Human Resource Management and Individualisation in Australian Labour Law

Abstract

By tradition, Australian industrial relations have been regulated by industrial awards and collective agreements made by, or under the auspices of, industrial tribunals. The central parties to these agreements and awards were employers and trade unions. The individual employment contract between employer and employee was subject to these collective arrangements, which, generally speaking, set the minimum floor of employment conditions from which the parties could not derogate. In common with other countries, there was a strong push for ‘deregulation’ of the labour market throughout the 1980s and the 1990s in Australia. In 1996, the Liberal/National Party Coalition conservative government introduced new federal labour laws that permitted employers and employees to enter individualised employment relationships by excluding the operation of much collective regulation from their affairs. The present paper explores the supposed rationales for this legal development, and outlines the legal conditions that are imposed upon this statutory individualisation process. It also examines the evidence in order to address certain questions: ‘How effective has the individualisation process been in Australia?’; ‘Explicitly or implicitly, what sort of employment system outcomes were envisaged?’; ‘What forms of flexibility has it been able to introduce into the employment relationship?’; and ‘To what extent has it been able to promote a “high performance” HRM agenda in Australian workplaces?’