Search

This short note introduces a mini-symposium on the changing nature of relationships at work. The mini-symposium essentially consists of two papers by two distinguished judges who are specialists in labour law--Mr Justice Langstaff from the UK and Justice Walton from Australia. In a revised version of my chairman's introduction to the original lectures given at University College London in April 2015, I present these two judicial authors, I relect briely on the topic of their papers and I welcome the comparative and empirically topical discussion which their two lectures instituted and which the two ensuing articles now continue in written and published form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the incongruity of individualization ideologies that position individuals at the centre of health care, by contributing, making informed decisions and exercising choice regarding their health options and lifestyle considerations. When confronted with a global health threat, government across the world, have understood that the rhetoric of individualization, personal responsibility and personal choice would only led to disastrous national health consequences. In other words, individual choice offers a poor criterion to guide the health and wellbeing of a population. This reality has forced many advanced economies around the world to suspend their pledges to 'small government', individual responsibility and individual freedom, opting instead for a more rebalanced approach to economic and health outcomes with an increasing role for institutions and mutualization. For many marginalized communities, individualization ideologies and personalization approaches have never worked. On the contrary, they have exacerbated social and health inequalities by benefiting affluent individuals who possess the educational, cultural and economic resources required to exercise 'responsibility', avert risks and adopt health protecting behaviours. The individualization of the management of risk has also further stigmatized the poor by shifting the blame for poor health outcomes from government to individuals. This paper will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic exposes the cracks of neoliberal rhetoric on personalization and opens new opportunities to approach the health of a nation as socially, economically and politically determined requiring 'upstream' interventions on key areas of health including housing, employment, education and access to health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of papers, Blackburn et al. claim to solve the conceptual and measurement issues associated with vertical gender segregation by occupation. In this paper it is argued that the authors misinterpret the conventional index measures of segregation, which leads them to a misspecification of their vertical and horizontal components of segregation which are alleged to be orthogonal. As a consequence, the two components are conflated, so that neither component of segregation is correctly calculated. There are also conceptual and measurement difficulties with the cross-national empirical work of Charles (2003). The absence of hierarchical employment data by occupation from the typical Labour Force Survey precludes the estimation of country wide vertical segregation. Data from sources such as the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey will enable the calculation of vertical gender segregation, in addition to the generation of insights about the factors contributing to vertical gender segregation. Case studies too will enable a greater understanding of the extent and causes of vertical gender segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As employment law changes and develops, in sometimes surprising ways, this paper considers the possibility that employment law may not be keeping pace with the diversity of working patterns and practices which have rapidly evolved in the past few decades. It therefore poses the question whether labour law needs to change direction to accommodate the work and workers of the twenty-first century. It firstly makes and details the point, against a statistical base, that significant change in the labour market is nothing new, but then turns to the identification of quite radical recent and continuing changes, and goes on to ask whether they demand a changing law. It presents four cases to illustrate where the law appears to fall short, expressing unease that a discriminatory wrong can be done without the law being able to address it, and highlights different ways in which the law of contract may not provide an appropriate model to deal with today's problems. The possibility is canvassed that if the expression 'arrangement' were used in place of the contractual model, the concentration might then be on industrial realities rather than legal niceties. In conclusion, it is emphasised that the answers are ones of policy which are critically dependent upon the guiding political philosophy of the time. (The paper was delivered as a lecture as a general election approached.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on findings from an Australian study of mental health service users' perspectives on service user participation to examine the challenges for translating recovery policy into practice. It considers the ways in which national mental health policies and developing welfare reforms reflect and/or contradict the highly personal mode of recovery important to service users; though they seemingly signal potential wins for service user empowerment, they are accompanied by losses for those who do not fit neatly into clinical categorisations. The service users (n = 11) and service providers (n = 6) interviewed for this exploratory qualitative study revealed that recovery was a lifelong process of fluctuating capacity and described a system poorly equipped and often unwilling to move beyond tokenistic modes of participation. The analysis of service user perspectives against the backdrop of policy reform reveals the ongoing tensions between personal and clinical definitions of recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Health Policy & Planning is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since breast feeding is acknowledged as the best nutrition for young babies, it needs to be protected, supported and promoted. This includes enabling mothers to continue breastfeeding even when they return to work. This paper describes a project that promotes balancing breastfeeding and paid work through the development, distribution, promotion and evaluation of suitable materials to workplaces employers and women in Australia. Information provided in a workplace kit was based on previous successful strategies from