bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Innovations in Trade Union Approaches in Malaysia’s Garment Industry
Authors: Crinis Vicki 
Published: March 2013

AbstractWomen workers employed in the export-oriented manufacturing sector in Malaysia have traditionally had poor access to representation by trade unions for two reasons. Firstly, government rules and regulations have prevented sectoral trade unions from representing large sections of the workforce, and secondly, unions themselves have not considered women their primary constituency. As a result, non-governmental organisations (NGO), rather than trade unions, have played an important role in educating women workers about their rights since the 1980s. In the garment industry in recent years, NGO activism has precipitated a change in the trade unions’ focus towards women workers in general, and towards female overseas migrant workers in particular. Where once unions viewed migrant workers as undermining the wages and conditions of Malaysian workers, they now assert their right to equality in the workplace. This paper explores the context in which NGOs became involved in union-like activities and unions’ responses to that involvement.
How Has The Notion of Social Exclusion Developed In The European Discourse?
Authors: Bradshaw Jonathan 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThis paper reflects on the development of the idea of social exclusion in European and particularly in British discourses. When it first emerged, social exclusion seemed to add to little to poverty and in some guises carried a great deal of behaviourist ideological baggage, or blamed the poor. Over time, however, experience in the UK has shown that social exclusion has broadened the research agenda and opened up new possibilities for policy. This paper contributes to these debates by presenting new estimates of poverty and exclusion in Britain using data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey. The estimates confirm that poverty and exclusion are related, but distinct concepts. There remains the question of whether social exclusion has not entered official discussions in Australia as a result of a ‘Howard effect’ or because of some more fundamental resistance in the Australian political — and academic — culture.
Business or Association? The Strategic Responses of Employer Associations to the Decentralisation of Bargaining in Australia
Authors: Sheldon Peter , Thornthwaite Louise 
Published: March 2013

AbstractDecentralisation of bargaining poses particular challenges for employer associations. It reduces the sense of collective identity among members, decreases the attraction of associations’ traditional collective goods and increases the urgency and array of individual member needs while increasing the costs of servicing them. Decentralisation also threatens revenue as large companies, the financial backbone of associations, shift employment relations activities in-house. This weakens the attractions of membership with the risk that employer associations will retain only smaller, heavily dependent members. We discuss employer association attempts to meet these challenges while competing with commercial service businesses. Their strategic choices lie on a continuum between traditional membership-based organisational identity, with its roots in movement as well as organisation, and one that more closely approximates a business services firm. Associations experiment along this continuum as they develop strategy iteratively and the article identifies factors that help determine their choices.
Two and Two Make Five: Industrial Relations and the Gentle Art of Doublethink
Authors: Dabscheck Braham 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThe paper employs George Orwell's notion of doublethink in examining three contemporary industrial relations issues. They are the Cole Royal Commission into the building and construction industry, bargaining fees and employee entitlements. The Cole Royal Commission was an inquisition into the heresy of unionism. The decision of a Full Bench of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission on bargaining fees has found that collective bargaining does not pertain to the employer-employee relationship. This decision encourages free-riding to weaken unions. On the other hand, various employee entitlement schemes, developed by the Australian government, to meet obligations of companies to employees when the former collapse, enable, or encourage, companies to free-ride on the backs of taxpayers. The paper concludes with the observation that a bleak future awaits unions.
Social Security Pensions in Japan: A Balance Sheet Approach
Authors: Takayama Noriyuki 
Published: March 2013

AbstractJapan is experiencing a rapid ageing of its population with a subsequent strain on its social security pensions. Despite periodic reforms over recent decades and comprehensive reforms in 2004, many outstanding issues remain. Using the balance sheet approach we show that despite its recent reforms, Japan's social security pensions face substantial excess liabilities. As well, the reforms themselves may have exacerbated the incentive-compatibility problem.
Growing Household Indebtedness and the Plummeting Saving Rate in Canada: An Explanatory Note
Authors: Seccareccia Mario 
Published: March 2013

