Suzanne Jamieson

Up, Up and Fading Away: the Work and Family Life of Executive International Travellers

Abstract This paper explores the work-life issues faced by executives of a global professional services organisation whose roles involve frequent air travel. It highlights how this aspect of their work, while boosting and advancing the worker’s career, can lead to stress, a progressive disconnection from family, friends and work colleagues and, for men at least, a loss of role within the family unit. The paper questions the organisation’s lack of proactive intervention in the management of this travel and its consequences, and issues a reminder about its legal responsibility to its workers.

Feminist theory, globalization and comparative labour law: women workers in Australia and Ireland

This project has sought to evaluate the contextual differences between Australia and Ireland in the way in which the equal pay and EEO legislation have impacted on working women while using a variety of traditional and critical legal methodological approaches within an overtly feminist theoretical framework. Law continues to hold out hope while delivering limited returns.

Trade Unions in 1991

* Department of Industrial Relations, University of Sydney, NSW 2006. Last year was a year of great threats and opportunities for Australian trade unions. Trade union membership generally seemed to continue downward, although perhaps not at such a frantic rate as before; unemployment reached unprecedented levels and finally crashed through the psychological barrier of 10 per cent; the federal Opposition released its ’Fightback’ package based

Managing occupational safety and health in culturally diverse small businesses: a commentary

Abstract It is estimated that over 175 million people, or 3 per cent of the world’s population, live outside their country of origin. While this diaspora has a significant impact on workforce demographics, there is still a lack of documented evidence on managing occupational health and safety in culturally diverse small businesses. In response to this lack of evidence, an international, collaborative research group was formed in 2009 to investigate the health and safety of culturally diverse workforces and resolve the inherent methodological issues. The research group has begun to undertake a number of exploratory studies located in different countries and within different jurisdictions, focusing primarily on small businesses. Informed by discussions at two recent colloquia on the topic, this commentary provides an overview of the themes and key debates in the extant literature and suggests ways forward. It concludes with an appeal that new approaches to researching and managing culturally diverse small businesses are needed.

The neoliberal state and the gendered prosecution of work injury

Abstract This paper concerns women workers and their work injuries in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. It explores how the State, through its relevant agencies (in this case, the WorkCover Authority of NSW), implements gender-neutral occupational health safety legislation to prosecute employers who breach their legislative duty to protect the health and safety of women workers. The paper’s findings are based on an examination of work injury prosecution outcomes. The paper finds that the public administration of gender-neutral laws is no guarantee against gendered workplace health outcomes.

Book Reviews : STRIFE: SEX AND POLITICS IN LABOUR UNIONS Edited by Barbara Pocock. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, xix + 242 pp., S29.95 (paperback)

industrial relations issues in non-English-speaking countries, the potential for the application of meaningful international comparative method is largely squandered. Similarly, readers looking for guidance on the value of empirical inquiry to the formulation of testable hypotheses will be sadly disappointed. Huiskamp’s study of variations in management approach to collective bargaining in several Dutch firms is a largely empirical piece that invokes strategic choice theory only as an afterthought. (Incidentally, the theoretical chapters themselves make next to no reference at all to the strategic choice model.) Qlatanmi’s assessment of the survival prospects for unionism in Nigeria (circa 1990) is disappointing. The thrust of the argument is that, in time of economic recession, non-militancy and collective bargaining is the more natural survival strategy for Nigerian unions. One is left wondering, though, whether this is really more a matter of labour market necessity than of strategic choice. Deh.l:er’s fulsome contribution on the scope for ’societal corporatism’ in postapartheid South Africa reads more like a public policy treatise in favour of nonauthoritarian corporatism than a rigorous and critical application of theory to practice. By the author’s own admission, the discussion is now largely out of date. The piece certainly points to some interesting questions about the relative worth of descriptive/analytical and prescriptive theory, but these are left largely unexplored. 1B1eltz’s concluding chapter (the only current chapter in the entire book!) on the malaise that has befallen academic industrial relations in North America in recent years adds nothing to Bruce Kaufman’s well-known assessment and

Globalization and Employment Relations in Asia and the Pacific: Some Emerging Issues Editorial Introduction

While countries in the Asia and Pacific region have not adopted a uniform approach to employment relations, increased economic development appears to be facilitating a higher degree of labour market institutionalization, as evidenced by the emergence of minimum wage laws, health and safety regulations and independent dispute-settling mechanisms. Although industrial relations institutions are generally rather weak, emerging democratization is resulting in legislative provisions to strengthen the rights of labour, particularly at the enterprise level. In many rapidly industrializing economies of Asia, governments are seeking to accommodate demands by employees and their unions for a more significant voice, and former systems of state suppression are being modified. However, while some degree of convergence can be seen in the goals of employment relations policies of many newly industrializing economies in Asia and the Pacific, this convergence is often being achieved through divergent means.

Book Reviews : THE NEW INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN AUSTRALIA Edited by Ian Hunt and Chris Provis. The Federation Press, Annandale, 1995, ix + 182 pp.,

that was generally critical of economic rationalization. Lots of conference collections really don’t work. Big egos can skew conferences to make organizers’ lives difficult and editors’ lives impossible. Years ago I attended a conference designed to discuss the 1921 Socialist objective of the Labor Party (I did say it was years ago), and an elderly Stalinist trade union official harangued the attendees for more than an hour and a half on the (then) beauties of worker self-management in Yugoslavia. The authors in this collection clearly read their briefs properly. That doesn’t mean there is a sameness to the product-far from it-but it does mean that there is some coherence to the whole.

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It may be that Australian judges do not today exhibit quite the degree of hostility to unions found in their British counterparts. Moreover, labour law here can claim to be at least semi-autonomous, given the many issues and disputes that are brought before the conciliation and arbitration tribunals to be determined on the basis of what is ’industrially right and fair’ rather than according to some black-letter rule developed in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the common law we inherited from England continues to influence many facets of the way in which we conceive of and regulate the employment relationship, the award system notwithstanding. Should the federal Coalition gain the opportunity to implement its proposals for change, this influence may well become stronger. Although the parallel is far from exact, there is much in the Australian conservative platform that smacks of the ’Thatcher ideology’, which Wedderburn dissects in ’Freedom of Association and Philosophies of Labour Law’. The essay is notable not only for its devastating critique of the writings of Friedrich Hayek, whose influence on British government policy in the 1980s is carefuly traced, but for its clarion call ’to those who do not accept the new faith on law and the labour market’ (page 228). As Wedderburn points out on a number of occasions in this book, those who claim to adopt an ’objective’ or ’value-free’ approach in this area

Book Reviews : CONTRACT OF EMPLOYMENT—PRINCIPLES OF AUSTRALIAN EMPLOYMENT LAW By Brian Brooks. 4th edition, 1992, CCH, Sydney, vii +344 pp. (no price stated)

Australian industrial relations have continued to move toward decentralization. The events of 1991 reveal that the persistent calls for decentralized bargaining between employers, employees and their representative organizations are having effect: enterprise bargaining within the federal system has been ratified by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, and legislation providing for enterprise bargaining has been introduced in New South Wales The trade union movement has sought to consolidate its position through the continued process of amalgamation of unions and involvement in enterprise bargaining. The study of industrial relations at the workplace level has become a priority of the federal government and, with the release of the first major survey in the area, a more important topic for industrial relations academics. The greater focus on the workplace by industrial relations academics will hopefully act to inform the proposed changes in the practice of industrial relations.