‘Work not as usual’: work and industrial relations in a post-COVID world

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the Labour & Industry special issue on ‘work not as usual’, following the theme of the 2022 AIRAANZ Conference. In introducing the articles published in the special issue, it examines key themes regarding how work and industrial relations are changing in unusual ways. These relate to the impacts of COVID-19; how work and industrial relations are shifting in the public sector and in the care economy; and how workers and organisations are responding to changes at work through voice, control and resistance. Analysis of these developments in the articles published in this special issue suggest that organisations and labour markets will continue to be defined by ‘work not as usual’ into the foreseeable future.

KEYWORDS:

• Care work
• COVID-19
• industrial relations
• neoliberalism
• public sector
• worker voice

Introduction

The world of work is profoundly changing. Technological change is transforming how organisations operate and how people do their jobs. Globalisation continues to demand businesses improve their productivity and international competitiveness, which places pressure on hard fought labour standards. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened the viability of many businesses and further blurred the boundaries between workers’ paid work and unpaid family responsibilities. These forces are to a large extent beyond the control of national governments, employers, workers and their representatives, which necessarily limits the capacity of these actors to respond (Colfer et al. 2023; Gavin et al. 2022).

In addition to these exogenous pressures, the changing nature of regulation and business structures have also impacted work and organisations. The increasingly ‘fissured’ nature of organisations has made it harder for governments, unions and businesses themselves to provide good-quality jobs (Weil 2014). Governments in many countries have been unable or unwilling to protect the growing share of workers classified as low-paid or in insecure work (Fudge 2017). These developments have had impacts on both workers and on organisations. For workers, it is even more difficult to develop their careers. For some organisations, it is harder than ever to attract and retain staff. Both contribute to workforce shortages and a more uncertain business environment.

Changing social norms have also shaped work in important ways. Large workforce participation and equality gaps continue to persist between First Nations and non-Indigenous Peoples in many countries, exposing the limitations of government and organisational policies to address this (Ravenswood et al. 2015; Young and O’Leary 2022). The proportion of women in the paid workforce has increased substantially in recent decades. However, women continue to face major barriers to equality at work. All over the world, women continue to shoulder the primary burden for household and care work, which forces many into part-time paid work. The burden of unpaid work also contributes to the gender pay gap with women earning less than men, a retirement resources gap with women retiring with less financial resources than men, and a leadership gap with fewer women in leadership (Baird and Heron 2020). Government and organisational policies continue to reflect the ‘male breadwinner’ legacy by not adequately encouraging a more equitable distribution of unpaid domestic work between partners. This has made it difficult to close the gender pay and retirement resources gaps and has also contributed to gender segregation across the labour market (Foley and Cooper 2021; Williamson 2020).

Climate change has continued to emerge as a major issue for attention across various dimensions of government policy and organisational practice, including work and industrial relations. Globally, workplaces are the main source of carbon emissions. This poses an existential threat to workers and organisations if not properly addressed (Goods 2017).

In this context, the theme of this special issue is ‘work not as usual’, following the theme of the AIRAANZ 2022 Conference, which was hosted online by the University of Sydney Business School from 9 to 11 February 2022. All articles published in this special issue were presented at the conference, including the articles based on the presidential address by Chris F Wright and the keynote addresses delivered by Virginia Doellgast and Michael Quinlan. This introductory article examines key themes regarding how work is changing in unusual ways, which underpin the articles published in this special issue. The next section examines these changes in relation to the impacts of COVID-19, how work and industrial relations are shifting in the public sector and in the care economy, and how workers and organisations are responding to changes at work through voice, control and resistance.

