those in the US, prima facie suggesting that Australian prices should fall sharply. This paper questions that simple hypothesis. The reasons explored are: Australian prices have risen significantly less than those in coastal California, the more valid comparison; the Australian housing finance system contains fewer of the structural weaknesses of the US system; fundamentals in the form of the decline in real interest rates explain most, but not all, of the price rise; and macroeconomic conditions for housing in Australia are more favourable to weathering the global financial crisis.

An emerging trend in Australia, over the past twenty or so years, has been for employment to become increasingly polarised into households where either no adult is working (jobless households) or all adults are working (all-work households). Despite this, relatively little research has been undertaken in Australia which has focussed specifically on these households. This article seeks to go some way towards filling this gap. Specifically, data from the first wave of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Survey in Australia (HILDA) Survey are used to: (i) quantify the incidence of jobless households in Australia; (ii) identify the characteristics of individuals that are associated with membership of a jobless household; and (iii) examine some of the financial consequences of living in a jobless household. The analysis finds that household joblessness in 2001 remains pervasive with strong associations with factors generally thought to influence individual joblessness such as age, education, ethnicity, illness and family background. It is also found that poverty and financial stress are more a function of household joblessness than of individual joblessness.

The Minimum Wage, in various variants, has been an important part of Australian wage determination for over a century. This paper documents the development of the minimum wage and in so doing highlights the pivotal role of the Sunshine Harvester case. That case left a number of legacies which are examined in other parts of the paper. These include the bifurcated nature of wage determination, consideration of family size, the sexual division of labour and wages, the conflict between needs and capacity to pay, wage adjustment indexes and the role of minimum wages in a decentralised wages system.

Researchers have studied truck crashes extensively using methods appropriate for behavior, technology, and regulatory enforcement. Few safety studies associate crashes with economic pressure, a pervasive latent influence. This study uses data from the US Large Truck Crash Causation Study to predict truck crashes based on work pressure factors that have their origins in market pressures on motor carriers and truck drivers. Logistic regression shows that factors associated with the work process, including an index of work-pressure attributes, predict the likelihood that crash analysts consider the truck driver to be the person whose last action could have prevented the crash. While not proving causation, the data suggest that economic factors affecting drivers contribute significantly to truck crashes.

In Australia, the proportion of full-time employees engaged in long hours, often very long hours, of paid work is relatively large and has been growing larger over the past two decades. This article describes and explains existing data and discussion in Australia, within a cross-national context. Primarily drawing on official labour force data, it begins by examining the proportion of employees engaged in long hours, trends in long work hours, and selected characteristics of the long hours workforce. It then links the discussion to overtime and the peculiar prominence of what is called ‘unpaid’ overtime. Growth in unpaid overtime seems to be the main component in the increase in the proportion of full-time employees working long hours. In seeking to explain these developments, the article describes the framework of formal working-time regulation and identifies several channels along which trends to long hours, whether based on paid or unpaid overtime, are able to flow. It then looks at the way in which the opportunities opened up by the deficiencies in regulation are taken up by employees and employers. It suggests that the key factor in explaining the development of long hours in Australia is employer pressure within the framework of weak working-time regulation.

Human civilisation faces a series of existential threats from the combination of five global and human-engineered challenges, namely climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, overpopulation and rising social inequality. These challenges are arguably being manifested in both an increased likelihood and magnified impact of catastrophes like forest fires, prolonged droughts, pandemics and social dislocation/upheaval. This article argues that in understanding and addressing these challenges, important lessons can be drawn from what has repeatedly caused organisational failures. It applies the ‘Ten Pathways to Disaster’ model to a series of disasters/catastrophic events and then argues this model is salient to understanding inadequate responses to the five threats to civilisation. The article argues that because these challenges interact in mutually reinforcing ways, it is critical to address them simultaneously not in isolation.

Shipping is a safety critical industry where operational errors may lead to maritime accidents involving property damage, loss of lives and environmental pollution. As part of the trend towards self-regulation, the International Maritime Organisation has adopted a worldwide International Safety Management Code which made ship managers responsible for workplace health and safety. This study, based on interviews in two Chinese shipping companies, examines how ship managers use ship visits to monitor shipboard safety management. Interviews with managers from company offices and crew members indicated that managerial ship visits mainly take the form of inspections that focus on low-trust surveillance and disciplinary action rather than genuine support, being based on the safe person rather than the more effective safe place approach. From the perspective of crew members, because the managers visited ships only occasionally, they were unlikely to have sound knowledge of the specific situations and work routines on their ships. Consequently, managers’ interventions for safety compliance were seen by crew members as failing to address real risk factors, and leading instead to increased workloads, psychological pressure and fatigue, the very antithesis of safety management. Meanwhile a coherent, supportive system for reducing risk remains underdeveloped in the shipping industry.

