Joshua Healy

The Australian labour market in 2014: Still ill?:

The Australian labour market remained in a subdued state during 2014. Participation and employment rates fell, while unemployment and underemployment rates rose. Of the limited employment growth that did occur, most was in the part-time workforce and concentrated on prime-aged and older workers. After exhibiting serious weakness in 2013, the youth labour market deteriorated further in 2014. A rise in job vacancies was a sign of possible improvement, but employers’ confidence has not yet recovered to nearly the extent necessary to end the labour market slowdown of recent years.

Adjusting to skill shortages in Australian SMEs

Skill shortages are often portrayed as a major problem for advanced economies, yet there is surprisingly little empirical evidence about how firms adjust to skill shortages and their associated effects on firm performance. This article provides new evidence from the Business Longitudinal Database, an Australian data set with unusually rich information on the causes and consequences of skill shortages in small- and medium-sized enterprises. We document the range of alternative strategies that firms adopt when responding to skill shortages and show that certain types of adaptation are used in some cases and not in others, depending on the type of shortage encountered and other attributes of the firm. Further, we show that certain types of skill shortage are more likely to be long-lasting and difficult to resolve, while others are alleviated relatively quickly with minimal adjustment. Our findings yield lessons for the skill utilization strategies of firms and for the labour market policies of governments.

Dial 'B' for burnout?: the experience of job burnout in a telephone call centre

Abstract High rates of labour turnover in the call centre sector are, in the view of some commentators, indicative of widespread employee ‘burnout’. However, few studies have formally investigated the frequency or antecedents of job burnout for this particular group of workers. This paper presents the results of a case study, undertaken within the call centre of a large Australian public-sector utility firm, which explores workers’ experiences of job burnout using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Our results support earlier claims that call centre workers are at least as susceptible to burnout as workers in other occupations that have previously been considered the most ‘burnout-prone’. We argue that the experience of job burnout for call centre workers can be largely attributed to the repetitive nature of the work itself, the variability of customer demands, the pervasiveness of managerial surveillance, the remoteness (that is, telephone-based delivery) of customer-employee exchanges, and the performance of ‘emotional labour’ by workers in the call centre. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on job burnout and the future of call centre research.

What Role do Safety Net Wage Adjustments Play in Alleviating Household Need

The strength of the relationship between low wages and household needs has become an important measure of the effectiveness of Australia’s employment safety net. This paper reviews the recent treatment of the needs issue in safety net wage cases of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, and provides a statistical analysis of data from two nationwide household surveys. I develop a method of identifying low-wage earners in sectors with high award reliance, and use it to describe the characteristics of their households. The workers of interest are predominantly found in households near the middle of the income distribution, rather than at the bottom end, because they typically live with other, higher-paid workers. The minority living in single-income households are more likely to be below the median income and to experience financial stress. A safety net maintained partly on the basis of a ‘needs’ criterion should be especially focused on the circumstances and prospects of this single-income group.

The Australian labour market in 2015

After two years of deteriorating conditions, 2015 was a year of modest improvement in the Australian labour market. Perhaps the most important change was a higher employment-to-population ratio, with increases in both persons employed and hours worked. Despite these encouraging signs of recovery, several weak spots remain. The full-time employment rate is stagnant, the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, and wage growth is anaemic. The recovery has not yet built momentum and there are risks that it may stall. But there is also reason to hope that 2015 was the year that the Australian labour market started to come back to health.

The Quest for Fairness in Australian Minimum Wages

The attainment of ‘fairness’ is widely regarded as a worthy goal of setting minimum wages, but opinions differ sharply over how to achieve it. This article examines how interpretations of fairness shaped the minimum wage decisions of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission between 1997 and 2005. It explores the Commissions approaches to three aspects of fairness in minimum wages: first, eligibility for increases; second, the form of increase; and third, the rate of increase over time. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission consistently gave minimum wage increases that were expressed in dollar values and applied to all federal awards. Its decisions delivered real wage increases for the lowest paid, but led to falls in real and relative wages for the majority of award-reliant workers. Fair Work Australia, the authority now responsible for setting minimum wages in the national system, appears apprehensive about parts of the Australian Industrial Relations Commissions legacy and has foreshadowed a different approach, particularly with respect to the form of adjustment.

