Political devolution and employment relations in Great Britain: the case of the Living Wage

This article examines the role of the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales in promoting the voluntary Living Wage. It shows that active promotion of the Living Wage standard has emerged in both countries from a broader commitment to an economic policy of ‘inclusive growth’. Employment law is not a devolved matter, and the article identifies a broad range of economic incentives and soft forms of regulation that have been used by the devolved governments to promote the Living Wage in the absence of hard power to legislate. Non‐legislative forms of state intervention are often regarded sceptically, but the article shows that the attempts of devolved governments to spread the Living Wage have been impactful, particularly in Scotland

Taking the pulse at work : an employment relations scorecard for Australia

This study, and the project behind it, is an attempt 100 years on from the Webbs to comprehensively assess the health of the industrial relations/employment relations system by ‘taking the pulse’ of the employment relationship. If, as we argue, the relative health and performance of the employment relationship remains the key dependent variable of the field of employment relations today, there have been remarkably few attempts to audit and measure its critical dimensions. This study, founded on a large representative survey of workers and managers across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, attempts to do just that, and produces in this article, results of those survey questions for Australia. The article is novel since this kind of employment diagnostic is based on a unique nationally representative survey of employers and employees. The study is also innovative, in that it presents the results of the health of the system in the form of an employment relations scorecard and is the first such attempt to do so in industrial relations

Fair Work Australia: the Commission reborn?

Fair Work Australia is a new institution created in 2009 to perform a range of functions under the Fair Work legislation – although it is far from the ‘one-stop shop’ that Labor had originally promised. It has much in common with the body it principally replaced, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, not least in terms of its personnel. Yet, at the same time, it has the freedom to operate in ways that have more in common with two other antecedents, the Workplace Authority and the Australian Fair Pay Commission. This article explores the character of the new agency and the processes it has chosen to adopt for four key functions: the approval of enterprise agreements; the resolution of unfair dismissal claims; wage fixation; and the setting and variation of minimum standards.Andrew Stewar