Population ageing is profoundly challenging the institutions and systems that organise paid work, healthcare, and retirement. A major response to these challenges has been to encourage older workers to remain longer in employment, thereby extending the period of ‘productive life’ in which they are net contributors to government revenue. Yet this strategy depends on a range of micro‐level adjustments, about which relatively little is known. These include how willingly older workers and employers adjust their attitudes and practices, and what types of policies facilitate these adjustments. In this paper, we critique the major policy responses to workforce ageing in Australia to date, and consider further measures to improve recruitment and retention of older workers. We argue that a more holistic policy response will require better evidence about ageist employment barriers, late‐career transitions, and older workers’ job performance. We outline a research agenda to improve evidence and policy in these areas.

The celebration in 1993 of a century of women's suffrage in New Zealand has brought even more sharply into focus the uneven impact of the Employment Contracts Act on the workforce. From the outset, debate about the effects of the Employrnent Contracts Act had focused for some on the likely impacts on women workers. This study is located firmly within the tradition of national and international literature front a range of disciplines including economics, industrial relations, sociology:- law and history, which describes a segmented labour market and labour process. One aspect of labour segmentation theory is gender segmentation, that is, the location of women and men in the labour market and their comparative situations. Much theoretical work and empirical research has been done to describe where women are located in the labour market, why they are located there, and that effects that location has upon them. Even within this field of study there is a wide range of subjects for analysis. For example, the subjects can range from the gender earning gap (Blau and Kahn, 1992) and occupational structures (Terrell. 1992) to the challenge of "flexibility" and the pool of labour women traditionally provide (Walby, 1989). Even the concept of skill itself has bad to be revisited by the gender segmentation theorists (Bervoets and Frielink, 1988). Much of the theoretical framework within which these scholars cited have written, along with numerous others, was codified in the 1970s and 1980s in response to Harry BravetJnan's classic mould-breaking \Vork Labor and Monopol)' Capital published in 1974. Writers such as Phillips and Taylor (1980), Cockbwn (1981, 1983, 1985) and Beechey (1982) remain some of the leading contributors to the discussion and ongoing analysis about women in the vvorkforce. As industrial relations regimes and bargaining structures have altered in the 1980s and on into the 1990s, the changes have been observed to impact differently upon different segments of the labour market

This note reports our most recent survey of unions and union membership in New Zealand for the year ended 31 December 1995. It builds on our earlier surveys for the 31 December years for 1991-1994. The pattern already firmly established of declining union membership has continued with unions losing a further 13,700 members in the most recent year. This represents a decline of 3.6 percent over the number of union members at 31 December 1994. These losses occur at a time when the workforce (as measured by the Household Labour Force Survey) continues to grow and accordingly union density has fallen more sharply than has union membership itself.

Free riding occurs when non-union members receive the benefits of a union-negotiated collective bargain without contributing to the costs of achieving that bargain, whether by paying union mem bership dues or an agency fee. In New Zealand, free riding has been a significant difficulty for unions operating under the Employment Contracts Act 1991. Free riding had been approximately 16 per cent of collective bargaining coverage under previous employment laws. Free riding under the Employment Contracts Act represented some 27 percent of collective bargaining coverage. This paper re views the nature and extent of the differences between industry free riding rates and examines the paradigm shifts occurring in the New Zealand industrial relations system.

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