Despite societal shifts in attitudes towards gender and sexuality, LGBTQ+ individuals continue to experience multiple forms of labour-market disadvantage – including greater unemployment, lower job satisfaction, and slower career progression. However, existing scholarship has paid little attention to the comparative employment conditions of LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ individuals. Leveraging unique data from a large, Australian, employer-employee dataset (2024 AWEI Employee Survey), we fill this knowledge gap by examining the relationships between LGBTQ+ status, non-standard employment (NSE), and workplace well-being. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we provide novel empirical evidence of the ‘double whammy’ faced by LGBTQ+ employees in relation to NSE. On the one hand, LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to be in certain forms of NSE than non-LGBTQ+ employees; on the other, their workplace well-being is more negatively impacted by these employment arrangements. These findings bear important lessons for policy and practice, indicating that closing the gap between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ workers requires careful consideration of their employment arrangements and the circumstances that surround them.

Organisational measures to support employees who are experiencing family and domestic violence (FDV) are increasingly seen as an important policy response to mitigate the consequences of such violence and promote gender equality. However, little is known about the costs to employers of providing such workplace policies. This paper assesses the costs and benefits to Australian employers of providing 10 days of paid FDV leave to employees experiencing such violence. We draw on a case study based on the evidence presented to the Fair Work Commission which contributed to their 2023 enactment that modern award wages should include 10 days of paid FDV leave. Using a bottom-up approach and utilising individual-level data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, our estimates reveal that the total annual cost to employers of providing an entitlement of 10 days of paid FDV leave to award-covered employees is between $13.1 million and $34.3 million. Our analysis highlights the role of robust economic analysis in generating evidence for policy change and offers an approach that can be applied in evaluating costs and benefits of other employer initiatives of similar nature.

Wage theft – the nonpayment of employees’ wages and benefits by employers – is a violation of national, state, and local labour standards, yet it is prevalent in the low-wage labour market of the United States. Building upon the recent increase in attention to the wage theft problem through advocacy, policy, and research efforts, we contextualise the problem within the country’s deregulated neoliberal labour market. We then propose a conceptual framework to demonstrate how the problem occurs when the price of labour standards violation is low due to lax enforcement, and there is a high price of compliance due to ambiguous and increasingly outdated labour standards. We further evaluate extant federal, state, and local policy initiatives designed to curb wage theft by modernising outdated labour standards and strengthening their enforcement. Finally, we propose future research agendas, such as examining the effects of fissured employment relationships and the enforcement efforts of state and local anti-wage theft laws, to guide the development of effective policy interventions.

This article has three objectives. First, we examine what is meant by minimum labour standards, including the array of different standards and their procedural and substantive elements, in differing or even diverging regulatory jurisdictions. Examination of different areas of labour standards provides instruction in the dynamics of these protections and we give illustrative examples, from several countries. The second objective is to highlight the importance of enforcement of standards. We do this through a brief historical overview of the emergence of labour standards as well as of how the recent rise of neo-liberalism has shaped current debates over their development and application. The third element of the analysis is an examination of some contemporary debates, pointing to areas requiring further study as well as to positive examples both in research and in policy/regulation.

Casual employment in Australia is more prevalent than temporary work in most European nations, and casual employees have fewer rights and entitlements than comparable temporary employment categories in Europe. Yet, despite Australia’s long history of industrial activism and political representation of labour, there are fewer examples of social or political movements in Australia resisting precarious work than in Europe. This article provides a partial explanation of this puzzling lack of social resistance to casual employment. It begins from the idea, developed by the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory, that economic systems can create or sustain norms that conceal their more harmful social effects from public view. It then uses conceptual categories drawn from critical social theory to show how individual and social costs of casual employment have been overlooked or ‘reified’ in the workplace and in public political discourse. The study is based on existing qualitative research and on a new analysis of attitudes to work and economic organisation in Australian public discourse.

There exists a gap at the intersection of Australia’s immigration and employment laws that has serious implications for employees, employers and policy. Australia is host to a large and growing population of immigrants working without authorisation, described as the most significant problem facing Australian immigration authorities. These undocumented workers are often exploited by employers through wage theft, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions. Yet, they are not entitled to protection under Australia’s employment laws. In addition to the implications for workers, there are broader policy concerns arising from the current system of regulation that effectively rewards employers who are equally in breach of immigration law. Left uncorrected, current regulation may in fact be encouraging a ‘race to the bottom’ for employment standards and increasing undocumented immigrant work. As well as highlighting the inadequacy of the existing regulatory framework, potential avenues for addressing this are explored.