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ABSTRACT
This article reflects on the recent literature comparing employment relations in Australia and New Zealand. It begins by returning to the ‘Accord and Discord’ article by Bray and Walsh, published in this journal in 1995, and the wave of comparative analysis that surrounded it. Developments since then, in both the real world of Australian and New Zealand employment relations and theoretical debate, are reviewed. They suggest two trends in comparative analysis. First, there is a need to go beyond institutionalist analysis in exploring the similarities and differences between the two countries. Second, it is possible that trends in Australian and New Zealand employment relations should be located in wider trajectories towards neoliberalism. Both trends offer great potential for future research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Teaching was established at University of Sydney in 1991, funded by the Australian Research Council and under the Directorship of Russell Lansbury. Later Directors included Ron Callus and John Buchanan. Some time after the ARC funding finished, it changed its name to the Workplace Research Centre. It closed at the end of December 2014.
2. Comparative projects adopting a similar methodology included the political scientists’ analysis of the Australia–New Zealand conundrum (Castles, Gerritsen, and Vowles Citation1996) and another project funded by ACIRRT comparing various aspects of labour history in Australia and Canada (Kealey and Patmore Citation1996).
3. This reflected both the limited publication options of the time and ACIRRT’s publication strategy.
4. Bray and Walsh might have anticipated better the precariousness of corporatism in Australia if they had placed greater emphasis on two neglected preconditions: the structure and strategies of employers, and the environmental factors. With respect to the former, the relatively disunited stance of Australian employers towards the Accord (explicitly acknowledged at pages 18–19) ended in the early 1990s with a new consensus amongst them in favour of neoliberal solutions. With respect to the latter, the lack of a political culture in Australia that valued compromise and consensus also made the cooperation between the unions and the Labor Party – without the involvement of employers and conservative political parties – a fragile arrangement and the subsequent rejection of corporatism much easier.
5. A third stream of research, which we do not have space to explore, has focused on ‘legal origins’ and sought to compare (using quantitative methods) the legal protections embodied in labour laws of various countries, including Australia and New Zealand; see, for example Anderson et al. (Citation2011) and Gahan et al. (Citation2012).
6. This definition of neoliberalism (for more detail, see Baccaro and Howell Citation2017, 18–19) offers interesting possibilities for the analysis of Australia and New Zealand, where the emphasis has tended to be on reduced state regulation and the freeing up of market forces. In particular, it potentially deals with the previously difficult complication that Australian governments espousing neoliberal philosphies have actually increased legal regulation as part of their campaign to reduce the influence of trade unions.
7. An award can be defined as ‘a legally enforceable determination (or the document) containing the terms and conditions of employment in a firm or industry’ (Sutcliffe and Callus 1994, cited in Bray Citation2011, 17). While awards are technically the result of decisions by industrial tribunals, their form and function, and the processes by which they are created and enforced have changed considerably over time.
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Notes on contributors
Mark Bray
Mark Bray has held the Foundation Chair in Employment Studies at the University of Newcastle since 1997. Before then he held academic positions at the University of Sydney (1988–1996), University of Wollongong (1985–1987) and University of New South Wales (1980–1984). His most recent research has focused on the role of industrial tribunals in promoting workplace cooperation, which produced a book (co-authored with Johanna Macneil and Andrew Stewart): Cooperation at Work: How Tribunals Can Help Transform Workplaces (Federation Press, Sydney, 2017).
Erling Rasmussen
Erling Rasmussen is the Professor of Work and Employment at Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand). He has worked in employment relations in academia, the public and private sectors since the 1970s and has undertaken research for government, businesses and unions. He is an Editor of New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations (www.nzjournal.org) and has authored and co-authored many books and journal articles (seewww.aut.ac.nz).