Abstract
In this issue, we introduce a new initiative relating to the journal's approach to annual reviews. In doing so, we are mindful of the great interest among academics and students in the approach that has been taken in the past. We acknowledge with appreciation the efforts of previous Editors-in-Chief (Marian Baird and Bradon Ellem) and Associate Editors (Stephen Clibborn, Rae Cooper, Alex Veen and Chris G. Wright) to ensure coverage of important subjects pertaining to the industrial relations scene in Australia in annual reviews, notably the labour market; women, work and industrial relations; unions and collective bargaining; employer and employer association matters; industrial legislation; and major court and tribunal decisions with additional practitioner reviews. We particularly acknowledge the scholars who have contributed to annual reviews on a three-yearly appointment basis on these specific topics.
However, we are of the view that on the eve of the journal's 65th year in 2024 and in light of interesting and critical developments in Australian industrial relations since the change of the federal government in 2022, it is time to shift to a broader, thematic approach that can enhance the depth of commentary, while still encompassing the traditional topics and actors that have been the focus of past annual reviews. To illustrate that change is not entirely alien to the Journal of Industrial Relations (JIR) and to provide readers with our rationale for the change of approach, this extended editorial provides an overview of the journal's history of reviewing past developments, highlighting orientations and notable gaps.
In fact, the approach that readers have come to know was formally introduced soon after the journal shifted from the University of New South Wales (NSW) to the University of Sydney in August 1999. The subsequent issue in September of that year, Vol. 41, No. 3, was produced collaboratively by the outgoing and incoming editorial teams and the papers covered topics that the journal had covered in the past and that would continue to be examined in the foreseeable future. As outlined by the incoming editors, Ron Callus and Russell Lansbury in their editorial in 2000 (Vol 42, No. 1), annual reports would be ‘mainly devoted to reviewing events’ of the preceding year, in relation to ‘legislative developments, tribunal decisions, trade unionism, employers and their associations, wages and wage determination’ (p. 3). However, the following year, 2001, marked another important transition for the journal. As the Editorial in Vol. 43, No. 1 noted, the journal was to be published by Blackwell in partnership with the Industrial Relations Society of Australia (subsequently renamed the Australian Labour and Employment Relations Association) and henceforth ‘the annual reports’ would be featured in the June 2001 issue (p. 1), a tradition that continued from that time on. Also notable were two additions. The first was an important article by Boyd Hunter and Anne Hawke on discrimination against Indigenous Australians that drew on an analysis of the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS) of 1995. The second addition was inclusion of attention to the Australian labour market, which was ‘featured for the first time as part of the annual review of industrial relations in 2000’ (Callus & Lansbury, 2001, p. 109). Then, in the 2008 Annual Review, attention expanded further to include Women in Low Paid Employment in Australia (Vol. 50, No, 3, pp. 475–488), a welcome development coming exactly a decade after Keith Hancock published on “The Needs of the Low Paid” in JIR (Vol. 40, No. 1). And from 2009 attention to Women, Work and Industrial Relations became a consistent feature. This annual review also marked a broadening of the focus on trade unions to encompass collective bargaining (Vol. 51, No. 3). Generally, however, the annual reviews continued to be framed by the traditional institutional model developed by John Dunlop focused on contexts, employment rules and the key actors (trade unions and employees, employers and their organisations and the government and public agencies).
The journal's attention to reviewing past developments within this framing can be traced back to its foundation and early years. However, to an extent, the early years also encompassed a broader focus. In the first issue in April 1959, D.C. Thomson examined ‘Recent Developments in the Australian Industrial Scene’. In October, Kingsley Laffer examined ‘Recent Developments Under Arbitration’ and in October 1960, D.W. Rawson considered ‘Recent Developments in Trade Unionism’. Certainly, there were articles that solely focused on the previous year or two. Yet the notion of reviewing developments beyond that time frame was a recurrent thread throughout the early decades. Examples included an article examining ‘A Wage Structure for Papua and New Guinea: Recent Developments’ in 1966, followed in 1970 with another on ‘Recent Developments in Industrial Relations in Papua-New Guinea.’ In the meantime, ‘A Review of Developments in Industrial Relations 1967/68’ was published by A.E. Woodward Q.C., and ‘A Review of Developments in Industrial Relations 1970–1971’ followed by C.P. Mills in 1971 and later by ‘Recent Developments in New Zealand Industrial Relations’ in 1972. This was also the time when attention to developments in relation to employer associations commenced.
