Damian Oliver

An Expectation of Continued Success: The Work Attitudes of Generation Y

ABSTRACT A popular mythology has emerged about the ‘Generation Y’ worker: Generation Y workers are uncommitted to their jobs and their employers and have unreasonably high expectations from their jobs; Generation Yare individualistic and reject the collective underpinning of trade unionism. This article explores one factor that may have caused Generation Y to have work attitudes and expectations that are different from previous generations: the increase in student employment. Student employment has increased in incidence, duration and intensity and, for university students, occurs in a setting very different to their intended occupation. These developments have changed young peoples socialisation into work. A survey investigated the work attitudes and expectations of 890 final-year undergraduates. Approximately three in four students were working. Students who were working were found to have lower levels of work centrality and higher expectations of job quality, job security, and individual bargaining than non-working students. However, no differences in relation to attitudes towards trade unions were found between the two groups. These differences are attributed to the ‘student career’ that is now the norm. The factors underpinning the impact of the student career are discussed.

University Student Employment and Expectations of the Graduate Labour Market

Young Australians are increasingly combining study with work. Research and media reports frequently reveal that young Australian workers know little about their employment rights, placing them in a poor bargaining position and exposing them to the risk of exploitation. This study, using data from a survey of 1200 Australian university students, finds that students with experience in the labour market are more knowledgeable about their current employment arrangements and more confident about entering the graduate labour market once they finish their studies, reporting higher expectations of job security and being able to negotiate pay. Students also seem aware of segments in the graduate labour market, with confidence also varying by field of study.

Solidarity reconstructed: The impact of the Accord on relations within the Australian union movement

Unions’ strength and identity is determined primarily by the extent to which they can nurture effective solidarity amongst wage earners in general and between networks of unions in particular. The experience of inter-union coordination throughout the Accord years has strengthened political solidarity across the movement (demonstrated most recently in the 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign). The movement’s industrial solidarity has been in secular decline since the peak union leadership enthusiastically embraced enterprise bargaining in the final phase of the Accord in the early 1990s. The key challenge for unions today is to broaden the ambit of political solidarity and to revitalise industrial solidarity in an era of increasing workforce diversity and working life transformation.

Modern Awards and Skill Development through Apprenticeships and Traineeships

Vocational education and training (VET) and industrial relations systems are inherently linked. The Federal Government aims to increase the number of workers with VET qualifications but it is unclear how this policy is being supported through the industrial relations framework, in particular by the new system of modern awards. Research into training outcomes has shown that job-related factors are linked to completion rates among apprentices and trainees. An analysis of a cross-section of relevant modern awards reveals that award modernisation has had a small negative impact on the wage arrangements for apprenticeships. Modern awards continue to provide no recognition for some categories of workers who have undertaken VET qualifications through traineeships.

Missing links: connections between qualifications and job roles in awards

Modern awards directly determine the pay and employment conditions of around one in five Australian workers and indirectly influence many more by setting the standard for enterprise agreements. This paper examines the relationship between formal qualifications within the Australian Qualifications Framework, job roles and pay rates in Australia’s 122 modern awards. These institutional linkages are key mechanisms connecting skills acquisition through education and training with production processes and pay outcomes. More than a quarter of awards make no connections at all between classifications and qualifications while only a quarter feature strong linkages. In most awards, the connections are relatively loose and there is also strong variation by industry. Notably many modern awards in the fast-growing service industries contain few or no connections. Despite the growing importance of non-technical skills and university-level education, references to qualifications across the modern award system overall are predominantly to trade-level Certificate III qualifications. The results suggest that the current structure of awards will do little to promote further skills acquisition among most of the award-reliant workforce.

