Using Historical Perspective to Enhance Understanding of the Relationship Between Equal Employment Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Diversity Management

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the value of considering Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Affirmative Action (AA) and Diversity Management (DM) and the relationships between them from an historical perspective. By locating all three policies and/or strategies in the specific historical contexts in which they emerged, the paper considers analogous political, social and legal developments that emerged concurrently, and whether they had an impact on the way that EEO, AA and DM have been practised and represented. For our purposes, such developments include multicultural and productive diversity policies and anti-discrimination laws. This approach makes it possible to uncover the similarities and differences between these policies/practises and also patterns of change and continuity. On this basis, the paper indicates how ahistorical approaches to EEO/AA and DM have prevented understandings of and engagement with the workplace experiences of migrant workers from non-English speaking backgrounds, thereby contributing to a lack of insight into inter-cultural relations in organisations composed of women and men from a wide range of countries, linguistic groups and cultures.The symposium is organised on behalf of AAHANZBS by the Business and Labour History Group, The University of Sydney, with the financial support of the University’s Faculty of Economics and Business

La mobilisation et les espaces de résistance : à propos de la politique de l’espace dans les ateliers ferroviaires d’Eveleigh (Sydney) des années 1920 aux années 1960

Les ateliers d’Eveleigh, ouverts en 1887 à Sydney, constituent au premier XXe siècle une implantation ferroviaire à la fois centrale et emblématique pour le pays. En effet, outre sa taille considérable (3 000 ouvriers entre 1907 et 1950) il était dirigé par l’État et localisé au plus près du Parlement, au sein d’un espace public de premier plan. Eveleigh joua ainsi un rôle décisif lors de la grande grève générale de 1917, aboutissant à une écrasante défaite ouvrière qui marqua pour des décennies les travailleurs australiens. Ces ateliers ferroviaires constituent ainsi un observatoire privilégié pour comprendre comment l’espace peut à la fois être un enjeu et un moyen de la mobilisation ouvrière. Mettant en œuvre la problématique des pratiques spatiales, cet article analyse la confrontation entre ouvriers et dirigeants autour du processus du travail et du droit des ouvriers à s’organiser collectivement sur leur lieu de travail. L’étude particulière des espaces met à jour, d’une part, la manière dont l’encadrement a essayé de contrôler les déplacements des ouvriers. D’autre part, elle révèle comment ceux-ci se sont battus afin d’occuper des lieux stratégiques et de contrecarrer la direction dans sa volonté de mettre en place des frontières. Il s’agissait aussi d’accroître leur maîtrise du processus du travail et leur autonomie vis-à-vis de l’encadrement et de la bureaucratie, enfin de définir et de défendre différentes façons de travailler et de vivre. De telles pratiques permirent aux ouvriers d’Eveleigh de retravailler l’espace à leurs propres fins et, en somme, elles ont été essentielles pour la mise en place de la politique du lieu et la transformation du statut des ateliers, ces avant-postes de la lutte qui sont devenus les enjeux mêmes de la victoire. En raison de leurs situations sur ce sol contesté, divers lieux sont abordés, notamment la « place rouge » et les portails d’entrée qui avaient acquis un statut d’autonomie relative dont les ouvriers se servirent pour faire échouer les mesures qui leur étaient imposées pendant le cours de leur travail et qui les privaient de liberté.The Eveleigh railway workshops opened in 1887 in Sydney. It can be considered during the first half of the 20th Century as a central rail establishment strongly emblematic for the country. Indeed, in addition to its considerable size (3 000 workers between 1907 and 1950) he was led by the State and located closer to the Parliament, within a public space of foreground. Eveleigh thus played a decisive role in the great general strike of 1917, resulting in an overwhelming labour defeat that marked for decades Australian workers. These railway workshops represent a privileged observatory to understand how the space can both be a challenge and a mean for the working-class. Implementing the problem of spatial practices, this article analyses the confrontation between workers and leaders around the process of labour and the right of workers to organize collectively at their place of work. The study of spaces in particular enlightens, on the one hand, the manner in which managers tried to control the movement of workers. On the other hand, it reveals how the latter fought to occupy strategic places, thwart the direction in its willingness to establish borders. It was also to increase their control of the labour process and their autonomy from the coaching of bureaucracy, finally to define and defend different ways of working and living. Such practices helped workers of Eveleigh to rework the space for their own purpose. In short, they were essential for the implementation of a space policy and the transformation of the status of the workshops, these outposts of the fight which became stakes of victory. By their situations on this disputed soil, various locations are studied, including "red square" and the entrance portals, which had acquired a status of relative autonomy whose workers used to frustrate the measures that were imposed on them during the course of their work and who deprived them of freedom

