Class has always mattered, and now labour parties around the world are finding out why.
- Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow at the Centre for Future Work, Melbourne; and Professor Emeritus, Griffith Business School, Griffith University
Obviously, the government can’t set wages directly. But research shows recent policies that have increased worker power are associated with strong wage growth.
Science doesn’t occur in a vacuum – politics, harassment and intimidation can hamstring progress.
There’s a broader push to limit the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) when dealing with sexual harassment cases. Any reforms should centre on giving victim-survivors greater agency.
All workplace policies and issues usually come back to productivity. But what it means and how its measured is largely misunderstood.
In most wealthy nations all workers are entitled to annual leave. But that’s not the case in Australia – and the Albanese government’s reforms still won’t change that.
Will the decision to grant a 5.75% increase in award rates add to inflation and increase interest rates, making many of us worse off? Well, no.
Economic conditions today are very different from those that informed Bob Hawke’s 1983 summit – and that will affect what unions and the government can get from each other at the 2022 summit.
Uber Australia’s deal with the transport workers union signals the Albanese government won’t mess about with attempts to reclassify gig workers as employees.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he has no plans to reintroduce controversial industrial relations changes. His problem is the Coalition’s track record.
Saat bekerja dari rumah, wanita berjuang lebih dari pria untuk menemukan waktu untuk upaya berkelanjutan yang diperlukan untuk menghasilkan penelitian yang baik dan dapat diterbitkan.
For the first time, there’s almost one job vacancy for every unemployed Australian. But that isn’t translating to better wages.
When working from home, women struggled more than men to find time for the sustained effort needed to produce good, publishable research. Lack of thinking time is a problem for all knowledge workers.
The government’s latest industrial relations reform does little to change the power between employers and employees - with the former still strongly advantaged.
The practice of ‘casual’ employment has become a means to foster insecurity and low power, depriving many workers of leave under the guise of an alleged need for flexibility.
The COVID-19 crisis is transforming work and how it is done, not just in universities. If managers think that they unilaterally know how to manage remote work, disorder could become chaos.
Research shows predictions for the jobs of the future are unreliable, and the government’s funding changes don’t match what their own data shows about future earnings.
Enterprise bargaining provisions take up seemingly endless pages in the Fair Work Act. When we talk about IR “reform”, we need to make the system simpler for workers.
There are signs of unintended consequences, and as big as the payments are, they are less generous than those in the UK.
Labor productivity doesn’t matter as much as emissions productivity. Workers aren’t a particularly finite resource.
After decades of research showing the link between union power and wages growth, government economists don’t want to talk about it.
Unions and Labor have a long history of working together, but if the ALP wins office, unions will have to compete with many other groups to get what they want.
The stand-off between the Morrison government and one of the country’s largest unions, the CFMMEU, should be seen as a contest of politics and ideology rather than simply one of industrial relations.
Less secure jobs are just one aspect of the rise of finance capital. It’s a driver of increasingly uneven income distributions and corporate priorities that are now putting our future at risk.
Most workers are still employees, not casuals or gig workers. So what has changed to increase the insecurity of workers?
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