Kerrie Saville

DID WORKCHOICES DELIVER? EVIDENCE FROM SURVEY DATA

The introduction of the Workplace Relations (WorkChoices) Amendment Act 2005 (Cwlth) proved to be one of the most contentious changes to federal labour law in Australias history. There is considerable debate as to whether it fulfilled the governments expectations of giving ‘flexibility’ and ‘choice’ to both employees and employers or whether it resulted in an overall deterioration in working conditions. In order to assess the impact of WorkChoices on Australian businesses and their employees, this study reports data from a survey of 5,600 human resource professionals throughout Australia. Despite the limitations of the survey, the survey evidence reveals that most human resource professionals did not report any significant changes in productivity, job creation or work-family balance as a consequence of the new workplace laws. Moreover, only a minority expected an improvement over the next 3 years.

The Structural Events Approach — A `Better' Way to Understand Long-term Change in Trade Union Structure: The Australian Story (1986—96)

Traditional studies of long-term change in trade union structure have predominantly focused on aggregate trends in union merger activity in constructing explanations of change. Using the Australian trade union movement as an example, this article argues that our understanding of the long-term change in the external structure of trade unions would be better served by a structural events approach (Waddington, 1995) that examines the incidence of union formations, dissolutions, and breakaways, in addition to that of union mergers. In doing so, this article presents new data on structural change in the Australian trade union movement between 1986 and 1996, and explains the additional contribution made by union dissolutions and union formations to the reductionist effects of the merger wave that dominated these years.