Putting Wage-Earners into Wage-Earners' Welfare States: The Relationship Between Social Policy and Industrial Relations in Australia and New Zealand.

The "wage-earners' welfare state" model has gained wide acceptance as a framework explaining the evolution of Australian and New Zealand social protection. Despite its important contribution to Australasian and comparative policy analysis, however, the model does not adequately highlight the importance of the labour market to social protection. This is because it treats the industrial relations system as largely static. This paper considers debates within both the industrial relations and social policy literatures and analyses the interplay between state welfare and protective labour mechanisms in Australia and New Zealand. Focusing on the period since the early 1980s, the principal argument is that updating and understanding the comparative evolution of the two regimes requires a dynamic and historically nuanced explanation of the nexus between social policy and industrial relations. Viewing social protection in this way reveals more subtle characteristics of contemporary neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]