COVID-19 and work

For many workers, the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped how workers and employers complete and organise their work, with individual experiences of the crisis varying based on age, gender, class, and country (Churchill 2021; van Barneveld et al. 2020). Some workers across industries faced widespread layoffs, while those completing essential services such as cleaning, healthcare and retail saw an intensification of work (Markey 2020). Knowledge workers saw major shifts in where and when they complete their work, with a greater shift to performing their work from home (Baird and Dinale 2020; Craig and Churchill 2021). As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, governments around the world responded with unprecedented measures to mitigate the impacts (van Barneveld et al. 2020). For example, Australia responded with two buffers to employment. The first was JobSeeker, which provided employees who lost their jobs with a temporary income replacement, and the second was JobKeeper, which provided employers with funds to keep their existing workforce employed (Kaine 2020). However, as in the case of New Zealand’s rising minimum wage, some practices came into effect before the pandemic, but were rolled out during the time of uncertainty. The impacts of these measures, or lack thereof, on organisations and workers during the COVID-19 pandemic have been studied by academics, including in several articles published in this special issue.

Sara Tödt, Carla Chan Unger, Ema Moolchand and Shelley Marshall’s article in this special issue explores the area of socio-ecological supply chain resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact on the commercial cleaning industry in Australia. The cleaning industry emerged as one of the most important industries during the pandemic, yet cleaners were not rewarded with improvement to conditions of work or pay that support worker resilience, and cleaners were overworked or lost their jobs. Further, they were exposed to work intensification and the risk of contracting COVID-19 due to cost cutting and limited access to adequate protection such as personal protective equipment. As such, the article highlights the impact of policies and laws, with JobKeeper failing to support cleaning workers, and those on temporary visas such as students losing their work by virtue of being locked out of the country. This impacted workers as well asemployers due to resulting labour shortages and dependent industries that required thorough cleaning more than ever, for example, hotels and hospitals. Reflecting on the impacts of COVID-19, the authors conclude that a focus on worker resilience is imperative, including the potential for policy changes that centre the worker-focused socio-ecological perspective (Tödt et al. 2023).

Katherine McFarlane’s (2023) article considers the implications of workplace closures and restrictions imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for trade union right of entry in Australia. The article examines three cases brought before the Fair Work Commission to assess laws regulating union requests to enter workplaces and requirements to comply with ‘reasonable requests’ by employers about their obligations under workplace health and safety law. The pandemic presented unique challenges for employers seeking to meet these obligations particularly considering the need to take steps to prevent the spread of the virus at the workplace. The article raises important questions about how union right of entry should be regulated in a post-pandemic context, particularly given the barriers to unions created by increased working from home arrangements and additional workplace health and safety measures that many employers have introduced (McFarlane 2023).

Jim Arrowsmith and Jane Parker’s article examines how the New Zealand Labour government increased the minimum wage in response to the country’s low wages combined with an already high and continually rising cost of living, especially with respect to housing, which accounts for one of the highest costs amongst Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) countries. By 2021, one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the minimum wage was 87.9% of the living wage, up from 74.7% in 2013. To understand the impact of this on organisations, Arrowsmith and Parker examine an understudied area: employer attitudes to and experiences of the closing gap between the living wage and the minimum wage. Most of the 639 New Zealand organisations surveyed reported being negatively impacted by COVID-19. Reactions to the increased minimum wage were twofold with employers reporting that it served to benefit lower paid employees while simultaneously demotivating those who are higher paid due to the closing gap between entry level and low paid staff, and higher paid and more experienced employees. Similarly, those who had been previously paid above the minimum wage were now considered to be minimum wage employees, and career progression was no longer attractive given the pay was not much higher, yet responsibility increased. Organisations that chose to adopt a living wage also saw positive and negative consequences including positive workforce outcomes (for example, increased recruitment, retention, motivation), coupled with cost implications, and a closing wage gap leading to more difficulty recruiting for senior positions. Overall, the most positive benefits to adopting the living wage was improved employment relations. Uptake of the living wage was low, and some respondents from companies that did not implement the living wage indicated disappointment with the decision, including leading to recruitment difficulties. From these findings, Arrowsmith and Parker conclude that public policy should address both low pay and cost of living, particularly housing costs. In the context of a hypercompetitive labour market, they recommend employers who wish to improve recruitment, retention and motivation couple higher pay with good working conditions and better organisational culture (Arrowsmith and Parker 2023).