In this early period, during Kingsley Laffer's editorial tenure (1959–1974), the attention to developments and trends was accompanied by the inclusion of papers on historical developments in industrial relations by stalwarts of the field, as well as by leading labour historians such as C.E. Sinclair (1967), David Plowman (1985, 1987), Peter J. Macarthy (1968, June & September; 1970), J.M. Howells (1970), Ken Buckley (1971), B.J. Gordon and R.W. McShane (1971) and T.G. Parsons (1972). Such inclusions were not extensive during John Niland's tenure (1974–1991) with the exception of an article by Howard F. Gospel on ‘New Managerial Approaches to Industrial Relations: Major Paradigms and Historical Perspective’ (1983, pp. 162–76) but grew substantially during Braham Dabscheck's tenure (1991–1999). Historical papers then appeared by Diane Fieldes and Tom Bramble (1992), Lucy Taksa (1992,1995), Peter Sheldon (1993, 1998), John Shields (1995), Peter Gahan (1996), Judy Brown (1997), Raelene Frances (1998), Peter Saunders (1998) and most significantly, Joe Isaac on ‘Australian Labour Market Issues: An Historical Perspective’ (1998). In the subsequent decades though, as historical perspective and attention to la longue durée diminished, attention grew for numerous areas of previous neglect. As noted previously, until 2007–08, attention to women was virtually non-existent, with the notable exception of an article by Thelma Hunter in 1961.
Research on industrial relations in Asia has been another area that attracted increased attention over the decades, building on a now largely forgotten legacy of research in the journal's early decades, which included eleven articles published on various dimensions of industrial relations in Papua New Guinea, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. Other early articles focused on Pakistan in 1965, four on Hong Kong during the 1970–1980 period, and a couple appeared on India, South Korea and the Philippines in 1998–1999. During the following decade, a large number of papers were published on China and this country has not surprisingly attracted continuing attention. Articles on general developments in Asia and the Pacific have also grown. The greatest numbers have been on New Zealand, commencing in the 1960s and continuing throughout the 1990s and since. The largest number on Southeast Asia have focused on issues in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, with only a couple or so on each of India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia, the Philippines and one on Fiji over recent decades.
The largest continuing international coverage of industrial relations in the journal has related to developments in the United Kingdom and North America, with some articles on other parts of Europe. Only a few have focused on South America and even fewer on Africa. However, the most significant continuing gap in the journal is related to First Nations industrial relations and specifically Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Although the journal featured one of the earliest articles on Aboriginal employment by McCorquodale, in 1985 (Vol. 27, No. 1), subsequent work has been sparse. From the late 1980s, the lead was taken by the journal Labour History, especially through its special issue on Aboriginal workers in 1995. It was in that journal that industrial relations stalwarts such as Jim Hagan and Richard Castle published first on ‘Regulation of Aboriginal Labour in Queensland’ in 1997. Not until the following year did Hagan, Castle and Clothier publish on ‘Fixing wages for Aborigines in the Queensland cattle industry 1901–1965’ in the Journal of Industrial Relations (1998). In the meantime, the journal featured ‘An Indigenous Worker's Guide to the Workplace Relations Act’ (Hunter, 1997) and ‘An Indigenous Worker's Guide to the Workplace Relations Act – an Alternative View’ (Hawke, 1998, pp. 304–309). Later Hunter and Hawke (2001) published ‘A comparative analysis of the industrial relations experiences of Indigenous and other Australian workers.’ It would be a long time before the next article appeared in the journal on this subject – the paper by Birch and Marshal entitled ‘Revisiting the earned income gap for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian workers: Evidence from a selection bias corrected model’ was published in 2018 (Vol. 60, No. 1). This was then followed three years later by Lamb and Verma's ‘Nonstandard employment and indigenous earnings inequality in Canada’ (2021).
