Ray Markey (03 February 1949–23 April 2022)

Raymond Arthur Markey will be remembered as one of Australia's leading labour historians and industrial relations scholars as well as a much-appreciated mentor to research students and early career academics, and a thoughtful, collaborative and supportive colleague. Ray's major research contributions spanned labour history, employee participation and voice, comparative industrial relations and labour history, and contemporary industrial relations policy issues. He was a prolific scholar, publishing over 130 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and 14 authored or edited books, as well as numerous funded reports for governments, think tanks, and labour movement organisations.

Ray was born in Raymond Terrace, Australia, near the city of Newcastle which was then considered the heart of industrial NSW, dominated by the steel industry and nearby coal mining. Ray started his tertiary education at the Teachers’ College in Wagga Wagga in 1966 but eventually migrated to the University of Sydney where, in 1971, he graduated with an Honours degree in Arts, majoring in History and then a Diploma in Education in 1975. Ray began his academic career tutoring at Macquarie University in Sydney between 1976 and 1979, before moving to Wollongong. At the University of Wollongong, he commenced employment as a Lecturer in 1979. There, Ray embarked on a PhD which he gained in 1983. During his tenure at the University of Wollongong, Ray also convened the Industrial Relations Programme between 1979 and 2005 and was the Founding Director of the Centre for Work and Labour Market Studies at the University from 1987 to 2004.

In 2005, with his partner Frances, Ray moved to New Zealand, to take up a role as a Professor of Employment Relations at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT). At AUT, he built the employment relations discipline and shaped the Human Resource/Employment Relations major within the undergraduate business degree. One year after arriving in New Zealand, he also took up the position of Foundation Director of the New Zealand Work Research Institute, AUT. In 2011, Ray crossed back over the Tasman Sea to join Macquarie University in Sydney as a Professor of Employment Relations and Director of the Centre for Workforce Futures. Ray retired from Macquarie University in 2016, but he continued to pursue several research passions begun there to do with casual labour entitlements, and climate change, environmental bargaining and the workplace, while holding Emeritus and Honorary Professorial positions.

Ray's contributions to empirical research and theory on labour history were wide-ranging. Perhaps his most significant contribution was the 1988 book, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900 (Markey, 1988). Based on his PhD thesis, this presented the argument that the interaction of the social and economic backgrounds of the labour movement, especially the hazardous and inhumane working conditions experienced by the working class, were the basis for the formation of the state's Labor Party. Ray also engaged in and influenced the development of a comparative approach to labour history in Australia. Lamenting the traditional focus of labour history on the nation-state, and the tendency in comparative research to concentrate on institutional comparisons of a small number of similar countries, Ray also urged scholars to examine shared experiences and processes with a wider international scope. In this regard, one key contribution was the 2008 issue of Labour History which Ray co-edited with Kerry Taylor and which centred on Trans-Tasman studies of labour history (Markey and Taylor, 2008). This volume included transnational and comparative analyses of labour history in New Zealand and Australia, including labour from a gender perspective, and histories of regulation, trade unions and the third arm of the labour movement, consumer cooperatives. It also contained Ray's own comparative analysis of New Zealand and Australian Labor Party ideologies, support bases and electoral success.

Ray also applauded and contributed to the emergence of labour histories of communities including not only communities of class and place but also communities of race and gender. In an edited book Labour and Community: historical essays (Markey, 2001), for instance, Ray examined the importance of community as a basis for labour in terms of its reproduction, industrial and political organisation, culture and history.

Ray's recognition of the value of international comparative analysis was also reflected in his longstanding involvement in research on employee participation and voice. While some of Ray's studies of employee participation were purely Australian-based including single-organisational and single-industry case studies in Suncorp Metway and ICI and the university sector (e.g. Barnes et al., 2013; Markey and Patmore, 2009), much of his research involved a long collaboration with Danish colleagues including Herman Knudsen and Jens Lind. This collaboration resulted in numerous studies and publications, including comparative research in specific industries, such as teaching, hotels, and food processing, research on contemporary trends in relation to employee participation and voice and also investigations of the quality of work life in Denmark and New Zealand (e.g. Knudsen et al., 2013; Markey and Knudsen, 2014).

