Singapore’s Progressive Wage Model, introduced in 2012 and mandatory in the cleaning industry since 2015, is a skills- and productivity-based approach to redesigning jobs and restructuring wages in the largely outsourced cleaning, security and landscaping sectors. Focusing on cleaning work in the food and beverage industry, this case study examines some early outcomes of this national drive to reduce wage inequality by improving the pay and conditions of commodified work in a sector subject to outsourcing-based cost competition. Based on interviews with cleaners, supervisors and managers, the findings suggest that in general, government and the trade union and employers’ association have worked together, to set wages and conditions transparently. Nevertheless, enforcement issues mean that cleaners remain vulnerable. They have limited information about their employment benefits and face various types of poor conditions, some sanctioned by and others in violation of labour laws. These vulnerabilities have structural roots, including rent imbalances and cheap sourcing, factors that commodify jobs. The implementation of the Progressive Wage Model may have helped de-commodify cleaning jobs for Singaporeans and permanent residents, but such outcomes are still dependent on non-systemic and unenforceable factors such as the kindness of individual supervisors. While a promising start has been made, Singapore’s initial efforts to improve incomes and conditions in low-wage work will nevertheless require stronger regulatory commitment.

Sri Lanka has a history of successfully managing communicable diseases by utilising its extensive public healthcare network of community clinics and public hospitals. This article makes use of Job Demands-Resources theory (JD-R) to examine the impact of COVID-19 on nurses’ working conditions in public and private hospitals in Sri Lanka. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses’ job demands on public hospital wards included long working hours, limited workplace autonomy, minimal medical resources and high workloads caused by understaffing. Private hospital nurses experienced pressure from patients and their families to provide them with discounts on medical bills. Nurses allocated to work on COVID-19 wards experienced additional physical job demands from wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) for lengthy periods on hospital wards in a humid climate. Nurses on COVID-19 wards also experienced increased anxiety that they could transmit the disease to family members. While nurses experienced job resources such as social support from nursing supervisors and other nurses, they reported receiving minimal training in the provision of healthcare to COVID-19 patients. This combination of high job demands and low job resources increased the levels of exhaustion and mental distress experienced by many nurses working on COVID-19 hospital wards.

Collective bargaining can be of benefit to both employees and employers. Nevertheless, there is growing interest in individual contracts, as part of a broader agenda for labour market flexibility. In particular, individual contracts are being pursued by some companies as part of a human resource management strategy to increase productivity by reducing the role of third parties and promoting ‘common purpose’ between the firm and its employees. There is some evidence that individual contracts can indeed contribute to higher productivity. The challenge for policy makers is to provide sufficient flexibility in the area of individual contracts while preventing employers from using them to reduce wages and conditions.

The model of social dialogue within organisations between management and employees is facing unprecedented challenges, and changing rapidly. In this new context of labour relations, experiences and expectations of each other are key drivers for the primary parties to this social dialogue. There has been little systematic research investigating the conditions for constructive social dialogue, particularly when it comes to ‘soft factors’, such as perceived competences, trust, influence and conflict behaviours. Addressing these issues based on theories of conflict, trust and influence, this article investigates experiences and expectations of employee representatives on the part of human resource managers, their counterparts in social dialogue. The results of surveys conducted in 11 European countries indicate that, overall, employers found a model of structured dialogue with elected employee representatives useful. Furthermore, competences of employee representatives, cooperative conflict behaviours, informal relations and trust promoted the influence of employee representatives on organisational decision-making and the quality of these decisions. We discuss implications for different systems of industrial relations.

This article examines the Australian Pulp and Paper Mills Ltd. (APPM) dispute which took place in Burnie, Tasmania between March 3 and June 10, 1992. The dispute is placed within the context of major changes in Australian industrial relations, which have been in process since 1986. Management and unions throughout Australia are still experimenting with a variety of industrial weapons to achieve their aims and goals within the parameters of the “Structural Efficiency Principle” and “enterprise bargaining”, constructed in Accords III through VI, from 1986 to the present.

