Private Governance, State Regulation and Employment Standards: How Political Factors Shape their Nexus in Australian Horticulture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The global weakness of collective bargaining and state regulation has spawned growing interest in employment protection though private governance. However, scepticism about the efficacy of unsupervised codes of conduct has triggered debate about external discipline through state regulation. This article seeks to contribute to debates about the processes that shape the nexus between private governance and state regulation. It is based on an empirical study of Australian harvest workers who formally benefit from state regulation of pay and occupational health and safety (OHS). However, industry changes have undercut standards. Product market pressures from supermarkets squeeze growers’ capacity to pay. Also, the labour market is increasingly supplied by vulnerable Asian temporary migrants (including undocumented workers), often supplied to growers by unscrupulous temporary work agencies. While pay and OHS practices vary, many harvest workers are exploited. Nor is private governance (which extends to horticulture through the codes of conduct of supermarkets and peak temporary work agency bodies) effective. All codes draw their standards from minimum legal employment conditions, and all possess loopholes allowing breaches to escape attention and rectification. In 2015, media and political attention fell on the working conditions of temporary migrants in horticulture. Government inquiries found evidence of exploitation, but were divided over solutions. Progressive politicians (influenced by unions) favoured stronger state enforcement powers and temporary work agency licensing. Conservative politicians (influenced by business lobbies) claimed these steps would fail, and favoured the status quo. Political reform therefore stalled. This study illustrates the importance of political processes in shaping the nexus between state regulation and private governance. In this case, a political stalemate leaves both regulation and governance deficient. Lacking protection from either source, harvest workers remain exposed to exploitative employment conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".