Public sector work and the care economy

Public sector work was critical to the global pandemic response. This brought renewed focus on its importance to the functioning of societies at large, with industries such as health, community services and education already facing the challenges associated with decades of government-driven restructuring and cost-cutting (Colley et al. 2022). Having faced unprecedented pressures, calls for an updated understanding of the value of this work have been amplified.

While all industries faced myriad challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, severe natural disaster preceded lockdowns and economic downturns in some regional Australian contexts. Martin O’Brien’s article investigates the role of public sector employment and spending in nine regional Local Government Areas of New South Wales and Victoria, considering its contribution in both times of expected decline and in times of unexpected crises. Given their reliance on tourism and agriculture, seasonal fluctuations have been a predictable feature of the regional economies in the areas studied. The consecutive onset of severe bushfires across south-eastern Australia in 2019–2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to compare the baseline impact of public sector employment and income during years that resembled more predictable seasonal fluctuations with a period of significant crisis and economic downturn. A mixed methods approach was used, including quantitative measurements of industrial employment distribution in each region studied, and the public sector contribution to the regional labour market and gross regional product. These were supported by qualitative interviews with public sector employees on spending and work patterns during this period. Public sector employment and employee spending balanced these seasonal fluctuations in economic activity during predictable periods of downturn. Public sector employees possessed a close awareness of this impact, deliberately choosing to shop locally and at smaller businesses to sustain the local private economy. In times of prolonged crisis, the countercyclical effect of this spending escalated even further, with further increases in the contribution of public sector employee income to gross regional product following the devastation of the bushfires and COVID-19. O’Brien concludes that this phenomenon is specific to regional areas, contributing to our understanding of the value and diversity of this work in its own right, and for the role it plays in supporting the private sector throughout off-peak periods, downturns, and economic and social crises (O’Brien 2023).

The pandemic may have necessitated significantly increased workload and responsibility for the public sector (Williamson et al. 2022), but many areas of public sector work were already undergoing long-term change and restructuring. Isabella Dabaja’s article in this issue investigates the impact of new public management reforms to managerial work in public education. From 2012 to 2018, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education implemented a suite of policy reforms collectively known as ‘Local Schools, Local Decisions’. Resembling similar reforms implemented throughout the OECD that have aimed to increase efficiency in public sector work by introducing more business-like practices, ‘Local Schools, Local Decisions’ devolved selected decision-making processes to local school sites. A qualitative policy analysis and interviews with secondary school principals in the NSW public education system revealed unique tensions forming after almost a decade of reform. The reforms claimed to better equip schools to respond to the specific needs of their local contexts, and to some extent, offered new powers to school leaders in areas such as staffing and the procurement of services. Ultimately, however, principals reported a tightening of control over their work. In great contrast to the rhetoric that framed these policy changes, new decision-making capabilities meant less when negotiating a lack of resources and persistent underfunding. Principals overwhelmingly found they had to work longer and harder to bridge the gap between the resources available to them and the work required to successfully manage their schools. With an ever-increasing workload and the formal expansion of their roles to include major administrative and budgetary responsibilities, principals have significantly less time to focus on educational leadership, which they still view to be the core purpose of their work (Dabaja 2023). From changes in policy to the challenges of crisis, both Dabaja (2023) and O’Brien (2023) encourage consideration of the broader social value of public sector work, especially as the future of this work threatens to be shaped by post-crisis austerity.

COVID-19 has further exposed the pre-existing exploitation and poor working conditions in many frontline industries in Australia, New Zealand and internationally (Baines et al. 2017; MacDonald et al. 2018; MacDonald and Charlesworth 2016, 2021). Studies have identified harmful effects of the marketisation of the care economy, including aged and health care (Hodgkin et al. 2020). The pandemic led to a shock to the caring economy exposing how the marketisation of care cultivated inadequate and inappropriate staffing levels despite the very complex needs and regulatory ambivalence that staff were exposed throughout the pandemic (Thomas et al. 2022).

