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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.

The purpose of this paper is to advance a conceptual analytical framework to help explain employment regulation as a dynamic process shaped by institutions and actors. The paper builds on and advances regulatory space theory.

The paper analyses the literature on regulatory theory and engages with its theoretical development.

The paper advances the case for a broader and more inclusive regulatory approach to better capture the complex reality of employment regulation. Further, the paper engages in debates about the complexity of employment regulation by adopting a multi-level perspective.

The research proposes an analytical framework and invites future empirical investigation.

The paper contends that existing literature affords too much attention to a (false) regulation vs deregulation dichotomy, with insufficient analysis of other “spaces” in which labour policy and regulation are formed and re-formed. In particular, the proposed framework analyses four different regulatory dimensions, combining the legal aspects of regulation with self-regulatory dimensions of employment regulation.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.