Anne Junor

Permanent Part-Time Work: New Family-Friendly Standard or High Intensity Cheap Skills?

Abstract Permanent part-time (PPT) employment grew strongly in Australia between 1987 and 1997, remaining approximately 87 per cent female and ‘non-standard’. Whilst it relieves the insecurity of casualisation, its hours may or may not be family-friendly’. It is located in the career stream only in its minority parental leave form. As an employer initiative, PPT work may allow the ‘flexing’ of hours around monthly or annual averages, creating a finer-tuned temporal and numerical flexibility, and greater work intensification, than is achievable through casualisation. Employers of PPT labour are utilising the workforce re-entry of mature-aged women in jobs classified as base grade, to obtain complex but unacknowledged ‘articulation work’ skills at low cost. In the long run, PPT work may help entrench the standard working hours and social division of labour of the family wage era. A least-bad short-term coping device, PPT work needs to be part of a broader-based solution to the work/life dilemma.

Casual University Work: Choice, Risk, Inequity and the Case for Regulation

Australian universities now have a headcount casualisation rate near the national workforce average. Reasons for, and impacts of, this development are explored, and an argument is made for the role of industrial regulation in reconciling requirements for flexibility, security and equity in university employment. Responses to a large survey of casual academic and general staff suggest that this employment mode is a minority preference. Discrete groups of casual university staff, including those seeking university careers, those with other secure income sources, and students in transit to other careers, experience different forms and levels of insecurity and inequity. Appropriately targeted regulatory responses thus include criteria-based caps, a general staff conversion mechanism, a work value review, access to increments and service entitlements, and workplace representation rights.

Putting the process back in: rethinking service sector skill

Service skill definitions have been over-extended, by equating compliance with skill, and underdeveloped, by not recognising service jobs’ invisible social and organisational aspects. Existing approaches to determining service skill levels draw on occupational qualifications and capacity for labour market closure, on knowledge worker/ knowledgeable emotion worker dichotomies, and on the conceptual conflation of labour process deskilling, unskilled jobs and unskilled workers. The theoretical and empirical basis for a new framework identifying hitherto under-specified ‘work process skills’ is outlined. This framework allows recognition of the integrated use of awareness-shaping, relationship-shaping and coordination skills, at different levels of experience-based complexity, derived from reflexive learning and collective problem-solving in the workplace. Political struggles over the use of combinations and levels of these ‘skills of experience’ may result either in jobs designed to reduce autonomy, or in improved skill recognition and development, enhancing equity and career paths.

New public management and employment relations in the public services of Australia and New Zealand

This study begins with a brief theoretical discussion of the defining features of new public management (NPM) and its employment relations implications. This is followed by analyses of the managerial and union strategies through which change was effected, resisted and negotiated in Australia and New Zealand. The discussion contrasts the approaches to regulating employment relations that waxed and waned under a succession of Labor and Coalition governments in Australia and Labour and National governments in New Zealand. The conclusion is one of survival in both countries, both of elements of NPM and of public sector unionism.

Australian HRM and the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005

This speculative piece predicts that the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 will encourage a range of different strategic responses among employers regarding HRM policy and practice. Firm size, product and labour-market conditions, employer culture and union presence influence strategy formulation. The Act will intensify the ‘low road’ tendencies of certain industries, particularly as it structurally individualises employment relations for significant segments of the workforce by transferring them from awards to AWAs. Over time too, through its attack on union functioning, it will put downward pressure on industries and market segments that now provide better employment conditions. At present, shortages of skilled labour are a principal factor neutralising these downward pressures and encouraging creative, high-commitment HRM strategies. Smaller firms without specialist HRM functions will largely focus on compliance and the low road. HRM professionals in larger firms will have opportuni...

Critical Realism Comes to Management

Academics and students teaching and researching in the field of management and organisation theory might be expected eagerly to welcome management-related writing which is neither empiricist nor constructivist. In the commerce faculties where many academic management and organisation theorists work, there is certainly a need for clearly written critical realist material which can challenge and contest point by point the positivist assumptions underling too much quantitative research. There is equally a need for a better alternative to positivism than the various brands of idealist writing in existing texts, which offer prescription masquerading as description, or untestable models purporting to map every contingency on a two-axis or four-quadrant grid. Even the critical texts tend to stop short at pointing out contradictions, without moving on to explanation. Management, organisation theory, marketing, human resource management and industrial relations tend to rely on borrowed disciplinary bases, whether psychology, sociology, and anthropology, accounting, economics, history or law. Scholars in these fields are thus particularly prone to methodological defensiveness and epistemological uncertainty, in the face of the lingering positivist hegemony which has colonised the numberoriented disciplines alongside which they work in commerce faculties. Yet with the exception of ‘ gurus’ and other corporate apologists, management theorists have less capacity than postmodernist cultural theorists, for example, to fall back on style and flamboyant assertion as a cover or defence for side-stepping ontology. Management and organisational theorists need to demonstrate that their analyses have some explanatory power or practical adequacy. Yet whether framing research projects or preparing cases for public debate, they find themselves having to respond to empiricist rules of evidence, and are often uncertain about how to justify qualitative methodologies, or about non-empiricist uses of quantitative data. Critical realism has the capacity to provide the epistemological and methodological base that they require.

