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

Commonwealth arbitration reports

Description based on: Vol. 303 (1986)Imprint varies"A report of decisions given under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act."Mode of access: Internet.Includes decisions of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission and other bodie

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

Continuity and Change in Australian Wages Policy

Australia shares with several small European economies the characteristic of having a relatively coordinated union movement with the ability to influence real wage levels. This article explores the course of wages policy over the last decade by applying to Australia a model of wage determination originating in Europe, a model which assumes that the union movement can determine the real wage level. The wage level the union movement chooses is influenced by choices it faces between real wage increases and employment growth. The unions are also influenced by the public sector employment generating activity of government. Stagflation in the late 1970s is analysed by hypothesising a misperception by the union movement of the policy options available to government, and a mistrust by government of the unions' willingness to moderate wage increases if employment levels rise rapidly. The model suggests that an accord between unions and government (such as that which has been in place in Australia since 1983) is a way to escape some of these policy dilemmas. Copyright 1985 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.