It is argued that the crucial change during the past six years has been the ability of companies to re-establish managerial prerogative through litigation. This has provided management with the power to confront secondary issues and agents of change such as the Accord, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Structural Efficiency, Enterprise Bargaining and Restructuring with a new vigour, toughness and effectuality. Increasingly docile, debilitated and legally disabled union officials and workers seem to be coming to the view that a union victory occurs if the company agrees to abide by the law while directing its workforce, and recognises the workers’ right to be represented by a “third party”.

This article provides an overview of the radical changes in workplace agreement-making introduced by the ‘Work Choices’ amendments to the Workplace Relations Act. It outlines the six types of statutory workplace agreement and the procedures, termination rules and content requirements associated with them. While some agreement-making procedures have been simplified, this has come at the cost of independent oversight. Furthermore, the government's overall regulatory approach is shown to be prescriptive, punitive and one-sided. The article contrasts the new workplace agreements with contracts and observes that alternative regulatory frameworks could readily have been created, with greater respect for party autonomy.

Meeting the education and training needs of low-skill working adults will require a transformation of United States workforce development policy. A significant component of this transformation is the development of education and training programs that are crafted around the needs of these workers. Traditional classroom based learning — which is inflexible in time and place — presents a series of barriers to low-skill adults. This article documents the relationship between educational attainment and labour market status in the US. It explores the extent to which the use of technology and online learning may help to equalise access to education and training by providing learning opportunities that can better incorporate working adults' work, education and family demands.

Vocational rehabilitation of injured workers to facilitate their early return to work is now an established feature of workers’ compensation arrangements in Australia. Critical to the return to work process is the provision by employers of suitable employment for workers following work related injury wherever this is reasonably practicable. This article emphasises the importance of employment security measures within the workers’ compensation arena for both injured workers and the control of scheme costs. It highlights the precarious nature of employment security measures in Australian workers’ compensation schemes due largely to the lack of enforcement, and the concomitant need for legislative and administrative reform. In doing so a number of specific reform proposals are put forward for discussion. In addition the nexus between employment security measures and the operation of the labour market is briefly considered.

This paper considers the implications of the decision of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission in the April 1997 wage case (the ‘Living Wage Case’) for wages policy. The recent history of wages policy in Australia is analysed in terms of competing goals for wages policy and the changing priorities for these goals. The Living Wage Case decision is a continuation of developments in the Australian labour market that worsen the relative income position of the low paid, tend to create a two-tier wage structure, and worsen the prospects for reductions in unemployment because responsibility for the control of wage based inflation has been given to restrictive monetary policy.

This paper investigates the extent to which unemployment, particularly among older males, is hidden by the welfare system. It is argued that the official unemployment rate has fallen because of a decline in participation rates among older males since 1972, and a significant proportion of these can be accounted for by the increase in the percentage of males receiving the Disability Support Pension and the Mature Age Allowance. These males are considered the Labor Market Disabled, since the principal cause of them being on welfare is the weakness of the labor market in which they have traditionally found employment. The unemployment rate is then reconsidered after including the LMD into the calculation, producing a more pronounced hysteresis affect over successive business cycles. It is argued that active job creation programs are required to move these people from welfare to work.

As governments move from being both a funder and provider of human services to a purchaser of services in private sector markets or quasi-markets, ensuring that providers do what they are supposed to do becomes more difficult. Agency theory and stewardship theory have been suggested as ways of overcoming this problem. This article argues that both are inadequate, particularly because they conceptualise the relationship as bilateral (government funding department and service provider), ignoring the role of clients in achieving organisational objectives. Co-production that recognises the role played by clients in the production of employment outcomes can provide a more useful way of thinking about relationships among key actors involved in the provision of employment services.

Unless the global financial system is radically reformed – and the necessary reforms are looking increasingly unlikely to occur – it will continue to be conducive to financial crises. Government rhetoric and actions can often influence in desirable ways both the speculative actions that now determine the exchange rate and the effect of exchange rate movements on the domestic economy. Managing the exchange rate should start with Australian support for measures such as the Tobin tax that dampen speculation. In 2008 and 2009, exchange rate changes were helpful in reducing the impact of the global financial crisis on Australia, largely because of a very clear commitment by the Australian government to make preservation of jobs its top priority. In 2009, a rapid rise in the exchange rate was unhelpful. In the short run, little can be done about this, but in the longer run, it is possible to offset the adverse effects.