In this context, Sandra Martain’s article explores the centrality of worker exploitation in Australia’s marketised aged care system. The article presents a qualitative ethnography to analyse the impact of neoliberalism on aged care. It investigates how macro-level forces of neoliberalism, such as marketisation, impact the micro-level experience of aged care workers and contribute to their exploitation. The article reveals that the marketisation of aged care work sees worker bodies performing ‘Taylorised’ labour. This form of labour imposes regimented and inflexible time and task requirements, which run counter to the needs of aged care clients in both residential and private home care facilities. Martain points out that the business model of aged care is highly reliant upon a system that sees employers being incentivised to profit from the exploitation of workers’ bodies and exposes them to poor job quality. The article concludes that worker bodies are subject to poor working conditions and severe job strain ranging from physical, mental and emotional stresses from the exploitation. Despite the persistence of this exploitation, it is often concealed, and workers are often in precarious employment and fungible. Martain concludes that the exploitation of workers’ bodies may increase if marketisation of the industry continues, providing impetus for future research and policy change to break the reliance of the aged care market on the extraction of surplus value from often hidden, vulnerable and disposable worker bodies (Martain 2023).

Voice, control and resistance

Several articles in this special issue examine the ideological forces driving changes to work, revealing both established and emergent consequences of the neoliberal zeitgeist. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has permeated economic and political spheres, prioritising private profit and the ‘free market’ over worker-protective regulation (Western et al. 2007) and leading to increased employer and corporate power (Baccaro and Howell 2017). This has led to the sustained erosion of workers’ capacity to organise and the weakening of collective voice (Cahill and Konings 2017), thus raising questions about how such change can be resisted and potentially reversed.

Several articles in this special issue consider how weakened worker protections and collective voice mechanisms have contributed to increased precarious work and inequality. Poor quality jobs are a defining feature of the cleaning and aged care industries analysed by Tödt et al. (2023) and Martain (2023). Quinlan and Maxwell-Stewart (2023) remind us that there is a long historical legacy of trade union strategies and government initiatives to improve the quality of jobs and to make them more secure. Arrowsmith and Parker (2023) and McFarlane’s (2023) articles highlight that these strategies and initiatives are continuing to evolve in response to the change nature of work and the contemporary intensification of labour market inequality.

The article in this special issue by Chris F Wright examines how neoliberal government policies have contributed to this growth of precarious work and inequality. In liberal market economies such as Australia, industrial relations policies since the 1980s have been built on an assumption that industrial conflict and excessive union power are the main ‘labour problems’ to be addressed. While the focus of industrial relations scholarship has shifted from these ‘problems of labour’ to ‘problems for labour’, such as precarious work and inequality, industrial relations policymakers are yet to make this transition. The article draws upon insights from the neo-pluralist school of industrial relations research, which is concerned primarily with analysing ‘problems for labour’, to argue for the adoption of a new industrial relations policy framework to solve contemporary labour market challenges. This framework would focus on improving job quality and worker wellbeing, creating a more equitable system of wage determination, stronger enforcement of labour standards including for migrants and other groups of workers vulnerable to mistreatment, and more effective measures to address gender inequality (Wright 2023).

Neoliberal reforms have also impacted directly upon work and industrial relations in the public sector. Examining neoliberal reforms through which public sector managers were purportedly given more control over their work, Dabaja’s analysis of principals in NSW secondary schools applies labour process theory to make explicit how the state, as an employer, seeks to control and extract as much labour as possible. The first of these mechanisms of control is the way in which principals’ new responsibility for managing resources in already underfunded schools led them to work longer and harder. Following on from this, increased workloads have led to the degradation of their work, resulting in less time to practice educational leadership and less capacity to practice and develop some core conceptual elements of their work. Finally, principals are restricted in their capacity to voice opposition to changes to work in schools that they do not necessarily support, and yet must often implement these changes in their leadership positions. The application of a critical lens to the employment relationship between public sector workers and the state is not only necessary to understand how this work is changing but also to distinguish between the policy agenda of the state and the voices of the workers delivering key public services (Dabaja 2023).

