Union responses to regulatory change: Strategies of protective layering

Abstract

Changes to the Australian regulatory landscape over the past three decades of global liberalisation created regulatory uncertainty for unions. Coupled with membership decline and internal restructuring through union amalgamations, they prompted an important reorientation by unions (back) to the workplace, and precipitated different strategic decisions and organising challenges. However, the proliferation of fragmented employment relationships rendered workplace-centred organising an insufficient response. As a result, some unions experimented with ways of supplementing existing legal frameworks by other regulatory initiatives, through campaigns that resulted in the layering of regulation. In this article, we examine attempts by three unions – covering garment workers, road transport workers and aged care workers – to address the needs of members in garment homeworking, road transport and aged care in a contested regulatory environment.

The Industrial Relations Policy and Penalty

“…The road transport industry was based on 'hierarchical contracting'-a variant of the model used in franchising-a model in which top firms avoid accountability, but retain control and extract profit, making collective organisation hard, transferring risk to workers (and contractors) at the end of the supply chain and concentrating profits at the core. Using the corporations power in the Constitution, and following examples in the apparel industry in Australia and internationally (Kaine and Brigden 2015;Reinecke and Donaghey 2015), the RSRT set minimum pay rates for distances and for hours of owner-drivers. It met resistance from the top of the supply chain (where profits were threatened) and some contractors (who faced a loss of income from empty 'backloads').…”

Labour regulation now and in the future: Current trends and emerging themes

“…IR scholars have explored how non-state actors might experiment with their own forms of regulation to complement or supplement state regulation, consistent with the broad definition of regulation outlined earlier. Kaine and Brigden (2015) examine 'how unions have sought to carve out or cling on to aspects of their regulatory relevance . .…”

Employment structures, employee attitudes and workplace resistance in neoliberal Poland

“…As in other countries (e.g. Australia) where the number of trades unionists decreased and new strategies and campaigns were initiated to rebuild the relationships between trades unions and employers (Heery, 2015; Kaine and Brigden, 2015), the major trades unions in Poland, OPZZ and Solidarity, tried to adapt to the new conditions. By the end of the 1990s, NSZZ Solidarność established a Union Development office (DRZ), whereas the second biggest union, formerly the ‘official’ socialist confederation, OPZZ, founded the Confederation of Labour, with an explicit aim of organising non-unionised workers (Mrozowicki et al, 2010: 225).…”