Given the gendered power relations and the isolated nature of women hotel room attendants' working environments, guest‐initiated sexual harassment experienced by room attendants is a significant, under‐investigated problem. This study of women attendants' experiences of sexual harassment was conducted in 5‐star hotels located on the Gold Coast — a notable tourism destination — of Queensland, Australia. Adopting a socialist–feminist critical theory epistemological perspective, the study used a qualitative constructivist grounded theory methodology. The research reveals the pervasiveness of sexual harassment experienced by women hotel room attendants. In particular, this study illuminates the varied forms, meanings and consequences of sexual harassment in a particular organizational context. In focusing on the interacting effects of the gendered nature of the hotel workplace and the hotel workplace culture, the near‐complete ‘normalization’ of sexual harassment within the hotels is revealed. This outcome is a source of considerable concern, with implications for the industry, for employment relations institutions and for public policy.

This paper explores the complexities surrounding the lived experiences of skilled migrant women and men from non‐English speaking backgrounds (NESBs) who arrive in Australia and attempt to seek work. The paper will analyze the migrants' experiences using intersectionality theory as a framework. Drawing on Anthias's social relations framework, this research will contribute to the field by demonstrating how intersectionality theory can be operationalized to understand the complex lived experiences of disadvantaged groups. The research will reveal how being a new migrant in Australia, unfamiliar with local job search processes, complicates jobseeking. The paper will show how gender and family roles impact this process, especially when young families are involved. Both genders suffer downward occupational mobility, with men seeking any type of work to get by, and women gravitating towards insecure forms of employment, or exiting the labour force, in order to manage the family unit.

Young people are arguably facing more ‘complex and contested’ transitions to adulthood and an increasing array of ‘non-linear’ paths. Education and training have been extended, identity is increasingly shaped through leisure and consumerism and youth must navigate their life trajectories in highly individualised ways. The study utilises 819 short essays compiled by students aged 14–16 years from 19 schools in Australia. It examines how young people understand their own unique positions and the possibilities open to them through their aspirations and future orientations to employment and family life. These young people do not anticipate postponing work identities, but rather embrace post-school options such as gaining qualifications, work experience and achieving financial security. Boys expected a distant involvement in family life secondary to participation in paid work. In contrast, around half the girls simultaneously expected a future involving primary care-giving and an autonomous, independent career, suggesting attempts to remake gendered inequalities.

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In light of declining trade union density, specifically among young workers, this article explores how trade unions recruit, service and organize young people. Our focus is the way in which trade unions market their services to the young. We use, as a lens of analysis, the services and social marketing literature and the concept of an 'unsought, experience good' to explore trade union strategy. Based on interviews with a number of union officials in the state of Queensland, it is clear that unions see the issue of recruitment of young people as significant, and that innovative strategies are being used in at least some unions. However, the research also indicates that despite union awareness, strategies are uneven and resource allocation is patchy. While the research was carried out in one state, the results and conclusion are broadly applicable to the Australian labour movement as a whole, and have implications for union movements in other Anglophone countries.