by Nick Wailes & Russell D. Lansbury

III. The sources of flexibility
. . A. The sources of flexibility

Despite the declining importance of informal workplace bargaining in Australia, work rules continue to play an important role in determining the organization of production and the ways in which labour is used in the production process. The outcomes of bargaining between workers and employers over wages and conditions of work amend the common law individual contract of employment. As Fox (1974) noted, it is not possible for the individual contract of employment to cover all the eventualities that arise during the employment relationship. While collective bargaining has attempted to regulate the aspects of the employment relationship not specified in the common law contract of employment, a range of issues have continued to remain subject to custom and practice and arbitrarily determined work rules, even in the most regulated of environments. Work rules therefore remain an important source of the pattern of labour market regulation in any economy.

To the extent that changes in the Australian industrial relations system have reduced the range of issues covered by collective bargaining or the scope of collective bargaining, then it could be argued that the range of issues determined by work rules has increased. Patmore (1991) shows that work rules have always played a major role in Australia. The growth of enterprise bargaining may have resulted in many of these work rules being codified into formal agreements. The eroding coverage of the federal industrial relations jurisdiction associated with decentralization of bargaining may have increased the importance of work rules in some sectors of the economy. However, without detailed case studies of individual enterprises it is difficult to draw any conclusions about this facet of employment regulation in Australia in the contemporary period.