published works in refereed journals and in consultation with employers, employees and other key people. Information for employees was further summarized and translated into Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish and Vietnamese. Over 50 000 information kits were distributed Australia-wide using a database that comprised contact details of medium to large workplaces plus employee and employer organizations, with preference given to workplaces that employed women of childbearing age and women from diverse cultural backgrounds. The translated material was also distributed to migrant resource centres and working women's centres around Australia. Promotion of the project was extensive, resulting in 20 newspaper articles, 17 radio interviews or news items, and articles in 18 newsletters and professional journals and three magazines. The project was also promoted at three conferences and one seminar. Evaluation (directed at employers) focused primarily on the distribution and content of the information kit, since the evaluation was conducted soon after distribution. The evaluation survey was sent to 1571 valid contact (808 e-mail addresses, 1360 fax numbers). The response rate was 12.8% (n=202). Seventy per cent of responding businesses rated the information kit as excellent. Over half anticipated the kit would be useful in their organizations, while over two-thirds agreed that the kit provided sufficient information and suitable solutions to support balancing breastfeeding and work in their organization. While this project has achieved its objectives, further work is required to assist organizations to develop and implement policies and procedures for balancing breastfeeding and work, so that breastfeeding mother who are returning to work can continue to breastfeed as long as they and their baby require it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have reported evidence of negative associations between fixed-term contract employment and fertility. With few exceptions, these studies assume that employment status is exogenous and thus results are likely biased. Furthermore, previous research has mostly not considered whether the effects of employment status on fertility might vary with other worker characteristics. We draw on nineteen years of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to investigate the causal effect of contingent forms of employment (including both fixed-term and casual employment) on first births, and how that effect varies with selected worker characteristics. The issue of endogeneity is addressed through the use of instrumental variables estimation. Our main finding is that both fixed-term contracts and casual employment lead to a significantly lower probability of first births among men, with the effect of fixed-term contracts being almost as twice as large as the effect of casual employment. We also find that these negative fertility effects vary with workers' education, occupational status, country of origin, age, and relationship status. In the case of women, one of the instruments fails to satisfy the exclusion restriction, suggesting endogeneity remains a concern when analyzing female fertility outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies by the author, (1975, Chapter 6) and (1977), have investigated the demand for employment and three categories of energy consumption, using temporal data for individual subclasses in Australian manufacturing industry. It was assumed that factor demands were determined by minimizing costs subject to given levels of output and factor prices. Simple log-linear demand functions were estimated, with separate Koyck lags for each factor. The results were varied, but generally exhibited strong output effects and weak price effects, with average lags of about a year. Most importantly, the restrictions on coefficients, implied by the explicitly additive Cobb-Douglas production function and the implicitly additive Constant Difference Elasticity of Substitution function, Hanoch (1975), were generally rejected statistically. These findings suggest that the adjustment process should be generalized to allow different speeds of response to changes in output and relative prices, and less restrictive forms chosen for the production function. The "putty-clay" vintage model, Johansen (1959) and Salter (1960), offers an appropriate generalization of the adjustment process and is adopted in this paper. It allows the speed of response to changes in output to differ from that to relative prices, and for a faster response to decreases in output than to increases. In addition, its application allows a contribution to be made to the continuing debate concerning the validity of the vintage model of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Western societies face an increasing demand for informal care. The primary goals of the present article are to understand the degree to which employment rights support the needs of working carers' of elder age relatives and to underscore the need to promote social policies to better secure both working carers and their older relatives. Drawing on findings showing that high-intensity caregiving is associated with a reduction in the labour pool for paid work and negatively affects employment status and career, this study examines how employment legislation support working caregivers from an international perspective. The study utilizes an intrinsic and case study research design to compare the employment rights and entitlements in Australia, England, and Israel. The findings indicate that, first, all three countries surveyed provide basic protection through statutory employment rights which are categorized under three fundamental occupational entitlements: Paid or Unpaid Leave, Sick Days and Equal Rights. Secondly, while Australia and England maintain a legal right to request flexible work to care for elder relatives, the analysis foregrounds the absence of flexible employment legislation in Israel. Thought that the aim of balancing limited public resources with family resources requires a broad understanding of concrete legislation, such comparison can inform policy targeted to reconcile distress along the work–eldercare axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian undergraduate students are facing difficult economic circumstances and rates of psychological distress are well above the general population. Many are combining their study with paid work to manage financially. There is, however, little to no research on the relationship between economic pressures, academic demands and health (mental and physical) among these young adults. This study used a mixed-methods approach, combining semi-structured interviews with health measures