Journal of Industrial Relations

The years immediately after the Second World War witnessed over-full employment in the Australian economy. The workforce, backed by public opinion, sought to reap gains in employment conditions after years of restraint. High on the unions' official agenda was reform of the federal arbitration system, which dominated the wage-fixing process. In 1947 the ALP government amended the Conciliation and Arbitration Act. Although endowed with unprecedented constitutional and political authority, the Chifley government failed to meet the main expectations of its union constituents. The system remained centralized and dominated by a small bench of judges. Chifley's appointments to the bench failed to depart from the conservative norm. The Labor government's overwhelming motivation was to hold down wage costs and cushion the economy from the shock of industrial labour's newfound bargaining power.

The study of industrial relations management has been a long-neglected aspect of the Australian scene. Recent changes in the balance of power on the shop floor in the aftermath of prolonged recession in the metal and engineering industry, however, make such neglect an expensive luxury. This article looks at four aspects of management t strategy: the labour relations management function, relations with the unions at the workplace, attitudes to employee involvement, and attitudes to the employment relationship. The suggestion, in the light of secondary evidence and a series of fourteen case studies in the Victorian and New South Wales metal industry, is that three variables are important in helping to explain the direction that labour relations management has taken in recent years. These are the 'labour threat: the reorganization of production methods, and changes to the legal and institutional framework. It was found that management in those plants in which exposure to these three environmental pressures was similar responded with fairly similar labour relations management practices, suggesting that there may indeed be a link between the key variables.

One of the many causes of conflict within the labour process is choice of an appropriate criterion for the selection of labour and the allocation of work tasks. While merit, as a proxy for productivity or efficiency, is appropriate according to economic rationality and the principles of business management, evidence abounds of the prevalence of seniority as the criterion most used. In an attempt to explain this apparent contradiction it is hypothesised that, in many cases, management is obliged to utilise seniority because the costs of insisting upon merit are too high. These costs, in turn, are claimed to result from three factors: the difficulties of measuring merit, workers' attachment to the seniority principle and external constraints on having merit predominate. Evidence from a variety of case studies is presented in support of the hypothesis.

Before 1986 the regulation of occupational health and safety fell solely within the domain of the states, both through legislation and the activities of state inspectorates. This pattern of regulation was broken in 1986 with the making of the Vehicle Industry Occupational Health and Safety Award by the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. This article examines the enforcement provisions of the award, and, in particular, the extent to which these provide lower standards of regulation than the provisions of the Victorian Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1985. An examination of the award also discloses a complex interphase of activity between state inspectorates, which will have certain residual activities under state legislation not affected by the award, and members of the federal Arbitration Inspectorate, who have the task of enforcing the award. The article concludes that the federal inspectorate has neither the resources nor the expertise to properly enforce an award regulating occupational health and safety.

Jurisdiction conferred on the Australian Industrial Relations Commission by the Industrial Relations Act 1988 is more marked by continuity than by experimentation. This paper identifies some areas where greater structural changes might have been expected—the use of different constitutional powers, the regulation of contractors, and the removal of restrictions on the definition of 'industrial dispute'. It summarizes those beneficial reforms which the Act effects.