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In this review, the authors discuss developments in the Australian labour market over the year 2001, the persistence of the unemployment problem and the implications of the continued rise in part-time employment. Four special policy issues are then highlighted: (a) the youth labour market; (b) the position of older males in the Australian labour market and the interface with pension availability; (c) the incidence and implications of long service leave entitlements; and (d) the dominant Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) supply-side policy framework that is currently driving labour market policy in Australia. The authors conclude that, overall, the jobs market continues to be unresponsive, full-time jobs are difficult to find, and official unemployment rates mask the true extent of labour under-utilisation in Australia. Show less

In many industrialised countries, there have been major changes in the pattern of labour utilisation in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper argues that, in Australia, labour utilisation has been changing in thee key dimensions: job broadening, employment insecurity and work intensification. These changes are affecting both standard 'core' workers and non-standard 'peripheral' workers. Reviewing case study evidence and survey data from a federal Australian government study of workplace change, we analyse employee perceptions of these forms of labour utilisation. Employees are being affected by differing combinations of these changes and are experiencing higher stress levels, greater job insecurity and lower levels of satisfaction with the work/family balance.

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Globalisation is too often equated with the deregulation of labour. The central proposition of this article is that globalisation entails a re-regulations rather than a deregulation of employment relations. Research, it is argued, should focus on the nature of that re-regulation. Drawing on three vignettes of labour regulation in Canada, the article seeks to provide a theoretical account of the nature of labour regulation and re-regulation in the context of globalisation. After identifying different dimensions of globalisation, it explores four features of labour regulation with particular attention to the consequences of globalisation on them. These features are: the nature of employment relationship; the role of organisational processes and contingency in the shaping of work rules; the strategic interdependence of actors and, in particular, the importance of the balance of power between them in shaping labour regulation; and, finally, the nature of rules about work, especially their dynamic and social character.

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Over a period of 50 years at Kiruna iron ore mine in the far north of Sweden, we can see a transformation of work from underground to remote control at surface level. What characterized the old underground workface was the close relation between man and the hard rock centred on arduous physical work under dangerous conditions. Today, the face miners are located ‘up in the sky’ on the seventh level of an office building close to the mine. The workers leave their job at the end of the shift just as clean as when they arrived. The contact with the hard rock is mediated by machines controlled by remote control technology. The modern technology has created a new type of work - new in terms of competencies and knowledge as well as workload. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the technical development of underground mining in Kiruna and to consider the implications it has had on qualifications, identity and gender. There is an emerging, and in many aspects already evident, knowledge transformation - from the old and obsolete physical and tacit knowledge and skills (for example the ability to ‘read the rock’) to something new which can be described as abstract knowledge. But the old culture still provides an important context for workplace learning and the construction of identity and gender. This is associated with a degree of ‘worker identity lag’ and to difficulties in adapting attitudes and norms to the demands and structures that result from the new technology and the new work tasks. The new forms of work in the mine have less need for the traditional mining competencies, attitudes and ideals. The traditional workplace culture and its ‘macho style’ have also been challenged. Workers have to find new ways to learn and to develop a workplace culture more attuned to a new type of worker identity and masculinity.

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Using Statistics Canada's Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) data for 2003 and 2004, this research note addresses an important component of labour market retention by investigating whether the presence of workplace child care and elder care programs influences employees' decision to quit. The key findings are as follows: (a) workplace elder care support is almost non-existent in Canada; (b) employees are more likely to remain with an organization that offers workplace child care support programs; and (c) those employees who actually use the workplace child care support are even more likely to stay with the organization. We suggest that future research should assess whether the particular support programs themselves 'cause' employees to stay, or whether there are other factors (within organizations offering these support programs) that account for the retention.

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After two years of deteriorating conditions, 2015 was a year of modest improvement in the Australian labour market. Perhaps the most important change was a higher employment-to-population ratio, with increases in both persons employed and hours worked. Despite these encouraging signs of recovery, several weak spots remain. The full-time employment rate is stagnant, the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, and wage growth is anaemic. The recovery has not yet built momentum and there are risks that it may stall. But there is also reason to hope that 2015 was the year that the Australian labour market started to come back to health.

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Debates over whether customer service work is deskilled or part of the knowledge economy tend to focus on single issues such as control, emotional labour or information management. Call centre work, however, falls within a spectrum of service jobs requiring simultaneous and multifaceted work with people, information and technology. This activity, which we call 'articulation work', is often performed within tight timeframes and requires workers, first, to integrate their own tasks into an ongoing 'line' of work, and second, to collaborate in maintaining the overall work-flow. The requisite skills, of awareness, interaction management and coordination, tend to be poorly specified in competency standards that subdivide work into discrete tasks. We compare examples of call centre competency standards with case study accounts of the use of articulation work skills, arguing the need for a taxonomy allowing the recognition of different levels of these skills across the service sector.

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Public employment was traditionally seen as a 'good job', and governments were seen as 'model' employers. That reputation has faded in recent years due to factors including public management reforms that changed traditional public service employment. This research considers how the Australian public service labour market fared compared to the private sector during the global financial crisis. The research compares public and private sector outcomes in Australian states, focusing on two indicators of the size of the public service and wage outcomes. It finds that the global financial crisis did not enhance job prospects or conditions in Australian state public services, and potentially further detracted from public perceptions of governments as 'model' employers and the desirability of public service jobs. The crisis also highlighted the institutional tensions and complexities of the contemporary public employment environment.

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This article uses the notion of national recipes of corporate governance to explore national differences in the provision, extent, range, cost and arrangements made for training by employers. Drawing on an extensive database, careful analysis shows that there are significant differences between the liberal market economies and others in their employer training provision and systems. The research also highlighted considerable differences in practice in coordinated market economies, most notably between the social democracies of the Nordic countries and the Rhineland continental economies. The data also shows evidence of the embeddedness of training systems in the society and the industrial relations systems in which they operate: there are a limited number of clusters of countries that retain distinctive features. These clusters broadly correspond to the five different models of capitalism identified by Amable (2003), with differences encountered being generally on the lines predicted by the latter.

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This article builds on recent research into both casualization and job quality or 'decent work' by exploring the qualitative aspects of casual employment in the education industry. The article attempts to bridge two distinct positions in the literature on decent work between research that identifies objective components of decent work, and research that focuses on subjective perceptions of job quality. The article focuses on objective aspects of quality work but draws in subjective perceptions both as a path of additional evidence and as a way of capturing the crucial level of personal experience. The article draws on a recent study that explored the experiences of casual school teachers in the New South Wales public education system. It finds that casual employment can erode the job quality of otherwise decent work within professional occupations.

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