This article outlines the current processes of change in Australian industrial relations -processes whose ultimate direction and effects are unforeseeable. The traditional dominance of conciliation and arbitration tribunals is giving way to more devolved arrangements. Some protagonists of change envisage a move towards collective bargaining, with trade unions having a pervasive and secure role; others believe the place of unions is in question.The impulse for change comes partly from market-oriented ideology, but this is not extensively discussed. A second source is the desire of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Labor Government to determine wage policy jointly, with the role of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission being essentially that of implementation. Also important is a widely held view that reform of industrial relations is a path to better productivity performance.The paper discusses the justification for that view.Various questions remain to be answered. These include the possibility for enduring wages policy; the legal framework necessary for bargaining; the nature of the industrial relations system of non-union enterprises; and the congruence of enterprise bargaining with the structure of trade unionism.For well over a century Australia has attracted the interest and curiosity of practitioners and theorists of industrial relations. In the great constitutional debates of the 1890s our founding fathers gave the proposed Commonwealth a power to settle interstate industrial disputes by conciliation and arbitration. When we became a nation in 1901 one of the first things we did was to set up a Commonwealth tribunal which could exercise this power t o settle disputes -a power which rapidly became one of setting wages and conditions directly or by example for most Australian employees. It was a system which served Australia quite well I think, but the news I have to deliver today to those of our visitors who still think Australian industrial relations is run this way, is that it is finished. Not only is the old system finished, but we are rapidly phasing out its replacement, and have now begun to d o things in a new way.The Hon. Paul Keating, MP, Prime Minister'Keith Hancock and Don Rawson are located, respectively. in Adelaide and at the Australian National University in Canberra.

No abstract

No abstract

I IN Australia, as in many other parts of the world, there has been some expansion during recent decades of collective bargainingl on behalf of white-collar workers and a slow and uneven but quite perceptible growth of white-collar trade unions. This has been accompanied by increasing complaints that non-manual workers have failed to keep up with a general rise in incomes throughout the community. This paper is an attempt to set out some of the factors which have determined what conditions white-collar workers have received during the last few decades, including the strength-or lack of it-of their trade union organisations.Just who constitute the white-collar workers provides an initial difficulty but one which, for a very general survey of this kind, is not of great practical importance. If we define them simply as non-manual workers, the marginal cases are relatively few and can usually be dealt with by referring to how the workers concerned think of themselves. Morse seriously, the white-collar workers form an extremely heterogeneous group and in some respects the differences among them are more important than their basic similarities. The various ways in which they can be classified-according to education and specialist training, to income levels or to the power of independent decision making, for example-produce different groupings of workers. Classification according to education and special training is most easily measured and least subject to change, and is the main test used here.The white-collar structure is a pyramid, with clerks, supervisors and salesmen forming the most numerous but lowest paid and least responsible group at the base. These occupations generally require some degree of secondary education or equivalent training and they are semi-skilled in the sense that on such a grounding a fully competent worker can be trained in three to twelve months. The second largest group consists

No abstract