However, this total of seven articles on First Nations industrial relations, with only six dealing with Australia does not adequately reflect the coverage of this subject within the JIR. In fact, the overview of industrial relations, 1964–1965 by J. R. Kerr in Vol. 7, No. 2, drew ‘attention to the industrial happenings in relation to aborigines in the Northern Territory and the indigenous people in New Guinea’ (p. 117) and further referred to the policy of ‘assimilation’ or, at least ‘integration’ vis-à-vis ‘the aborigines in the Northern Territory’ and their exclusion from awards set by the Arbitration Court during the 1940s and 1950s such ‘that conditions of employment and rates of pay for aborigines on stations’ were to be controlled by legislation (p. 118). Subsequently, more fulsome, and supportive accounts were provided in the ACTU Congress reports, which appeared as an annual feature in the journal from 1961 until 2000. For instance, reporting on the 1965 Congress, R.M. Martin noted in the September issue that ‘Congress accepted without debate the Executive's proposal of a levy to finance the legal costs incurred by the North Australian Workers’ Union in its claim for award wages for aboriginal pastoral workers in the Northern Territory’ (1965, p. 324). Ten years later, in the 1975 ACTU Congress Report, Martin referred to the fact that ‘there were no Aboriginal delegates: it was a Maori delegate (Storemen and Packers) who asked why there was no resolution concerning ‘my brothers, the Aboriginals’ (1975, p.392). Similarly, in his report for the 1977 Congress, Martin referred to the fact that ‘As usual, there were no Aboriginal delegates at congress’ (1977, p. 431). A year later, in an article entitled ‘Patterns of Industrial Relations Research in Australia’, Michael A. Gurdon indicated that the lack of engagement with First Nations industrial relations issues was more extensive. As he pointed out, the ‘minimal attention’ to the ‘Aboriginal population in Australia’ was as ‘true in the literature as … in the form of a coherent governmental policy’ since in total there had ‘been just three post-1970 theses devoted to the topic’, which had admittedly started to result in ‘valuable publications’ (1978, p. 455).
By the 1993 ACTU Congress report, Peter Gahan was able to reflect on some improvements at least in the labour movement. Marking the International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples, with an appearance from Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter supported by David Arden, the first session of Congress was addressed by Joanne Kerr from the Public Sector Union, who critically outlined ‘the development of ACTU policy on Koori issues, and the industrial relations agenda that should be pursued for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’ (1993, p. 608). On the third day of the Congress the ACTU launched its new Aboriginal Employment Liaison Officers Strategy and Pat Dodson, Chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation addressed delegates reminding them of the role ‘that unions had played in the subjugation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers’, while acknowledging that even though the unions’ role ‘was improving… unemployment among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was six times the national average, and the relative pay inequality between Aboriginal workers and ethnic groups had hardly improved’ (1993, pp. 610–11).
As the overview of articles published in the journal on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers and their employment indicates, the engagement by industrial relations scholars has improved little since Gurdon reflected on the lack of research on the subject in 1978. To address this problem, we began a process of rectification. First, we invited two First Nations scholars to join our editorial team as Associate Editors: Dr Sharlene Leroy-Dyer, Director Indigenous Business Hub (Acting) & Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland Business School who is a Saltwater woman, with family ties to the Garigal, Awabakal, Darug and Wiradyuri peoples, of NSW and Dr Tyron Love, Associate Professor in the Business School at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Tyron has Māori tribal affiliations to Te Atiawa (Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington), Ngāti Ruanui and Taranaki and has New Zealand Pākehā (non-indigenous) ancestry. Together, our Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Indigeneity sub-committee Chaired by Deputy Editor Amanda Coles, worked on the development of an Indigenous Early Career Editorial Traineeship scheme, which we launched at the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand conference in Queensland and at Deakin Business School together with ALERA President Neroli Ellis earlier in 2023 (https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/pb-assets/cmscontent/JIR/JIRIndigenousEditorialTraineeshipOutlineandEOI4April2023final-1681341722.pdf). We hope that these initiatives will start the process of improving attention to First Nations industrial relations in the journal and scholarship by First Nations peoples in the field. In this annual review, we are very pleased to include an article by Dr Sharlene Leroy-Dyer as a step towards this goal.
