Carolyn Sutherland

Industrial Legislation in 2009

In 2009, two major pieces of industrial legislation were enacted to give effect to the Labor Government’s commitment to replace Work Choices with laws for ‘Fair Work’. The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) promises to bring greater stability and simplicity to Australia’s workplace relations system. However, transitional rules in the Fair Work (Transitional Provisions and Consequential Amendments) Act 2009 (Cth) mean that it will be some time before participants in the system can enjoy these benefits. This review gives a brief account of both Acts before examining in more detail the enterprise bargaining rules which commenced operating in July under the supervision of a new institution, Fair Work Australia. We then consider two aspects of the Fair Work legislation which are most likely to provoke controversy when they commence operating in 2010, the adverse action and transfer of business provisions. We also look at the steps taken by federal and state governments to move towards a national system of workplace relations.

Major court and tribunal decisions in Australia in 2015

A number of significant Federal Court and Fair Work Commission decisions decided in 2015 reveal the approach that each institution (the court on one hand and an administrative tribunal on the other) has taken to the interpretation and application of important workplace law principles and rules. These include the abiding question of ‘who is an employee’ and therefore covered by workplace laws; how the General Protections in the Fair Work Act should operate; what constitutes ‘fair’ treatment for the purposes of the Commission’s unfair dismissal and workplace bullying jurisdictions; and how flexibly (or technically) the rules for enterprise bargaining should be applied.

Industrial legislation in Australia in 2014

2014 was a year of considerable legislative activity with the introduction of six industrial relations Bills into Parliament. However, the Coalition Government failed to secure the passage of a single piece of industrial legislation. This article focuses on the most significant of these reforms, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014, which is designed to facilitate the making of greenfields agreements and to increase the take-up rate of individual flexibility agreements. At the same time, the Bill proposes to constrain the rights of unions to enter workplaces. As an addendum to these measures, a second Bill to amend the Fair Work Act was introduced late in the year. It aims to encourage the inclusion of productivity measures in enterprise bargaining negotiations. The article also considers legislative activity in the building and construction sector and the delayed implementation of new reporting requirements under the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012. At the state level, the article briefly reviews Tasmanian legislation to protect businesses from the activities of protesters, developments in the regulation of work health and safety in Queensland and Western Australia and a new code of practice for the building and construction sector in Victoria.

Enterprise bargaining as a tool to reduce regulatory layering: A content analysis study

This article assesses whether Australias system of enterprise bargaining has helped to streamline workplace relations rules by replacing overlapping industrial instruments with a single enterprise agreement. It presents empirical findings from a content analysis study of enterprise agreements made in the higher education and fast food sectors between 1993 and 2011. These findings suggest that there has been a remarkable shift over time in the contribution of enterprise agreements to the problem of regulatory ‘layering’. Whereas the majority of early agreements exacerbated the problem by inserting new arrangements on top of existing industrial instruments, more recent agreements have tended to replace multiple instruments with a single agreement. The empirical findings also point to various ways in which legislative reforms and funding incentives have contributed to this shift towards greater simplicity in the workplace relations system.

Stay or Go? Human Behavior in Major Evacuations

Human behaviour in building evacuation and use of elevators has been studied more extensively in recent years. There is also a move to explore concepts of “protect-in-place”, thus avoiding evacuation in some circumstances. This raises the matter of decision making as to whether to “stay or go”. In the fields of natural hazards, such as bushfires and floods, this decision to “stay or go” becomes equally important for safety. A comparison of literature sources on human behaviour and decision making in buildings with recent research on bushfires and floods highlights some common factors critical to decision making as to evacuation or not. These factors include emergency preparedness, situation awareness and trusted information systems. This paper suggests that greater understanding of group behaviour and socio-cultural differences is required if more effective emergency management is to be achieved.

Assessing the Impact of Employment Legislation: The Coalition Government’s Labour Law Programme 1996-2007 and the Challenge of Research

Following 13 years of Labor government at the Federal level a Liberal/National Party Coalition government was elected to office in the Australian general election of 1996. This government was subsequently re-elected in 1998, 2001, and again in 2004, before finally losing power in the 2007 Federal election. Industrial relations and labour law policy were critical aspects of the Coalition’s political and social platform throughout its entire period of office and in pursuance of these policies the government introduced many significant changes to employment relations legislation. These were more than changes of detail, representing fundamental shifts in the distribution of power between the parties to employment relations, and in the means of determining terms and conditions of employment. This report is designed to provide a summary and review of research published over the period 1997-2008 on the impact of the reforms to employment relations legislation which occurred during that period. The report is not a legal analysis per se, although the work does include some published studies carried out by labour lawyers. Rather, the main aim of the report is to assess what practical impact the Coalition’s legislative programme had upon various aspects of labour market and employment relations institutions, arrangements and behaviour; an assessment, then, not of why and how the law changed in a technical sense, but of the consequences and outcomes of legal change. The report also aims to say something about the nature of research in this area, and some of the disciplinary difficulties associated with it.