Management

Provides a comprehensive picture of the nature and extent of these changes for individuals requires close study not just of pay packets, but of total earnings, hours worked, employment security, employee voice, and workplace climate. Such a study can be conducted by means of ...

Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir.

This paper focuses on the minimum working time standards in the 'safety net' created by the Fair Work Act 2009. We draw on an analysis of on-paper minima in the 10 National Employment Standards (NES) and in two Modern Awards covering paid care workers. We argue that the gendered legacy of poorer working time provisions in non-standard jobs held by many Australian women workers has been reproduced in the architecture of the new Fair Work regime. Our case study suggests that the permanent full-time norm of employment continues to permeate working time regulation, despite the fragmentation of the standard employment relationship with the growth in casual and part-time work. Not only does casual status limit the access of many women workers to particular NES, but there remain significant and gendered differences in award minimum working time standards, particularly for casual and part-time care workers, in comparison with the conditions and protections provided in one of the key male industry awards. Further, a hierarchy of working time standards for care workers has been reproduced, underpinned by differences in contract status, job classification and work location. This leaves those at the bottom of this hierarchy with little working time or income security. 2

In police services, both in Australia and internationally, attention has been focused on increasing the representation of women. The availability of parttime work has been identified as a key mechanism to retain women who have been recruited. To date however the take-up of part-time work remains low. It is also concentrated in administrative work and non-operational policing work. In this paper, we draw on research in Victoria Police around the experiences of, and attitudes towards, part-time work. The research suggests that there are a number of policy constraints to the take up of part-time work, particularly by police officers. There are also significant cultural barriers to both increasing and integrating part-time work, which influence attitudes to part-time work at all levels of the organisation. However, these barriers are intertwined with and reinforced by institutional structures and processes that position part-time work as 'other' and a gendered understanding of police work. In increasing access to part-time work, the challenge for police services is to address both institutional and cultural barriers to the integration of parttime and full-time work.

The findings discussed in this paper are drawn from a larger study of the changing work experience of front-line workers in four comparable, restructured, liberal welfare states, in a subsector of the economy known as the nonprofit social services (NPSS). Older practices, unique to the sector, such as collectivist ethics, relationship building, care and social justice are being colonised and displaced by the new technologies of performativity such as self-monitoring, target setting, outcome measures and technocratic solutions. In addition, changes in labour markets have produced high numbers of unemployed men in some countries, some of whom have moved into jobs in this traditionally female sector, reshaping aspects of the work and its mission-based ethos. This paper suggests a continuum of masculinised and feminised strategies exist in the NPSS. The latter depend on idealised, female self-sacrifice and reinforce social justice ethics while most of the former challenge non-profit ethics and alter work practices to be more consistent with managerialist aims.

Following the 2006 Victorian state election and the 2007 federal election there is now firm government commitment to introduce two quite different models of 'right to request' regulation both, designed to support employee work/family balance. This paper aims to analyse the potential of such regulation to do so and canvasses the ways in which such potential would be best realised. It sets out the main rationale and features of the federal model to be introduced as one of the ten national employment standards and the anti-discrimination model to be introduced in Victoria. We argue that while novel in the Australian context, both models are relatively limited particularly when compared to the European models from which they derive.

In the community services sector government policies and practices around the tendering and contracting out of services have a direct impact not only on the wages and conditions of care workers, but also on these workers' capacity to combine paid care work and unpaid care. The paper reflects on the qualitative methods employed in a large cross-national comparative study of community sector agencies, which contribute to a rich and gendered understanding of how work and family is 'done' in such workplaces. In particular, the paper focuses on the iterative 'rapid' ethnographic approach employed in the study and its macro and meso theoretical underpinnings, which are valuable in making the link between workplaces and the institutional and policy contexts in which they are located. The paper briefly illustrates the utility of this layered qualitative approach through selected findings on ways in which paid care work can trump unpaid care responsibilities.

In making the submission we draw on our extensive research experience, jointly and individually, in the areas of: changing forms and patterns of employment in Australia and internationally; employment regulation, including cross national comparison; casual employment; women and work, gender equality, including pay equity; job quality; work and family; collective bargaining and trade unions.