The agricultural industry throughout the world has great trouble recruiting and retaining workers drawn from the local population and has become reliant on temporary migrant workers to undertake work which is low paid and arduous. The viability of many of the industry’s branches, and [...]
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Verity Burgmann has produced an excellent, broad coverage of different instances of resistance by labour movements from around the world in her book Globalization and Labour in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2016). It includes accounts of occupied factories in Argentina, opposition to [...]
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In August Laurie Carmichael, former AMWU and ACTU leader, former president of the Communist Party of Australia and one of the architects of the accord, died. In October commemorations of Laurie’s life were held in Melbourne and Sydney. I attended the Sydney event. It was very moving and [...]
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Signed by 124 Labour Market, Employment Relations and Labour Law Researchers
For the last several years, Australian wages have experienced an unprecedented slowdown. Nominal wages have been growing at only about 2% per year since 2015. That’s barely half the traditional pace of [...]
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There’s nothing unusual about employers monitoring their employees, in an age-old effort to extract maximum effort and productivity from their paid staff. But new technologies – such as CCTV cameras, GPS locator chips, and computer and social media monitoring – are making this monitoring [...]
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Scientific understanding of the consequences of inequality has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Thanks to the pioneering work of scholars such as Joseph Stiglitz, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, and Tony Atkinson, we know that persistent social and economic inequality exacts an [...]
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Globalisation has been shifting manufacturing from richer to poorer countries for decades. In its initial phase, the global shift of labour-intensive products like garments, shoes and toys was criticised as an exercise in the exploitation of low-wage labour—the so-called ‘low road’ of [...]
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Sarah Kaine, 'Long-term non-market strategies: how platform economy firms create favourable regulatory space'
The proliferation of platform businesses has presented a regulatory challenge in jurisdictions around the world as start-ups have sought to shape the rules that define the [...]
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