Journal of Industrial Relations

This article examines the collective, member-based employers’ associations in the UK that regulate the employment relationship by participating in collective bargaining. The main empirical contribution is to provide, for the first time, a longitudinal dataset of employers’ associations in the UK. We use archival data from the UK Government’s Certification Office to build a new dataset, identifying a decline of 81% in the number of employers’ associations between 1976 and 2013–2014. We also find that political agency and reducing levels of collective bargaining undermined employers’ associations by reducing employers’ incentives to associate, although changes within the UK’s system of employment relations enabled other types of collective employer organisation to survive.

Despite the vast amount of scholarship covering the progressive turn in unions in the US and in Europe and a widespread recognition that it has been driven by the staff working for reformed unions there has been no examination of the causes, beliefs, and identities that new generations of staff bring into the labor movement. The question asked in this article is how personal projects – defined as a motivational narrative for social action – held by progressively minded union staff can impact inclusiveness in unions. A key focus is how staff's personal projects interact with organizational structures and practices. The study finds that personal projects vary in terms of the way that staff construct role boundaries in their jobs to invest more in certain roles than, others which also affected their investment in skills development. These strategies have theoretical implications for understanding the nexus between staff careers and organizational outcomes in unions in particular and in ‘social movement organizations’ more generally. Results also have practical implications for skills development and knowledge transfers within and across organizations, as well as for union capacities to deal with competing goals.

The history of domestic servants in Australia offers a provocative challenge to the prophets of the digital gig economy. Like home-based service workers today, 19th-and 20th-century domestic servants worked without the protection of minimum wages or hours, unions or independent arbitration and endured perpetually porous boundaries between their work and non-working time, low status and pay. This article argues that digital platforms are instruments of a fundamental shift in the governance of home-based service work, from a system of ‘dyadic’ to one of ‘structural’ domination. Intermediaries played virtually no role in the operation of the former system, but they play a fundamental role in the latter, as aggregators of data about workers’ responsiveness and speed that enable market-based disciplinary mechanisms to operate without reference to public law and across a much larger spatial context than was previously possible. Short-termism and the fungibility of workers are pre-eminent features of the gig economy model, processes which are inherently corrosive to quality caring relationships that demand an atmosphere of trust and non-instrumentality. The historical analysis that is advanced gives rise to a number of implications for the regulation of digital platforms, union responses and industry planning in the future.

An emerging body of research addresses the link between environmental issues, especially climate change, and employment relations. In this article, we examine the ways in which employment relations actors are addressing climate change, particularly focusing on collective bargaining. We begin by surveying the literature linking climate change and employment relations, especially analysing union strategies in this sphere, and develop a conceptual framework linking these threads. We then examine the incidence and content of collective enterprise bargaining over environmental issues in Australia for 2011–2016, applying and adapting Goods' concepts of embedded institutional and voluntary multilateral approaches. The former inserts environmental commitments into formal collective agreements; the latter involves unions and workers more directly in developing emissions-reduction activities in the workplace. We address the potential links between these and the different actors (unions or management) that drive them. We find that environmental clauses in Australian agreements are rare, and that they are as likely to be driven by management as by unions. The institutional, organisational, and particularly the regulatory environment seem responsible. However, exceptions – notably in universities – provide exemplars for substantial, class-based union agency. We also find that collective bargaining may facilitate more ongoing, strategic initiatives of the voluntary multilateral type.

With projected future demand severely outstripping the current workforce size, it is crucial for the Australian aged care sector to develop strategies to encourage non-traditional workers (such as men) into the sector. Yet despite some recent progress, there is still surprisingly little empirical evidence about how to attract and retain men into gender atypical occupations such as aged care. This article offers an in-depth and innovative investigation into male aged care workers, their experience of the work and future employment plans. Using a mixed methods design, this article combines the findings from an analysis of the Australian National Aged Care Workforce Census and Survey with the findings arising from 51 in-depth interviews conducted with male aged care workers. The integration of these findings allows us to understand the determinants of men’s representation in the aged care sector so that workforce strategies and policies can be generated about how the sector can best attract and retain male workers to meet current and future skill shortages.

This current controversy analyses the legal impediments to taking lawful strike action for workers in Australia, reviewing the components of the regulatory system that combine to restrict access to strike action for Australian workers. The discussion explores the flaws underlying the enactment of the right to strike, the limitations surrounding the definition of industrial action, the prerequisites to lawful strike action including the problems that arise from the pre-strike ballots regime, the grounds on which lawful strike action can be stopped, and the consequences of getting it wrong. The picture presented by the legal regime for strike action is that the impact of the regime is greater than the sum of its parts – making it very difficult to strike even for the most seasoned industrial players. It is possible that strike regulation in Australia has reached a tipping point whereby the costs associated with getting it right may now be so high that simply abandoning the lawful path and engaging in unlawful strike action may be more appealing than complying with the law.