AbstractMuch as it has occurred in the United States, over the last two decades the household saving rate in Canada has fallen sharply to unprecedented levels, as it now hovers essentially about the zero rate. Accompanying this fall, we have witnessed a parallel rise in household debt ratios — a phenomenon that some have dubbed a state of “affluenza”. The object of this article is to provide an explanation of this phenomenon by pointing especially to the role played by fiscal policy in shifting the burden of debt from the government to the household sector. Moreover, the article raises serious concern about the sustainability of this particular growth process.
The Contract Regulation Club
Authors: Dabscheck Braham 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThe Contract Regulation Club has been the dominant force in Australian industrial relations since the latter part of the 1980s. Its membership includes major business and employer organisations, leaders of the Liberal and National parties, various regulatory bodies, ‘New Right’ think tanks and media commentators. Its modus operandi is doublethink. It advocates deregulation of employment contracts while intervening in their operation and demanding more regulation to ensure that they are loaded in ‘favour’ of employers. The Club has a vision of an industrial relations nirvana where employees voluntarily align their behaviour to the needs of the enterprise. The paper argues that this vision is fundamentally flawed and is the basis of the Club's demand for more regulation. The paper examines the origins and consolidation of the Club, activities and interventions after the election of the Howard Coalition in 1996 and major features of the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 (Cth)
Shifting the Balance of Power in Collective Bargaining: Australian Law, Industrial Action and Work Choices
Authors: McCrystal Shae 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThe Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 (Cth) effects significant changes to the provisions of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (Cth) governing industrial action in the federal workplace relations system. This paper examines these changes, situating them in the context of the historical relationship between law and industrial action in Australia, and evaluating the impact of the changes on the balance of power in voluntary collective bargaining. The paper argues that the Work Choices changes have elevated the power of employers, and protection of third party welfare, above access to the right to strike for employee participants in collective bargaining.
Can Child Poverty Be Abolished? Promises and Policies in the UK
Authors: Sutherland Holly 
Published: March 2013

AbstractIn 1999 Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister, promised to end child poverty within a generation. What does this mean? Can it be achieved? What progress has been made so far? The paper starts by placing UK child poverty at the end of the 20th Century in historical and international context. It reviews the policies that have been introduced in order to meet specific interim targets - of reducing child poverty by one quarter by 2004/5 and halving it in ten years - and discusses the prospects for success in meeting these targets. The second part takes a step back and reflects on why child poverty - rather than poverty more generally - has become the political and policy focus. It then considers whether such an emphasis - together with the particular policy directions that have been taken - may be counter-productive in meeting the eventual goal of ending child poverty. The ‘end to child poverty’ has now been translated as meaning having achieved a relative child poverty rate that is ‘among the best (i.e. lowest) in Europe’. The final part of the paper considers what this might involve. To what extent can the policy approaches taken by the current ‘best in Europe’ countries be seen as recipes for success for the UK, or indeed elsewhere?
Uniting Management and Education in Pursuit of Efficiency: F.W. Taylor’s Training Reform Legacy
Authors: Taksa Lucy 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThis historical case study demonstrates the importance of education to the diffusion of management ideas and strategies. The article explains how management and education came to be united in the pursuit of efficiency and how they came to use similar assessment techniques to ensure the achievement of this goal. Documenting F.W. Taylor’s interest in education, it reveals how scientific management, as promoted by management ‘gurus’, consultants, managers, educational administrators and related professionals, came to influence the early twentieth century reform of education and training in both the USA and Australia. It shows how Taylor’s methods, principles and philosophy were transformed into a scholastic program, and how this program was infused into the administration and content of teaching and learning offered in NSW schools, technical colleges, universities and adult education, with long-term implications for the training of managers, students and workers.
Understanding Diverse Outcomes for Working-Class Learning: Conceptualising Class Consciousness as Knowledge Activity
Authors: Sawchuk Peter H. 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThis article poses the question: Why is it that work/life teaches some workers resistance and militancy while it seems to teach others despondency, withdrawal or manic careerism? The significance of this question lies in the decline of working-class community. The question is answered through an exploration of ways of conceptualising working-class learning that account for a diversity of outcomes in terms of class consciousness. The article briefly reviews key dimensions of learning theory, and then, by drawing on two empirical illustrations, it argues that the workplace must be conceptualized as an ensemble of work/life spheres. The argument confirms the prospect for a better understanding of the complex nature of work-learning relations with an emphasis on artifact mediation (i.e. the role of tools and ideas) and participatory structures (i.e. activity systems). Here the content and structural location of working-class cultural practices and dispositions (i.e. habitus) within activity systems are deemed central.
Australian Skill Shortages: How the Howard Government Did Not Change its Mind
Authors: Montague Alan , Bessant Judith 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThis article begins by assessing the evidence that there was, and is, a skill shortage in Australia, and notes that for some years the Howard government initially denied there was a problem of unmet demand for skilled people. It was not until late 2006 that we saw any kind of official acknowledgement of a problem. On 12 October 2006, Prime Minister Howard announced a ‘Skills for the Future’ policy that involved a commitment to spend $837 million over five years, and aimed ‘to help build a more highly skilled and responsive workforce to support Australia’s long-term economic growth’. Acknowledging that policy-making begins with the framing or constitution of a problem, assessments are offered of this federal government’s account of the ‘skill shortage’ problem. The questions posed in this article are: what policy initiatives during the Howard years were designed to address issues of training, and what was their potential for addressing the problem of an apparent shortage of skilled workers in Australia?
The Current Crisis Has a Silver Lining
Authors: Nevile John 
Published: March 2013

