From full employment to the the new service economy

Abstract

This chapter offers a brief history of 'traditional' employment policy in Australia and will explore trends in the labour force, such as casualisation and economic inequality, that have emerged as a result of government reponses to both internal and external economic trends. It will be argued that the resulting shift from an inflexible, centralised system of employment relations to a more responsive decentralised, partly deregulated system has, on balance, benefited employers at the expense of some groups of employees.