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The purpose of this article is to assess the ability of formal equal employment opportunity (EEO) programmes and workplace agreement making to facilitate work and family balance for women workers in Australia.

This article uses documentary analysis and semi‐structured interviews in six Australian organisations that are required to develop formal EEO programmes.

Formal EEO programmes and agreement making are limited in their ability to promote work and family‐friendly arrangements at the workplace. Informal arrangements and managerial discretion are important in realising work and care balance.

The paper is Australian based, and the case studies were confined to six organisations, which restricts the findings.

Leave and work arrangements need to be required within agreements and EEO programmes. Most programmes gravitate towards minimum requirements, hence, it is important to ensure that these minimum requirements provide for work and care reconciliation. Programmes beyond the workplace, such as funded childcare, are important in this context.

The article highlights that formal mechanisms cannot achieve work and care reconciliation for women workers if they are built upon very limited minimum requirements, are voluntary and are dependent upon a bargaining process at the workplace.

There is considerable political and industrial relations debate in Australia concerning the value and merit of Australian workplace agreements (AWAs). However, formalised individual agreements are a relatively new phenomenon in the Australian industrial relations landscape, consequently, to date there has been limited assessment of the strategies, outcomes and processes involved in making and negotiating such agreements. This paper attempts to fill this gap by reviewing responses from 688 employers who had approved AWAs with the Office of the Employment Advocate (OEA) before February 2000. There are a number of issues that can be identified from this exploratory study. AWA employers were likely to be “individualistic” employers with more individual employee consultation and human resource practices. Individual employee and employer consultation arrangements were more likely to be used in establishing AWAs and generally communicating with the workforce as a whole. The survey also suggested that the majority of respondents intended to increase their use of AWAs in the future citing increased flexibility and the benefit of all employees being under one type of industrial relations instrument as the primary reasons for their introduction.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the Africa image and map portal (AIMP) project’s origins and development, along with its applications to date. This paper includes methods and a step-by-step appendix so that the project can be reproduced at other institutions.

AIMP was created with a suite of free and open source software, including QGIS, Mapbox.js and GitHub. Built around the concept of an interactive index map, AIMP allows for geographic searching of maps, posters and images from Indiana University’s (IU) African Studies collections. This paper presents a case study for the use of this geographic discovery tool at an academic library.

AIMP has allowed comparison of collection strengths with research interests of IU African Studies affiliates and to make strategic collection development decisions that will best serve the authors’ patrons. The instruction applications of AIMP are also full of potential. To date, the Librarian for African Studies has used the portal to familiarize faculty, as well as undergraduate and graduate students, with the range of image and map resources available to them, in a variety of settings.

AIMP allows researchers around the world to discover materials through a geographic search, dramatically connecting and increasing access to and discoverability of these important collections. The use of free and open source geospatial software (foss4g) means that the interface does not rely on an institution’s proprietary software-licensing agreements, making it replicable for other institutions. This use of foss4g widens access to maps, spatial data, images and posters of Africa held by IUL to a global audience.

While interactive index maps are popular among map libraries, AIMP uniquely acts as a discovery portal for a variety of media, including images and posters. In this way, AIMP works to overcome institutional silos and increase discoverability of these important collections to a global audience.

The labour markets of Australia and New Zealand have been regulated in similar ways, through industrial conciliation and arbitration, since the early 1900s. Globalization and market deregulation generally have led to intense pressure for greater labour market flexibility in both countries. In New Zealand, flexibility was achieved by a radical dismantling of the industrial relations system. What had been essentially a multi‐employer bargaining system was replaced with a system that supported individual employment contracting. In Australia, conciliation and arbitration remained protected by the constitution; however, industrial relations reforms aimed at severely weakening the system were implemented in the 1990s. This paper compares various labour market outcomes across both countries. The trends in both countries are similar despite maintaining different systems. Collective bargaining coverage has dropped. Collective bargaining outcomes have seen reductions in benefits, and significant changes in working time arrangements. Union density has dropped, as also has public sector employment.

In attempting an examination of the contractual and normative concepts of the collective agreement, some ideas are tentatively put forward in the pages which follow hoping that they will stimulate the reader's mind and open areas for further discussion.

A shift from collectivism to individualism in managing employees is identified in employment studies. Developments in Australia have reflected this change, accompanied by claimed organisation benefits. This paper examines an empirical data set to examine such claims on key dimensions in the employment relation. The analysis points to few differences in views between employees working under individual contracts and those not. Moreover the factors generating concern over individual and firm performance among employees differed little between the two groups. Traditional work factors underpinned attitudes for both. The differences that emerge from organisation size, union membership and gender appear to be inconsistent with the claims of individualism. The data point to the importance of general employee concerns – job satisfaction and perceived management style – in generating employee commitment and loyalty. The findings have implications for the nature of employee relations and management, which are discussed in light of their theoretical and practical ramifications.

This paper examines how accounting either contributes to or undermines worker resistance to unfair pay, thereby enhancing our current understanding of the emancipatory potential of accounting.

We apply Jacques Rancière's concept of politics and build on recent calls to introduce Rancière's work to accounting by analysing a case based on workers in an Australian supermarket chain who challenged their employer Coles over wage underpayments.

We find that in this case, accounting is, in part, a means to politics and a part of the police in Rancière's sense. More specifically, accounting operated within the established order to constrain the workers, but also provided workers with a resource for their political acts that enabled change.

This empirical research adds to Li and McKernan (2016) and Brown and Tregidga (2017) conceptual work on Rancière. It also contributes more broadly to emancipatory accounting research by identifying radical possibilities for workers' accounting to bring about change.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact on the new federal wage fixing system on gender pay equity in Australia.

The article is divided into four parts. The first section briefly examines the policy approach to the issue of gender pay equity in other Anglophone counties and the history of pay (in)equity under the Australian tribunal based industrial relations system. The second section overviews the recent developments at the State level in Australia focused on gender pay equity. The third section discusses recent cases in State wage fixing systems in Australia designed to remedy the gender based undervaluation of children's services employees. The fourth and final section discusses the implications of the new “national” workplace relations laws in the context of gender pay equity in Australia.

The capacity of State tribunals to continue to apply gender free wage determinations is under threat because of the federal government's 2006 “reforms” to the Australian industrial relations and wage fixation systems.

The commissioned case studies and inquiries demonstrate that governments – and State Labor governments in particular – have placed the issue of the gender earnings gap on the policy agenda.

This article presents the results of an exploratory study of wage outcomes in the West Australian public sector. The research aimed to determine the effect of gender segregation on pay bargaining outcomes in a deregulated industrial relations regime. In the first part of the article, public sector employment relations are discussed and analysed. The second part provides a synopsis of the changes in the legislative and industrial relations environment in Western Australia. The final part examines the effect of gender segregation on bargaining outcomes in the Western Australian public sector.

This paper provides an account of Australian immigration in the late twentieth century focusing on labour market and industrial relations issues. The paper chronicles the changing immigration policy framework, from one premised on exclusion to one designed primarily to serve the needs of the domestic labour market. One of the consequences of the policies, more by default than design, has been the transformation of society from a monocultural to a multicultural one. In spite of this migrants from other than mainly English speaking (MES) countries often have poor labour market outcomes, sometimes well after the time of arrival. This group appears to be more adversely affected by the downturn in economic cycles than other migrants or the Australian‐born population. At the industrial relations level trade unions have made a pragmatic, as well as a principled, shift to embrace immigrant workers from non‐MES countries. However the transition from a centralized system of conciliation and arbitration to a more deregulated labour market has compounded the disadvantage suffered by these workers.