to investigate the interactions and interconnections between work, study and health among 22 Australian undergraduate students. Thematic data analysis concentrated on the effect of time constraints on health, due to the financial and academic demands of contemporary undergraduate life. We found that students felt time-pressured, and commonly sacrificed sleep, nutrition, exercise and lecture attendance as a way of managing employment demands. These strategies contributed to poor health; we observed very high rates of psychological distress, poor sleep, diet and exercise, peaking during exams. Our in-depth study illustrates the challenges facing the current generation of undergraduate students in Australia, raising their study–work conflict as a genuine public health and social equity issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, as in many industrialized countries, the past 50 years have been marked by increasing female labor-force participation. It is popularly speculated that this might impose a mental-health burden on women and their children. This analysis aimed to examine the associations between household labor-force participation (household employment configuration) and the mental health of parents and children. Seven waves of data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children were used, comprising 2004–2016, with children aged 4–17 years). Mental health outcome measures were the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (children/adolescents) and 6-item Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (parents). A 5-category measure of household employment configuration was derived from parental reports: both parents full-time, male-breadwinner, female-breadwinner, shared-part-time employment (both part-time) and father full-time/mother part-time (1.5-earner). Fixed-effects regression models were used to compare within-person effects, controlling for time-varying confounders. For men, the male-breadwinner configuration was associated with poorer mental health compared with the 1.5-earner configuration (β = 0.21, 95% confidence interval: 0.05, 0.36). No evidence of association was observed for either women or children. This counters prevailing social attitudes, suggesting that neither children nor women are adversely affected by household employment configuration, nor are they disadvantaged by the extent of this labor-force participation. Men's mental health appears to be poorer when they are the sole household breadwinner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background People with disabilities often face a range of social and economic adversities. Evidence suggests that these disadvantages result in poorer mental health. Some research also indicates that people with disabilities are more likely experience thoughts about suicide than people without disability, although most of this research is based on small cross-sectional samples. Methods We explored the relationship between self-reported disability (measured at baseline) and likelihood of reporting thoughts of suicide (measured at follow up) using a large longitudinal cohort of Australian males. A logistic regression model was conducted with thoughts of suicide within the past 12 months (yes or no) as the outcome and disability as the exposure. The models adjusted for relevant confounders, including mental health using the SF-12 MCS, and excluded males who reported thoughts of suicide at baseline. Results After adjustment, there was a 1.48 (95% CI: 0.98–2.23, P = 0.063) increase in the odds of thoughts of suicide among men who also reported a disability. The size of association was similar to that of being unemployed. Conclusions Males reporting disability may also suffer from thoughts of suicide. We speculate that discrimination may be one explanation for the observed association. More research on this topic is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using longitudinal data from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey (2001–2013), we examine the relationship between the dynamics of work-limiting disability, employment, and life satisfaction. By employing two alternative classifications of the dynamic trajectories of disability, we are able to explicitly consider the influence of disability exit in addition to examining onset by chronicity and severity. After controlling for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find pronounced declines in the probability of employment and life satisfaction at disability onset. Further, while individuals are found to recover rapidly and completely from a one-period disability, there is little evidence of recovery even after 10 years for those whose disability is chronic, defined as evident for three or more years post-onset, and severe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims Past research suggests that adverse experiences at work (such as job stressors and precarious employment) are associated with thoughts about suicide, especially among males. A limitation of this research is that it is largely cross-sectional. Thus, it is unknown whether job stressors are a prior cause of thoughts about suicide. This study examined the baseline association between adverse experiences at work and thoughts about suicide at follow-up in a large nationally representative cohort of employed men. Methods We used data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health (Ten to Men). The outcome was thoughts about suicide in the prior 12 months (reported in wave 2) and the key exposure variables were: high job demands, low job control, job insecurity, perceived unfairness of pay, occupational skill level, and employment arrangement (all reported in wave 1). We adjusted for possible confounders, including mental health and suicidal thoughts (wave 1). Results In a sample of 8379 and after adjustment, job insecurity (OR 1.35, 95% CI 1.13–1.61, P = 0.001), low job control (OR 1.19, 95% CI 1.06–1.33, P = 0.004), and employment on a casual or on a fixed term basis (OR 1.30, 95% 1.01–1.67, P = 0.041) were associated with a greater odds of thoughts about suicide at follow up. Results for all by job control were maintained after removing those who reported thoughts of suicide at baseline. Conclusion This study suggests that experiences at work may be risk factors for thoughts about suicide among employed men. More research is needed to unpack the complex associations between, employment, and experiences of suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sickness absence is associated with adverse health, organizational, and societal outcomes. Using data from a longitudinal cohort study of working Australians (the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey), we examined the