From 1992, Ray provided international leadership for research on employee participation through his role as Chair of the Workers’ Participation Study Group of the International Labor and Employment Relations Association, which pioneered international comparative studies of employee participation. A major outcome of the Study Group's body of comparative research was the publication of Models of Employee participation in a Changing Global Environment: Diversity and Interaction, a book which Ray co-edited with colleagues in 2001 (Markey et al., 2001). This brought together a host of case studies on various forms of employee involvement including direct participation and participation through such mechanisms as works councils and trade unions in a variety of national contexts and workforce contexts. The book argued that employee participation is not just adopted in the pursuit of organisational productivity but also to provide a sphere for industrial citizenship and to increase self-realisation at work. In 2006, Ray turned his gaze to employee participation in the Asia Pacific region and examined the limitations of existing structures for representative employee involvement in the region's four countries where such mechanisms were the most substantial: Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Australia. Ray argued for global unions to exert more pressure on firms to improve participative opportunities (Markey, 2006).

While Director of the Centre for Workforce Futures at Macquarie University, Ray continued researching and publishing on labour history and on voice and employee participation, while also embarking on funded research in relation to specific policy issues – including workers’ compensation law, portable long service leave, superannuation governance, casual worker entitlements, and climate change (e.g. see Markey et al., 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015). As Deputy Director of the Research Centre, I worked alongside Ray during this time, and experienced his generous collegiality in bringing together people from diverse scholarly backgrounds and mentoring them in multi-disciplinary teams which could tackle complex policy problems. These projects produced reports which not only led to a myriad of scholarly publications but also had a clear material impact, entering policy debates and in some cases, influencing legislative change. The latter included influences on workers’ compensation law reform in NSW and portable long service leave law in Victoria.

Ray's research for the Australian Council of Trade Unions on the labour market impact of penalty rates with Martin O’Brien, which began during this time, was perhaps the most significant in this respect (Markey and O’Brien, 2021; O’Brien et al., 2018). Employers were challenging the levels of penalty rates for unsociable working hours in the Fair Work Commission. The research mapped the likely impact of reductions (or increases) in penalty rates for unsociable working hours in the retail and hospitality sectors, finding that the quantum of penalty rates neither hindered productivity nor reduced employment levels. Ray was interviewed on prime time television current affairs shows to explain the research, but also endured an extensive grilling in the Fair Work Commission over the evidence.

Following his official retirement, Ray continued with his work on penalty rates with Martin O’Brien, including publishing a number of scholarly papers on their findings (e.g. Markey and O’Brien, 2021). He also continued examining issues to do with climate change and Australian workplaces, with colleagues including Joe McIvor, Chris Wright and others (Markey and McIvor, 2019; Markey et al., 2021). Most recently, this included research on union activism and environmental bargaining through the mechanism of enterprise agreements. While Ray and his co-authors found that union environmental bargaining was limited, they argued that there were significant prospects for substantial, class-based union agency and for ongoing, strategic initiatives for collective bargaining on environmental issues in Australia.

Throughout his long career, Ray was also an academic who, seeing himself as part of a community of scholars, contributed on a sustained basis to the building and maintenance of professional scholarly organisations and academic journals. This sort of participation may seem old-fashioned to some, given the increasing focus of university managers on measuring academic performance in relation to an increasingly small range of quantitative targets. There is a growing tendency for academic supervisors to dismiss efforts aimed at building disciplines and disciplinary communities as a waste of time. While in Wollongong, Ray became foundation chairperson of the Illawarra Branch of the Industrial Relations Society of New South Wales (1987–1990) and foundation president of the Illawarra branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (1995–2002) and a National Executive member. As part of his participation in the Illawarra branch of the Labour History Society, he also edited the Illawarra Unity, a journal of the history of the labour movement in the Illawarra district, from 1996 to 2004. Ray was also a generous and committed member of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, also known as AIRAANZ, including being on its executive committee for many years. As a long-term member of the New Zealand contingent as well as the Australian one, he helped to build the bonds between members on both sides of the Tasman.

In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Ray had a very full private life, his passions including his family, cricket, swimming, fine wine, travel, and blues music. Emeritus Professor Ray Markey died on the 28th of April 2022.