A lecture delivered at a Public Meeting of the Centre for Applied Economic and Policy Research, held at Swinburne University of Technology on 10 July 2006. The author is Emeritus Professor in the History of Economic Theory, Cambridge, Emeritus Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge and Professor Emeritus, Adelaide.

In 1999 Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister, promised to end child poverty within a generation. What does this mean? Can it be achieved? What progress has been made so far? The paper starts by placing UK child poverty at the end of the 20th Century in historical and international context. It reviews the policies that have been introduced in order to meet specific interim targets - of reducing child poverty by one quarter by 2004/5 and halving it in ten years - and discusses the prospects for success in meeting these targets. The second part takes a step back and reflects on why child poverty - rather than poverty more generally - has become the political and policy focus. It then considers whether such an emphasis - together with the particular policy directions that have been taken - may be counter-productive in meeting the eventual goal of ending child poverty. The ‘end to child poverty’ has now been translated as meaning having achieved a relative child poverty rate that is ‘among the best (i.e. lowest) in Europe’. The final part of the paper considers what this might involve. To what extent can the policy approaches taken by the current ‘best in Europe’ countries be seen as recipes for success for the UK, or indeed elsewhere?

Policy by assertion is an all too common temptation amongst economic analysts. Plausible stories substitute for closely developed economic theory backed by convincing empirical evidence. In the case of Japan, an extended period of deflation attracted numerous proposed policy responses. Structural explanations, typified by those relating to corporate governance, appear to be uncontroversial. On closer examination however, the causative mechanisms and actual evidence turn out to be seriously lacking. Instead, a collection of individually desirable objectives are bundled together to present an appearance, rather than a reality, of cause and effect. The result is a set of obvious solutions, but the associated policies remain largely dependent on assertion for their authority.

Just over 20 years ago, Fred Gruen (1982) reviewed debates about the level of welfare expenditure in Australia, noting them as being motivated on the one hand by the view that ‘more is better’, and on the other hand by the view that ‘too much’ is dangerous. Despite Gruen's debunking of many assertions about the Australian welfare state, the debate continues, with arguments on the one hand, that Australian welfare state spending is ‘mean’ compared to other countries, and on the other hand, that Australia has a significant problem of welfare dependency and increasing welfare spending. This paper presents the results of recent OECD studies that provide the most-up-to-date comparative information on the relative performance of Australian welfare arrangements. The paper looks at: (i) the trends in the level of social expenditure in Australia compared to other OECD countries, and explanations for differences across countries; (ii) the level of benefit receipt among people of working age; (iii) the impact of social expenditure on income distribution; and (iv) the relative generosity of benefits and implications for incentives. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy conclusions that might be drawn from these comparisons.

In Australia, the proportion of full-time employees engaged in long hours, often very long hours, of paid work is relatively large and has been growing larger over the past two decades. This article describes and explains existing data and discussion in Australia, within a cross-national context. Primarily drawing on official labour force data, it begins by examining the proportion of employees engaged in long hours, trends in long work hours, and selected characteristics of the long hours workforce. It then links the discussion to overtime and the peculiar prominence of what is called ‘unpaid’ overtime. Growth in unpaid overtime seems to be the main component in the increase in the proportion of full-time employees working long hours. In seeking to explain these developments, the article describes the framework of formal working-time regulation and identifies several channels along which trends to long hours, whether based on paid or unpaid overtime, are able to flow. It then looks at the way in which the opportunities opened up by the deficiencies in regulation are taken up by employees and employers. It suggests that the key factor in explaining the development of long hours in Australia is employer pressure within the framework of weak working-time regulation.

‘Breaching’, or the imposition of financial penalties for infringing income support rules and obligations, has been highly controversial in recent years. This is mainly because of a large increase in the number of breaches imposed between 1999 and 2002 in the context of an intensified ‘mutual obligation’ regime. Welfare advocacy groups have argued that these penalties are unnecessarily harsh and tend to fall most heavily on the more vulnerable income support recipients. However, there has been little systematic examination of the impact of breaching, either in terms of hardship or in terms of its effect on future compliance with obligations. This article discusses the results of the first large-scale study of these impacts, commissioned by the Department of Family and Community Services and carried out by the Social Policy Research Centre in 2002/03. The research involved a review of existing literature, a national telephone survey of breached income support recipients, together with in-depth interviews with a small number of survey respondents, and a national postal survey of welfare agencies.