This study examines the causal relationship between education and the use of digital collaborative platforms as a first step in exploring the potential impact of the new digital labour markets on inequality. From the viewpoint of transaction costs theory, the less educated could benefit significantly from the digital collaborative economy due to the reduction in information costs made possible by this new form of exchange. Conversely, a positive relationship between educational level and platform use may be expected following neoclassical and institutionalist economic theories. Using microdata from the 2016 Eurobarometer survey, together with an instrumental variables strategy and conventional ordinary least squares models, hypothesis testing reveals that education has a clear positive effect on digital collaborative platform use. As a result, the less educated are less likely to access the job opportunities offered by digital labour markets. Understanding the relationship between education and access to digital collaborative platforms and impacts on socio-economic inequality is crucial for designing future public policies that promote social justice and well-being in a disrupted landscape.

In this paper it is demonstrated that the measurable costs of the sustained high rate of unemployment in Australia are substantially higher than the alleged gains from neo-liberal (microeconomic) reforms. In addition, significant individual and social costs can be identified. Consequently macroeconomic intervention to reduce unemployment should be viewed as a priority, rather than the imposition of market reform with its uncertain impact. The paper concludes with a brief outline of a Job Guarantee Program, advocated by Mitchell (1998) that utilises the principles of the buffer stock mechanism to reduce unemployment. It is argued that the net increase in government outlays is modest and could be offset by a reduction in the level of annual corporate welfare.

The growth of information technology has enabled the ‘off-shoring’ of many business processes, and such off-shoring has grown exponentially in the past decade. India has been a major recipient of such off-shored work. To understand the effects of this phenomenon on off-shore workers, it is necessary to understand the legal context within which such work is undertaken.

This article thus explains the labour law framework of India, from Constitutional protections down to local laws, policies and rules. It then examines labour practices, and identifies the gaps between formal labour law and actual practice in this sector. The article notes that some of these gaps between law and practice are a result of public matters, such as corruption, legal exemptions, and lack of law enforcement; but others are due to features of the sector itself, such as its newness, the types of work it offers, and the ready availability of alternative jobs.

This paper is a selective review of recent Australian research upon enterprise bargaining and workplace industrial relations. It begins with a discussion of data collection methods, pointing out some strengths and weaknesses of survey, case study, and agreement text analysis methods. It then focusses upon two substantive issues to test the success of research. The first concerns the infrastructure for enterprise bargaining. Our conclusion is that research illuminates this topic, and reveals general unreadiness. The second issue is productivity performance and enterprise bargaining. We are far more sceptical that research has proved a relation between the two. We conclude with the observation that researchers may be on the wrong track if they try to quantify the effects of enterprise bargaining on productivity performance. The paper recommends that greater attention be given to change management programmes designed to increase competitiveness, and to the outcomes sought from these, rather than to productivity.

The increase in pension eligibility ages in Australia, as elsewhere, throws into relief the consequences of gender inequality in employment. Because of career histories in lower paid and more insecure employment, a higher percentage of women than men are dependent on the age pension rather than on superannuation or savings and investments, and so will be disproportionately affected by deferred access. Yet, fewer women than men hold the types of ‘good jobs’ that will sustain them into an older age. Women are more likely to be sequestered in precarious employment, with reduced job quality and a greater potential for premature workforce exit. This article counterposes macro-level data drawn from national cross-sectional labour force statistics and the longitudinal Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia survey, with case study analysis, based on interviews with 38 women in midlife insecure jobs, in order to identify the types of life course and labour market barriers that contribute to women’s reliance on the pension and the systemic disadvantage that will render them particularly vulnerable to any further erosion of this safety net. The analysis moves between this empirical evidence and a discussion, drawing on the theoretical literature, of the failure in equal opportunity endeavours over recent decades and what this means for later life workforce participation for women.

This paper critically examines the key empirical evidence used to support the fiscal consolidation argument, complemented by a brief assessment of the limitations of the analytical foundation of the growth promoting benefits of the fiscal consolidation thesis. It also reviews the evidence on the debt-growth relationship at some length. It finds that the negative relationship between debt and GDP growth is influenced by outliers or exceptionally high debt-GDP ratios. It also points out that the composition of public debt matters. Additionally, the debt-GDP relationship appears to be non-linear—positive first and turning to negative, but there is considerable variation in the estimated turning or ‘tipping’ point, which is not helpful as a policy guide. Historical evidence does not lend support to the concerns that the current situation is likely to cause rapid upward spiraling of public indebtedness. Finally, the argument that fiscal consolidation is possible without adversely affecting growth is not based on robust empirical evidence. This conclusion is reinforced by a succinct overview of some country-specific experiences (Denmark, Ireland and United States).

