E
DITORIAL
Kay Broadbent’s opening article examines the feminisation of part-time work in Japan using Atkinson’s flexible firm model of a core and peripheral workforce as a starting point for examining the segmentation of Japan’s labour market. Broadbent finds that the model does not adequately explain why women are predominant in the part-time workforce in Japan. The article suggests that the disparity in employment conditions between female and male workers in the periphery is fostering the development of a gender hierarchy in Japan’s non-full-time workforce resembling that existing in ‘lifetime’ employment practices. In Fang Lee Cooke’s article ‘Ownership change and reshaping of employment relations in China: A study of two manufacturing companies’, the emergence of new patterns of enterprise ownership, and consequently new employment rela-tions which are distinctively different from those in the traditional SOEs, are explored through two case studies. The paper explores how key elements of the employment relations may have changed as a result of ownership change; why the trade unions have failed to perform adequately, and what the impact has been on workers of the new form of employment relations.
Ed Rose’s paper examines the nature of the labour process in a call centre in the UK and the impact on union commitment. The paper considers issues such as absenteeism and labour turnover, management control, work intensification, and union and organisational commitment within a banking services call centre. The main findings of the research indicate that employees were frustrated and bored with repetitive and standardised work operations; that there were high levels of managerial control and surveillance and that there was little opportunity for exercising creativity and autonomy in the work situation. Employees who were unionised were found to be moderately committed to their trade union despite some disappointment concerning the apparent inability of local union represen-tatives to pursue and process grievances effectively.
A three-paper Symposium based on papers presented at a workshop held in Sydney in 2000 on ‘The Changing Nature of Inequality’ follows. Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal and Karel Williams begin the symposium by focusing on two current drivers for inequality. The first is the link between household income and the value of goods and services that a household can afford to consume, which in turn feeds back into the kinds of jobs created; this is labelled the cheap goods/cheap jobs nexus. The second is the growth of funded savings from some households, which are directed onto stock markets from where these flows may have destabilising effects on corporate decisions and asset prices. In both cases, the authors argue, the drivers bring new elements of precariousness for individ-uals and their households, as well as the potential for instability at the macro level. The paper argues that, from a policy perspective, it is important to focus on the role of the household in mediating the consumption and saving choices
of individuals and as the unit that bears the risks that arise from labour and capital markets.
Ian Watson then examines the connection between wage inequality and under-employment in Australia. The article presents a theoretical account based on Marx’s notion of the reserve army of labour, as developed in the work of Botwinick. Secondly, he presents the findings of a distributional analysis of the 1990 and 1997 Income Distribution Surveys. These findings show that wage inequality increased markedly between 1990 and 1997, particularly for men. Importantly, the bottom deciles experienced not only declining hourly earnings, but also declining access to hours of work. The result was a considerable decline in weekly earnings.
The final Symposium paper by Buchanan and Pocock offers some proposals about what can be done about the changing dynamics driving inequality today. The authors, in thinking through practical responses to inequality, build on two literatures. The first concerns the need to rethink the linkages between economic, social, labour market, skill formation and industrial relations policy on the basis of an approach to the life cycle conceived in terms of ‘transitional labour markets’. The second concerns the debate about union renewal based on the so-called ‘organising model’. The authors critique these two literatures and suggest that we need better tools of analysis to understand the current situation and better categories to help understand the links between work, social and economic life and how this may assist in developing new policy ideas that would combat inequality today.
Finally, before presenting the latest book reviews we also present an exchange between Braham Dabscheck, the author of a number of earlier JIR articles that sought to develop a theory of Industrial Relations, and Grant Michelson and Mark Westcott, who published a critique of Dabscheck’s work(s) in the September issue of this Journal. In the end, neither side makes any significant concessions in their respective positions and readers are left to draw their own conclusions on the merits and utility of the debate.
