This paper examines the experience of the Hyundai Motor Company (HMC) managing its employees in a new plant established in Chennai, India. The establishment of the Indian plant in 1998 marked an important attempt by HMC to ‘relaunch’ its globalisation strategy after an earlier failure to manufacture in Canada. The ability of HMC to adopt an appropriate employment relations strategy in India will be an important factor determining its success as a global manufacturer. A key issue facing the Hyundai Motor Company of India (HMI) is the role to be accorded to unions and employee representation in the plant.

One of the major factors in building a successful system of employee participation is the involvement of unions and government. In this article, the limitations of system of employee participation in Taiwan are examined. The article begins with a brief overview of Taiwanese industrial relations. It then focuses on the development of Employee Participation in Taiwan, before exploring the impacts of privatisation on the state-owned enterprises in Taiwan, with reference to Chunghwa Telecom Company.

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.

As early as the 1890s women in a diverse range of countries organised their own unions, some of which continue to the present. Almost a century later, women-only unions have been (re)-created in Japan and South Korea. Was this coincidence or a union organising strategy development in North Asia? What does the existence, and the contemporary formation, of women-only unions in Japan and South Korea mean? This preliminary study seeks to explore women-only unions and highlights women actively creating their own organisations in order to improve working conditions and provide women with a voice separate from the existing ‘malestream’ union movement which has largely ignored their concerns.

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 aim of this paper is to discuss the challenges of organising women workers in Asia, and to discuss how trade unions can facilitate their more effective participation in these movements. The paper is primarily informed by research undertaken with Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights (SIGTUR). Formed in Perth, Western Australia in 1991 and made up of delegates from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil, the aim of SIGTUR is to promote collaborative activity by independent trade unions in the ‘South’ or rather countries within the Asia-Pacific. The paper highlights the effects of neo-liberalism on workers and develop appropriate international responses.

Are people receiving unemployment-related income support more likely to exit from income support if they live in a stronger labour market? This paper examines this question using data from the Australian Department of Family and Community Services Longitudinal Data Set (LDS). We find that, controlling for other observed characteristics, living in an area with a one percentage point lower unemployment rate is associated with a 5 per cent increase in the probability of exit. This implies a 9 per cent decrease in the mean duration of benefit receipt. This should be considered an upper bound for the impact of regional labour market characteristics as it partly reflects the fact that people with low skill levels can only afford to live in high unemployment regions. To control for unobserved characteristics (such as skill levels) that are constant over time we look at changes in income support among people who move location. This suggests a much lower, but still significant, impact of local labour market conditions on unemployment benefit receipt.

With the launch of export-oriented industrialisation policies in 1977, trade unions in Sri Lanka entered a new set of challenges. The state promotion of labour market deregulation and privatisation has directly undermined union strategies based on bureaucratic modes of organising worker solidarity. Nevertheless, among the gamut of union strategies are tendencies characterising what is described as social movement unionism (SMU). The SMU approach focuses on strategies of independent unions combining participatory democracy internally with structured alliances externally. This paper looks at the case of a union in the tea plantations and its potential towards developing a SMU strategic orientation. In particular, the discussion focuses on the deepening of democratic tendencies within the unions which may be capable of reinforcing the movement dimension of unions.

A great deal of the research into the determinants of labour market outcomes has focussed on the role of human capital and the structure of the labour market. Relatively little attention has been paid to the role of social capital. This paper investigates the extent to which an individual’s social capital relates to their labour market outcomes. The relationships between social capital and labour force status and social capital and job search method are explored using data collected from a national random sample of Australians. Both a network and typology approach to measuring social capital are used.

Women workers employed in the export-oriented manufacturing sector in Malaysia have traditionally had poor access to representation by trade unions for two reasons. Firstly, government rules and regulations have prevented sectoral trade unions from representing large sections of the workforce, and secondly, unions themselves have not considered women their primary constituency. As a result, non-governmental organisations (NGO), rather than trade unions, have played an important role in educating women workers about their rights since the 1980s. In the garment industry in recent years, NGO activism has precipitated a change in the trade unions’ focus towards women workers in general, and towards female overseas migrant workers in particular. Where once unions viewed migrant workers as undermining the wages and conditions of Malaysian workers, they now assert their right to equality in the workplace. This paper explores the context in which NGOs became involved in union-like activities and unions’ responses to that involvement.