The Australian labour market in 2016

The Australian labour market in 2016 was characterised by fragmented improvements. While headline economic growth has strengthened, a pessimistic business environment has been accompanied by patchy employment growth. This growth has been driven by male part-time employment and roles in the lower wage segments of the labour market, including clerical, community service and manual labour occupations. While the unemployment rate has fallen and retrenchments have dropped across the labour market, youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, while older job seekers have become more likely to fall into long-term unemployment. High youth unemployment has stimulated debate about the role and regulation of unpaid work experience, while popular commentary about the effects of automation on the labour market is yet to appear in the statistics. Wage growth remains very subdued.

Wage determination in Australia: The impact of qualifications, awards and enterprise agreements

A prevailing assumption in labour market policy is that workers have a powerful incentive to acquire new skills and qualifications, as this should lead to higher wages. However, the process of rewarding qualifications with higher wages is not automatic, determined solely by market principles, or consistent across all qualification types and fields. Whereas human capital theory struggles to explain why greater human capital (in the form of higher qualifications) may not always lead to higher wages, institutional approaches can better accommodate a more nuanced relationship between education and training institutions, industrial relations institutions and wage outcomes. This article examines the role that awards and enterprise agreements play in the recognition of workers’ qualifications and in so doing demonstrates the ongoing relevance of industrial relations to skills policy. Using data from the longitudinal Australia at Work survey, this article reveals that workers with vocational and university qualifications who were employed on awards report higher wages over and above the qualification premium received by workers on other wage-setting arrangements. This finding did not extend to workers on enterprise (collective) agreements. The article confirms the positive role of awards in promoting skill acquisition, especially among the low-paid, award-reliant workforce.

‘Fair Work’ and the Modernization of Australian Labour Standards: A Case of Institutional Plasticity Entrenching Deepening Wage Inequality

Australia was long recognized for its relatively compressed wage structure. From the 1940s to the 1970s this was associated with a comprehensive regime of ‘award-based’ minimum wages. Since the 1980s, this has been subjected to comprehensive ‘modernization’. After three decades of reform and in the most supportive economic environment in the OECD, Australian wage inequality has deepened. Although multiple political-economic forces have been at play, the evolution of Australias labour standards regime is an example of ‘institutional plasticity’ whereby the purpose and operations of wage-setting institutions not only evolves but can actually be inverted over time.

Complexity in Vocational Education and Training Governance

Complexity is a feature common to all vocational education and training (VET) governance arrangements, due to the wide range of students VET systems caters for, and the number of stakeholders involved in both decision making and funding and financing. In this article, Pierre and Peters framework of governance is used to examine complexity in VET governance models. Criticism has been made of complex decision-making processes in VET governance models, whether stemming from co-determination with social partners or shared responsibilities in federations between national and sub-national governments, with the contention being that such complex processes reduce system adaptability. This article argues that the focus on decision-making processes is misguided and the effects of other complex system processes should be considered. First, debate needs to be broadened to take into account how governance frameworks emerge from historical and political differences, such as the impact of federal structures of government. Adaptability depends on more than decision-making processes. Second, international comparisons suggest that complex policy instruments, whether the result of convoluted decision-making or not, may demonstrate greater adaptability in the system but also threaten system coherence. Finally, complex processes for allocating resources and generating feedback seem to increase system accountability, although unintended consequences for other system outcomes may yet emerge.

The Australian labour market in 2017

Low wage growth consistently featured as the main underlying characteristic of the Australian labour market in 2017. Overall economic conditions remained weak, although unemployment was fairly static. All indicators of average wage growth declined: average weekly earnings, the wage price index and the average annual wage increase in enterprise agreements. Collective bargaining coverage continued to decline. Although the 3.3% minimum wage increase represents a modest increase in real wages for low-paid workers, the Fair Work Commission decision to reduce Sunday and public holiday penalty rates for some award-reliant workers would put further downward pressure on workers’ incomes. There were more successful applications to terminate expired enterprise agreements, including those where wage rates were thought to be uncompetitive and unsustainable. The underlying causes of low wage growth remain contested. Despite some agreement that the regulatory framework is a contributing factor, firm proposals for regulatory change are yet to emerge.