Inequality, Worker Mobilisation and Lessons from History: Australia 1788-1900

The rise of neoliberalism witnessed substantial changes in work arrangements, decline in organised labour (both its industrial and political wings), rising inequality and the decline/reshaping of disciplines with collectivist traditions like industrial relations, sociology and history. Simultaneously digitalisation has facilitated the capacity to undertake innovative historical research with the capacity to refashion our understanding of the past and better inform contemporary struggles. Drawing on a unique database that seeks record all attempts at worker organisation in Australia this address will re-examine the emergence, extent and building blocks of worker mobilisation in Australia, 1788-1900. It argues inequality was the key driver of mobilisation. I explore the relationship between unfree and free labour, formal and informal organisation, industrial and political bodies and gender dimensions and what parallels and historical lessons can be drawn from this. This includes precarious work, worker/public health and safety and community mobilisations. The address also argues for a ‘big picture/big-data’ shift in future research (giving other examples of this approach) in the field of industrial relations and ways this might be accomplished.

Since 2012, the New South Wales public education system the largest such bureaucracy remaining in the southern hemisphere has been restructuring its work to align with New Public Management ideals. Seeking claimed private-sector like efficiencies through the devolution of managerial responsibilities to local sites, its initial suite of reforms failed to produce improved results within the broader education system (NSW DOE, 2021, p.1). Following research that indicated these reforms contributed to unsustainable workloads for teachers and principals (Fitzgerald et al., 2018; McGrath-Champ et al., 2018) and hindered principals’ ability to lead teaching and learning (Deloitte, 2017; McGrath-Champ et al., 2017), a new reform model has been introduced different in name, but similar in its goals. This paper combines policy analysis with a labour process analysis of qualitative interviews. Study participants involve principals and staff in active working relationships to capture the local impacts that are highlighted by the particularities of each cased school. Problematising control and a policy rhetoric that emphasises the need for schools to make local decisions, this paper builds upon findings from a pilot study that revealed the way new forms of control were implemented over the work of school principals despite the promise of greater local autonomy. It presents findings from a further investigation of the way these reforms, along with further recent policy changes, have interacted to shape the organisation of work and working relationships between principals and their staff, including control mechanisms over the work of deputy principals and head teachers.

Algorithmic management is rapidly reshaping work and employment relations. Defined as the deployment of machine learning algorithms to automate traditionally human, managerial decision-making processes and practices (Duggan et al., 2020; Parent-Rocheleau & Parker, 2021), it has been attracting scholarly interest from a range of disciplines. This study examines: What are the implications of algorithmic management for work and employment relations research and scholarship, and how can the field of employment relations contribute and further the wider debates on this twenty-first century technological development? Through a systematic review of publications involving algorithmic management across 47 management, employment relations, human resource management, information systems, and sociology journals, it is explored how the technology is operationalised, studied, and analysed across disciplines. In addition, highly cited articles on databases including Scopus, Google-scholar, and Web-of-Science were also included. A combination of descriptive and interpretive techniques (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014; Byington et al., 2019) were used to examine the implications for employment relations research. We identify patterns of siloing of debates across disciplines, with employment relations research for instance leading on issues such as how the technology can be fashioned to enhanced managerial control and its impact on job quality. At the same time, in comparison to other disciplines, employment relations scholars have only engaged with the design and ethical implications of these workplace developments in a relatively limited way. We highlight that a challenge across the academic literature more broadly is the lack of conceptual clarity or imprecise understand of this new form of technology.

This paper investigates employee voice during an Australian university restructure in 2020.It examines the meaning of voice, the nature and quality of voice mechanisms and their contexts during restructuring in a case study university. The research is framed by recent literature on the range, forms, processes, and effectiveness of voice mechanisms at the workplace. Power imbalance characterises the employment relationship, and the ability to voice issues counters the imbalance and leads to meaningful work. University restructuring has been ongoing, reflecting changes in government funding models and the growing market orientation of the sector. Voice mechanisms exist through enterprise agreements and employment regulations. However, there is limited research on how voice manifests and applies during university restructures with low union membership in the sector and under crisis conditions such as the COVID pandemic. The study entails data collection from multiple sources through a qualitative, single instrumental case study method. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with key stakeholders given their proximity to and affinity with the case study university and their ability to enrich data through personal narratives about restructuring. Interviews will be transcribed, coded and analysed. The study will analyse data from multiple sources to achieve robustness of findings and to augment research trustworthiness. This research is a significant area of study in higher education, economics, and employment relations as organisational restructures frequently happen in universities across Australia. The study will provide critical analyses of work, the employment relationship and voice in the context of restructuring.

