Globally, gender equality is the next frontier for social transformation, and women’s economic empowerment is promoted as the pathway to achieve this goal, particularly in countries of the Global South. Women’s economic empowerment is broadly defined as women’s capacity to contribute to, and benefit from, economic activities on terms that recognise the value of their contributions. Advocates for women’s economic empowerment state that it has the potential to be a safeguard against poverty and precarity by enhancing women’s wellbeing. Using a critical-feminist lens, we explore the benefits and risks of the global trend towards women’s economic empowerment. After providing an overview of the evolution of the concept of empowerment, we review the benefits of women’s economic empowerment: economic growth, improved rates of tertiary education and market participation for women, and growth of women’s autonomy. We then examine the risks of the global focus on women’s economic empowerment, which we distil into three key areas: (a) women seen as a country’s ‘natural resource’, used as instruments for economic prosperity and reproduction without considering their wellbeing; (b) a focus on women’s market participation without adequately factoring in current labour market realities; and (c) pushing the women’s economic empowerment agenda forward without fully considering the scope of unpaid reproductive work undertaken by women. We conclude with an analysis of how UN Women (2024) is shifting the agenda by providing a holistic framework for thinking about women’s economic empowerment. We suggest that there is room for cautious optimism if this framework is widely adopted.

While gender-based violence (GBV) is increasingly recognised as a significant social and political issue, its impact on women educators remains underexamined. In the context of growing concerns about violence against educators and the prevalence of GBV in educational institutions, this study investigates gendered patterns of violence against school leaders in Australian schools. Drawing on 18,172 observations from reports by principals and deputy principals, this analysis explores incidents of bullying, threats of violence, and physical violence to identify disparities in the experiences of men and women school leaders. The analysis determined that women school leaders were more likely to experience threats of violence and bullying at work than their male counterparts. Logistic regression analyses revealed that gender, school sector, and role significantly influence the likelihood of experiencing various forms of workplace violence, with women in secondary schools and those in government or Catholic sectors being particularly vulnerable.

The offshoring-fuelled growth of the Central and Eastern European business services sector gave rise to shared service centres (SSCs) – quasi-autonomous entities providing routine-intensive tasks for the central organisation. The advent of technologies such as intelligent process automation, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence jeopardises SSCs’ employment model, necessitating workers’ skills adaptation. The study challenges the deskilling hypothesis and reveals that automation in the Polish SSCs is conducive to upskilling and worker autonomy. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews, we highlight the negotiated nature of automation processes shaped by interactions between headquarters, SSCs, and their workers. Workers actively participated in automation processes, eliminating the most mundane tasks. This resulted in upskilling, higher job satisfaction, and empowerment. Yet, this phenomenon heavily depends upon the fact that automation is triggered by labour shortages, which limit the expansion of SSCs. This situation encourages companies to leverage the specific expertise entrenched in their existing workforce. The study underscores the importance of fostering employee-driven automation and upskilling initiatives for overall job satisfaction and quality.

This article considers how the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a remarkable social experiment in the market for migrant ‘au pair’ labour in Australia. As has been illustrated in broader accounts of the pandemic’s ‘care crisis’, the global health emergency cracked open underlying fault lines, as capacities for social reproduction were stretched to breaking point. At the same time, the pandemic deepened the precarity of temporary migrants as they lost jobs and incomes, experienced housing insecurity, and were excluded from state emergency relief measures. Building on interdisciplinary feminist literatures on gender, work, migration, and social reproduction, this article adds to emerging scholarship on the growing phenomenon of au pairing in Australia to examine drivers of demand, migrant mobilities in and out of au pair labour, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the market. While au pairing emerged during the pandemic as a form of survival work where migrants had little negotiating power, the market ultimately shifted when emergency childcare measures were withdrawn, migrant labour became scarce, and visa restrictions on working hours were relaxed. In addition to providing new empirical insights into au pairing in Australia, the findings underscore the constitutive role of law and policy settings in shaping the distributions and divisions of reproductive labour, which can both consolidate and also challenge broader gendered care norms and distributions and the social reproduction bargain.