This paper investigates changes over time in the proportion of the male and female population aged 15 and over who are employed. It is especially aimed at studying the influence of changes in the age composition of the population on this indicator. The main findings are: (a) while the underlying trends for males and females are in the opposite direction, both male and female employment ratios fall in recession and rise in recoveries; (b) changes in the age composition of the population (ageing, per se) can explain only a very small amount of the changes in the aggregate employment ratio for both males and females over the period 1978–2001; (c) the falling aggregate male employment ratio is not primarily or even largely a result of movements out of employment by older workers, indeed, over half of the reduction in the aggregate employment ratio for males is due to falling employment ratios for prime working-age males. Policy implications are discussed in the concluding section.

Should the Australian labour movement pursue a system of statutory union recognition? The experiences of the UK and Canada illustrate that such a system can address some of the worst breaches of freedom of association under the Workplace Relations Act 1996 (Cth). However, the influence on union density and collective bargaining coverage is likely to be modest. It may also constitute a structural impediment to multi-employer bargaining, boxing unions into a system of fragmented bargaining, and results are sensitive to institutional design so there could be serious consequences if the system was re-engineered towards the US model in the future.

Relative to the rest of the population, Indigenous Australians are disadvantaged across a number of outcomes. Not only is income lower, but so is life expectancy. Furthermore, the incidence of a number of chronic conditions is much higher (especially after controlling for the younger age profile). There are a number of interrelated historic, social and economic reasons for these poorer outcomes, but one important factor is likely to be substantially lower education levels. That is, Indigenous Australians are much less likely to finish high school, and for those that do, less likely go on to university or other studies. This paper looks in an empirical way at the relationship between education and health for Indigenous Australians, comparing it to similar associations for the non-Indigenous population. Using probit model estimates on data from the 2001 National Health Survey, two traditional health outcomes (self-assessed health and chronic conditions) as well as a set of health risk-factors are examined. For all health measures used, those with lower education levels have significantly worse health outcomes. Interestingly, education is found to have a significantly different magnitude of association for some measures across Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Despite twenty years of training reform’s in Australia, there are widespread concerns about a ‘skills crisis’. This raises the question: to what extent is this a training crisis, and to what extent is it a crisis in the retention of skilled workers, exacerbated by the new relationships of the workplace? In assembling two quite distinct sets of viewpoints, this symposium invites readers to adopt a broad view of worker education. It includes voices who argue that skills training is but one element of workplace learning, the other being the acquisition of contextual knowledge, formal or tacit, about the employer-employee relationship. The first perspective is a critique of a recent attempt to train managers in the efficient use of ‘relationship’ skills. From here, a longer-term perspective demonstrates how the narrow skills approach can be traced to diffusion of Taylor’s educational theory through formal and community-based vocational education systems in NSW. A new perspective is then introduced by a conversation among adult educators, who take the view that workplace learning inevitably involves learning about employer/employee relations. Contributions from South Africa, Canada and Australia consider the relationship between practical activity and the gaining of two aspects of this awareness — union activism and class consciousness. They explore approaches to union renewal and employee participation in shaping learning. Noting the decline of working class communities and of working class education movements, the symposium ends with a suggested explanation for the fluctuating class awareness of those whom the Australian labour movement is currently addressing as ‘working people’.

The issue of job insecurity and its impact on employee's sense of well-being remains an under-researched topic. The objective of this paper is to utilise the HILDA dataset to show how job insecurity impacts on mental health outcomes. An important feature of the HILDA survey is that it enables an examination of the relationship between the level of job insecurity and mental health outcomes at a given point in time as well as how changes over time in job insecurity impact on mental health outcomes for the employed. The results suggest that a strong and significant relationship exists between job insecurity and employee mental health outcomes.

This is one of few empirical studies of the implementation of the Frontline Management Initiative. It is based on qualitative research in six Australian organizations. Arising from a 1990s policy view, represented by the Karpin Report, that Australia’s competitive weakness was partly an outcome of poor management capabilities, the FMI was introduced in order to train first-line supervisors, who were seen as key in changing work practices. The FMI, however, suffered from the weaknesses in competence-based training (CBT), exacerbated by problems in the Australian National Training Framework. Lack of uniformity in curricula and standards, coupled with a fuzziness in defining frontline management, undermined this exercise in management development as public policy. Narrowly-specified outcomes did not deliver the claimed ease of assessment but undermined content. More fundamentally, ‘unitarist’ assumptions such as those underpinning the FMI are based on an inadequate understanding of workplace learning. Even the highly structured CBT approach cannot prevent learners from exploring their own interests and affirming their own counter- identity, in ways that may run counter to enterprise productivity.

