Teacher unions are working in challenging times. Building power is important for teacher unions to resist neoliberal reforms that have aimed to restructure school education and weaken collective organisation. Yet we have few understandings of the democratisation project that teacher unions have engaged in to build and renew internal power in this…

Despite decades of Equal Opportunity legislation, gender inequality persists in Australian universities. This is largely due to the shaping of universities by new market principles, discourses of individualisation that render the asymmetry of gender relations invisible, and privileging masculine epistemologies. Concurrently, industrial relations…

Purpose: Originally written in the 1990s but unpublished, the paper is now revised; the purpose of this paper is to examine the context of the formation of the Educational Workers League of NSW in 1931 with particular emphasis on the NSW Crown Employees (Teachers) Conciliation Committee and the enactment of its agreement in the worsening economic…

National Qualifications Frameworks (NQFs) are intended to promote stronger linkages between education institutions and the labour market. This paper examines how industrial relations institutions mediate the relationship between formal qualifications, job classifications and pay outcomes in Australian manufacturing. In Australia a tribunal sets…

This paper presents a detailed case study of the development and implementation of a quantifiable academic workload model in the education faculty of an Australian university. Flowing from the enterprise bargaining process, the Academic Staff Agreement required the implementation of a workload allocation model for academics that was quantifiable…

The recommendations of the "Bradley Review" of higher education in Australia identified a clear need for examination of the academic labour market and the limited attractiveness of academia as a profession. Reasons for the lack of attractiveness include increased academic workloads, as evidenced by larger class sizes and staff-student…

The principle of decent work was first espoused in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since 1999 the International Labour Organisation has operated according to a Decent Work Agenda and in recent times the movement towards the provision of decent work as a means of improving the quality of life has gathered momentum. Decent work is…

The loss of collegiality and the loss of academic integrity were key themes raised during forums, personal interviews, a survey and focus groups conducted with University of Western Sydney academic staff as part of a research project into academic work load agreements. In this paper the experiences related by participants are placed in the light…

Recent attempts at professionalising the youth sector have focused on "codes of ethics" and left pay and conditions issues to community sector unions. The authors suggest that the history of nursing in Victoria provides a case example of the benefits of combining professional aspirations with industrial organisation.

Shows that compulsory arbitration does not prevent strikes, even when nine out of ten workers are covered. (BH)

Looks at Australia's Training Reform Agenda and discusses the extent of training provisions in bargaining agreements, the demographic profile of those covered by agreements, and the quality of training included in agreements. (JOW)

This paper considers the implications of current notions of the learning city. It argues that popular neoliberal ideologies create an environment in which lifelong learners strive for the learning city as an end product, both in production and for consumption, rather than embrace it as a living, social context. The rhetoric of the knowledge…

Macro-level data paint a detailed picture of the vulnerability of young people in employment, such as their concentration in casualised jobs, low average-weekly earnings and reduced access to collective representation, yet little is known about the internal conflicts that arise in individual workplaces that employ youth. This study seeks to…

Examination of the widening gender earnings gap in Australia indicates that women's wages continue to lag behind those of men. The main factor appears to be women's concentration in part-time work in enterprises where bargaining is less likely to occur. (JOW)

Themes of the program were centralization and bureaucracy, planning and systems analysis, accountability and assessment, and teacher negotiations and participation in policymaking. (Author/JF)