Chris F. Wright

The Effectiveness of Socially Sustainable Sourcing Mechanisms: Assessing the Prospects of a New Form of Joint Regulation

The traditional mechanisms for improving and protecting labour standards in advanced economies are failing. In Britain, the effectiveness of collective bargaining has diminished substantially over the past quarter century. Legally enforceable minimum labour standards have been an inadequate substitute. A new form of ‘joint regulation’ is emerging that may be better attuned to the contemporary structure of product market competition. It involves employers and unions coordinating action on labour standards across the supply chains of firms that contribute to the production of a particular good or service. This article explores the circumstances in which these ‘socially sustainable sourcing’ mechanisms develop and examines their impact on labour standards, by means of two case studies.

Immigration Policy and Market Institutions in Liberal Market Economies

This article examines how the regulatory character of market institutions shapes government responses to labour shortages, with particular reference to immigration policy. The period between the late 1990s and the late 2000s saw many advanced economies relax entry controls on select categories of foreign workers. This trend was most pronounced among states with liberal market institutions. The underlying reasons for these trends are analysed through an examination of the motivations for reform in Australia and the UK, two states that oversaw significant liberalisations of their labour immigration policies. It argues that the liberal character of key market institutions encouraged firms in these states to look to external rather than internal solutions for meeting their labour requirements. These findings suggest that perspectives from the comparative political economy scholarship, most notably the varieties of capitalism literature, may provide insights into the way that different modes of market regulation shape immigration policy preferences.

The response of unions to the rise of precarious work in Britain

There has been significant growth of precarious work in Britain over the past three decades. This article examines the strategies adopted by unions to counteract this trend. It uses Weil’s ‘strategic choice framework’ to assess the attempts of the Trades Union Congress to encourage affiliates to adopt innovative ways of reaching precarious workers and examines the extent to which these strategies have been implemented. Unfavourable external shifts have placed greater pressure on unions to develop appropriate internal strategies and structures to strengthen their capacity for reaching precarious workers. The Trades Union Congress has encouraged unions to use community unionism strategies to organise precarious workers outside of the workplace and sustainable sourcing strategies to regulate their conditions through procurement mechanisms. These strategies are relatively effective means of reaching precarious workers in the context of legal constraints on unions and changes in the organisation of work and production. The internal governance structures of the British union movement need to be reformed if these strategies are to be adopted more widely.

Policy legacies, visa reform and the resilience of immigration politics

Comparative scholarship tacitly assumes immigration politics to be relatively rigid. A states immigration policy legacy is said to institutionalise policy preferences, thereby making it difficult to implement lasting reforms that are inconsistent with that legacy. This presents difficulties for states with restrictionist legacies wanting to implement liberal reforms in response to the emergence of labour shortages or demographic problems. The supposed rigidity of immigration politics is scrutinised in this article through a systematic process analysis of developments in the United Kingdom over the past decade, where the Blair government confounded the UKs characterisation as a ‘reluctant immigration state’ to implement various liberal work visa reforms. The uncoordinated nature of policymaking and implementation, and the limited involvement of state and societal institutions in the reform process, reflect the UKs historical experience with restrictionist policies, and help to explain the subsequent reintroduction of strict visa controls. The case demonstrates that policy legacies indeed play a significant role in defining the character of the policymaking institutions that shape a states immigration politics.

Employee participation and carbon emissions reduction in Australian workplaces

This paper addresses a research gap on the role of employee participation in motivating workplace climate change mitigation activities. Drawing upon a survey of 682 Australian employers and an analysis of 1329 enterprise agreements, we find strong associations between organisational activities for the reduction of carbon emissions and employee participation in motivating, developing and/or implementing these measures. Engagement with emissions reduction at the workplace level is more likely where employee participation has a substantive role involving deeper and wider influence in organisational decision-making. This is especially the case when a range of approaches, including collective bargaining through trade unions, are utilised. Reflecting extant research on employee participation, this study confirms the importance of the concepts of depth and scope in evaluating the extent to which employee participation is substantive, and that different forms of participation have mutually reinforcing impacts over workplace decisions to reduce carbon emissions. The findings presented suggest that the form of participation may be less important than the way in which it is implemented and the degree of substantive influence that employees have in practice.

