Australian industrial relations in 2019: The year wage theft went mainstream

Abstract

This article introduces the Journal of Industrial Relations’ Annual Review of Industrial Relations in 2019. It provides an overview of the six Annual Review articles, an international review and a practitioner review. Wage theft and other forms of employer non-compliance with minimum wage laws evolved into a major issue in 2019, with household brands bringing it to media prominence and state and Commonwealth governments exploring criminal sanctions for employers. For these reasons, this article focuses on wage theft and other employer non-compliance, interrogating in particular the Commonwealth government’s response.

The emergence of coercive federal Australian labour law, 1901–2020

“…The former system was one overseen and enforced by unions with knowledge of and expertise in their discrete industries and areas of sectoral representation, as partners with the state. The continual locking-out of unions from this state process, particularly through coercive legislation since the 1990s, has in turn created a regulatory gap, now filled by a coercive and (as some have argued (Clibborn, 2020)), ineffective regulatory regime.…”

Unions and collective bargaining in Australia in 2020

“…Unions continued to pursue employers for non-compliance with awards and enterprise agreements – an issue they preferred to call ‘wage theft’ (Clibborn, 2020). An example was in the university sector, where the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) expanded its wage theft campaign over alleged underpayment of casual, sessional academic and contract staff.…”

Australian industrial relations in 2020: COVID-19, crisis and opportunity

“…They account for the majority of cases addressed by the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) despite being less likely to report underpayment to authorities (Fair Work Ombudsman, 2019; Wright and Clibborn, 2019). International and Australian research on employment law compliance and enforcement notes the scourge of under-resourced state labour enforcement agencies like the FWO, common in developed nations (Clibborn, 2020; Weil, 2008) as well as the benefits of joint- or co-enforcement involving worker representation (Fine, 2017, 2018; Hardy and Howe, 2009). New prospects of cooperation between union and government and major legislative reform presented an opportunity for the parties to solve the wage theft problem, restoring a level playing field.…”

“…Changes to the small claims procedure offered promise of improving the efficiency of litigation to recover unpaid wages, but were inadequate on their own. Criminal sanctions proposed by the 2020 IR Bill will, as noted in last year’s Annual Review (Clibborn, 2020), likely be ineffective at discouraging employers from breaching minimum wage laws without significant increases in enforcement resources, comprising both state enforcement via the FWO and co-enforcement with unions. The Bill also proposed changes that would potentially entrench casual work by introducing a definition prioritising employers’ express intention at the time of engagement rather than the reality of the relationship between employer and employee (Schofield-Georgeson, 2021).…”

“…Considering the policy stagnation of that time and anticipation of change in the following year, it was an open question whether future reforms would boldly address those underlying challenges to social cohesion or whether there would be continued swings of the industrial relations pendulum simply favouring particular actors’ interests (Clibborn, 2019a). Last year’s Annual Review posed a question specific to one of those major challenges: ‘Will the Australian Government implement a research-based, well-resourced policy to substantively address employer non-compliance with minimum wage laws, or will criminalising wage theft merely provide distraction from a continued liberalisation agenda?’ (Clibborn, 2020). In 2020 we received the answer to these questions.…”