Until the Industrial Revolution, the regulation of employment was not a subject which engaged the minds of legislators to any great extent. Even so, attempts to control employment had been made as early as 1351 when, in the reign of Edward III, the Statute of Labourers sought to reduce wages to the levels which applied before the Black Death. The labour shortage caused by that awful plague had seen wages rise and labourers move in search of improved conditions. As has often been the case, the statute failed to realise its goal.
In this country, colonial governments made sporadic attempts to control the labour market, and often with the same lack of success as had been experienced half a millennium earlier in England. It was not until the great strikes of the 1890s that a concentrated effort was made to create a system which might prevent or settle disputes. Legislation to establish systems of conciliation and arbitration emerged, first in Western Australia (1900) and then New South Wales (1901), theCommonwealth (1904), South Australia (1915) and Queensland (1916). Tasmania and Victoria retained a curious attachment to wages boards until 1984 and 1992 respectively.
The slow march in legislation was mirrored in the common law of employment, where principles established in the 19th century and earlier were applied with varying degrees of precision well into the late 20th century. But the market for labour does not wait for parliaments or courts. While changes in the types and styles of employment have been recognised to a limited extent by the various industrial commissions through awards and agreements, the pace of change continues to quicken.
This book recognises that the acceleration in change means that decades of labour law jurisprudence are being relegated on a continuing basis to the file marked ‘of historical interest’. Knowledge of the interstices of interstate industrial disputes or the effect of ambit claims was once an essential part of an industrial lawyer's armoury. After the WorkChoices case, the thousands of pages devoted to those matters are now consigned to the dusty shelves of unvisited libraries.