Glenn Patmore

Perspectives of legal regulation and employment relations at the workplace : limits and challenges for employee voice

This article examines how employee voice is understood by both scholars of labour law and of industrial relations. While there is a sophisticated literature on employee participation and involvement in employment relations scholarship, there is an absence of consideration of legal perspectives. The article addresses this gap in the literature by first examining how employee voice is used to explain and critique workplace practices in the dominant and emerging employment relations scholarship, and then critically considering how dominant legal theories refer to and confine understandings of employee participation. The article examines each field through its discipline, method, approach, content and limits. It concludes that the scope of these disciplines is very different, and that they might be regarded as fraternal rather than identical twins. Finally, some questions are raised about the challenges for research in developing an interdisciplinary scholarship of employee voice.

Evaluating Social Partnership in the Australian Context

Over the past 2–3 decades, many western countries have pursued an employment relations (ER) agenda involving labour–management cooperation or a form of ‘partnership’; for example, the USA, Britain, Ireland and New Zealand (Ackers and Payne 1998; Kelly 2004; Johnstone et al. 2010; Macneil and Bray 2013; Cathcart 2014). Attracted by the success of partnership practices in the UK, Australian academics and policy-makers have previously investigated the viability of partnership models in the Australian context, both conceptually (Lansbury 2000; Gollan and Patmore 2006; Townsend et al. 2013) and through empirical case studies (Mitchell and O’Donnell 2007; Jones et al. 2008). Yet little research has specifically examined the role of current industrial relations practices in promoting workplace partnerships within both union and non-union settings in Australia. This chapter will thus focus on exploring the current industrial relations and regulatory context for the support of workplace partnership practices within the political and socioeconomic environment in Australia.

The Right to Participate: Revisiting Roach and Rowe

As is well known, the Constitution does not refer to the words ‘democracy’, ‘representative democracy’, ‘representative government’ or ‘referendum democracy’. Nonetheless the High Court has been willing to imply recognition of these foundational principles. Most of the cases have considered the implied freedom of political communication. More recently, the High Court recognised a constitutional protection of a right to vote and to participate in membership of the political community.2

Justifications for Initiating a Constitutional Amendment to Establish an Australian Republic: An Empirical Study

Under section 128 of the Australian Constitution federal parliamentarians have the power to initiate constitutional amendments. This paper examines the justifications of politicians and public figures for proposing a referendum to introduce an Australian republic. From interviews conducted between 2008 and 2011, three important justifications for proposing change emerged: promoting a new national identity; success in passing a referendum and in re-election; and timeliness. An examination of these justifications raised additional questions, including: what reasons did politicians and public figures think were significant? How did their justifications form and develop? What were the reasons that inspired political action? The reasons for initiation of a referendum for a republic, and recognition of indigenous people in the Australian Constitution are also compared. The paper adds to the literature on formal constitutional change, and also offers a critique of the field.

The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia@@@New Voices for Social Democracy: Labor Essays 1999-2000@@@Labor Without Class: The Gentrification of the ALP

Over the past decade, Labor’s legacy has been variously critiqued and re-interpreted. Triggered in part by the 100th anniversary of the ALP, the late-1980s and early-1990s witnessed a wave of books analysing the government of Bob Hawke against the legacy of labourism, and finding it wanting. Labor, they proclaimed, had betrayed its own values in general, and the legacy of HV Evatt and Gough Whitlam in particular. Predictably, these works were accompanied by a spate of others arguing that the Labor tradition was safe in the hands of its leaders, who were simply applying the principles of yore to present realities.

Imagining Constitutional Crises: Power and (Mis)Behavior in Republican Australia

The change we propose [to the Australian Constitution] has very limited implications for the design of Australias democracy. It is the so-called “minimalist” option. All the essential constitutional principles and practices which have worked well and evolved constructively over the last hundred years will remain in place.1