Child maltreatment and child labor are major public health concerns that have been extensively studied. However, studies tend to focus on either child abuse or child labor, neglecting the intentional maltreatment of child laborers. This study explored experts understanding of the nature and prevalence of maltreatment of child laborers in Bangladesh. Seventeen interviews were conducted via skype with expert stakeholders. Experts were purposefully recruited, using a snowball approach. Experts included academics, paediatricians, journalists, and senior members of international labor organisations. Data was analysed using NVivo. The experts discussed the nature of four forms of maltreatment such as physical, emotional, neglect and wage theft, although in a narrow level. They believed maltreatment was more likely to occur in the informal labor market, and where children worked away from their parents with a third-party employer. However, it was clear from the interviews that these experts have little insights into the prevalence of child labor maltreatment. Their understandings of prevalence came from the media, and all estimates of prevalence were guesses. They were unaware of research or believed the research to be poorly conducted or to lack rigor. In most instances they focused on child labor as a form of abuse, with little consideration to the maltreatment of the child laborer. Therefore, given the lack of knowledge, the next step is to conduct survey research that can identify the prevalence and assist in addressing policy implications.

Contingent workers in hazardous industries experience some of the poorest OHS outcomes in the world. This is unquestionably the case in the developing state context, where informal economies prevail and workers have little power. This paper considers the construction industry in Indonesia and examines: How labour unions seek to cultivate representation and voice opportunities for informal workers on the issue of OHS. Although unions in Indonesia face significant barriers to both accessing and organising workers, OHS is becoming a more visible issue globally and one they are seeking to address. This paper undertakes a case study analysis of an independent union in order to understand the role they play in tackling the issue of OHS with vulnerable workers and assesses their activities on the macro, meso and micro level. Data was collected in three parts for this qualitative study. An initial round of fifteen semi-structured, face-to-face interviews was undertaken, in country in Indonesia, which was followed up by a period of secondary source analysis inclusive of substantive monitoring of current media sources and social media accounts. A final round of more structured interviews were undertaken on-line to complete the study. Findings from the study conclude that whilst Indonesian unions continue to be shut out of workplace negotiations, they are able to cultivate opportunities that provide workers with voice and and representation through a variety strategies and networks, however this remains on a relatively small scale.

This paper investigates the experiences of temporary migrant workers who have worked as au pairs in Australia. Drawing upon exploratory qualitative interviews conducted in 2020-1 with 26 temporary migrants, as well as 6 parents, the paper explores interviewees’ perceptions and attitudes towards au pairing as work and/or non-work, and how this impacted perception of pay, conditions and overall experiences. Findings reveal the stickiness of gendered socio-cultural norms and popular discourses of au pairing as a site of exceptional non-work, that is, a cultural exchange. Nonetheless, au pairs did relate to their au pairing placements as work in complex ways that highlighted that doing work was not mutually exclusive to culturally immersive, or culturally intensive, experiences. Interviewees tended to resist a binary choice between au pairing as job or cultural exchange, suggesting it was both at once. Temporary migrants desired being viewed as professionals, reflecting the fact that a substantial proportion were in fact qualified care workers, whilst also seeking out a strong connection or family feeling. At the same time, temporary migrants were ambivalent about the notion of being part of the family and reflected upon its limits, contractions and dangers. These findings highlight some of the challenges in organising au pairs as workers and improving conditions. This paper emerges from a larger socio-legal project exploring the history and futures of household domestic and care work in Australia, which seeks to situate this work within the political economy of shifting migration, labour, and welfare state regimes.

This presentation provides a brief overview of my doctoral research which theorises a new model to explain the central research question: Why, since 1990, has the cross-national relationship between female labour force participation and fertility rates been positive in post-industrial nations. The first part of the presentation will provide a brief review of emergent literature that has sought to use gender equity-based explanations to explain this question. The extant literature points to the need for a new model that encompasses multiple dimensions of women’s public lives (employment) and private lives (household). The second section presents the theorisation of a new institutional interdependency model to explain the central research question. The new model argues that interdependencies between three sets of institutions: 1) labour market institutions (including skill regimes and wage setting systems), 2) welfare state and social policy institutions (including employment protection legislation, family policy, active labour market programmes and public sector employment), and 3) the household as a social institution influence women’s constraint and opportunity structures across nations which have macro-level impacts on both female labour force participation and fertility rates. Third, the mixed methodological approach to operationalise the model is explained. Finally, the results and contribution of the thesis is explained.

The Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the pace of technological change in Australia’s retail industry. In supermarkets and grocery stores in particular, online home delivery and click and collect purchasing have surged over the past 18 months as consumers explored new ways of getting their food home while minimising risks to their health. These changes, along with other aspects of digitalisation, such as the use of smartphones, big data, social media, artificial intelligence and robotics, have the potential for a profound transformation of work in the retail industry. Past research has examined the prospects of digitalisation to affect job function, skill, employment status, worker-manager relations and relationships with customers. Less studied has been the potential gendered impacts of these changes, and how digitalisation might impact on women in particular, with the foundational acknowledgement that digital technologies shape, and are shaped by, gender relations and gendered power structures (Wacjman et al., 2020: 1). This study asks the research question, ‘How does digitalisation affect work in the retail industry and in what ways is this gendered?’. It seeks to answer the question by combining data from a nation-wide survey of retail workers with qualitative interviews with key industry stakeholders, and additional case studies of retail stores. Drawing on labour process scholarship and feminist studies of technology, this presentation will report on some initial findings regarding workers’ gendered perceptions of the future of work, technological change and employee voice, to examine the implications of digitalisation for gender equality in retail.

There is evidence that when working men try to access enablers of care such as flexible work and parental leave, they face organizational barriers, managerial barriers and a flexibility stigma (Borgkvist et al., 2018; Coltrane et al., 2013), due to gender role stereotypes, the ideal worker norm and policy contexts that reinforce traditional roles.The project examines how rides-share driving on the Uber platform, one variant of platform work, enables and/or hinders fathers who wish to be involved in both caring and domestic work, exploring the actual and perceived flexibility of the work. Through this examination, the gendered experience of platform work, a current research gap, is also explored (Kaine and Josserand, 2019). The study used a mixed methods case study design. Four-hundred male Uber drivers were surveyed across Australia and 47 interviews with drivers who were fathers were undertaken. This study found that participants are driving Uber for two main reasons, flexibility and income, which is in line with findings of other research (Churchill and Craig, 2019; McDonald et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2019). The majority of interviewees found Uber driving to be flexible in general (91%) and those with children (63%) indicated that the flexibility of the work was a key motivation that enabled them to manage their family and care responsibilities. For these drivers, the platform economy provided an alternative form of work that helped them to balance personal responsibilities, and enabled them to participate in unpaid domestic work and caring work.

In June 2019 the International Labour Organisation (ILO) adopted Convention C190 Violence and Harassment Convention (the Convention) and its accompanying Recommendation R206 (the Recommendation). The Convention calls for an inclusive, integrated and gender responsive (IIGR) approach to prevent and eliminate violence and harassment in the world of work. I am interested in exploring how the IIGR approach in the Convention translates into practice and whether it can be used as a new framework for regulatory and policy analysis. The Convention sets out structural mechanism that should be included in this IIGR approach but does not define what an IIGR approach is. Drawing on the Convention text as a starting point I have designed a framework, called IIGR Plus. IIGR Plus translates the IIGR concept within the Convention into a guide that includes both under-pinning principles and the practical elements. The IIGR plus framework was developed drawing on: academic literature and reports that informed the development of the Convention; the text of the Convention and Recommendation; semi-structured interviews with ILO officials and union actors involved in negotiating the text; and observations during the development of the Convention. The method of analysis utilised draws from Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach to policy analysis and the work of Verloo and Lombardo’s critical frame analysis approach to examining gender equality policies. In this paper I will introduce the IIGR Plus framework and provide reflections on its use as a tool for reviewing new regulatory approaches in Australia.

