The Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand
Abstract
In this paper we examine the outcomes of the 2001, 2004, 2007 Enterprise Bargaining Agreements
between the Australian Nursing Federation (SA) and the South Australian Government with
particular focus on union-based strategies for de-intensifying nurses’ labour in the acute and
community sectors. Consistent with the theoretical and empirical research on time, the strategies
employed in the acute sector reflect rational, linear, bureaucratic, logical and masculinist relations
to time through the use of computerised time and task measures. Community sector solutions are
characterised by cyclical, messy and highly relational feminised approaches to reducing work
intensification. We argue that the outcomes of these two approaches are contradictory. The
community-based solution of case management is less successful in reducing workload, but
maintains worker control over the labour process, while in the acute sector, the highly Taylorist
approach is successful in de-intensifying workload but at the cost of reduced control over the
labour processes