Finally, we wish to provide the rationale for the thematic choice for this first Annual Review of Critical Developments in Industrial Relations. As noted at the outset, there have been some momentous policy and legislative changes since the election of the federal Labor Government in May 2022. Interest in such changes was evident in the media and among constituent members of ALERA. One example of such interest was the ‘After the Dust Settles – Proposed Federal IR Reforms’ event hosted by the Industrial Relations Society of NSW on 25 October 2022, which sought to consider the proposed industrial relations reform agenda that was taking shape and the areas of interest for the government, employers, unions and other interested parties following the federal Job Summit held in August of that year that sought to find ways to lift wages, spur productivity and ease skills shortages. At this event, Peter Sams – Industrial Relations Consultant and former Deputy President of Fair Work Commission, referred positively to the NSW Industrial Relations legislation that had been developed by then NSW Minister for Industrial Relations, Jeff Shaw, with his staff, Adam Searle and Bruce Grimshaw. In reflecting on the NSW Industrial Relations Act 1996, in his article entitled ‘In Defence of The Collective: New South Wales Industrial Relations in the twenty-first Century’, published in JIR Vol. 39, No. 3, Jeff Shaw made several critical points that remain pertinent today. First and more generally, he commented: ‘Of course, change and workplace reform can come in a range of forms. Reform, after all, is a question of substance, not of form’ and in regards to the new NSW legislation, he pointed to the object of encouraging and facilitating ‘the adoption of cooperative workplace reform and equitable, innovative and productive workplace relations (Section 3(h))’. Reform, he argued could ‘take a variety of incarnations. A good example is a consent award made under the new legislation between a number of employers’ (p. 399). Second, he noted that this was ‘an unusual piece of legislation in the current Australian industrial relations climate’ by being ‘formulated with consideration for the needs of all relevant parties and following extensive consultation with them’. Not only did it provide ‘for workplace reform’ and stress ‘productivity and efficiency’ but it also provided ‘a range of mechanisms and forms by which to achieve flexible, adaptive and creative outcomes in pursuit of lasting productivity’. Third, and most importantly, he stressed that ‘philosophically, the legislation owes a great deal to a collective model. And it is these collective underpinnings that, coupled with the drive for workplace reform and efficiency, make the NSW Act a forward-looking piece of legislation’ (p. 396). Hence, the critical point Shaw stressed was that the legislation was ‘a model for the regulation of industrial relations that is based on a recognition of, and a commitment to, collectivity in industrial relations’ (p. 400).
Collectivity and collective bargaining in this article built on a tradition in the journal from its very early issues, hardly surprising given that as Shaw noted in the above article ‘Since federation, the Australian industrial relations system has facilitated and encouraged collective industrial relations’ (p. 389). In 1960, Helen Hughes and D.W. Rawson published on ‘Collective Bargaining and the White-Collar Pay Structure’ (pp. 90–98). Two years later, Keith Hancock examined ‘Compulsory Arbitration versus Collective Bargaining: Three Recent Assessments’ (1962) followed by Joe Isaac's article ‘Dr Hancock on Collective Bargaining’ (1962) and Kingsley Laffer on ‘Compulsory Arbitration and Collective Bargaining’ (1962). Three years later, Richard Kirkby wrote ‘Some Comparisons Between Compulsory Arbitration and Collective Bargaining’ (1965), and this was followed by W.A Howard's ‘Collective Bargaining as an Error-Learning Process’ (1973), John Niland's ‘The Case for More Collective Bargaining in Australia’ (1976), Ross McClelland's ‘Towards Collective Bargaining: A Critical Analysis of Trends’ (1976), Jackie M. Fristacky's ‘Collective Bargaining, Conciliation and Arbitration in Victorian Wages Boards’ and N.F. Dufty's ‘The Operation of Western Australian Unions and the Prospects for Collective Bargaining’ (1979). In the ensuing years, articles on collective bargaining continued to appear by scholars such as Raymond Harbridge and James Moulder (1993) and Carol Fox (1997) but increasingly these were superseded by those focused on enterprise bargaining, gender equality bargaining, environmental bargaining and good faith bargaining. As noted previously, attention to collective bargaining reappeared in annual reviews by Cathy Brigden linked to trade unions in 2009.