Despite societal shifts in attitudes towards gender and sexuality, LGBTQ+ individuals continue to experience multiple forms of labour-market disadvantage – including greater unemployment, lower job satisfaction, and slower career progression. However, existing scholarship has paid little attention to the comparative employment conditions of LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ individuals. Leveraging unique data from a large, Australian, employer-employee dataset (2024 AWEI Employee Survey), we fill this knowledge gap by examining the relationships between LGBTQ+ status, non-standard employment (NSE), and workplace well-being. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we provide novel empirical evidence of the ‘double whammy’ faced by LGBTQ+ employees in relation to NSE. On the one hand, LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to be in certain forms of NSE than non-LGBTQ+ employees; on the other, their workplace well-being is more negatively impacted by these employment arrangements. These findings bear important lessons for policy and practice, indicating that closing the gap between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ workers requires careful consideration of their employment arrangements and the circumstances that surround them.

This manuscript presents findings from a 2023 qualitative Indigenist research project examining disability service providers in Southeast Queensland that tailor services for Indigenous peoples with disabilities. Data were collected through yarning interviews with 14 organisations, including both Indigenous-managed and non-Indigenous-managed entities. The findings highlight distinct differences in approaches to cultural safety, with Indigenous-managed organisations demonstrating an Embedded Cultural Base (CB) model, wherein cultural safety is deeply integrated into service provision, decision-making, and organisational structures. These organisations reported high Indigenous staff representation and strong engagement with Indigenous peoples with disabilities, alongside proactive inclusivity extending to other diversity groups, including LGBTQIA+ communities and refugees. In contrast, non-Indigenous-managed organisations primarily employed Ad Hoc (AH) cultural safety approaches, incorporating cultural initiatives such as reconciliation action plans (RAPs) and cultural competency training, yet lacking the foundational integration seen in CB organisations. The research highlights the potential of Indigenous-led management strategies in fostering holistic, culturally safe, and flexible disability services. Aligning with First Nations scholarship on the custodial ethic and the model of cultural inclusion, this study highlights how Indigenous cultural values serve as both a protective and empowering factor for people with disabilities. The findings suggest that embedding Indigenous management principles within the disability sector could enhance cultural safety, service accessibility, and community-driven care models, prompting further consideration of their role in shaping inclusive and effective management practices.

People with disabilities face barriers to employment compared to people without disabilities, including the way in which employment opportunities are structured. The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up new ways of working (e.g. working from home), which have been trialled in a number of different locations, and these have the potential to widen employment opportunities for people with disabilities. It is therefore important to explore the extent to which job preferences differ between people with disabilities and people without disabilities, in particular for aspects such as teleworking. In total, 253 participants (62 male and 191 female) took part in a discrete choice experiment (DCE) that investigates participants’ preferences for various job aspects. These include discretionary medical leave, flexible scheduling, working from home, and the availability of part-time jobs. People with disabilities significantly prefer flexible scheduling and the availability of part-time jobs compared to people without disabilities. The results of a latent class analysis suggest it is older women with disabilities in particular, who most value increased flexible job design. An analysis of lexicographic preferences suggests that it is people who are most constrained by ‘traditional’ working conditions who benefit the most from increased flexibility, e.g. people who require teleworking or flexible scheduling. This suggests that wider adoption of these attributes by employers has the potential to go some way towards addressing the persistent disability employment gaps and related health inequalities observed in many countries around the world.

Based on recent evidence from Europe, the paper shows that polarisation and upgrading are not mutually exclusive trends, but rather, simultaneously defined recent structural changes in employment. The results show that (a) the occupational structure shows a general shift towards high-skill jobs, (b) the prevailing upgrading patterns are often accompanied by job polarisation, as the share of middle-skill jobs declines in most cases, and (c) while low-skill employment often outperforms middle-skill jobs, it has tended to decline. In addition to analysing trends for EU-27 countries with different levels of development for the latest available time periods, the article also shows that occupational upgrading patterns are rather intertwined with job polarisation and are compatible with both the Skill-Biased Technical Change (SBTC) and Routine-Biased Technical Change (RBTC) hypotheses. The employment dynamics of low-skill workers are uncertain, as they are not fully compatible with any theoretical model, thus pointing to the need for a finer understanding of changes in occupational structure, and the extent to which both polarisation and upgrading are shaping the evolution of the labour force structure under the impact of (ongoing) technological change.

