This article brings together labour relations, sociological and political perspectives on precarious employment in Australia, identifying local contexts of insecurity and setting them within the economics of regional supply chains involving the use of migrant labour. In developing the concept of precarious work-societies, it argues that precarity is a source of individual and social vulnerability and distress, affecting family, housing and communal security. The concept of depoliticisation is used to describe the processes of displacement, whereby the social consequences of precarious work come to be seen as beyond the reach of agency. Using evidence from social attitudes surveys, we explore links between the resulting sense of political marginalisation and hostility to immigrants. Re-politicisation strategies will need to lay bare the common basis of shared experiences of insecurity and explore ways of integrating precarious workers into new community and global alliances.

No abstract

The low level of the Newstart (unemployment benefit) payment has become a major source of concern about Australia's willingness and ability to protect unemployed Australians from poverty. Despite this disquiet, there has been little scholarly examination of the implications of living on Newstart. In this article, through the use of a survey and in-depth interviews, we examine features of everyday life for Newstart recipients in the Sydney area, experiences that reveal the scarring potential of low benefits. The article illustrates that for a majority of interview participants, the most basic items were difficult to purchase and many of the interviewees were living in inadequate and even unsafe situations owing to an inability to afford satisfactory accommodation. For some, their lack of disposable income had severe health implications. Social isolation was a common phenomenon, and many of the interviewees found that the low payment made finding employment a lot more challenging. JEL Codes: I38, J64

Australia and New Zealand developed distinctive 'wage-earner welfare states', with social protection largely delivered through high breadwinner basic incomes and residual social policies. Market reforms then pursued in both countries during the 1980s and 1990s retrenched important elements of the Antipodean model. Our article offers a novel characterization of major reforms to both welfare states from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. We focus on industrial relations, as a form of wage-earner welfare, and expansions to social provision for families and retirees that may be viewed as responding to the evolving needs of wage-earners as family patterns diversify and populations age. Policy reversals complicate the picture of the long-term path of industrial relations. Voters rejected the Employment Contracts Act in New Zealand in 2000 and WorkChoices in Australia in 2007, with incoming labour governments moderating policy to favour wage-earner expectations of decent wages and fair bargaining. Alongside this, governments expanded both paternalistic social policies and private social provision. We argue these changes taken together produced a 'hollowing out' of wage-earner welfare in both countries, accompanied by increasingly stratified welfare, which marginalizes and stigmatizes many outside the workforce. But, we also note persistent differences, reflecting the more radical and 'pure' New Zealand experiment, its relatively centralized politics and stronger liberal tradition. Hence, Australia retains more progressive taxation and family support less connected with employment status, while making greater use of tax expenditures to support private welfare.