Suchergebnisse

The current Australian Capital Territory (ACT) public sector workplace bargaining round lasted more than two years with most agreements involving a trade‐off between low wage outcomes and protection of job security within performance improvement measures. The main focus of this paper is on government and agency experiments with bargaining structures and processes. The first was a limited and largely unsuccessful attempt in 1998 and 1999 at participative agreement making without the involvement of the key unions. The second, a selective decentralisation of bargaining to parts of a single business, was more successful: of 50 agreements, over 40 have been achieved. The procedural success of the decentralisation strategy is a significant outcome. However, the fragmentation strategy contained internal contradictions and required strong centralised policy control of bargaining agendas and outcomes, leading to delays and breeding distrust. Unions conducted effective defensive campaigns against non‐union agreements and involuntary redundancies, but face their own dilemmas in finalising this round and preparing for the next.

AbstractThis article reprises debates over 'the social construction of skill' (SCS), in the context of the rise of a service economy, and a diminished capacity for collective worker protection of job quality. After exploring the changed conceptual terrain in which the concept of SCS is deployed, it puts the case for recognising under‐documented skills in service jobs. It argues that real (because based on learning) but hitherto uncodified skills are beginning to be mapped in a corpus of interpretative research. A fieldwork‐based conceptual framework is offered for more fully codifying these skills. Such codification may give employers a handle for increased behavioural control, but may also help workers gain recognition and reward for real skills. We identify 'stages of social construction': first, skills' 'detection' and naming in job‐analysis interviews and second, skills recognition in qualifications and job/person descriptions. Increased remuneration and/or work reorganisation through political–institutional processes, driven by the agency of unions and professional organisations, HR departments or even management itself, may follow. The politics of the concepts' development (or not) in academic and policy communities – another facet of the SCS – we eschew here.

Service skill definitions have been over-extended, by equating compliance with skill, and underdeveloped, by not recognising service jobs' invisible social and organisational aspects. Existing approaches to determining service skill levels draw on occupational qualifications and capacity for labour market closure, on knowledge worker/ knowledgeable emotion worker dichotomies, and on the conceptual conflation of labour process deskilling, unskilled jobs and unskilled workers. The theoretical and empirical basis for a new framework identifying hitherto under-specified 'work process skills' is outlined. This framework allows recognition of the integrated use of awareness-shaping, relationship-shaping and coordination skills, at different levels of experience-based complexity, derived from reflexive learning and collective problem-solving in the workplace. Political struggles over the use of combinations and levels of these 'skills of experience' may result either in jobs designed to reduce autonomy, or in improved skill recognition and development, enhancing equity and career paths.

The state sector has led slow progress towards pay and employment equity in Anglophone countries. Horizontal and vertical job segregation have, however, proved intractable barriers to closing the gap fully. An under-researched element of the solution may involve examining whether skill levels are accurately reflected in the low pay and flat career structures of occupations and part-time jobs where women and ethnic minorities are concentrated. This is a public policy issue, requiring that systemic reviews of pay and employment equity include skill reassessments. It has so far been mainly a public administration issue, because of the state sector's vanguard role in equity reviews. Against a backdrop of equality initiatives in the UK and other Anglophone countries, we focus on the pay and employment equity review process in Aotearoa-New Zealand between 2004 and 2008. Here a mainstreaming approach has been adopted, `making gender equity ordinary' by providing tools for reviews of pay and employment opportunity and for remedies such as job re-evaluation. Our focus is on the potential contribution to this agenda of skill reassessments. We outline the research-based development of a toolkit to help classify the under-recognized social and organizational skills required in jobs where women are concentrated, from low-paid `support' roles to policy advice. This skills taxonomy can also help identify the progressive deepening of these skills through problem-solving practice — an identification that may assist in defining career pathways. We conclude with an equity and business case for `mainstreaming' its use.