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This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the institutions and processes shaping work, labour markets and industrial relations policies in Australia.
It explores traditional industrial relations issues and examines social change and policy failures in areas such as gender, work and family dynamics, skills and immigration and wage theft. Additionally, it considers how pandemics, climate change, technological advances and new business structures impact policy change. Addressing these universal challenges, the book offers fresh conceptual approaches and rethinks policy problems and solutions.
Essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners, this book reshapes our understanding of work and industrial relations policy.
“This is a valuable contribution from leading Australian thinkers about work today and the role of the state in shaping it. It closely analyses the impact on work of societal trends and how recent changes to workplace law have sought to respond. I commend this book to all who are interested in how the state can influence the world of work - for better or for worse.” Senator The Honourable Murray Watt, Australian Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations.
“Path-breaking books often perform a task that, one is surprised, was never addressed before. This innovative volume examines how the Australian state regulates its labour market and provides a surprise of just this kind. It presents a novel analysis of the different methods the state in Australia has used to regulate trade unionism, gender relations, productivity, migration, and precarious forms of work, foregrounding the state as an industrial relations actor in a manner that has not been attempted before. The book is a great success. With luck, it will inspire non-Australians to develop similar analyses for their own countries.” Edmund Heery, Cardiff University
“Work and Industrial Relations Policy in Australia is an extremely thorough, modern, and forward-looking analysis of how public policy regulates and helps shape work. The authors provide a rich historical analysis of conventional industrial relations policies and incorporate contemporary issues of gender equity, climate change, gig work, immigration, and worker voice. In doing so the book is both a valuable resource for students, practitioners, policymakers, and academics in Australia and a model for those who might undertake similar analyses in other countries. Hopefully, their international peers will follow suit.” Thomas A. Kochan, MIT Sloan School of Management and Institute for Work and Employment Research
Bradon Ellem is a Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Sydney.
Chris F. Wright is Professor of Work and Labour Market Policy at the University of Sydney.
Stephen Clibborn is Associate Professor of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney.
Rae Cooper is Professor of Gender, Work and Employment Relations at the University of Sydney.
Frances Flanagan is Lecturer in Law at the University of Technology Sydney.
Alex Veen is Senior Lecturer in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney.
1. Introducing Industrial Relations Policy
2. Understanding Work, the State and Policy
3. Policy in Australia: Origins, Change and Legacies
4. The Fair Work Policy Framework
5. Voice: Worker Representation and Collective Bargaining
6. Equity: Gender and Work
7. Efficiency: The Productivity Debate
8. Skills and Immigration: Addressing Workforce Supply and Demand
9. Policy Failure: Underpayment and Insecure Work
10. Policy Subversion: The Gig Work Problem
11. The Climate Crisis and Industrial Relations
12. Assessing Australian Industrial Relations Policy