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A key thrust of labour market policy in Australia and many other western countries is that long-term unemployed people lack the personal motivation to engage proactively and successfully in the search for paid employment. In this paper we argue that the implementation of what are experienced as paternal workfare programs are counter-productive to achieving the official policy goal of improving self-efficacy and gaining paid employment. The empirical discussion presented in the paper is based on a semi-longitudinal study that tracked 75 long-term unemployed people in three different labour markets in Australia between 2005-2007. The study was funded by the Australian Research Council and Jobs Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For parents there can be negative aspects of how work `spills over' to family. This analysis focuses on mothers of young children and considers how aspects of work-to-family strain differ for single and couple mothers. While there has been increased focus on the work-family strains of mothers, less is known about single mothers and their experience of work-family strain. We might expect that single mothers would have more difficulty in combining work and family, given that they do not have the support of a resident partner to assist with childrearing responsibilities. This paper explores the relationships between several demographic, employment and supports factors and work-family strain, It also examines whether these associations are different according to family form; that is, whether certain factors make the work-family balance significantly worse or better for single mothers than for otherwise similar couple-parent mothers. The analysis is based on the 2004 Growing up in Australia: the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). This dataset contains detailed family and child data for around 10,000 families, all with at least one child aged 5 or under. With such a large sample size, the number of single mothers is sufficiently large to enable more analyses than is often possible from survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia the policy balance has shifted away from institutional forms of health and aged care towards supporting people in their own homes. This change presupposes a significant and growing supply of informal caring labour. A large proportion of informal carers (40-60 per cent) currently combine paid employment with their caring responsibilities. Using the longitudinal Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, the paper examines the effect of caring on employment, hours worked and earnings. The analysis shows that working age carers experience disadvantage. Carers are more likely than non-carers to reduce their hours of work or exit from the labour force, and earn lower levels of income. In planning for an ageing population, policies will need to address these negative effects and privatised costs of caring if the supply of informal care is to be sustained in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refugee Muslim women face a number of formidable obstacles in the resettlement process within Australia. As Muslims, they are a religious minority that has come under considerable racial attack in recent years in the wake of international terrorism. As refugees, they are struggling to put past traumas behind them and find ‘security’ in a strange land with different customs. As women, they are trying to find a voice for themselves amidst ethnic traditions that limit their range of expression and an Australian society that aspires to, but has not yet achieved, equality for women. Our qualitative study, upon which this paper is based, explored resettlement issues of Muslim refugee women during their first five years of arrival in Perth, Australia. It is based on focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 80 Muslim refugee women: 35 Iraqi, 34 Sudanese and 11 Afghan. Our study re-affirms that well-documented issues of resettlement continue to be poor English language competency, securing employment and accommodation and gender-specific problems. In addition, however, our study highlights a new and emerging issue, which is that of personal, psychological and cultural insecurity, heightened by the current political climate and exacerbated by their religious background. This leads to problematic ‘intersections’ with an Australian society that is far more complex and more difficult to cope with than is portrayed in popular discourse and political rhetoric of the easy-going ‘lucky country’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate collapses in Australia have provided stark evidence that employees do not always secure their employment entitlements, despite having a legal right to do so. There has been an implicit assumption in the Australian industrial relations system that employer evasion of employee entitlements is rare. However our detailed examination of enforcement within the Australian federal industrial relations system shows, for the first time, that despite awards, industrial agreements, union presence and an official enforcement agency, correct payment of entitlements has always been problematic. This paper examines inspection strategy between 1904 and 1995 and makes two points. The first is that changes in strategy have reduced the probability of detection. The second is that shifts towards individual contracts, lower union density, and increased precarious employment have decreased the likelihood of employees' ability to recover monies owed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops measures of job creation and job destruction (JC&D) based on the methodology initially developed by Davis and Haltiwanger (1990) and using industry employment data from the ABS Survey of Employment and Earnings (SEE), which is available on a quarterly basis between August 1983 and December 2001. It specifically examines the interaction of part-time and full-time employment with JC&D processes over the business cycle. Econometric analysis has been conducted to determine the time series properties of cyclical sensitivity and asymmetry.These findings are considered in the context of the likely consequences of the Howard government's Work Choices legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]