The Australian labour market in 2013

The year 2013 saw slowing growth in the Australian economy and labour market, relative to 2012. Slower rates of increase in gross domestic product and employment led to rising unemployment and underemployment rates, fewer job vacancies, and increased caution on the part of the Fair Work Commission about the appropriate rate of increase in Australian minimum wages. Compared with other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, however, the Australian labour market continued to perform well, with lower unemployment rates for all age groups and higher labour productivity growth. The main areas of weakness are falling male full-time employment, high youth labour force underutilisation, and rising earnings inequality associated with falling relative earnings for the lowest paid.

Should we take the gig economy seriously

ABSTRACT The ‘gig economy’ has emerged rapidly as a form of service delivery that challenges existing business models, labour-management practices, and regulations. The ways in which platform companies transact with workers, in particular, has created a burgeoning public interest, but has yet to give rise to a corresponding academic literature. In this paper, we ask whether the gig economy deserves to be a subject of employment relations scholarship, given its current dimensions and likely future. We argue that academic analysis is needed, to better understand the power dynamics operating within the gig economy and how these are testing existing norms and institutions. We discuss two mains ways that employment relations researchers can expand their theoretical repertoires and, in doing so, improve the evidence on gig-based working arrangements. We begin to sketch the outlines of a systematic research agenda, by elaborating indicative questions that need addressing to advance understanding of ‘gig work relations’. We caution, however, that academic analysis of the gig economy should not be predicated on an expectation that it is the future of work. A number of economic, industrial and political factors threaten to slow or halt the gig economy’s growth.

Guest editors' introduction: technological disruption and the future of employment relations

A technological paradigm shift is underway. Nearly every day, we learn about another major technological breakthrough that promises to have life-changing effects. Driverless vehicles are taking to our roads. Drones are appearing in the sky. Surgeries are conducted by robots with little human assistance. And sophisticated predictive algorithms are ‘optimising’ what we see, mediating our contact with information and people in increasingly important ways. These developments are at the frontiers of what is variously known as ‘the second machine age’ (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014) or ‘the fourth industrial revolution’ (Schwab 2016). They represent a potentially transformative convergence of new and improved technological capabilities in a range of areas, including digitisation, data capture and storage, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Progress in each of these areas has lately started to combine and ‘cross-over’ in ways that enable larger, and frequently unexpected, leaps in capability. Most notably, there has been striking recent progress in ‘machine learning’ – a form of AI in which machines are ‘trained’ to perform specific tasks using vast data troves. With greater access to ‘big data’ sources, such machines have acquired superhuman proficiency in limited domains, including the ability to play sophisticated strategy games, recognise and translate speech, and accurately identify faces in photographs (Trounson 2017; Walsh 2017). In watching the labour market developments of recent decades, we have become accustomed to automation that displaces human workers in routine manual jobs, on farms and ports, or in factories. But newer forms of automation, driven by machinelearning technologies, are now beginning to encroach on more highly skilled ‘cognitive’ and ‘non-routine’ occupations, such as in accounting, medicine and the law. With accuracy that matches or betters human experts – and usually in much less time – machines can now comb through case files to identify legal precedents, or diagnose diseases in patients’ medical scans. Even these highly impressive technologies possess severely restricted capabilities. They can perform narrow, tightly defined tasks well, but can do nothing else (Brooks 2017). We are a long way from developing an all-purpose ‘artificial general intelligence’ (Walsh 2017). Nevertheless, even in its more limited current forms, AI is dissolving some long-standing boundaries of human expertise and endeavour. It is demonstrating that many capacities are not the ‘uniquely human’ domains that we might have imagined them to be. These advances have led some scholars to anticipate drastic changes in the nature of professional work, as ever more complex tasks are given over to ‘smart’ machines (Susskind and Susskind 2015). This in turn raises many questions about how far the automation of work is permitted to go, what the responsibilities of technology LABOUR AND INDUSTRY, 2017 VOL. 27, NO. 3, 157–164 https://doi.org/10.1080/10301763.2017.1397258

The Ageing Workforce: Policy Dilemmas and Choices

Population ageing is profoundly challenging the institutions and systems that organise paid work, healthcare, and retirement. A major response to these challenges has been to encourage older workers to remain longer in employment, thereby extending the period of ‘productive life’ in which they are net contributors to government revenue. Yet this strategy depends on a range of micro-level adjustments, about which relatively little is known. These include how willingly older workers and employers adjust their attitudes and practices, and what types of policies facilitate these adjustments. In this paper, we critique the major policy responses to workforce ageing in Australia to date, and consider further measures to improve recruitment and retention of older workers. We argue that a more holistic policy response will require better evidence about ageist employment barriers, late-career transitions, and older workers’ job performance. We outline a research agenda to improve evidence and policy in these areas.