This study is based on four focus group interviews with public school teachers in Massachusetts about reducing work hours as a means of improving their working conditions. Our analysis documents a common experience of overwork, expressed in the focus groups and measured by time-use diaries. Teachers reported long work hours and a significant ‘mental load’—both of which affect teachers’ quality of life, physical and mental health, relationships with their families and desire to keep teaching. While participants were union members and therefore experienced with collective bargaining, most approached the issue of overwork as an individual problem that must be solved by setting and maintaining personal boundaries. Focus group participants differed in their assessment of a hypothetical policy proposal for a work-time reduction without a loss of pay for teachers or instructional time for students. While generally supportive of the goal, participants questioned whether contractual reductions would correspond to actual reductions in hours worked. Teachers expressed both eagerness to include work-time reductions in future contracts, as well as scepticism that their districts had the fiscal space or political will to achieve this goal. Discussions revealed that teachers’ professional identities as hard-working and caring ‘perfectionists’ who are responsible for their students’ learning, inhibited their policy imaginations with regard to using collective bargaining to win them additional leisure time.

Labour mobility has garnered considerable attention within the realm of international relations, prompting economic powers such as New Zealand to seek answers for workforce shortages. Industries dependent on physical labour, often entailing exposure to hazardous substances, face pronounced challenges in attracting workers. In this article, we will focus on three crucial elements of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996: ensuring the protection of the Person Conducting Business Undertaking (PCBU), safeguarding Indigenous iTaukei workers, and preserving the environment under the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme. Employing the 3D veivosaki as a culturally sensitive data collection method, the research strategically gained access to iTaukei workers in the South Island of New Zealand (Central Otago and Oamaru, North Otago) where a recent influx of RSE workers has settled. A total of one hundred iTaukei individuals voluntarily participated in the survey – fifty from each location. The research finds that most of the workers do not understand their rights on their access to protective protection equipment. This report presents a detailed exposition of their responses to the survey.

Over the past half-century, there have been significant advances towards workplace gender equality. However, Australia’s working women continue to earn less than men. A key reason is that occupational segregation has maintained very high levels of feminisation in frontline care and other occupations, including in many ‘ancillary’ or supportive roles, which employ large numbers of women and where skills may not be readily recognised and valued. This article explores the way one set of highly segregated ancillary occupations, receptionists, are vulnerable to gender-based undervaluation and argues that this group warrants further attention in strategies to promote workplace gender equality. First, the article outlines the legislative changes, which have recast regulatory attention to low pay and undervaluation in highly feminised occupations and industries, then draws on Australian Bureau of Statistics data to show the presence of several ancillary occupations among Australia’s most feminised. The article then narrows to examine health care reception and reviews the small body of literature that explores the complex, invisible skills this work involves. The example of health care reception underlines the need for gender equality strategies that challenge constructions of women’s jobs as peripheral and subordinate to male-dominated roles, and which recognise and make visible the skills and contributions that women make in a fuller range of feminised occupations.

Organisational measures to support employees who are experiencing family and domestic violence (FDV) are increasingly seen as an important policy response to mitigate the consequences of such violence and promote gender equality. However, little is known about the costs to employers of providing such workplace policies. This paper assesses the costs and benefits to Australian employers of providing 10 days of paid FDV leave to employees experiencing such violence. We draw on a case study based on the evidence presented to the Fair Work Commission which contributed to their 2023 enactment that modern award wages should include 10 days of paid FDV leave. Using a bottom-up approach and utilising individual-level data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, our estimates reveal that the total annual cost to employers of providing an entitlement of 10 days of paid FDV leave to award-covered employees is between $13.1 million and $34.3 million. Our analysis highlights the role of robust economic analysis in generating evidence for policy change and offers an approach that can be applied in evaluating costs and benefits of other employer initiatives of similar nature.