Labour non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs) role in the reconstruction of Indonesia’s organised labour movement has been widely acknowledged. They are not, however, generally recognised as a legitimate part of that movement. This paper uses the Indonesian case to demonstrate how the existing scholarly literature has failed to consider labour NGOs as a form of labour organisation in their own right because they do not fit within practitioners’ and scholars’ definitions of what is, and is not, a legitimate industrial relations actor.

In the latter part of 1997, and the first half of 1998, Australian industrial relations was dominated by a major recognition dispute on the waterfront. Patrick Stevedores sacked its Maritime Union of Australia workforce on 7 April 1998, employing labour supplied by a National Farmers Federation subsidiary. The sackings precipitated mass picketing around Australian ports. The Federal Court issued an interlocutory injunction, which in essentials was upheld by the High Court 6-1, ordering reinstatement of the workforce because of the possibility that Patrick, the National Farmers Federation and the Australian government had conspired to thwart the Freedom of Association provisions of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (Comm.). The dispute is further complicated by an unsuccessful attempt to train former and current military personnel as stevedores in the port of Dubai. This article examines and analyses major twists and turns associated with this dispute.

The link between inter-firm networks and industrial development in Taiwan has rarely been conspicuously identified in the extant literature. This paper highlights the existence of such a link, first in the labour-intensive phase of industrialisation from early 1960s to late 1970s, and then in the current phase of technology-intensive industrial development in Taiwan. However, established forms of inter-firm networks within and across the Taiwanese border have structural limitations to generate innovation from within the networks. This impedes further development of Taiwan’s industries, in particular those which are more technology-intensive. Using the information technology industry as a case study, this paper examines the role of the state and the private businesses in fostering the formation of newer forms of inter-firm networks which contribute to Taiwan’s further industrial development.

The use of exchange rates based on Purchasing Power Parities to compare incomes across countries and over time has now become standard practice. But there are reasons to believe that this could lead to excessively inflated incomes for poorer countries and in some cases also inflate the extent of real changes over time. Estimates of gross domestic product growth in the Chinese and Indian economies in recent years provide examples of this.

The COVID-19 pandemic is sending shockwaves through communities and economies, and public servants have risen to the novel policy challenges in uncharted waters. This crisis comes on top of considerable turmoil for public services in recent decades, with public management reforms followed by the global financial crisis (GFC) leading to considerable change to public sector employment relations and a deprivileging of public servants. The research adopts the lens of the ‘public service bargain’ to examine the effects of the pandemic across Australian public services. How did Australian public service jurisdictions approach public employment in 2020, across senior and other cohorts of employees? How did this pandemic response compare to each jurisdictions’ response to the GFC a decade earlier? The research also reflects more broadly of the impact on public sector employment relations and to what extent pandemic responses have altered concepts of the diminished public service bargain or the notion of governments as model employers?

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this article re-assesses ‘post-communist’ transformation in the Baltic countries from the perspective of labour. The argument is based on a historical materialist approach focusing on the social relations of production as a starting point. It is contended that the uneven and combined unfolding of ‘post-communist’ transformation has subjected Baltic labour to doubly constituted exploitation processes. First, workers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have suffered from extreme neoliberal restructuring of economic and employment relations at home. Second, migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe in general, trying to escape exploitation at home, have faced another set of exploitative dynamics in host countries in Western Europe such as the UK. Nevertheless, workers have continued to challenge exploitation in Central and Eastern Europe and also in Western Europe, and have been active in extending networks of transnational solidarity across the continent.

There has been a major international debate about the importance of work time change. One key aspect of this debate has been the extent and impact of extended work hours. In this paper we examine the effects of a flexitime system on excessive hours in a Queensland public service department. This study finds that, for some groups of workers, the introduction of the flexitime system directly contributed to the development of a long-hours culture. The long-hours culture developed as part of managerial prerogative and in the absence of adequate regulation. Our research also finds that employees reluctantly working long hours consistently reported negative effects on their working and non-working life.