The legal profession is an institution influencing public policy, business practice and access to justice, yet the workforce is characterised by inequity. Gender inequalities in pay and leadership persist, despite women constituting 52% of solicitors in Australia. Changes in the legal profession, such as digitalisation and post-covid adaptations, may further exacerbate differential experiences. Scholars have emphasised various actors and forces shaping gendered legal careers, manifest in work-life conflicts, promotion practices and stereotypes. This includes individual responses, often perpetuating inequitable norms and structures (e.g Tomlinson et al., 2013); organisational and occupational gendering and closure, by male-dominated networks (e.g. Bolton and Muzio, 2007); and institutional forces, including neoliberalism and work-care dichotomies (e.g. Thornton, 2014). The role of the client in constructing gendered legal careers however is relatively underexplored, despite being considered important to gender dynamics (e.g. Bitbol-Saba and Dambrin, 2019; Roth, 2004). This PhD examines this actor, asking; ‘What is the role of the client in shaping legal careers and is this gendered? How do technology and new forms of working influence this?’. Employing a multi-level analysis, it considers how women’s and men’s work experiences and outcomes in a changing profession are shaped by client interactions, expectations and embeddedness in organisational practices. This presentation shares first-year PhD research, including headline data from a survey of 800 NSW solicitors. The research is part of an Australian Research Council Linkage grant (Cooper, Foley, Vromen), employing a mixed-methods approach to data collection on designing gender equality in the future of work.

This paper draws on one aspect of my doctoral research, a critical feminist policy analysis of three years of Annual Wage Review decisions and submissions (2017-2020). My doctoral research is a gendered analysis of Annual Wage Reviews (AWR) and the economic well-being of women in low-paid employment using a social reproduction theorisation and a critical feminist methodology. The feminist methodology includes a policy analysis of the AWR alongside qualitative interviews with women employed in the low-paid, feminised work of aged care and disability support, to answer the research question: Is the minimum wage-setting process of the Annual Wage Review reflecting the employment experiences of women in low-paid precarious work? Preliminary findings from my analysis of recent Annual Wage Reviews indicate that within the contested discourses and ideologies that characterise the Reviews, there is a scarcity of analysis and commentary acknowledging the specific challenges for, and experiences of women in low-paid employment, despite the specific AWR objective of meeting the needs of the low paid. Where women’s employment is referenced, it is frequently within very limited ideological frames. One implication of the limited gendered analysis within the AWRs is the capacity of the National Minimum Wage Decision to accurately recognise and account for the economic needs of women in low-paid employment. The objective of my research is to contribute to the research base that informs Australian wage-setting, focussing on the needs of low-paid women, and to contribute to advocacy for decent and sustainable work in aged care and disability support.

Women’s participation in the labour market does not automatically empower women if the socio-economic and cultural contextual conditions impose restrictions and limit choice. The research question investigated is ‘What obstacles and opportunities do women experience in the process of transition from informal agricultural work to formal care work?’ By using structuration theory and the concept of agency in exploring women’s participation and transition into formal paid employment, this paper provides an analysis of women’s participation in the labour market and women’s access to decent work through the lens of women’s agency in transitioning economic structural change in a regional Indonesian context. The research conducts comparative case studies of women’s participation in the formal economy and the role of agency in the Sleman and Gunungkidul districts of Java. The research draws on interviews with rural women workers in both the formal and informal sector. This research demonstrates that the transition both from agricultural to non-agricultural, and informal to formal labour has had less impact on women’s formal employment opportunities than expected, due to structural and cultural barriers which continue to limit women’s choices and ability to transition into formal employment. Regional women’s participation in the formal labour market has been obstructed by cultural factors (such as multiple care burdens, acceptance attitudes, male domination, and misinterpretation of religious values), and structural factors (limited financial resources, limited education attainment, limited skills transition, rigidity of recruitment and selection processes, limited flexibility of job opportunities, and inadequate infrastructure facilities).

Bangladesh is a world leading garment manufacturer, employing millions across thousands of factories. The majority of garment workers come from impoverished rural areas. Paid employment has undeniably created new opportunities for this previously marginalized group. However, garment workers are found to be employed under exploitative working conditions. The employment terms are poor, particularly in lower-tier factories. Authors agree that economic upgrading of firms does not automatically lead to social upgrading of labour. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has driven factory workers into desperation with devastating implications for labour standards. Existing literature does not adequately explore the impact of COVID-19 for the social upgrading of labour in global production networks (GPNs). In these premises, this study aims to explore the implications of COVID-19 for the social upgrading of labour in the garment GPN. The main research question is: What are the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic for the social upgrading of labour in the Bangladeshi garment industry? The study draws upon the GPN and social upgrading conceptual frameworks. The study uses a qualitative research strategy and case study research design. Primary data will be collected from semi-structured interviews of factory workers, supervisors and managers. Template analysis will provide the framework for data analysis. A key theoretical argument based on expected results is that the pandemic has negatively influenced both measurable standards and enabling rights. Overall, the policy implications of this study will inform both public interventions and lead firm initiatives to address the inherent challenges faced by workers during this global pandemic.