A retreat from individualism? The Fair Work Act 2009 and the re-collectivisation of the Australian labour law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The system of conciliation and arbitration established under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 was both highly collectivised and highly centralised in character. It was often assumed to be inimical to collective bargaining, although there was in fact a great deal of collective bargaining, both inside and outside the formal system. Starting in the early 1990s, there was a shift away from the traditional emphasis on conciliation and arbitration in favour of formal recognition of collective bargaining at enterprise level. In 1996, a new element was introduced in the form of individual statutory agreements (Australian workplace agreements (AWAs)) which prevailed over, and had the capacity entirely to displace, otherwise applicable collective instruments. Public concern at these developments played a major role in the defeat of the (conservative) Howard Government in 2007. The Labor Government that replaced it was committed to the 're-collectivisation' of the system, and to the abolition of AWAs. This second commitment was honoured in 2008, and a new bargaining regime was put in place by the Fair Work Act 2009. This article examines that new system. It finds that the techniques adopted by the 2009 Act are more sophisticated and nuanced than those that have been adopted in jurisdictions such as the USA, Canada and the UK, and as such seem to avoid many of the pitfalls that have thwarted attempts to promote collective bargaining in those countries. It remains to be seen, however, whether the participants in the bargaining process have the commitment and capacity to enable the legislation to re-collectivise the labour market in any significant way.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".