We hope this brief overview of treatments of collective bargaining in the journal will be useful for those who teach on the subject in the relatively few industrial relations courses remaining in our Australian universities. As Hayter, Fashoyin and Kochan pointed out in their ‘Review Essay: Collective Bargaining for the twenty-first Century’, published in JIR in 2011: Collective bargaining has served as a cornerstone institution for democracy, a mechanism for increasing workers’ incomes, improving working conditions and reducing inequality, a means for ensuring fair employment relations and a source of workplace innovation (2011, p. 225).
Examining the evolution of collective bargaining institutions in different regions of the world, these scholars included attention to the Americas and the Caribbean, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay (2011, p. 231), and also ‘transition countries such as Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nepal and Vietnam’ which they suggested were then ‘in the process of establishing new labour relations frameworks’ and legal reforms ‘focused on establishing the framework for sound industrial relations’ (2011, p. 232).
We have taken the lead from these scholars in the inaugural thematic review of critical developments in industrial relations focusing on collective bargaining and specifically their point that: ‘Given the predominance of enterprise-level bargaining in this region, the role that particular institutions play in coordinating wage settlements across the economy is an important issue for future research’ (2011, p. 233). The key papers in this annual review continue to give attention to the actors and institutions in the context of industrial and legal reform in industrial relations in Australia.
In line with past tradition, our first article by Anthony Forsyth and Shea McCrystal ‘The Potential Impact of the Fair Work Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Act 2022 on Collective Bargaining in Australia’ focuses on legislative developments and changes and their impact on the key actors. Our second, ‘Collective Bargaining and Low Paid Women Workers: The Promise of Supported Bargaining’ by Sara Charlesworth and Fiona Macdonald examines the legislative changes regarding the capacity for collective bargaining of a key group of actors who have featured throughout annual reviews. Our third is a practitioner contribution on ‘Developments in Collective Bargaining during 2022 and their implications for the Future’ by Jonathan Hamberger. Following these are two cases that track critical developments in collective bargaining in specific contexts and for specific groups of workers in two key sectors in Australia. The first focuses on ‘Collective bargaining in the Australian Public Service: From New Public Management to Public Value’ by Sue Williamson and Cameron Roles and the last and certainly a pinnacle for the journal examines ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment provisions within Enterprise Agreements in Australian Universities, and the role of the National Tertiary Education Union and Collective Bargaining’ by Sharlene Leroy-Dyer. We are extremely pleased that this is the first time an article has been authored by a First Nations scholar on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander industrial relations. This paper is epic in its review of and data on the long struggle for inclusion of key matters in enterprise agreements in Australia's higher education sector. All these commissioned papers were subject to double-blind review except for the last, which was externally reviewed in Australia and overseas but not blind as to her identity by author choice on the grounds of her identifiability as the only First Nations scholar working on this subject of the paper.
The last two papers in this issue, submitted through the usual means to the journal, align with our thematic approach on collectivism and bargaining and extend the focus beyond Australia's shores. Both are on geographical locations that have not previously had as much attention as they arguably deserve. The first by Ingrid Landau, John Howe, Trang Thi Kieu Tran, Petra Mahy and Carolyn Sutherland examines ‘Regulatory Pluralism and the Resolution of Collective Labour Disputes in Southeast Asia’ and the second by Angel Martin-Caballero, Sebastian Mauricio Mauricio Ugarte, Paula Cornejo-Abarca explores ’Beyond the surface: Unpacking the opportunity structure for Gender Equality Bargaining in Chile’. Finally, our book review by Sanford M. Jacoby critically examines For Labor to build on: Wars, Depression and Pandemic, by William B. Gould IV. We are happy to receive suggestions from readers for future annual review themes and we hope you find the papers of interest and value.