AbstractCapitalism has had many crises and often they have led to improvements in the way it has operated. Two related improvements are predicted as a result of the current crisis. One is the hastening of the decisive defeat of market liberalism. The other is the rehabilitation of fiscal policy as part of the tool kit used to minimise the inherent instability of capitalist economies. After a brief exposition of the core aspects of market liberalism, this article considers the use of fiscal policy in each of the short run and the long run. Policies around the OECD in the last 16 months have already embodied both these improvements, but a similar achievement in the long run will be more difficult. The crowding-out thesis has more appeal when applied to the longer run. However, the empirical evidence does not support crowding out. More generally, economic orthodoxy relies on neo-classical growth theory to support a belief that longer run trends in real economic variables such as output and employment are determined solely by supply side factors. The article uses the authority of Solow and Swan to emphasise that this is an assumption, not the result of any analysis, and that neoclassical growth theory itself assumes that fluctuations in investment over the business cycle will necessarily affect the path of potential output. Moreover, not only is the NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) determined by the path of investment in physical and human capital, but at a much lower level of unemployment than the conventional wisdom believes.
The Paradox of Post-Communist Trade Unionism: ‘You Can't Want What You Can't Imagine’
Authors: Kallaste Epp , Woolfson Charles 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThis article explores employee attitudes towards trade union membership in the post-communist Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It reports on a comparative empirical social survey of attitudes towards representation. We suggest that in addition to those employees who are union members and those who fall within an identifiable ‘representation gap’, there is a sizeable group of ‘undecided’ employees who could be persuaded to join trade unions, if they could see the relevance of collective representation. We argue that this relatively large group could be specific to the Central and East European countries, and employees who fall within the commonly understood representation gap in other countries can be found within this undecided group in Baltic countries. Trade unions therefore face a considerable challenge in proving their relevance to such employees, a problem that has wider resonances in a European context but may be more difficult to resolve in the Central and East European countries.
Metamorphoses: The Concept of Labour in the History of Political Economy
Authors: Theocarakis Nicholas J. 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThe emergence of an understanding of labour as the basis of value is traced from ancient Greek authors to classical political economy and Karl Marx, and the subsequent eclipse of the theory in neoclassical economics is then charted. While the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of labour as a measure of value, in Scholastic authors the notion was fixed that labour and cost of production determine value. Labour assumed a central role in Adam Smith, but it was with David Ricardo that a fully blown labour theory of value was achieved. Marx gave the concept its philosophical dimension, tying it to a critique of classical political economy. The labour theory of value came under attack in neoclassical formulations which in the end effected the analytical disappearance of labour in several ways. Labour became just another factor of production, with marginal productivity regulating its price. Then factors of production and final goods became analytically equivalent as sources of subjective utility, especially in the context of general equilibrium theory. In disutility models of labour supply, labour was substituted by its absence, ‘leisure’. Finally, attempts were made to explain the employment relationship as an application of agency theory, moving away from the pure commodity model of labour. Nevertheless, all these theories failed to account for what became the Achilles' heel of neoclassicism — namely the indeterminacy of the labour contract.
Legal Incentives to Promote Innovation at Work: A Critical Analysis
Authors: Dent Chris , Fenwick Colin , Newitt Kirsten 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThe allocation of any benefit that arises from worker-generated innovation is complicated by the importance of three separate areas of law — employment law, intellectual property law and equity — and the distinction between those types of innovation that attract intellectual propertyrightsand those types that do not (the latter being a category that is often referred to as ‘know-how’). The purpose of this article is to engage with the legal scholarship on the principles that are relevant to innovation. To date, the discussion has focused on two distinct approaches — what may be termed theeconomicand thefairnessperspectives. The former may be seen as a justification for the current regime, while the latter has focused on the perceived needs of workers (in large part in opposition to the employers). Our argument is that these two approaches are both incomplete. In an attempt to get closer to a workable framework for the effective allocation of benefits, we offer a third approach; one that is based on thepracticesthat are central to the employer-worker relationship.
Minimum Labour Standards Enforcement in Australia: Caught in the Crossfire?
Authors: Goodwin Miles , Maconachie Glenda 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThe complex transition from convict to free labour influenced state intervention in the employment relationship, and initiated the first minimum labour standards in Australia in 1828. Since then, two principal sets of tensions have affected the enforcement of such standards: tensions between government and employers, and tensions between the major political parties over industrial and economic issues. This article argues that these tensions have resulted in a sustained legacy affecting minimum labour standards’ enforcement in Australia. The article outlines broad historical developments and contexts of minimum labour standards’ enforcement in Australia since 1828, with more contemporary exploration focusing specifically on enforcement practices and policies in the Australian federal industrial relations jurisdiction. Current enforcement practices are an outcome of this volatile history, and past influences remain strong.
‘Modernising’ Employment Standards? Administrative Efficiency and the Production of the Illegitimate Claimant in Ontario, Canada
Authors: Gellatly Mary , Grundy John , Mirchandani Kiran , Perry J. Adam , Thomas Mark P. , Vosko Leah F. 
Published: March 2013

