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Climate change is most directly felt by people who cannot escape its impacts, including workers whose source of livelihood may put them directly at risk from high heat. Research on these impacts for Australian workers, especially the sociopolitical determinants of effective workplace heat management, remains limited. This article presents findings from a national research project that investigated these issues in collaboration with the Australia-based United Workers Union. It reports on the experiences of members exposed to high heat, explores how they address heat stress and how they relate this to climate change. The article expands understanding of the impacts of workplace heat, especially for indoor workers and those in lower paid jobs, through a focus on how workers articulate their experiences and understand and exercise their agency at work.

The experiences of academics with disability have received modest but growing attention internationally, but virtually none in the Australian context. This article outlines research findings from a study examining their experiences at a large Australian university. The article uses a materialist framework to demonstrate how capitalist social relations shape and demarcate an ‘ideal university worker’, how disabled workers find it difficult to meet this norm, and the limited assistance to do so provided by managers and labour relations policy frameworks. The research findings point to a profound policy gap between employer and government disability policy inclusion frameworks and the workplace experience of academics. This breach requires further investigation and, potentially, the development of alternate strategies for workplace management of disabilities if there are to be inroads towards equity.

This paper examines climatic heat stress as a question of workplace health and safety in relation to at-risk and precarious labour. First, we argue that precarity is usefully understood as a phenomenon that is both generalised (all work is precarious given the function of labour under capitalism) and differentiated (experienced differently across geography, labour process and employment status). We frame climate change and labour relations as internally related and argue that climate change needs to be incorporated into the notion of precarity. Second, we explore the experience of construction workers in New South Wales, Australia, and consider the industry as a potential site of organising over both labour conditions and global warming. We conclude that climate change exacerbates precariousness, disrupting all work and intensifying and extending individual risk in various ways. Further, these experiences present a potential site to simultaneously act on both global warming and labour conditions.

On 15 October 1970 in Melbourne, Australia, a span of the West Gate Bridge fell during construction, killing 35 employees. The subsequent Royal Commission Report into the causes of the collapse cited a number of problems with the erection of the steel structure, including poor engineering practices, design flaws, and fragmented management oversight. The report also suggested that industrial action had contributed to the disaster by unduly extending the construction period. In the concluding words of the commissioners, it was argued that ‘the unions and men must bear their share of responsibility for the tragedy that ensued’. Surprisingly, the case study provided by the West Gate Bridge collapse has been little studied outside the engineering discipline but, on the basis of this research, we argue that it raises important considerations for scholars of work organisation and safety today. Using Quinlan’s (2014) ‘ten pathways’ analysis, this chapter examines the contributory factors that led to the West Gate Bridge disaster, including the contested place of health and safety inspection and union influence at this work site.

© 2018, © The Author(s) 2018. Given recent calls for a new social contract between the unions and government, it is timely to consider the relationship of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) prices and incomes Accord (1983–97) to the construction of neoliberalism in Australia. Contrary to most scholarly accounts, which posit the ALP and ACTU prices and incomes Accord and neoliberalism as exogenously related or competing processes, this article argues they were internally related aspects of economic transformation. The implementation of the Accord agreement deepened Australia’s existing corporatist arrangements while simultaneously advancing neoliberalism within a highly structured political-economic framework.

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Numerous scholars have identified the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ as the key driver of the neoliberal transformation. These accounts emphasize the building of neoliberal hegemony through the mobilization of this collective, and the New Right parties who aligned to these ideas. We argue that Australia's corporatist road to neoliberalism pushes against this thesis, as the movement found little sympathy among policy makers. Rather, the thought collective acted more like a ‘ginger group’, attempting to radicalize public debate and create space for new neoliberal arrangements. In Australia, successive centre-left Labor governments rolled out neoliberalism in a series of formal corporatist arrangements with the trade union movement. This paper sets out a reconsideration of the role of the thought collective, on the basis of the Australian experience, and argues this can move us beyond the ideational determinism that has come to characterize key accounts of how neoliberalism developed.