This study examines long term changes in the industrial and workforce structure of the Australian construction industry and their effect on the capacity of the industry to invest in training. The study finds that restructuring has raised the barriers to employer investment in vocational training and is the principal cause of sustained skill shortages in the industry. Using the 1986 and 2001 Population Censuses and economic and labour force surveys, it examines the significant changes in the occupational, industry, firm size, educational attainment and demographic structure of employment in the industry that have occurred over the last two decades. The major drivers of change include: new technologies; evolving consumer tastes; an intensification of sub-contracting through the intra-industry division of labour; outsourcing of activities through the inter-industry division of labour; and reduced role of the public sector in the industry. The study also finds evidence that a large proportion of sub-trade vacancies are filled by qualified tradespersons. This finding has important implications for current strategies to address trade skills shortages. It is concluded that changes in industry and workforce structure which exacerbate the lack of employer investment in training are creating an industry which does not have the skilled people required to meet demands.

The KEF developed its identity, role and activities in the face of challenges to employers quite different to those that marked the history of employer associations in western countries. Only in recent years have economic and political developments generated perceived threats from unions and pro-labour legislative proposals. Instead, the KEF had to find ways of attracting, holding and uniting members in the absence of these threats. The result was a very limited organisation operating at low levels. As those threats emerged more fully through Korea's democratisation process, the KEF responded to pressures to raise its profile, broaden its activities and sharpen its identity. In seeking to attract and retain members and to develop internal cohesion, macroeconomic and macro-political developments have been of crucial importance, as has the central role of large employers among the KEF membership.

This historical case study demonstrates the importance of education to the diffusion of management ideas and strategies. The article explains how management and education came to be united in the pursuit of efficiency and how they came to use similar assessment techniques to ensure the achievement of this goal. Documenting F.W. Taylor’s interest in education, it reveals how scientific management, as promoted by management ‘gurus’, consultants, managers, educational administrators and related professionals, came to influence the early twentieth century reform of education and training in both the USA and Australia. It shows how Taylor’s methods, principles and philosophy were transformed into a scholastic program, and how this program was infused into the administration and content of teaching and learning offered in NSW schools, technical colleges, universities and adult education, with long-term implications for the training of managers, students and workers.

The global trend towards the removal of child labour began in the nineteenth century and continues into the twenty-first century, yet estimates of children working in India range up to 100 million. Though the Indian government prohibits employment of children in factories, there is no law to prohibit employment of children in family households, cottage industries and family owned agricultural fields or family businesses, and large numbers of children miss school to look after cattle, collect firewood or work infields, restaurants or quarries. The framers of the Constitution of India were aware of their responsibility towards children and a number of provisions were made to protect children. This article focuses on legislation since 1938, prohibiting the labour of children aged below fifteen years. Defects in the legislation and weak enforcement machinery have meant that children working in family-owned industries and agricultural fields continue to escape attention. The small earning of a child have been seen as a means of survival for a large number of families in India. The article is primarily a historical piece, tracing this regulatory failure through five decades of independence and freedom in which lives of children, born free but bonded for life in the largest democracy in the world. This paper will provide the basis for assessing the degree of change for children, as India becomes one of the world's fastest growing economies.

Much more is learned in the workplace than efficient skills. We have rather few concepts with which to theorise the ‘counter-cultural’ nature of much workplace learning. In leading off four articles that address this gap, this introduction dips into Australian labour history to open a discussion aimed at making visible some of the other learning that occurs at work. It asks why most workplace learning researchers have not acknowledged or extended such learning, and suggests that changing working conditions within universities may change this.

Australian trade unions in the 1980s and 1990s sought to influence and guide the restructuring of vocational and workplace education policy, to widen participation in education and training, and establish partnership arrangements with government and business in order to promote international competitiveness. Since the mid 1990s, however, the changed contours of the labour market, and a steady decline in both the numbers of union members and density rates, accompanied by legislative attacks on the right to organise, led many unions to shift their emphasis to organising new members. Education was identified as a critical factor in preparing unions to undertake this new effort and as a means of changing union culture. This article studies the changes in union education that flowed from one union’s new concentration on developing capacity for organising for growth, and examines the new ways of knowing that resulted among officers and activists.