Supply chains, maintenance and safety in the Australian airline industry

This article examines potential regulatory and safety problems arising from the outsourcing and offshoring of heavy aircraft maintenance. We raise questions about the advisability of using increasingly complex supply chains in the aircraft maintenance industry where safety standards are paramount. Greater disarticulation of maintenance work makes regulatory oversight more convoluted and expensive to do thoroughly and transparently. Using a Pressure, Disorganisation and Regulatory Failure model, the article highlights how new work arrangements involving increased use of supply chains are developing more quickly than adequate airline, union and regulator responses to the safety problems engendered by those changes. In often heated industrial debates between licensed aircraft maintenance engineers (LAMEs) and airline managers about business needs and safety, we urge that more attention be paid to LAME concerns about outsourcing.

How Closely Do Australian Training Package Qualifications Reflect the Skills in Occupations? An Empirical Investigation of Seven Qualifications.

This paper uses evidence from an Australian research project into under-recognized skills in occupations, gathered through industry-level interviews and company case studies, to examine VET curricula. The project, funded by the Australian Research Council, focused on skill in jobs traditionally regarded in Australia as unskilled. As part of the project, the evidence about skill was compared with the relevant qualifications. The qualifications are contained in Training Packages, which form the basis of most formal VET training in Australia. The qualifications for the seven occupations were in three broad industry areas (manufacturing, services and property services) and had all been developed in recent decades, unlike apprenticed trades which have long-standing qualifications and curricula in Australia. The comparison exercise showed some mismatches between the skills that were found in the researched occupations and the content of the qualifications. Some of the issues are believed to have broader applicability beyond these specific occupations and qualifications and thus can provide evidence to improve the design of Training Packages themselves.

How do occupational norms shape mothers’ career and caring options?:

Occupationally-differentiated patterns of paid work arrangements help shape the extent to which mothers of children under the age of 16 have access to both career and caring security (stable paid jobs with career prospects that also guarantee the ongoing capacity to provide and arrange high-quality care for children). Five sets of conditions critical to mothers’ work and caring security are: contracts providing two-way mobility between full-time and part-time work; actual hours worked; work scheduling; work location; and contractual security. Occupations can be clustered into ‘shapes’, based on the relative mother-friendliness of different ways in which they combine these conditions. Some shapes provide both employment security and caring security; others involve types of ‘flexibility focusing a trade-off between the two types of security. Data for 64 occupations, taken from early waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia (HILDA) Survey, were used to identify statistical norms for key aspects of each employment condition, and also the strength of these norms – that is, how flexible they were, for better or worse. These occupational norms and strengths were assumed to reflect regulatory standards or commonly accepted organisational practices. The 64 occupations could be grouped into five shapes that were associated with different concentrations of mothers. Occupational ‘shapes’ may thus act as barriers or enablers to mothers’ labour market transitions. They may tend to exclude mothers by denying caring security; allow employment maintenance based on a trade between caring and career security; or enable full occupational integration by providing both forms of security. The concept of shapes aids theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of occupational segregation and labour market segmentation, and may aid the targeting of regulatory interventions to improve mothers’ access to both career and caring security.

Participation, Fragmentation and Union Response: The 1998–2000 ACT Public Sector Bargaining Round and the Workplace Relations Act

The current Australian Capital Territory (ACT) public sector workplace bargaining round lasted more than two years with most agreements involving a trade-off between low wage outcomes and protection of job security within performance improvement measures. The main focus of this paper is on government and agency experiments with bargaining structures and processes. The first was a limited and largely unsuccessful attempt in 1998 and 1999 at participative agreement making without the involvement of the key unions. The second, a selective decentralisation of bargaining to parts of a single business, was more successful: of 50 agreements, over 40 have been achieved. The procedural success of the decentralisation strategy is a significant outcome. However, the fragmentation strategy contained internal contradictions and required strong centralised policy control of bargaining agendas and outcomes, leading to delays and breeding distrust. Unions conducted effective defensive campaigns against non-union agreements and involuntary redundancies, but face their own dilemmas in finalising this round and preparing for the next.