Regulating Clothing Outwork: A Sceptic's View

By applying the strategies of international anti-sweatshop campaigns to the Australian context, recent regulations governing home-based clothing production hold retailers responsible for policing the wages and employment conditions of clothing outworkers who manufacture clothing on their behalf. This paper argues that the new approach oversimplifies the regulatory challenge by assuming (1) that Australian clothing production is organised in a hierarchical ‘buyer-led’ linear structure in which core retail firms have the capacity to control their suppliers’ behaviour; (2) that firms act as unitary moral agents; and (3) that interventions imported from other times and places are applicable to the contemporary Australian context. After considering some alternative regulatory approaches, the paper concludes that the new regulatory strategy effectively privatises responsibility for labour market conditions – a development that cries out for further debate

Becoming an industry: The struggle of social and community workers for award coverage, 1976-2001

Until the 1990s, most workers employed by non-government community services organizations were excluded from the most basic right of Australian industrial citizenship' ” award coverage. Expected to be a formality by the newly-formed Australian Social Welfare Union, establishing an award for the non-profit social and community services sector became a grinding struggle at both federal and state levels against the resistance of both Liberal-National coalition and Labor party governments, the major charities and other unions stretching from the 1970s through the 1990s. Our explanation of why the struggle for industrial recognition was so long and hard emphasizes the lack of social recognition for care work and contradictions among care workers between their roles as professionals, caring for others, and unionists ” factors that led to internal, institutional, strategic and cultural resistance to an award for the social and community services workers

A case of mistaken identity The social welfare professions and New Public Management

Social welfare professions have been highly exposed to the corrosive effects of New Public Management (NPM) on professional identity and influence. In this article, I argue that ambivalence from within the social welfare professions, and in society more generally, towards professional recognition of these occupations enables NPM to enact an agenda of de-professionalization. Further, gendered assumptions about professional identity, and particularly about the caring professions in which there is a high concentration of women workers, are pivotal to the destabilization of the professional social welfare workforce. I draw on examples from the Queensland Department of Child Safety workforce reforms to illustrate how NPM discourse intersects with, and is enabled by, well-established ambivalence towards professional recognition within and outside the social welfare professions. I suggest that a gender analysis can deepen our understanding of the substantial impact of NPM on social welfare professions and can enable these professions to develop effective responses to the substantial threats they now face