Finally, we take this opportunity to reflect with great sadness on the untimely passing of Ron Callus, past co-editor-in-chief of this journal (with Professor Russell Lansbury) and a stalwart of the Australian industrial relations community. A full obituary will be included in the November issue to pay tribute to him and to recognise his significant contributions as a colleague and mentor to many who studied industrial relations and as a fondly remembered tutor in the subject at the University of Sydney. In fact, his 1978 Master thesis, ‘Migrant workers-their employers and unions: a study of management's attempt to promote labour stability in a multi-ethnic workforce’, his co-authored, ‘“Well at least it's better than the line”: an examination of the working lives of migrant employees in three state government instrumentalities’, with Michael Quinlan and Malcolm Rimmer in 1979 (Department of Industrial Relations, University of Sydney) and his article that year on ‘Employer Policies for the Management of a Multi-Ethnic Workforce: A Critical Examination’ in the JIR (Vol. 21, No. 4) provided inspiration for those interested in migrant employment and working conditions long before the subject gained more general interest in the field. A few years later, in 1993, he completed his work on the subject with ‘The industrial relations of immigrant employment’, co-authored with Martha Knox (Australian Bureau of Immigration and Population Research).
In the interim, Ron commenced what would arguably be his most profound contributions to the field, first as the Project Director for the AWIRS in the Commonwealth's Department of Industrial Relations in 1988 and as the first full-time director of the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training (ACIRRT) at the University of Sydney in 1991. As Rusell Lansbury and incoming co-editor Bradon Ellem put it in their 2005 tribute to Ron at the time of his retirement from the latter role and as JIR co-editor, ‘No research centre has done more to gather and disseminate data on changes at work – or to contribute to public debate about the regulation of work’ (Vol. 49, No. 2, p. 148). Both roles ensured that Ron had an immense impact on industrial relations research and policy, as well as the careers of the many budding industrial relations scholars and practitioners who obtained employment opportunities with ACIRRT. We recommend the account presented on AWIRS by Callus, Morehead, Cully and Buchanan in 1991 and especially Ron's article ‘Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys (AWIRS)’ published in the JIR (Vol. 33, No. 4). We highlight Ron's recognition that the AWIRS research reflected the ‘upsurge of interest in Australian workplace industrial relations’ which ‘coincided with a perceptible policy shift’ that could be ‘traced to the mid-1980s’ and ‘debate on the desirability of labour market flexibility, as a necessary precondition for improved product market efficiency’ (p. 451). Equally important was Ron's emphasis on the role and contribution of the industrial relations academic community (p. 453) and ‘the remarkable convergence in research priorities of academics, employers, the union movement and government’ in Australia during the 1980s and early 1990s. According to Ron, the view informing the AWIRS research ‘that the subject matter of industrial relations is not static … led the research team to address two fundamental questions at the outset: what is industrial relations, and what are the boundaries of workplace industrial relations?’ (p. 455).
We draw inspiration from Ron, this view and his approach to industrial relations research and policy and we aim to follow this lead throughout the term of our editorship in this and future issues, as reflected in the Journal's Vision and Mission (https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/description/JIR) and the updated Journal Aims and Scope (https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/aims-scope/JIR). To facilitate thoughtful discussion, debate and expansion of the field's boundaries and enable penetrating work on significant industrial relations topics, we produced new guidelines for Special Issue proposals (https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/aims-scope/JIR) and we are particularly pleased to welcome Associate Professor Donella Caspersz (University of Western Australia Business School) as our new Deputy Editor responsible for Special Issues. Like the new Australian industrial relations laws, we hope that through these issues, the journal will be able to close loopholes and pull threads to expose others.