Ann Hodgkinson

Gender, part‐time employment and employee participation in Australian workplaces

The international trend in the growth and incidence of “non‐standard employment”, and its highly gendered nature, is well documented. Similarly, interest in employee involvement or participation by academics and practitioners has seen the emergence of a rapidly growing body of literature. Despite the continued interest in each of these areas, the literature is relatively silent when it comes to where the two areas intersect, that is, what the implications are for employee participation in the growth of non‐standard employment. This paper seeks to redress this relative insularity in the literature by examining some broad trends in this area in Australia. The literature lacks one clear, accepted definition of “non‐standard” employment. For ease of definition, and because of the nature of the available data, we focus on part‐time employment in this paper. The paper analyses data from the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey of 1995 (AWIRS 95). It tests the hypotheses that part‐time employees enjoy less access to participatory management practices in the workplace than their full‐time counterparts, and that this diminishes the access to participation in the workplace enjoyed by female workers in comparison with their male colleagues, since the part‐time workforce is predominantly feminised. These hypotheses were strongly confirmed. This has major implications for workplace equity, and for organisational efficiency.

Productivity measurement and enterprise bargaining – the local government perspective

The introduction of efficiency improvements and enterprise bargaining into local authorities has been severely hampered by a failure to agree on a method of measuring service productivity. This paper develops an outcomes measure of productivity which, it argues, meets both externally imposed cost efficiency requirements and clients’ needs for service effectiveness in terms of quality and equity in delivery. Applications of this measure to library and statutory planning services are provided.

The Impact of the Workplace Relations Act on Regional Patterns of Industrial Relations: The Illawarra Region of Australia, 1996— 2004

Work Choices fundamentally restructured the Australian industrial relations system in 2005, by marginalizing the role of awards and the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, privileging individual contracts and restricting industrial action by trade unions. The Workplace Relations Act 1996 (WRA) represented a significant first step in this direction prior to the Liberal National coalition gaining control of the Senate in 2005. However, there has been no extensive workplace data of the kind produced by the Australian Workplace Relations Survey to take stock of the impact of the WRA. This study undertakes a stocktake of the impact of the WRA for the Illawarra region. It compares data for trade unions, employer associations, forms of employee participation, workplace reductions, industrial disputes and payment systems from the Illawarra Regional Workplace Industrial Relations Survey 1996 with a further survey in 2004. It concludes that while the WRA did impact on the region, the Illawarra nevertheless maintained a distinctive pattern of industrial relations in which the New South Wales State system was more influential. If this provides any indication of the wider impact of the WRA, it offers strong reasons as to why the government proceeded with Work Choices.

Space, Subjectivity and the Investment Location Decision: The Case of the Illawarra

The article seeks to make a dual contribution. It adds to the work of those researchers who have attempted to carry the spatial dimension of industrial relations research beyond traditional systems theory. In so doing it urges the need for industrial relations analysts to become conversant with the wide body of scholarship that has contributed to the labour dimension of the spatial literature. The article also examines the relative importance that those charged with determining where investment is located, place on industrial relations issues and compares the major regions of New South Wales in this regard.

Choosing Business Collaborators Using Computing Intelligence Methods

Inter-firm collaboration has become a common feature of the developing international economy. Firms as well as the nations have more relationships with each other. Even relatively closed economies or industries are becoming more open, Australia and China are examples of this case. The benefits generated from collaboration and the motivations to form collaboration are investigated by some researchers. However, the widely studied relationships between collaboration and profits are based on tangible assets and turnovers whereas most intangible assets and benefits are neglected during the economic analysis. In the present paper, two methods, naive Bayes and neural network, from computing intelligence are used to study the benefits acquired from collaboration. These two methods are used to learn the relationship and make prediction for a specified collaboration. The proposed method has been applied to a practical case of WEMOSOFT, an independent development department under MOBOT. The predication accuracies are 87.18% and 92.31%, for neural network and naive Bayes, respectively. Experimental result demonstrates that the proposed method is an effective and efficient way to prediction the benefit of collaboration and choose the appropriate collaborator.