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The exercise by an Australian state agency of coercive powers against construction industry workers has been justified by reference to claimed gains in productivity and hence national welfare. Yet the literature suggests that a more cooperative approach to union-management relations would offer better opportunities for productivity improvement. This article examines the data behind the productivity claims and finds that they were erroneous, probably due to incorrect transcription, and that the source data indicated no relative productivity gains against the identified benchmark. Despite being made aware of this, the state agency and its consultant maintained the original claims about the size of productivity and welfare gains from the use of coercive powers. Official cross-industry and time series data also showed no productivity gains arising from the use of coercive powers. However, there is some evidence that there has been a shift of income shares in the industry from labour to capital. The findings have implications for understanding the role of commissioned studies in public debate, and for regulation of the construction industry.

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Is there a job-quality problem in mining? Is part of this problem that mining employees are working involuntary long hours? If so, how extensive is this problem? What is the impact, if any, of involuntary long hours in mining on family life? And how much control do mining employees have over their working-time arrangements? What are the possible policy responses? We address these questions through analysis of data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Work and Life Index survey, a survey of employees in Queensland, and qualitative interviews with 135 people associated with the Queensland mining industry. We find evidence of substantial involuntary long hours in mining, closely related to 24-hour operations and 12-hour shifts, with adverse implications for the work-life balance, which is made worse where employees lack input into the design of rosters. The findings suggest that, in order to promote 'good jobs' in the mining industry, there is both a need to revisit protections for employees against being forced to work 'unreasonable' hours above the ostensible national standard of 38 hours per week and strong support even amongst mine-workers for a ceiling on hours worked per week.

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There has been widespread interest across various national contexts in employers' use of contingent forms of labour. The tendency to conflate different contract types into catch-all categories has increasingly given way to recognition of the differences between forms of labour. Despite this, systematic comparisons of employers' attitudes to different forms of labour remain an underdeveloped area of research. Drawing on an original survey of the UK construction sector this paper offers new insight into employers' attitudes to different forms of contingent labour and tracks changes in their use. Uniquely, the analysis of movement between different forms of labour goes beyond approaches that focus on the dichotomy between direct and contingent labour to trace a more complex pattern of movement between the different contingent forms. This more nuanced picture of changing patterns of employers' use of contingent labour suggests an area for development in future research.

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This article highlights the old wisdom that technology is socially constructed. By using examples from a study of how German machinery manufacturing firms and North American use industries act and think while developing and implementing advanced technology, and reflecting on these examples to elucidate Swedish manufacturing culture, the study highlights how knowledge about industrial behaviour can only be made visible by comparative studies, since only in relief - in contrast with something different - can the ‘taken for granted’ behaviour be identified. It is argued that identifying the prevailing industrial behaviour in a region opens up the possibility not only of identifying different strategies in inter-firm contacts but also of mastering them. Engineering that could ‘customize’ not only technology but also the interaction with customers and differentiate the service for different markets would have a competitive advantage.

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The present paper analyses the extent to which access to family-friendly work practices is determined by differential access within or between organisations. It is found that the variation in access to a range of work practices is greater among employees working in the same workplace than the variation between workplaces. A number of employee characteristics are found to be related to the probability of accessing family-friendly work practices. Interestingly, there is no relationship between having dependent children and the likelihood of having access to family-friendly work practices. Another finding is that, employers are most likely to offer family-friendly work practices to employees with high skills levels or in whom they have invested training or other resources. An implication of these findings is that policy makers need to focus on policies that will increase the availability of such practices within organisations to all employees who would benefit from access to these practices.

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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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The aim of this article is to explore the role of creativity for high-performance innovative activity. It is our conjecture that this approach enables us to go beyond the dominant science-focus of the present discourse on the transformation to a knowledge-based society. In line with the first part of the Schumperterian definition of innovation: creative combination, the ability to be creative draws on dispersed - new and old, external and internal, scientific and non-scientific - knowledge sources. The article is primarily a theoretical and conceptual exercise: however, we relate our discussions to empirical findings from mature manufacturing industries. The discussions are also related to the current industrial transformation in the Iron Ore Belt in Sweden, and the possible challenges this entails for a region characterized by a strong tradition of large-firm domination and natural resource-based industry. In the current transformation, this region must find new ways to both encourage and support economic and technological development - something which may find its base not only in scientific skills in a narrow sense, but also in new attitudes to industrial creativity.

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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 begins with a brief overview of developments in the Australian labour market in 2003. It then looks at the appreciation of the Australian dollar and discusses the raising of interest rates by the Reserve Bank as a policy shift and its impact on the housing and construction sector. The booming employment services industry is briefly discussed before moving on to the issues associated with the ageing of the Australian population. The article highlights policy changes to end early retirement and to extend the working life of older workers. The final section looks at child care provision and possible policies to increase labour force participation rates of women to compensate for the possibility of a labour shortage associated with an ageing population. Show less

During the 1980s and 1990s, Australian labour attempted to restructure vocational education and training by linking skill development to wages through the award system. The author argues that, although unions provided the inspiration for the new system, the initiative had been lost by the early 1990s with the emergence of enterprise bargaining and the re-assertion of control by employer associations and state education bureaucracies and the subsequent creation of a new training market. The author situates this training reform in the wider program of economic modernisation and then considers training reform in three phases of union leadership through development, ebb and wane. The article draws on the experiences and reflections of several union officials who took part in the implementation of training reform policies and who were members of national tripartite committees and inquiries. An assessment of labour's experiment concludes the article. Show less