Employer Organizations and Labour Immigration Policy in Australia and the United Kingdom: The Power of Political Salience and Social Institutional Legacies

This article examines employer organizations and labour immigration policy in Australia and the United Kingdom. Drawing on 102 elite interviews, it analyses employer organizations’ preferences and influence over recent reforms. The article builds on Culpeppers arguments relating to the significance of political salience and identifies the importance of various institutional factors, particularly social institutions, in shaping employer organizations’ decisions and engagement with the policy process. Political salience and social institutional legacies are critical for explaining why employer organizations played a central role in driving labour immigration reforms in Australia and a marginal role in the UK. Large intakes of workers from the European Union, which sustained immigration as a high salience issue and fuelled the Brexit campaign, also influenced the strategies of UK employer organizations.

Who Killed the Australian Automotive Industry: The Employers, Government or Trade Unions?

The decision by the three multinational automotive manufacturers—Ford, General Motors and Toyota—to cease production in Australia followed a long period of decline in the local industry. This paper examines the factors potentially contributing to these decisions including reductions in government assistance to the industry, the volatility in exchange rates, global strategic decisions by the parent companies to shift production to expanding markets in Asia, and the role of industrial relations and trade unions. Despite the attention given in public discourse to industrial relations arrangements in supposedly hastening the demise of local automotive manufacturing, we find that this factor made no identifiable difference to the final decisions of the parent companies in Tokyo and Detroit to cease production in Australia, which can be attributed to an unfavourable conjuncture of factors. The paper concludes by considering possible options for retaining some aspects of automotive manufacturing in Australia in the future.

Supply chains, production networks and the employment relationship

Supply chains, production networks and other complex inter-organisational relationships are defining features of contemporary business organisations. This article reviews the scholarship on the impact of supply chain pressures on work, employment relations and human resource management, with a particular emphasis on domestic-oriented supply chains. It focuses on several themes: key theoretical frameworks for analysing supply chains and employment relations; the relationship between outsourcing and business strategies; the implications of different supply chain configurations for the employment relationship; the challenges of regulating labour standards in supply chains; and the strategies adopted by unions, civil society organisations and regulatory agencies in response to these pressures. It also provides an overview of the articles contained in this special issue.

Why Do States Adopt Liberal Immigration Policies? The Policymaking Dynamics of Skilled Visa Reform in Australia

The question of why states actively choose to relax skilled immigration controls given the potential political risks involved remains largely unaddressed in the non-European context. Using a systematic process analysis of recent policy change in Australia, this paper asks whether comparative political economy frameworks, which have been conceived mainly with reference to European states with corporatist policy-making traditions, can explain the reasons for liberal skilled visa reform in states where governments have greater autonomy from the ‘social partners’. Consistent with the assumptions of these frameworks, labour market demands generated by a predominant liberal production regime strongly conditioned the policy preferences of key actors and institutions in the Australian case, which in turn influenced skilled visa reform. The findings suggest that while the comparative political economy frameworks have considerable utility in explaining skilled immigration policy change in non-European cases, they cannot fully account for the autonomy and distinct motivations of the state and the influence of ‘non-market’ factors over policy preferences and actor behaviour.

TRADE UNIONS AND ECONOMIC REFORM IN AUSTRALIA, 1983–2013

Many of the key reforms of the past three decades that helped to strengthen the Australian economy were implemented during the operation of the Accord that existed between Australian Labor Party governments and the union movement. In order to address structural economic problems, unions agreed to moderate wage outcomes and to facilitate the transition to workplace bargaining in return for social welfare gains for workers, which successive governments have maintained. These reforms helped to improve labor market efficiency and allowed firms to integrate successfully into international markets, without substantially compromising the interests of workers and their families, which thereby allowed economic dislocation and social unrest to be contained. In contrast to the assertions of certain Australian employer groups, research has consistently shown that union involvement in workplace bargaining has a benign impact on business productivity. However, declining membership presents a significant challenge to the capacity of Australian unions to influence economic outcomes at the national and workplace levels in the future.