The “Work Choices” Revolution in Australia: Recent Legislative Reforms and Their Consequences

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, Australia has steadily moved away from its traditional centralized industrial relations system based on the compulsory conciliation and arbitration of industrial disputes. Under that system, parties would routinely appear before centralized industrial commissions and tribunals, which would hand down determinations in the form of “awards”—comprehensive sets of industrial terms and conditions that were binding on all employers (as well as their employees and registered unions) operating in a particular industry and set of occupational classifications. Over the past fifteen years, the system has been gradually deregulated, facilitating, among other things, the growth in other forms of industrial agreements, most prominently, certified agreements (enterprise-based collective bargains negotiated between a union and an enterprise) and Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs), individual agreements negotiated between an individual employer and individual employees.1