The emergence of social media, from Facebook to Myspace and Linkedin to Twitter - much like the earlier evolution of email, IM and web 2.0 - have changed communications, expanding the virtual horizons for social networking and business promotion on these popular communications platforms....

The Howard government’s draconian Work Choices laws will soon be history. A change of government at the 2007 federal election means that Australian industrial relations legislation will continue to be a turbulent field, for some time yet. This review provides an account of the last piece of...

In March 2008, the Rudd Government started to dismantle Work Choices. The Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Act 2008 (Cth) reintroduced agreement-making safeguards, and removed the option of making Australian Workplace Agreements. The legislation also provided...

In 2009, two major pieces of industrial legislation were enacted to give effect to the Labor Government’s commitment to replace Work Choices with laws for ‘Fair Work’. The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) promises to bring greater stability and simplicity to Australia’s workplace relations...

This article examines the recent changes to the federal legal regime that controls the taking of protected industrial action in Australia. It considers the impact of both the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 (Cth) and the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act...

Collective bargaining by small business actors, including independent contractors, is subject to the anti-competitive conduct provisions in Part IV of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) (TPA). The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission can authorise the pursuit of conduct that would...

The paper reviews industrial relations developments in Britain during 1999 by assessing how New Labour's policy commitment to encouraging "partnership" is developing in practice. After a discussion of the Employment Relations Act, it considers the wider influence of European legislation. It then...

The term 'fissured workplace' has been coined by David Weil to describe fundamental changes in the organisation of work arising from firms' competitive strategies in the 21st century. As Weil put it, fissurisation refers to 'both a form of employment (for example, temporary agency employment;...

Labour law as an academic sub-discipline has been changing in response to developments in the labour market and work relationships. Especially in Australia, labour law scholarship has increasingly adopted a perspective of law as socially constitutive regulation. This approach draws on the...

The NLRA system of collective bargaining was born during the industrial age of the early twentieth century. As a result, key terms in the statute such as “employee.” “employer” and “appropriate bargaining unit” were first interpreted in the context of long-term employment and large...