Larissa Bamberry

Worker stress and the prospect of job loss in a fragmented organisation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance research on job loss-related stress through a critical realism framework which considers the interplay between organisational context and personal agency and its implications for worker stress in the pre-lay-off stage. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a qualitative case study approach and considers two groups of workers confronted with the prospects of job loss in Australia’s power generation industry – permanent employees working for power stations and workers employed by associated contractors. Field research and semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 35 power industry workers including power station employees and contract workers. Findings – The research shows permanent employees expressing higher levels of stress than contract workers. The different emotional responses expressed by the two groups are accounted for by differences in organisational circumstances and the conditioning of personal agency within these organ...

Restructuring women’s work; labour market and household gender regimes in the Greater Latrobe Valley, Australia

Abstract This article examines the impact of economic restructuring on gender relations. It examines the implications of labour market change for households within a region, in this case the Greater Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia. The argument is that the unchanging gender structures of the labour market constrain the intentions and efforts of individuals within households to significantly alter household gender relations. The analysis considers how restructuring has reshaped the regional labour market since 1996, changing opportunities for both men’s and women’s employment. Despite these changes, the regional labour market continues to be underpinned by a ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime and significant occupational and industrial gender segregation. Drawing on four vignettes, the analysis shows that the impetus towards greater gender equality in the household is constrained by a stagnant and stable labour market gender regime.

Households and citizenship in a restructured region: the Latrobe Valley, Australia

While policy responses to de-industrialisation have focussed on individual access to industrial citizenship through attachment to the workplace, there has been less focus on the role of households in mediating industry shocks or in building social citizenship. The paper explores how households with peripheral attachment to industrial citizenship cope with additional challenges to their social citizenship accruing from long-term disability support, ageing and retirement funding and discrimination on the basis of age and union membership. Two processes are at work. The first is the exclusionary nature of industrial citizenship and the way in which the subject of industrial citizenship has been narrowed while in the second, the substance of industrial citizenship has been dismantled and its domain weakened as a result of industrial restructuring. These themes are explored via a study of citizenship and households in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia, a region undergoing long-term social and economic restructuring.