Economic and ethnic restructuring: An analysis of migrant labour in Sydney

Social Polarization and Australian Cities

“…It is clear that, because of the decimation of manufacturing jobs since the early 1970s, immigrants can no longer simply be absorbed into the factories as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Tait and Gibson (1987) argue that as Sydney's economic base has shifted towards finance, commerce and services and away from manufacturing, the traditional sites of incorporation of immigrants in labour markets are disappearing. Immigrant workers have been hard hit by restructuring.…”

Outwork and Restructuring Processes in the Australian Clothing Industry

“…The makers-up were effectively powerless in their negotiations with contractors, who would always claim that there were other firms prepared to take the work if they could not complete it at the price offered. A great deal of thinly-veiled racism was also evident here, as the Vietnamese were typically singled out for their alleged willingness to undercut the more 'established' so,tthern European-owned firms (see also Tait & Gibson, 1987). The Vietnamese makers-up, it was claimed, were bringing about a return to sweatshop working by operating from garages and Downloaded by [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] at 01:21 17 March 2015 residential properties, by using family labour and large numbers of unregistered, underpaid outworkers and by operating illegally outside both the tax system and the Award system.…”

“…Perhaps a more likely development, at least in the short term, will be for the industry to concentrate on driving down production costs. This has been a common strategy in the 1980s, and one which has been linked directly to the growth of outworking in the industry (TNC Workers Research, 1985;Alcorso, 1987;CATU, 1987;Tait & Gibson, 1987). Outworking, as a comparatively low-cost form of employment, has played a crucial part in the increasingly complex production chains which have emerged in the clothing industry in response to increased import competition:…”

“…Many clothing factories, particularly the smaller ones, are dominated by single ethnic groups, native languages being spoken in the workroom (Storer & Hargreaves, 1976). Moreover, almost half of those classified as managers and administrators in the clothing and footwear industry were themselves born overseas, the largest single group amongst which are southern European immigrants (also Australian Financial Review, 1987;Tait & Gibson, 1987). 6 Some of the established (European-and Australian-owned) clothing firms have had difficulties in recruiting and retaining Asian workers, who often opt to work within their own communities, in Asian owned factories or as outworkers in their own homes (Viviani, 1984;CA TU, 1987).…”

Occupational Mobility in Segmented Labour Markets: The Experience of Immigrant Workers in Melbourne

“…Nevertheless, some qualifications to this approach are needed. As conventionally applied it too often slides into a descriptive typology, fails to account for the dynamic developments in labour markets (but see Tait and Gibson, 1987), and fails to move beyond description of the postulated segments to description and explanation of the social processes underlying the formation of these segments (Fine, 1987;Peck, 1989;Lever-Tracy, 1984). In the case of the Australian literature, these failures are compounded by an initial failure to develop an adequate descriptive account of segments in the Australian labour market (contrast the segments described by Collins, 1978and Power et al, 1985 with the results of the cluster analysis conducted by Webber et al, 1989).…”