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form and implementation of the neoliberal policy revolution, positing neoliberalism in its vanguard period as a project implemented by governments of the New Right, imposed coercively on civil society by state elites and only subsequently adopted by social democratic parties. In such accounts, labour is typically posited as the object and victim of neoliberalising processes. In contrast, this article focuses upon the active role of labour within the development of neoliberalism. The period of social democratic government in Australia (1983–1996) is used as a case study to illuminate labour’s active role in constructing neoliberalism. Indicative evidence from the USA and UK is then presented to argue that the agency of labour can usefully be ‘written in’ to the presently dominant narrative regarding the rise of neoliberalism to provide a more satisfactory account of its nature and resilience over time.

This article traces a line of theorisation regarding the state-civil society relationship, from Marx’s early writings to Gramsci’s conception of the integral state. The article argues that Marx developed, through his critique of Hegel, a valuable understanding of the state-civil society connection that emphasised the antagonism between them in capitalist societies. Alternatively, Gramsci’s conception of the ‘integral state’ posits an interconnection and dialectical unity of the state and civil society, where the latter is integrated under the leadership of the former. The article argues that while Marx and Gramsci’s positions are, at first, seemingly incongruous ideas – as to the ‘separation’ in Marx and ‘integration’ in Gramsci – this tension can be bridged when the integral state is understood as being always necessarily unstable. The article argues that this framework can help us understand the contemporary breakdown of political rule in the phenomenon known as ‘anti-politics’.

© 2018, © The Author(s) 2018. Despite the impact of global economic crises and, more recently, the international shockwave of populism, neoliberalism persists as a framework for policies, policymakers and social orders. In Australia, debate about neoliberalism was largely initiated by the publication of Economic Rationalism in Canberra in 1991. This special section of the Journal of Sociology has been compiled to mark the impact of this seminal text over the past quarter of a century. The contributions to this section outline the evolution and transformative impact of neoliberalism locally and globally, and especially highlight current work by early-career researchers in Australia. As well as acknowledging competing interpretations of neoliberalism, this introduction summarises emerging scholarship in economic sociology by focusing on: the rhetoric of policymaking; the rollout of neoliberal policies in Australia and comparisons with international experiences; the impact of neoliberalism on social movements and social activism; and its ongoing role as a frame of reference for everyday work and life.

The ‘s11’ protest in Melbourne in 2000 saw 20,000 demonstrators successfully blockade the Asia-Pacific Summit of the World Economic Forum and led to the cohering of the Global Justice Movement (GJM) in Australia. The 9/11 attacks, a year later to the day, halted that momentum and seemingly caused movement crisis and retreat. While some accounts, such as the Wall Street Journal's editorial ‘Adieu Seattle?’, argued the ‘global security crisis’ trumped movement claims and strategy, the experience of activists in Australia is better conceptualised as rearticulation and realignment in response to elite hegemonic practices. This article argues that 9/11 was not the cause of movement collapse in Australia, but that its consequences exacerbated internal movement weaknesses. Further, it argues that despite the return of anti-systemic movements — in the form of the Indignados and Occupy movements in particular — the global justice frame has remained weak in Australia. La protesta ‘S11’ en Melbourne en 2000 vio a 20...

© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. All rights are reserved. This paper re-evaluates Frank Stilwell's still unmatched, detailed intellectual engagement with the Australian Labor Party and Australian Council of Trade Union's Accord. Stilwell's was an indispensible critique of the Accord's failure to fulfil expectations that it would provide a political-economic solution to both the economic crisis that ended the long boom, and the Left's resulting impasse. Stilwell's key contribution was to pose sharply the necessity of a political response to the crisis-of the economy, politics and the Left-when competing radical (including Marxist) analyses failed to respond to this challenge adequately. From this recognition, the analysis asks how we might extend Stilwell's work on the Accord from the vantage point of today's (post)-neoliberal era. It seeks to open up the question of the state in relation to the Accord, and to consider how progressive and working class movements related to it. The chapter proceeds from analysis that there was a protracted assimilation of the unions and labour into capitalist state imperatives via the Accord. Furthermore, that this incorporation into a hegemonic state project cannot be separated from the implementation of neoliberalism in Australia-a process ultimately counter to the interests of labour and which contributed to the political defeat of the working class movement.