Abstract
A hierarchy of earnings growth is emerging, with the greatest pay gains experienced by senior executives, influenced by a form of comparative wage justice, and the least by mid-level non-union employees reliant on the safety net. Increasingly, wage increases secured in highly organized industries do not flow elsewhere. Productivity grows, with minor contributions from bar gaining, but it confronts fatigue. Shifts in patterns of industrial conflict, estab lisbed by the move to bargaining and before that the Accord, are reinforced by diminished employee power and changed approaches by some employers. The role of the state is critical: the AIRC is supplanted by courts and other state agencies and by activist, mostly partisan government intervention. A useful model for reform processes has been developed in Queensland, but the national government's agenda seems set to reinforce the Australian obsession with the 'enterprise' rather than 'bargaining'.
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