Groote Eylandt, one of Australia’s largest islands, is situated north of Darwin in the Northern Territory. The Groote Eylandt Mining Company (GEMCO) is the island’s most prominent employer, having begun open-cut manganese mining in 1964. GEMCO’s long-term presence has led to a seemingly intractable conundrum: economically crucial for First Peoples yet accompanied by chronic socioeconomic and cultural problems. Huge disparities have emerged between the wealthy mining town of Alyangula (with over 90 per cent of its population non-First Peoples and with a predominantly fly-in-fly-out workforce) and the Angurugu and Umbakumba townships (over 90 per cent First Peoples populations). Adopting a theoretical framework of organisational legitimacy, this paper evaluates how enterprise bargaining might contribute to achieving Groote Eylandt’s First Peoples employment and broader community objectives (including health, housing, and environmental restoration). At present, GEMCO’s ‘Employer of Choice’ Indigenous employment strategy comprises three main goals: (1) establishing and maintaining a qualified mentor network; (2) implementing culturally appropriate recruitment and induction processes; and (3) maintaining training programmes that provide the necessary skills for specific jobs. Yet, despite an expansion of mining operations and associated services, First Peoples employment opportunities and participation in the townships have stagnated, while underemployment has become endemic. The paper summarises GEMCO’s Employer of Choice promises and then evaluates these promises against employment and community outcomes. It goes on to explore the possibilities of enterprise bargaining at GEMCO, illustrating how future enterprise agreements might enable the achievement of First Peoples intersecting employment and community goals.

Discussions of the difference between Indigenous and Western legal systems, and the subsequent potential weaving of the two, have become a focus of Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) law academics and practitioners in recent years. Furthermore, industrial relations may have the potential to further some of this weaving within the world of work. This paper explores the weaving of tikanga Māori (Māori legal systems) and English-derived state law within Aotearoa NZ workplace personal grievance processes, by explaining the meaning of tikanga Māori concepts and their potential application to workplace personal grievance processes. It asks: what is the tikanga Māori take–utu–ea (∼cause–reciprocation–satisfaction) framework in relation to workplace personal grievances? What role could such a framework potentially have in ensuring reciprocal, mana (status)-enhancing approaches for personal grievance processes? This paper shows how current workplace personal grievance processes in Aotearoa NZ often produce ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and such outcomes are not conducive to maintaining or improving employment relationships. Such processes not only uphold obligations and duties to Indigenous peoples in a workplace context but also improve outcomes for all working peoples. Overall, this paper contributes to an emerging, broader discussion about the world of work and current grievance systems, and how these are unsuitable for the modern era, concluding that Indigenous solutions offer much prospect.

Precarious work, the problems it poses in terms of labour standards/regulation, and remedies to this, have sparked considerable attention from researchers and policy-makers over the past three decades. This paper examines industrial relations (IR) legislation introduced by the Australian Labor government elected in 2022, and which, amongst other things, has addressed precarious work. These initiatives are placed in historical context, noting how essentially similar problems shaped IR regulation a century earlier. The article also examines the more immediate precursors to the legislation, by reviewing state and federal inquiries into precarious work and related issues in Australia from the 1990s onwards. Placing the new legislation into historical context enhances our understanding of the law and surrounding policy debates. The Albanese federal Labor government package of industrial relations laws introduced between 2022 and 2024 marked a paradigm shift from earlier measures. While these reforms are rooted in Australian institutions, law and industrial relations history, they provide an alternative policy template for addressing the problems wrought by neoliberalism on labour standards, especially if accompanied by synergistic reforms in other areas, such as immigration and economic policies promoting manufacturing.

In this article, we consider the future of work in Australia’s renewable energy industry sectors through a consideration of the evolving political and economic context that will continue to shape it in years to come. We are particularly concerned about the quantity and quality of jobs, how these jobs will be realised, who secures them, and who will provide them. Further complicating matters, the debate is being carried out in the context of generalised skill shortages and recruitment difficulties. This article draws on and develops arguments we have put forward recently. Our focus in this article has been on the political economy of work and employment in Australia, especially implications of the polycrisis and associated geopolitics, the militarisation of industrial policy, renewable industries, regional development, just transitions, and the future of work and workers. In developing our argument, we consider Australia’s focus on ‘Renewable Energy Industrial Zones’ in an era of the ‘new state capitalism’, the impact of the US Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act particularly and new geopolitics generally, and the dominance of multinational corporations in renewable industries.

