Louise Thornthwaite

Working Time and Work-Family Balance: A Review of Employees’ Preferences

In discussions about how HR policy can facilitate work-family balance, working time arrangements are a critical issue. Recent research in Europe, North America and Australia has shed light on the preferences of employees who are ‘juggling’ work and family in regard to three key aspects of working time - total working hours, access to part-time work, and flexibility. This article compares data from a number of these studies on working time preferences in order to explore the relative strength of different preferences, the factors underpinning differences among employees, areas of strongest unmet demand, and the implications that these findings suggest for HR policy.

Employability skills and vocational education and training policy in Australia: an analysis of employer association agendas

Employer associations currently urge further change to Australia’s publicly funded vocational education and training (VET) system. An important, new focus is ‘employability skills’ - employers’ pre...

Swedish engineering employers: The search for industrial peace in the absence of centralised collective bargaining

The Swedish engineering employers’ association recently shifted away from the dramatic decentralisation of bargaining it had pioneered. Behind this shift were employer desires for better guarantees of industrial peace. The authors conclude by stressing the importance of the relationships between employer strategy, historical contingency and debates on bargaining structure.

Employer Matters in 2000

In a year of more intense industrial conflict, for some employers and their associations this meant facing vigorous union campaigns. As a result, associations concentrated more on their traditional tasks of coordinating industrial action, legal representation and political lobbying. Pressure for sympathetic legislative change continued and the ‘Work-place Relations Club’ continued to work towards institutional control on behalf of their unitarist vision. Some employers, bent on an adversarial approach to industrial relations, initiated strategies that depended more heavily on lockouts and litigation.

Employer Matters in 1998

their wishes. The question was, to what extent would it fulfil its promise? For employers, 1998 was the year in which the effects of the 1996 Act (and aligned legislation in Queensland) started to become readily apparent and their main priority was to foster its application at national, industry and company levels. The Act conditioned the way in which the year’s most spectacular development, the waterfront dispute, was played out between February and June. It also provided the impetus for stripping employees of many of their award conditions under the ’award simplification’ process. More generally, 1998 also allowed a clearer picture of the Act’s impact on employer choices as to industrial instruments: awards, union or non-union enterprise bargaining or Austra-

The Metal Trades Industry Association, Bargaining Structures and the Accord

As part of his more general argument about employer reactivity in Australia, David Plowman has asserted that the disunity of Australian employer associations has inhibited their success in initiating policy debates or strategically reshaping bargaining structures. However, this paper, in examining the industrial relations strategies and policies of the Metal Trades Industry Association under the Accord, argues that the association seized substantial initiative in policy debates relating to bargaining structures and in influencing the pace and direction of change regarding the progressive implementation of enterprise bargaining in Australia. This had nothing to do with unity or disunity among employer groups, but related to factors internal to the association, its industry-and, in particular, the associa tions evolving relationship with the industrys unions-and to circumstances regarding the public policy-making process.

Employer Matters in 2001

The expected surge of employer militancy did not eventuate on the legislative or industrial fronts. Employers appeared largely satisfied with the federal regulatory framework and continued to experiment with the choices it offers. In an election year and facing an unwilling Senate, they pulled back from their legislative crusade. Industrially and in the courts, large, adversarial employers have been losing as often as winning. Paradoxically, the main employer associations have more successfully navigated the challenges of a decentralised system. They played leading roles in a number of test cases and in defending employer interests in the face of legislative activism from Labor state governments.

Employee self‐rostering for work‐family balance

Examines two leading cases of Austrian organisations providing employee self‐rostering for work‐family balance, a little‐reported area of employment relations innovation. These cases highlight that such schemes can be successful for managements and employees even in highly routine, mechanised production environments. Asks what sorts of factors encourage management to adopt such schemes and whether different factors encourage their retention over time. In both cases, external environmental factors, internal environmental adaptation and managements embrace of high commitment strategies all influenced managerial decision making. However, these three sets of factors operated in different degrees and in different sequences between the two cases. In neither case was the institutional environment of any real importance.

Employer Matters in 2002

Employers and their associations found themselves in a more complex environment largely of their own making. Desired change through the federal system appeared too incremental yet repeated association calls for a hardening of the Workplace Relations regime fell foul of the Senate. At state level, policy backlashes have all but removed neo-liberal gains of the last decade. Developments in the building industry present an anti-union federal government, associations and adversarial companies with their best chance to extend the effects of the 1996 Act. In general, associations indulge in a neo-liberal form of rentier policy pleading while unions continue to make gains in unlikely circumstances.

NSW Workers’ Compensation Reform: A Parody of Evidence-based Policy Making

The characteristics and evolution of evidence-based policy making in Australia and other mature democracies have been mapped extensively in this journal. This article advances research on the use of evidence in policy making, examining changes in the New South Wales workers’ compensation system from 2012 to 2014. This analysis of two phases of policy change, legislative implementation and statutory review, highlights the limitations of building integrated, coherent evidence-based policy in a contentious policy area. The article finds that the collection of wide and detailed evidence will not satisfy requirements of evidence-based policy without political will, transparency, and accountability.