In the context of contemporary neoliberalism, Michael Quinlan and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s article discusses lessons from Australian industrial relations history from 1788 to 1900 for inequality and worker mobilisation. Quinlan and Maxwell-Stewart (2023) argue that the era of neoliberalism has led to rising economic inequality, substantial weaking in the strength of organised labour and a decline in industrial relations as a field of academic research. The article draws upon historical data to argue that the history of worker mobilisation in Australia helps to illuminate developments that have emerged in the aftermath of neoliberalism. It argues that bold initiatives to refocus research and the priorities of the academy are needed to correct for the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. It argues that this refocusing of academic research and priorities can better inform policy dilemmas related to industrial relations. Quinlan and Maxwell-Stewart stress the need and value of reinvigorated and refashioned industrial relations teaching and policy engagement. They argue that the COVID-19 pandemic and looming existential threats to humanity have increased the need to energise industrial relations research and policy impact. The article concludes by discussing how the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were exacerbated by neoliberalism, which imposed policies that undermined collective regulation and reduced the ability of workers to mobilise. Overall, it provides important insights for drawing lessons learnt from the past to better inform how current challenges can be addressed (Quinlan and Maxwell-Stewart 2023).

Virginia Doellgast’s article presents a comparative analysis of how social regulation of the digital economy is being strengthened. Using initial data from the US and Germany, Doellgast examines how organised labour has been able to use digital strategies and investments in information and communication technology. Doellgast identifies three ‘action fields’ of strengthened social regulation: efforts intended to influence government investment and data and regulation of artificial intelligence; campaigns to extend statutory or negotiated labour market protections to new groups of workers; and collective negotiations over the use of new technologies at the organisational level. Doellgast argues that these three main action fields can be seen as complementary in regulating new digitally enabled markets to protect platform or ‘gig’ workers from exploitation (Doellgast 2023).

Conclusion

The articles presented in this special issue highlight the extent to which work is changing. This has been an enduring historical theme particularly since the Industrial Revolution. There have been many previous eras where the nature of work and the structure of organisations and labour markets have been upended. Nevertheless, the significance of the changes that have occurred since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic need to be appreciated. The pandemic and its aftermath led to fundamental changes in the tasks that workers performed and the locations where they performed them. It also prompted a reassessment of essential work and the value attached to it, as several articles in this special issue highlight. The pandemic also led government, workers, unions, employers and other stakeholders to initiate or agitate for changes in how work is governed by public policy and organisational practice, a process that in some respects is only just beginning. These developments are intertwined with other important changes that are reshaping work, such as new technologies, new business models and climate change. Analysis of these developments presented in this special issue suggest that organisations and labour markets will continue to be defined by ‘work not as usual’ into the foreseeable future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isabella Dabaja

Isabella Dabaja is a PhD candidate in the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School. Her research focuses include new public management, labour process theory and control and resistance in public sector managerial work.

Daniel Dinale

Daniel Dinale is a post-doctoral researcher based at the University of Sydney node of CEPAR. He received his PhD degree from Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School. His doctoral thesis focused on cross-national patterns of female employment, motherhood and public policy regarding the reconciliation of employment and family. The thesis applied comparative institutional analysis to explain why the relationship between female labour force participation and fertility rates is now positive in post-industrial nations.

Lisa Gulesserian

Lisa Gulesserian is a PhD candidate and sessional lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School. Her thesis “Rideshare fathers, flexible work and gender roles” explores men, flexible work, platform work and fatherhood in Australia. Lisa’s areas of research interest are gender equality, the platform economy, paid and unpaid work, the mature workforce, and leave policy.

Chris F Wright

Chris F Wright is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney Business School where he researches and teaches comparative industrial relations, labour market policy, labour migration and skills.