This special Themed Collection of The Economic and Labour Relations Review examines the ‘Economics of Occupational Health and Safety’ (OHS). The economics of OHS looks at how economic structures and incentives, including labour markets and production processes, influence the health and wellbeing of workers and the communities where they live. It is a large and diverse subject that has been viewed from multiple different lenses. This thematic issue can only touch on some of these but will remind readers how economic incentives and industrial competitive pressures affect OHS. This editorial will take the form of an article which explores some of these intersections and places them in a wider context. To do this, the economics of OHS will not only be examined in terms of economic welfare and microeconomics at the industry and workplace level, but also from an historical perspective, as well as the intersection of these levels, thus providing a useful framework to shape research and discussion.

In spite of the upturn in the economy and in employment that has been observed in the EU since 2013 to 2019 (and after COVID-19 crisis), the gap between the figures for indicators of economic growth and those for the trends in domestic living conditions continues to be very wide; growth and newly created jobs are not resulting in a generalised improvement in the welfare of the population. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the recovery period after the Great Recession has not been one of truly inclusive recovery and to provide tentative explanations for this. We focus on the five main EU countries before Brexit. We conclude that the incidence of poverty associated with part-time work is now somewhat greater (‘in-work poverty’) and also that there has been strong containment of wages in the leading countries of the EU over the period under study, and even falls in real wages. At least, redistribution policies have shown themselves to be effective in reducing poverty.

Indigenous employment has attracted an increasing focus in recent decades from policy-makers, in the context of the gap between national rates of Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment. Non-Indigenous businesses are implementing a series of workplace and recruitment policies to enhance their rates of Indigenous employment, yet there is limited research demonstrating the impact of these policies. This paper uses primary survey data from a representative sample of Australian-based non-Indigenous-owned businesses to detail how Indigenous-focused workplace and recruitment practices are associated with Indigenous employment and retention. Descriptive analysis reveals that businesses with a workforce with 3.8% or more Indigenous employees (3.8% being the most recent Indigenous population proportion estimate) are more likely to maintain a series of Indigenous-specific workplace and recruitment practices, including celebrating NAIDOC, having a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), and cultural competency training, compared to businesses with fewer than 3.8% Indigenous employees. Businesses with higher Indigenous employee retention rates similarly demonstrate a higher likelihood to maintain these policies; however, the clearest delineation for businesses with 3.8% or more Indigenous employment and high Indigenous staff retention, is the presence of Indigenous management within these businesses. Revealingly, probit regression models demonstrate that Indigenous manager/s in a business are associated with a 50–60% higher probability of maintaining an Indigenous employment rate of 3.8% or above and an 11–16% lower probability of having poor Indigenous staff retention. Therefore, this paper reveals the importance of having Indigenous people in positions of organisational influence within non-Indigenous organisations, more so than implementing isolated workplace strategies.

There has been growing global interest in wellbeing over recent decades, yet what constitutes wellbeing depends on cultural and philosophical traditions, as well as worldview and knowledge systems. Our article offers an Indigenous Māori view on hauora – relational wellbeing – which emanates from the spiritual essence and ethic of hau, and traverses ecological, social, and economic spheres. We use the case study of Māori community support workers (CSWs), who, in our study, found that their hauora was affected by discrimination, racism, and a lack of cultural awareness and support from employers. Our participants, centred mostly within corporate community support providers, found that Western models of care and support did not allow for the expression of tikanga Māori, which limited their options for providing culturally appropriate care. Also prevalent was the lack of recognition by employers and funders of the importance of culture and culturally appropriate care. The implications of acknowledging hauora within Aotearoa New Zealand’s wellbeing frameworks are then examined, showing that Māori notions of wellbeing have the potential to deliver better outcomes not only for Māori but for all New Zealanders. In this article, we provide some recommendations and reflections on how organisations can prioritise and embed the cultural wellbeing of Māori CSWs, their whānau and their clients in the workplace.