This article explores the apparent conundrum of how, with minimal employment standards and limited equal pay laws, New Zealand managed to significantly redress the gendered undervaluation of low-paid aged care work. To draw out the pathways to these reforms, we focus on the long-term strategic coalitions that underpinned them. We examine, in particular, the activism of a diverse range of policy actors – unions, employers, industrial and human rights bodies and civil society groups, which together have worked to ‘undo’ the limitations of equal pay and employment regulation. Our findings point to the benefits of strategic collaboration between policy actors in New Zealand and an approach which recognises the intersection of unequal pay with other gendered dimensions of disadvantage in aged care work. Different strategies used over time by diverse actors helped them overcome inadequate industrial and equal pay infrastructure to realise meaningful increases in hourly rates of pay, buttressed by improved working time arrangements and provision for career progression. We conclude by highlighting some lessons for institutional and policy actors in other national settings drawn from the New Zealand collaborative approach to equal pay in care work.

The 2013 and 2014 announcements by major car manufacturers that they would wind down all their remaining Australian automotive operations by 2016/2017 pre-empted the March 2014 release of the Productivity Commission's final report into motor vehicle manufacturing. The Commission suggested that government subsidies had only delayed car plant closures and reiterated its longstanding opposition to industry policy and redistributive regional adjustment programmes by government. Industrialists, employer associations, state governments and trade unions have, however, questioned the Commission's forecasts for both economic spillover effects and social impacts in regions affected by automotive plant closures. In addition to challenging several underlying assumptions used to calculate the Productivity Commission's forecasts, this article argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the quality of future work. It extends insights from previous studies of industrial decline by proposing a new research agenda based on the idea of 'social spillovers'. JEL Codes: O14, O38, Z13

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This article explores how the recently developed Charter of Employment Rights can be used by legislators, employers and unions to achieve sustainable working relationships in the post Work Choices environment. It examines the themes emerging from the conversations that the Australian Institute of Employment Rights (AIER) facilitated with employers, employees, unions, academics, lawyers and politicians throughout 2007. AIER hopes its Charter of Employment Rights will inform and inspire the objects of Labor's new legislation and provide a framework for the new regulatory system. In addition to being an instrument to aid the design of a new system, this article explores the role of the Charter in providing a framework for good employer practice and as a vehicle for education and change within workplaces and the community.The recently elected federal Labor government faces the urgent task of designing a new system of regulation that promotes a culture of balance in the regulation of the employment relationship and which emphasizes the need for employers and employees to achieve a sustainable workplace relationship.