Using Historical Perspective to Enhance Understanding of the Relationship Between Equal Employment Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Diversity Management

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the value of considering Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Affirmative Action (AA) and Diversity Management (DM) and the relationships between them from an historical perspective. By locating all three policies and/or strategies in the specific historical contexts in which they emerged, the paper considers analogous political, social and legal developments that emerged concurrently, and whether they had an impact on the way that EEO, AA and DM have been practised and represented. For our purposes, such developments include multicultural and productive diversity policies and anti-discrimination laws. This approach makes it possible to uncover the similarities and differences between these policies/practises and also patterns of change and continuity. On this basis, the paper indicates how ahistorical approaches to EEO/AA and DM have prevented understandings of and engagement with the workplace experiences of migrant workers from non-English speaking backgrounds, thereby contributing to a lack of insight into inter-cultural relations in organisations composed of women and men from a wide range of countries, linguistic groups and cultures.The symposium is organised on behalf of AAHANZBS by the Business and Labour History Group, The University of Sydney, with the financial support of the University’s Faculty of Economics and Business

Financial cost of lymphedema borne by women with breast cancer

Psycho-Oncology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Objective: Our study examines the financial cost of lymphedema following a diagnosis of breast cancer and addresses a significant knowledge gap regarding the additional impact of lymphedema on breast cancer survivors. Methods: An online national survey was conducted with 361 women who had either breast cancer without lymphedema (BC) (group 1, n = 209) or breast cancer with lymphedema (BC+LE) (group 2, n = 152). Participant recruitment was supported by the Breast Cancer Network Australia and the Australasian Lymphology Association. Results: Both breast cancer and lymphedema result in significant out-of-pocket financial costs borne by women. Of patients with BC+LE, 80% indicated that their breast cancer diagnosis had affected them financially compared with 67% in the BC group (P \u3c .020). For patients with lymphedema, over half (56%) indicated that this specific additional diagnosis to their breast cancer affected them financially and that costs increased with lymphedema severity. The cost of compression garments formed a large proportion of these costs (40.1%). The average number of attendances to a therapist each year was 5.8 (range, 0-45). Twenty-five patients (16.4%) had an episode of cellulitis in the past year. The incidence of cellulitis was 7.7% in 91 patients with subclinical or mild lymphedema compared with 29.5% of 61 patients with more extensive lymphedema (P \u3c .001). The average out-of-pocket financial cost of lymphedema care borne by women was A$977 per annum, ranging from A$207 for subclinical lymphedema to over A$1400 for moderate or severe lymphedema. Conclusions: This study identifies an additional detrimental effect of lymphedema on women in terms of financial costs

Rethinking Community: Social Capital and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops

The tradition in Australian community studies has been to use the term \u27community\u27 as a synonym for \u27the social organisation of a limited geographical area.\u27 Likewise, the traditional approach taken by Australian labour historians to this social formation has been to focus on specific localities where the dominant industries have produced extensive union membership and activism. Generally, such studies have favoured coal mining and iron and steel industries and with only a few exceptions, they have tended to subordinate communal dynamics to economic, political and industrial developments.\u27 The problem with this approach is that it fails to deal with the inherent complexities of community and the processes through which communities of interest interpenetrate with communities of action. As Metcalfe puts it, localities are contestable entities with contestable rights, whose existence depends on economic and political processes which reach beyond their borders. They cannot be isolated, mainly because a multiplicity of social processes and networks pass through them \u27in different directions and for different distances

Naming, condoning, and shaming : interpreting employee assessments of behavior and misbehavior in the workplace

27 page(s

A History of Eveleigh Railway workshops

1 page(s

The Masked disease : oral history, memory and the influenza pandemic, 1918-1919

10 page(s

Mobilization and spaces of resistance : about the politics of space in the railway workshops of Eveleigh (Sydney) from the 1920s to the 1960s

23 page(s