The Concept Of The State In Australian Industrial Relations Theory

Labour & Industry, Dec, 2000 by Gerry Treuren

   Australians are said to have a characteristic talent for bureaucracy; yet
   they have paid little scholarly attention to the state. The state and its
   personnel have been an accepted part of the political landscape, examined
   from time to time by curious foreigners, but rarely by Australians
   themselves. This blindness to the state is particularly notable among
   labour historians, despite the fact that Australia's unique state
   conciliation and arbitration system and its pioneering development of a
   wage-earners' welfare state have been central to their analyses (Deacon,
   1994, p. 136).

The Australian system of employment regulation is more reliant on direct state intervention than other national systems. Constructed on a constitutional framework of statutory conciliation and arbitration, this system emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century at a time when continental and Anglo-American systems of employment regulation were moving towards forms of voluntaristic collective bargaining requiting minimalist state involvement. This state involvement in industrial relations, as part of the broader system of domestic economic and political management, has shaped the evolution of Australian industrial relations, trade unionism and management practice throughout the twentieth century(Howard, 1977; Plowman, 1989; Wright, 1995).

Despite this ongoing state intervention, our industrial relations literature has not clearly focussed on the Australian state. It is true that the `state' is ever-present at a lower level of generality and theory within the literature. The typical representation -- apart from conflating the `state' with `government' -- simply assumes the state to be an agent maintaining the distinct regulatory system of arbitration. This literature is typically more concerned with tracing the behaviour of the arbitration system and the parties within the system than with understanding the social basis of the state's role in industrial relations. The state is not approached clearly from an analytical or theoretical perspective.

Such a point may seem -- at first glance -- a return to the arcane paper battles typified by the marxist state theory of the 1970s, far removed from the more practical concerns of mainstream academic industrial relations. This paper assumes that understanding the role of the state in shaping employment regulation is central to understanding the rapidly changing political economy of industrial relations in the context of globalisation. The ongoing integration of domestic markets into the international marketplace is placing unprecedented pressure on domestic institutions of economic, political and social management.

Within Australia, longstanding institutions of Australian political and economic management have undergone fundamental change in recent years. The `New Protection' set of institutional arrangements, established in the early years of Federation, is now effectively defunct (Castles, 1988). Government control over exchange rates and capital movement, and even Keynesian demand management, are largely irrelevant. However, the `state' -- despite its analytical invisibility within the literature -- has played a significant role in restructuring the central institutions of Australian society (ACIRRT, 1998; Bramble, 1996; Broomhill, 1995; James, 1996; Smyth and Cass, 1998; Wooden, 2000).

How can this process of institutional restructuring be understood? It is commonplace within the `globalisation' literature that ongoing integration of domestic economies into the global marketplace places new pressures on domestic institutions (Fagan and Webber, 1994; Martin and Schuman, 1996; Ohmae, 1995). This literature, however, remains uncertain about the content of these pressures, the direction of this restructuring or how it occurs (Hirst and Thompson, 1999; Mishra, 1999; R. O'Brien et al,. 2000; Olds et al., 1999). In the context of industrial relations, some writers have argued that globalisation will result in similar national institutional systems, while others point to increased institutional divergence. Others suggest that either is possible, depending on the circumstances (Hyman, 1999). Giles and Wailes have argued that the theoretical tools of the industrial relations literature require substantial expansion to explain the dynamic inter-relationship between industrial relations, the integration of domestic economies into the global economy, and domestic economic, political and social constituencies (Giles, 2000; Wailes, 2000).

Ongoing work within historical sociology, comparative public policy and political economy has identified the centrality of the `state' within this process of institutional adaptation. Prompted by the growing difficulties of economic and political management after the demise of the post-war settlement, this literature specifically seeks to explain the increasingly complex process of social decision making in the last decades of the twentieth century. The rediscovery of the `state' as a primary analytical variable within political economy is central to these attempts to understand the relationship between `institutions', the economy, the political process and society. In this context, the `state' is recognised as an agent able to structure the institutions of an economy, as well as being subject to the prevailing institutions within broader political economy. This literature synthesises the key insights of the marxist debates of the 1970s, with the neo-Weberian analysis of state subjectivity throughout the 1980s. This framework has been substantially developed throughout the 1990s, particularly through the `new institutionalist' literature (Campbell, 1997; Evans, 1995; Hall, 1989; Hall and Taylor, 1996; Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1996; Skocpol, 1980; Van Den Berg, 1988).