Union compliance and incomes policy: The Australian Social Contract, 1983-87

Australia has a lang experience of centralised wage-fixing through the federal and state systems of conciliation and arbitration but unti/1975 this machinery was not embedded in a more general incomes policy. Although this was undermined progressively and finally abandoned in 1981 a further incomes policy was introduced two years later following the election of a federal Labour government. Overseas experiences indicates that the structural features of the union movement are important determinants of the success of an incomes policy. Australian experience since 1983 however, indicates that, despite large numbers of competing unions and a union peak council lacking formal control over affiliates, an incomes policy may be viable. This reasoning was supported by empirical evidence pertaining to the role of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in securing compliance from affiliated unions

Breakaway Unions: an Australian Case

This paper examines the concept of breakaway unions and places it within the Australian institutional context. The concept is then applied to a particular case involving power station operators, a group of which seceded from one union and merged with another while retaining their group autonomy. This somewhat novel approach to circumventing the constraints of registration under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act highlights the limitations of industrial style unions in representing a diverse membership

A Changing World of Workplace Conflict Resolution and Employee Voice: An Australian Perspective

The authors contribute to dispute resolution theory and provide new insights on such important issues as employee voice, workplace disputes and employees’ intentions to quit. They conducted and analyzed a survey of managers in Australian workplaces. They apply Budd and Colvin’s (2008) path-finding dispute resolution framework to examine two research questions: first, is there a relationship between the resolution of disputes and employee voice as measured by employee perceptions of influence over decision-making? Second, is there a relationship between the resolution of workplace disputes and employees’ intentions to quit? These are important questions in view of the high costs of workplace conflict and employee turnover. The authors find that employee voice facilitates successful dispute resolution. Further, employee voice has the additional benefit of directly reducing employee turnover intentions, above and beyond its indirect effect by helping to resolve conflicts at work

Restructuring the Australian State: Modernisation, Privatisation and National Competition Policy

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E-government in Australia and Spain: a Study of Contrasts and Similarities

Studies about the social impact of Internet and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are usually focused on private sector organizations. However, under the rubric of e-government, developments in the public sector are proceeding at a similar if not greater pace and are giving rise to a range of important issues which impact on the internal (organisational and managerial) and external (relations between government and citizens and clients) dimensions of public sector management and administration. Despite the importance of these developments, there is a dearth of academic critiques with the major contributors to the literarture being public managers and consultants. This paper is the result of a Spanish-Australian collaboration to investigate the development of e-government and its implications for public management and society at large. At first glance a comparative paper on Spain and Australia may seem surprising, however, the pervasiveness of the ideas of the New Public Management (NPM) and the univeral character of the set of innovations described as e-government suggests that a comparison of similar developments across divergent cultural, political and economic contexts may generate valuable insights into the character of both NPM and e-government, both separately and with respect to their interaction with each other. This paper proceeds on the hypothesis that governments in the two countries are making rapid advances in their use of e-government, but that this is not matched by the pace of change in the management process and the relations of governments and citizens. It is evident that public managers in both countries have welcomed Web sites and other Internet uses but it is necessary to ask whether these changes represent substantive rather than superficial advances. We suggest that, despite some notable exceptions, the development of ICT in Australia and Spain is actually improving unidirectional services rather than making innovations to online services and providing for interaction with citizens. This paper is in three parts. The first provides a comparative overview of developments in e-govenment in Australia and Spain. The second employs case study analysis of the leading e-government experiencies at the different levels of government in the two countries to explore the limitations of e-government in developing the information and knowledge society. Finally, as a result of interviews with managers, webmasters, ICT experts and public policy specialists from Spain and Australia about future trends and problems concerning e-government, we raise some questions for further discussion. The key issues here are: facilitating citizens access to ICTs, adapting organizations to ICTs and opening the internal structure of government to the social and political environment

Traces of trauma – a multivariate pattern analysis of childhood trauma, brain structure and clinical phenotypes

Background: Childhood trauma (CT) is a major yet elusive psychiatric risk factor, whose multidimensional conceptualization and heterogeneous effects on brain morphology might demand advanced mathematical modeling. Therefore, we present an unsupervised machine learning approach to characterize the clinical and neuroanatomical complexity of CT in a larger, transdiagnostic context. Methods: We used a multicenter European cohort of 1076 female and male individuals (discovery: n = 649; replication: n = 427) comprising young, minimally medicated patients with clinical high-risk states for psychosis; patients with recent-onset depression or psychosis; and healthy volunteers. We employed multivariate sparse partial least squares analysis to detect parsimonious associations between combinations of items from the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and gray matter volume and tested their generalizability via nested cross-validation as well as via external validation. We investigated the associations of these CT signatures with state (functioning, depressivity, quality of life), trait (personality), and sociodemographic levels. Results: We discovered signatures of age-dependent sexual abuse and sex-dependent physical and sexual abuse, as well as emotional trauma, which projected onto gray matter volume patterns in prefronto-cerebellar, limbic, and sensory networks. These signatures were associated with predominantly impaired clinical state- and trait-level phenotypes, while pointing toward an interaction between sexual abuse, age, urbanicity, and education. We validated the clinical profiles for all three CT signatures in the replication sample. Conclusions: Our results suggest distinct multilayered associations between partially age- and sex-dependent patterns of CT, distributed neuroanatomical networks, and clinical profiles. Hence, our study highlights how machine learning approaches can shape future, more fine-grained CT research

Industrial Relations and the Law: the New Industrial Relations (issues)

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The Training Guarantee, a good idea gone wrong

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Agreements in Firms Covered by Federal and State Awards: Medicentre Case Study

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