The relationship between the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH), where fans prefer games that are expected to be closely contested, and attendance is investigated in four non-AQ football conferences. The teams in these smaller conferences play games against each other and against bigger, more prominent schools in the elite AQ conferences. Using the betting market point spread as a proxy for uncertainty of outcome, two key points concerning the UOH emerge: college football fans in these conferences prefer less uncertainty of outcome both when their team is a home favorite and when their team is a home underdog.

This paper analyses recently released ABS data on the distribution of income and examines how inequality has changed since 1994–95 and since the election of the Howard Government in 1995–96. While real disposable incomes increased across the distribution, income inequality has also increased since 1994–95, particularly between 1996–97 and 1999–2000. Over the entire period from 1994–95 to 2000–01, mean income in the top quintile increased by $111 a week, more than eight times the increase of $13 a week in the lowest quintile. Since the Howard government came to office, the estimates indicate that almost half (47.3 per cent) of the total increase in disposable income was received by those in the top quintile — implying that half of the income generated by economic growth has been of no benefit to the bottom four-fifths (in income terms) of the population. Comparison with earlier research also shows that income inequality has, in some respects, increased more rapidly since the mid-1990s than during the 1980s.

Mainstream economists give the misleading impression that their argument for austerity is purely technical and indeed the most ‘scientific’. The argument developed here is that their reasoning is not, any more than that of their heterodox critics, independent of ideology, power and ethics. The widespread belief in austerity policies as scientifically justified has prevented arguments against austerity gaining more traction; issues of ideology, power and ethics need to be brought to the fore as part of the arguments on both sides. In other words, awareness of the epistemological issues arising from an open-system ontology is critical to understanding the crisis and the policy response, and therefore to challenging that understanding and encouraging a radical policy shift. The critique of austerity policies would therefore be strengthened by a critique of the mainstream’s rhetorical (mis)representation of economic theorising.

Suicide rates in younger age groups in Australia, and in a number of other similar Western countries, have increased substantially since the 1960s. In Australia this rise has occurred contemporaneously with rises in youth unemployment rates, especially in males. Aggregate analyses investigating the relationship between these trends are reviewed for Australia, and compared with similar international aggregate studies of youth suicide and unemployment. Individual based studies investigating the role of unemployment in the causal pathways associated with suicide are also considered in this review. Aggregate suicide and unemployment data for males aged 20–24 years is presented to illustrate the changing relationship between unemployment and youth suicide over 1921–1998. The relationship between youth suicide rates and unemployment rates, particularly in males, is discussed in terms of the utility of using such indicators in evaluating suicide prevention initiatives. The applicability of aggregate variables in multi-dimensional explanations of suicide is also discussed.

On 24 June 2010 Julia Eileen Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister. She had served as deputy prime minister to Kevin Rudd in the Labor government that was elected on 24 November 2007. As deputy prime minister she had enjoyed great popularity and although the means by which Gillard assumed the top job was controversial — and became more so over the course of time — initially her elevation was greeted with widespread enthusiasm. There was a palpable sense of history in the media coverage, with most outlets treat ing Gillard’s ascension as an important event, to be taken seriously. The public seemed pretty pleased as well. Her popularity rating was high. Many women and girls, especially, were thrilled at this milestone having been reached. A few weeks into the job, Gillard called an election, seeking to legitimise her position through the validation of a popular vote. The election, held on 21 August 2010, failed to deliver her an outright majority. However she was able to form a government by negotiating agreements with the Greens and three Independents.

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi problematised the commodity status of labour. He described it as ‘fictitious’ and asserted the human aspect of labour necessitates ‘protection’. In bringing Polanyi’s mature works to bear on these claims, this article uses the ‘fictitious commodity’ concept to highlight the tension in neoclassical theory between concrete reality and its idealist construction of the economy. This contradiction directly challenges the veracity of the self-regulating market. The article develops two related themes. The first is Polanyi’s critique of the neoclassical conception of ‘the economy’ as an ideal (market) construct which gave rise to the notion that labour could be regulated by the forces of supply and demand. The second is the lack of logic in the notion of a ‘self regulating’ market and Polanyi’s appreciation of the concrete tendencies of capitalist economies to develop institutional arrangements that ensure the economy is always, and necessarily, more than ‘the market’.

This paper reflects on the development of the idea of social exclusion in European and particularly in British discourses. When it first emerged, social exclusion seemed to add to little to poverty and in some guises carried a great deal of behaviourist ideological baggage, or blamed the poor. Over time, however, experience in the UK has shown that social exclusion has broadened the research agenda and opened up new possibilities for policy. This paper contributes to these debates by presenting new estimates of poverty and exclusion in Britain using data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey. The estimates confirm that poverty and exclusion are related, but distinct concepts. There remains the question of whether social exclusion has not entered official discussions in Australia as a result of a ‘Howard effect’ or because of some more fundamental resistance in the Australian political — and academic — culture.