Andrew Frazer

Industrial Relations and the Sociological Study of Labour Law

This article examines the prospect for more fruitful collaborative research between labour law and industrial relations, using recent studies in labour law as a starting point. An increased and more sophisticated interest in labour law as regulation, particularly in Australia, has moved the discipline towards some of the traditional interest areas of industrial relations. However there remains a need for more empirically-based research, with the social reality of law as its primary focus. The legal studies paradigm is not well geared to social science research and an interdisciplinary approach is required. Industrial relations is the obvious candidate for such a partnership, but it currently lacks the basis for a law-centred methodology. The paper argues that the established field of sociology of law provides the most suitable basis for such work. To adopt this approach would, however, require scholars in both labour law and industrial relations to move onto new terrain and to ask new questions.

Major Tribunal Decisions in 1996

* Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522. Few will deny that court and industrial tribunal decisions during 1996 were overshadowed by legislative developments. In the wake of recent legislative changes in most jurisdictions, tribunals were occupied with questions of interpretation and procedure, particularly in the areas of representation, appeals and the powers of tribunals. A persistent theme throughout the year was the relationship between the award system and individual contracts of employment. The importance of individual employment law, and the incidence of decided cases, increased with the spread of staff contracts and incentive payments, combined with the continuing privatisation of many state government services. A number of cases

Book Reviews : LABOUR LAW AND THE CONSTITUTION By George Williams. The Federation Press, Sydney, 1998, xix +164 pp.,

about the volume is the diverse range of work being done by labour historians in Australia today. That the times are a-changing is evident from the outset, in Mark Hearn’s deconstruction of the Australian Workers Union’s ethos of mateship, with its references to Sartre and Foucault, and quotations from Nietzsche, Geertz and Heidegger. The new cultural history is making its mark on labour history! Glenda Strachan’s essay on a very different sort of unionism, that in the nursing profession, is similarly a sign of the changing preoccupations of labour historians. While labour historians have long been interested in the experiences of women and the influence of gender, organisations such as those formed by the nurses, with their ’ethos of self-sacrifice’ (page 45), have until recently been relatively neglected. Labour historians are also preoccupied with questions of ethnicity and race, although the only essay that deals with Aborigines and work, that by Christine Nicholls and Ross Shanahan, while thoroughly readable and based on an interesting concept, is somewhat sketchy. In the same section of the book, I found the stories in Desmond O’Connor’s account of the conflicts between