Fair Work Australia recently published an educational resource for students, titled Waltzing Matilda and the Sunshine Harvester Factory, which I believe may be of interest to members of your association.

The book deals with the social and economic developments that led to debate in the Constitutional Conventions, and later the Australian Parliament, on the need for a national industrial court. It outlines the establishment of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in 1904 and early decisions of the Court dealing with minimum wages, including the Harvester decision.

The book also looks at the role of the Court and its successors in the development of other employment standards including decisions which reduced ordinary weekly hours of work from 48 to 44, from 44 to 40, and then from 40 to 38, and gradually established and developed various types of leave, including sick leave, annual leave, and maternity and paternity leave.

Waltzing Matilda and the Sunshine Harvester Factory is available in hard copy and as a downloadable PDF from a dedicated website at:

http://ww2.fwa.gov.au/education/

The website also contains links to source documents, a glossary and materials for use by teachers.

(Provisional) Title: Fair Work Act: Revision or Restitution
To be published by Heidelberg Press, Melbourne
 
Editors: Dr Keith Abbott, Dr Bruce Hearn-Mackinnon, Leanne Morris and Dr Kerrie Saville 
Affiliation: Deakin University
Contact details: abbottk@deakin.edu.au

Abstract deadline: Potential contributors should email papers, with full contact details, to the email address listed above by 31 March, 2011.

Maximum word length: 6,000 words plus references.
All papers will be double-blind refereed
In terms of federal industrial relations’ legislation we certainly live in interesting times. It has been in a period of seemingly perennial transition, with radical changes enacted under the Work Place Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005, and more recently under the Transition to Forward with Fairness Act 2008 and the Fair Work Act 2009.

The papers proposed for this edited book follow up on a similar book published by Heidelberg Press in 2008: Work Choices: Evolution or Revolution.  The proposed book will provide a similar collection of scholarly articles, in this instance dealing with the problems and prospects of Australian industrial relations under the federal government’s Fair Work Act 2009.  The following provides a list of possible themes:

The practices of workplace relations under the Act
The resolution of industrial conflict under the Act
The settlement of collective bargaining agreements under the Act
Fair Work Australia and the Act
Trade unions and the Act
Employers and the Act
The law and the Act
Skills and the Act
Employment and the Act
The Act in historical context
The Act in political context
The Act in legal context
The Act in a cultural context
The politics of the Act
Unfair dismissal under the Act
The transmission of business under the Act
Better off overall provisions of the Act
Trade union rights under the Act
Industrial bargaining under the Act
Managerial decision-making under the Act
Or any other theme related to the Act