Journal of Industrial Relations

This paper examines the under-explored demand-side of active labour market programmes that aim to transition people without jobs into employment. The paper's contribution centres on understanding the benefits that government-funded employment services can offer to employers and how they can work with employment service providers to leverage these. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with employers in Australia, our findings extend pre-existing concepts of employer engagement by illustrating the human resource, corporate social responsibility, and financial benefits to employers of engaging with employment services and how firm size affects their engagement. The findings offer improvements to policymaking and practice to facilitate the effectiveness of employment services in Australia and elsewhere.

Western governments have used regulation to progress gender equality for workforces in both the private and public sectors, yet gender equality has not yet been achieved. While governments have used various regulatory forms, Dickens (1999) argued that a tripod of collective bargaining, legislation and human resource policy would progress gender equality. Little consideration has been given to how these elements of the tripod fit together. We apply Dickens’ tripod to examine the regulation of gender equality in one Australian public sector. We use institutional analysis, drawing on historical and current documents, legislation, collective bargaining frameworks and human resource policy to examine how the regulatory tripod interlocks, and whether renewed commitments to public sector gender equality can be achieved in the current regulatory environment. We identify regulatory incongruence within the Australian public service and argue for improved congruence to progress gender equality, although we also note that congruence on its own does not lead to better outcomes. We identify that the legs of the tripod are not mutually reinforcing and that all legs need to be supported by better implementation. We extend Dicken's tripod to provide a new path to progress public sector workplace gender equality, enriching both theory and practice.

Informed by an emerging discourse in environmental labour studies, this article investigates the legality of environmental bargaining in Australia. It demonstrates that existing enterprise bargaining law mostly prevents meaningful and enforceable bargaining regarding environmental issues. Proposed here instead is that more impactful possibilities for environmental bargaining exist under state Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws. In this respect, the article engages with some of the latest legal developments within the field of WHS that may enable environmental bargaining on the terms recommended by the environmental labour studies literature. It nevertheless acknowledges that such proposals may generate additional regulatory and resource burdens on regulators and workers alike. Accordingly, it concludes by canvasing a range of alternative regulatory arrangements rendering environmental bargaining more fair and effective.

Trade union density increased for three consecutive years in the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2020. This contrasts with a general decline in union membership since 1979. Since union density continued to fall amongst male employees in 2017–2020, the overall increase was entirely attributable to females. This paper explores the factors which explain why there was an increase in overall union density after a period of decline (for males and females) and why union density evolved so differently for males and females. Using decomposition methodologies, we find that the increase in union density in 2017–2020 was not due to a higher propensity to unionise within particular groups or across all employees. Instead, the principal driver of the overall rise in 2017–2020 was an increase in the proportion of employment in certain public sector organisations. The largest contributor to the difference across males and females was increases in the share of employment in more unionised occupations amongst female employees and decreases amongst male employees.

This paper examines the factors that have led to the undervaluing of the medical science profession and how a union can take a strategic approach to strengthen the professional identity of its membership to overcome challenges. We draw on interviews with union officials and managers and focus groups with medical scientists in four health services in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on the union strategy literature, we argue that professional identity is related in a recursive way to the attitudinal context and the narrative capabilities of the union. We found that first, many medical scientists believed that medical science was invisible and undervalued contributing to a weak professional identity due to underlying structural and institutional factors. Second, this has been exacerbated by the attitudinal context in which the profession has been subordinated to the other stronger professions of doctors and nurses. Third, we report the union is attempting to strengthen the professional identity of medical scientists through developing union campaigns with a narrative around work intensification and the critical nature of medical science work. Union strategy underpinned by union campaigns seeks to transform medical scientists’ attitudinal context by harnessing their sense of associational power through narrative capabilities to strengthen professional identity.