One of the outstanding features of contemporary Australian industrial relations has been the dramatic growth in employer de-collectivization strategies. Four dimensions of employer strategies, sometimes interlinked and overlapping, are identified and analyzed in this article—employer lockouts, individualization of bargaining, counters to organizing campaigns, and the use of human resource initiatives in areas such as recruitment and selection. While some tactics have emerged organically through new management practices, the reconfiguration of employer strategies has been primarily state-led; legislative and non-legislative interventions have created opportunities, incentives and pressures for firms to adopt anti-union strategies.
Both the international/comparative and Australian literature on the decentralisation of bargaining has typically portrayed unions as reactive or impotent and globalisation and employers as the key agents of change. None of the current theories which explain decentralisation as the product of globalisation, employer‐led ‘low‐cost ?exibility coalitions’ or the ‘strategic managerialism’ of the Business Council of Australia (BCA)can fully account for the shift to enterprise bargaining in Australia during 1990/91. Unlike other nations where a decentralisation of bargaining has occurred, it was the union movement which actually engineered the change through two industrial campaigns which forced a reluctant Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC)to introduce enterprise bargaining. The erosion of union solidarity behind centralised wage ?xation and a power struggle between the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)and the AIRC, not the pressure of the BCA, were the key factors behind the shift in ACTU policy. However, the union movement created the space for a new wage system without developing an alternative regime leaving a policy vacuum to be ?lled by the BCA and a ‘low‐cost ?exibility’ coalition congealed among employers as fears of a wage explosion receded:the formation of a ‘low‐cost ?exibility coalition’ and the domination of the BCA throughout the 1990s were therefore as much a consequence as a cause of the decentralisation of bargaining in Australia.
Until the 1990s, most workers employed by non-government community services organizations were excluded from the most basic right of Australian 'industrial citizenship' -award coverage. Expected to be a formality by the newly-formed Australian Social Welfare Union, establishing an award for the non-profit social and community services sector became a grinding struggle at both federal and state levels against the resistance of both LiberalNational coalition and Labor party governments, the major charities and other unions stretching from the 1970s through the 1990s. Our explanation of why the struggle for industrial recognition was so long and hard emphasizes the lack of social recognition for care work and contradictions among care workers between Journal of Industrial Relations 498 their roles as professionals, caring for others, and unionists -factors that led to internal, institutional, strategic and cultural resistance to an award for the social and community services workers.
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