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

Intra-Industry Trade and Adjustment Costs in the Australian Textile, Clothing and Footwear and Motor Vehicle Industries: A Comparative Case Study Approach*

Australian studies have focused on different dimensions of intra industry trade (IIT) between the manufacturing sector and the rest of the world at the disaggregated level, i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 digit levels. The current study seeks to complement the existing literature by examining the IIT and hence output and employment performance of two different digit industries in the form of the textile, clothing and footwear (TCF) (2 digit) and motor vehicle (4 digit) industries because they are characterized by different factor intensity in production. Specifically, the former is fundamentally labour intensive whilst the latter is capital intensive in production. The central results reveal that the motor vehicle industry has exhibited a superior IIT and hence output and employment performance as compared to the TCF industry, as well as the manufacturing sector. The sophisticated capital goods produced and the capital intensive nature of motor vehicle production have made it possible to derive the cost benefits of large scale production which in turn has led to stronger export penetration. Moreover, the industry specific assistance measures which have been biased towards tax incentives for investment and R&D expenditure have favoured the motor vehicle industry's production and exports at the expense of the TCF industry, thereby reinforcing the former industry's stronger IIT and hence output and employment performance. Copyright (c) 2010 The Economic Society of Australia.

The Role of Government Assistance in Structural Change in Manufacturing: Australian Evidence

By the 1970s the Australian manufacturing sector was, by OECD standards, small, fragmented and inward looking. Successive Australian Federal Governments have since responded by progressively reducing levels of assistance to manufacturing in an effort to promote structural change. In this article we investigate whether these lower levels of assistance have accelerated the pace of structural change by estimating an empirical model using a pooled cross-section time-series data set. Our results suggest that reduced levels of assistance to manufacturing have had a positive impact on the pace of structural change in the Australian manufacturing sector. In addition, we find that taxes on factor inputs can be expected to impede structural change, and it would appear that structural change proceeds at a faster pace in more specialised manufacturing sectors. Copyright 1993 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

Labour Productivity and Employment in Australian Manufacturing SMEs

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between labour productivity and employment in Australian manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The results indicate that labour productivity of SMEs varies substantially between industries within the manufacturing sector, but on average labour productivity for manufacturing SMEs increased at a faster rate than that of large manufacturing enterprises across all industries. All manufacturing industries except one recorded employment growth during the period under study. However like labour productivity growth, employment growth also varies across industries within the manufacturing sector. Yet the study could not establish any definite relationship between labour productivity growth and employment. This finding is consistent with some previous studies