A central feature of the Asian currency crisis of 1997/1998 was the vast prior capital inflow into the region, and the later rapid reversal of that movement. In seeking to explain why this outflow of capital took place and was so devastating for the countries concerned, various writers have laid blame upon a combination of connected lending, poor bank supervision, moral hazard and “crony capitalism”.

Our emphasis is different. Much of the capital inflow financed a vast over-expansion of commercial real estate development. Plunging real estate values accompanied by severe difficulties in the banking and financial sector were common occurrences across the region. The argument we advance is that property plays a special role in banks’ portfolios and that large international portfolio capital flows mediated by banks will usually lead to rapidly appreciating asset prices which will result in banking/currency crises.

Australian universities now have a headcount casualisation rate near the national workforce average. Reasons for, and impacts of, this development are explored, and an argument is made for the role of industrial regulation in reconciling requirements for flexibility, security and equity in university employment. Responses to a large survey of casual academic and general staff suggest that this employment mode is a minority preference. Discrete groups of casual university staff, including those seeking university careers, those with other secure income sources, and students in transit to other careers, experience different forms and levels of insecurity and inequity. Appropriately targeted regulatory responses thus include criteria-based caps, a general staff conversion mechanism, a work value review, access to increments and service entitlements, and workplace representation rights.

Labour non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs) role in the reconstruction of Indonesia’s organised labour movement has been widely acknowledged. They are not, however, generally recognised as a legitimate part of that movement. This paper uses the Indonesian case to demonstrate how the existing scholarly literature has failed to consider labour NGOs as a form of labour organisation in their own right because they do not fit within practitioners’ and scholars’ definitions of what is, and is not, a legitimate industrial relations actor.

The events following the collapse of Ansett Airlines in September 2001 provide an opportunity to explore the impact of internal labour markets on post-retrenchment labour market outcomes. This paper traces the labour market experiences of a sample of 649 former Ansett Airlines employees in the first eleven months after the airline’s initial closure. It reveals that many workers spent long periods in an employment limbo — officially ‘stood down’ but not retrenched — while waiting for their Ansett jobs to be resurrected under new ownership. During that time, many accepted fragmented, short-term placements in ‘bad’ jobs. After this initial period of uncertainty, however, many former Ansett employees found their way back to ‘good’ jobs — either in the aviation sector or in firms offering secure primary segment employment conditions. The uneven outcomes experienced by different groups of workers reflect the interconnections between workers’ perceptions of their options, their attachments to Ansett, their age and household circumstances in the context of weak demand for their skills. The paper illuminates the ways in which the personal loyalties, social networks and work expectations developed within Ansett’s rigid internal labour market shaped retrenched workers’ job search, recruitment and re-employment outcomes.

This paper looks at the effects of changes in the age composition of the labour force on aggregate male and female unemployment rates. While it has been common to look at aggregate participation rate changes in terms of a weighted average over age groups this seems not to be the case for unemployment. We show in this paper that changes in the age composition of the labour force (driven mainly by changes in the age distribution of the population) has affected the aggregate unemployment rates in a systematic and, with hindsight, predictable manner. Amongst other things, we show that in the past decade or so, policy makers have benefited from a not inconsequential “free lunch” in that changes in the age composition of the labour force have been pulling the aggregate unemployment rates down below what it would otherwise be by around one percent of the labour force. We also show that this free lunch is now coming to an end.

Since the data necessary to make a formal quantitative analysis of Work for the Dole employment outcomes is not available to researchers who are independent of Commonwealth Government Departments, this article examines the (then) Department of Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business (DEWRSB) net impact report, finding in it a number of weaknesses. The combined effect of these is to inflate the estimated value for net impact but a corrected estimate is still higher than many consider likely. Any figure for the net impact estimate of an Australian labour market program can only be a broad indicator. This article argues that in the case of Work for the Dole the net impact is definitely positive and by more than a trivial amount.