AbstractIn October 2010, the provincial government of Ontario, Canada enacted theOpen for Business Act(OBA). A central component of the OBA is its provisions aiming to streamline the enforcement of Ontario’sEmployment Standards Act(ESA). The OBA’s changes to the ESA are an attempt to manage a crisis of employment standards (ES) enforcement, arising from decades of ineffective regulation, by entrenching an individualised enforcement model. The Act aims to streamline enforcement by screening people assumed to be lacking definitive proof of violations out of the complaints process. The OBA therefore produces a new category of ‘illegitimate claimants’ and attributes administrative backlogs to these people. Instead of improving the protection of workers, the OBA embeds new racialised and gendered modes of exclusion in the ES enforcement process.
A Better and Larger GST?
Authors: Freebairn John 
Published: March 2013

AbstractThis article argues the case for changes to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) as a key part of fundamental tax reform in Australia. A more comprehensive base would bring gains in efficiency and simplicity, with equity goals better met by the income transfer system. Revenue gains of a broader GST base and/or a higher rate could fund tax mix change packages to replace more distorting state stamp duties and fund lower income tax rates. The tax mix change packages would improve efficiency and simplicity, with no substantial changes to aggregate revenue or to equity.
Enrolling Non-State Actors to Improve Compliance with Minimum Employment Standards
Authors: Hardy Tess 
Published: March 2013

AbstractWhile the extent of employer non-compliance with minimum employment standards has yet to be decisively determined in Australia, there is evidence to suggest that it is both prevalent and persistent. This article draws on the scholarship emerging from the regulatory studies field to explore the underlying impulses and issues that may have led to this compliance gap. It considers how a more pluralistic and decentred understanding of regulation may improve compliance. This understanding is then applied to examine the various ways in which the federal labour inspectorate — the Fair Work Ombudsman — has sought to supplement and strengthen its existing compliance and enforcement mechanisms by harnessing or ‘enrolling’ non-state stakeholders, such as employer associations, trade unions, top-level firms and key individuals.
A Post Keynesian Perspective on Industry Assistance and the Effectiveness of Australia’s Carbon Pricing Scheme
Authors: Perry Neil 
Published: March 2013

AbstractAustralia’s carbon pricing scheme protects the profits of polluters and, as a consequence, has a negligible impact on the carbon emissions emanating from Australian industries. I concentrate on the assistance given to emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries and use a post Keynesian approach to explain that, despite the rhetoric, industries and firms will not move offshore under a carbon price and industry assistance is unnecessary. When assistance is given, profits are protected and could increase in certain industries, which occurred in the comparable European emissions trading scheme. In orthodox economic theory, despite this negligible impact on profits, any method of pricing carbon causes a reduction in emissions because firms seek to adjust technology and factor inputs at the margin and abate until marginal abatement costs equal the carbon price. However, from a post Keynesian perspective, the government’s prediction of a transformed economy and clean energy future will not occur unless the carbon pricing policy reduces the corporate profits of emitting firms. Thus, complementary policies are required to take the burden of reducing emissions off the more symbolic carbon market established. I further argue that a carbon tax without any industry assistance is a preferred approach and that where plant shutdown does occur, carbon emissions around the world will fall and workers could be compensated at a far smaller cost than the adjustment assistance given to industries in the policy’s current form.