Australian unionism built upon strong foundations transported from Britain. Subsequently it grew beyond this base inscope and form. By 1890 the level of unionisation of the colonial workforce exceeded that in the mother country. This was mainly due to the upsurge of new unionism in the late...

Any discussion of the viability of works councils in the Australian context needs to examine their operation in Europe, where they have a reasonably substantial history and have become an established part of the industrial relation infrastructure. In recent years, works councils have also...

The dramatic rise of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) as the single largest electoral force in the country between 1890 and 1910 has traditionally been associated with the mobilisation of the votes of the urban and mining working class. However, this paper argues that, in fact, the ALP relied...

This paper summarises the main results of the Illawarra Regional Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (IRWIRS). The data is unique in that it provides the only comprehensive and statistically reliable source of information about workplace employee relations at the regional level in Australia,...

The role of the state is traditionally considered to have been critical in assiting rapid trade union membership growth in Australia in the early 1990s and in the USA from 1935 to 1945, through the introduciton of the compulsory state arbitration system in Australia and the enforcement...

History has always been important for the labour movement in defining its identity. Partly of this reason the institutions of the labour movement have placed great emphasis on recording their participation in labour history.

Additional forms of employee representation (AFER) may be defined as any representative mechanism which exists alongside or instead of trade unions, which historically have been the most common form of employee representation in Australia. Little is known about how AFER are composed, their...

The international trend in the growth and incidence of 'no n-standard employment', and its highly gendered nature, is well documented. For ease of definition, and because of the nature of the available data, we focus upon part-time employment in this paper. Employee participation may be defined...

The growth in non-standard forms of employment has major implications for the effectiveness of employee participation mechanisms in the workplace, whether direct or indirect (representative). This seems to be especially the case with representative forms, such as consultative committees, because...