Although sociologists and psychologists have documented various motivations for working, the concept of work as essentially disutility or undesirable retains broad resonance among influential economists and social theorists. These concepts imply that workers will tend to avoid or ‘shirk’ their work task unless subjected to management controls. Yet emerging counter-narratives have sought to retrieve and develop alternative concepts of work as craft, where workers are motivated to work well or be recognized for doing so. On these approaches, management controls can decrease the quality of the final outputs. This article uses a case study of cleaners in Australia to challenge influential representations of workers as prone to ‘shirking’ and the interpretation of management control to which these perspectives lead. The article argues that craft concepts of work derived from Richard Sennett and contemporary recognition theory provide alternative narratives of how workers can derive satisfaction from working well even in ‘menial’ tasks, and how craft motivations can drive workers to subvert management controls to uphold rather than diminish service quality. In this way, craft theories reveal limitations of overly instrumental concepts of work, and also help conceptualize how workers’ attachment to their tasks can drive resistance to management control.
This article demonstrates that by contracting-out government services, the employment relationship has changed: workers' labour standards are now regulated through the combination of traditional labour law mechanisms and lesser understood contract law mechanisms. This has changed the regime of regulation and enforcement of labour standards for employees performing services that have been contracted out, in ways that deserve more attention. Evidence is drawn from a case study of New South Wales (NSW) government school cleaners, conducted between October 2010 and April 2011, which finds that cleaners' labour standards are regulated predominantly through commercial contracts for services. This is concerning because contracts are designed to facilitate commercial objectives such as competition and efficiency, and are poorly designed to protect labour standards. When used as a mechanism to enforce labour standards, contracts fail to meet the requirements of responsive regulation; contracts have limited enforcement tools and a weak credible threat of a 'big stick' style of punishment for infringements.
Neoliberal policies of industrial relations decentralisation and privatisation have transformed the economic landscape of Australia in the last 20 years. The primary objective of these policies has been to enhance wealth and prosperity by improving productivity and flexibility of the workforce and competition and accountability in the market. Yet the evidence suggests that precarious workers are not benefiting from this increased prosperity, indeed they suffer by comparison with all other workers. Cleaners are a subset of precarious workers who have been hard hit by the dual impacts of labour market decentralisation and privatisation. This study finds quantitative evidence of an increasing gap in earnings between cleaners and other workers inAustralia since the onset of workplace relations decentralisation and the proliferation of privatisation in the mid 1990s. We locate our argument in recent debates about the nature of variegated neoliberalism, the emergence of the networked economy, and the implications of these developments for the nature of work and employment.
Government contracts for services typically include terms requiring contractors to comply with minimum labour standards laws. Procurement contract clauses specify reporting procedures and sanctions for non-compliance, implying that government contracting agencies will monitor and enforce minimum labour standards within contract performance management. In this article, the case of school cleaners employed under New South Wales government contracts between 2010 and 2011 is the vehicle for exploring the effectiveness of these protective clauses. We find that the inclusion of these protective clauses in procurement contracts is unnecessary in the Australian context, and any expectations that government contracting agencies will monitor and enforce labour standards are misleading. At best, the clauses are rhetoric, and at worst, they are a distraction for parties with enforcement powers.
The characteristics and evolution of evidence-based policy making in Australia and other mature democracies have been mapped extensively in this journal. This article advances research on the use of evidence in policy making, examining changes in the New South Wales workers' compensation system from 2012 to 2014. This analysis of two phases of policy change, legislative implementation and statutory review, highlights the limitations of building integrated, coherent evidence-based policy in a contentious policy area. The article finds that the collection of wide and detailed evidence will not satisfy requirements of evidence-based policy without political will, transparency, and accountability.
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