relationship between changes in individuals' overall psychosocial job quality and variation in sickness absence. The outcome variables were paid sickness absence (yes/no) and number of days of paid sickness absence in the past year (2005-2012). The main exposure variable was psychosocial job quality, measured using a psychosocial job quality index (levels of job control, demands and complexity, insecurity, and perceptions of unfair pay). Analysis was conducted using longitudinal fixed-effects logistic regression models and negative binomial regression models. There was a dose-response relationship between the number of psychosocial job stressors reported by an individual and the odds of paid sickness absence (1 adversity: odds ratio (OR) = 1.26, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.09, 1.45 (P = 0.002); 2 adversities: OR = 1.28, 95% CI: 1.09, 1.51 (P = 0.002); ⩾3 adversities: OR = 1.58, 95% CI: 1.29, 1.94 (P < 0.001)). The negative binomial regression models also indicated that respondents reported a greater number of days of sickness absence in response to worsening psychosocial job quality. These results suggest that workplace interventions aiming to improve the quality of work could help reduce sickness absence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether being in temporary employment, as compared with permanent employment, was associated with a difference in Short Form 36 mental health and whether transitions from permanent employment to temporary employment were associated with mental health changes. We used fixed-effects regression in a nationally representative Australian sample with 10 waves of data collection (2001–2010). Interactions by age and sex were tested. Two forms of temporary employment were studied: “casual” (no paid leave entitlements or fixed hours) and “fixed-term contract” (a defined employment period plus paid leave). There were no significant mental health differences between temporary employment and permanent employment in standard fixed-effects analyses and no significant interactions by sex or age. For all age groups combined, there were no significant changes in mental health following transitions from stable permanent employment to temporary employment, but there was a significant interaction with age (P = 0.03) for the stable-permanent-to-casual employment transition, because of a small transition-associated improvement in mental health for workers aged 55–64 years (β = 1.61, 95% confidence interval: 0.34, 2.87; 16% of the standard deviation of mental health scores). Our analyses suggest that temporary employment is not harmful to mental health in the Australian context and that it may be beneficial for 55- to 64-year-olds transitioning from stable permanent employment to casual employment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The year 2011 marked the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Refugee Convention. It is thus an appropriate time to review the situation of refugees in one of the few signatory countries that accepts United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-approved refugees, Australia. Australia takes around 14,000 refugees annually, from countries in the African, Middle Eastern, and Asian regions. The Australian Government funds a range of services to assist the settlement process, and these are recognized as among the best in the world. While these services provide assistance in the areas of employment, education and training, housing, language, health, social support, and cultural orientation, there is room for improvement to ensure social inclusion. This article provides an overview of research undertaken with this population over the last 15 years investigating some of the key barriers to social inclusion. It outlines a number of matters in need of policy improvement, and areas for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the nature of the relationships between firms, and the ways in which these might contribute to processes of local and regional economic development. A significant body of literature suggests that local growth is often derived from social ties that bind firms together through trust, reciprocity, loyalty and forbearance. While there appears to be consensus in the literature that such relationships are important, there remain doubts in some sections of economic geography about two key elements of this institutionalist model. The first concerns the unequal power relationships that often exist between enterprises and the implications of these asymmetries for the performance of firms and localities. The second relates to the implied significance of geographical proximity whereby close spatial ties between firms are considered to be an important determinant of local competitiveness and economic performance. This article explores these issues through an empirical analysis of the transactional structures of 184 firms in Australia's manufacturing sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on issues related to economic effects of the Australian tariff. There is analysis of the Australian Tariff Committee's report on tariff and free trade theory. Professor Jacob Viner states that free trade theory had not attempted to face certain questions relevant to the application of protection to a country with resources like those of Australia. Economist Alfred Marshall's analysis of the laws of increasing and decreasing returns upon the fiscal policy is of special interest to Australia. It is viewed that the export industries have to bear most of the tariff burden. It is observed that the greatest expansion of employment in the primary industries is in dairying and sugar which have benefited substantially from the tariff. An analysis of the relation of the increase in employment to tariff assistance for manufacturing sustains the conclusion that those industries which have received the greatest protection are those in which the expansion has been most pronounced.

The article evaluates the work of the wages board based on the impact of the mode of wage regulation on the prosperity and welfare of the people in Australia. It is not possible to show by means of statistics what effect the determinations of wages boards have had upon wages. The most serious charge brought against the method of regulating wages by wages boards is that it leads to unemployment to minimum wage earners. A mode of wage regulation would have important consequences in industrial development. For many trades the wages board is the beginning of organization. The final test of the success of any legislative experiment made by self-governing people is the degree of satisfaction which these laws afford to those who are responsible for their enactment and enforcement.