by Nick Wailes & Russell D. Lansbury

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

It should be remembered that the introduction of laws relating to industrial relations in Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century, like many other developed countries, was a direct response to the perceived inadequacy of the common law contract of employment as a mechanism for providing effective protection for workers. The declining number of Australian workers covered by federal awards suggests that common law individual contracts have become more important in regulating the conditions of employment for a greater proportion of Australian workers than at any other time in the post-war period. In particular, the growth of casual employment and other non-standard forms of employment during the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in an increased number of Australian employees having their wages and conditions determined solely by common law individual contracts. The growth of common law individual contracts, therefore, has played an important role in increasing external numerical flexibility associated with non-standard employment.

Recent changes to the industrial relations system have also introduced provisions for the development of an individual bargaining stream, known as Australian workplace agreements. These are not common law individual contracts, but rather a form of individualized bargaining which is regulated by a set of legislated requirements and administered by a federal agency, the Office of the Employment Advocate (OEA). These provisions only came into operation on 1 March 1997 and there is no evidence available yet concerning the number of AWAs that have been registered with the OEA or the content of these agreements. However, just as with Individual Employment Contracts in New Zealand under the Employment Contracts Act 1991, AWAs will be regarded as private commercial contracts and there will be no publicly available information provided on their content. Therefore, it will be difficult to assess the changes in employment regulation that accompany the introduction of AWAs. Nevertheless, a number of commentators have argued that the complexity of the provisions relating to AWAs will prevent this form of bargaining from becoming widespread (Ronfeldt, 1997).