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LABOUR REVIEW, 15 JULY 1999

Practices of External Providers of Employee Assistance Programs in Australia

Assessing the Impact of 12-Hour Shifts

ACTU Push to Limit Working Hours

Bargaining: the Year Ahead

Organising: Trade Union Strategy in International Perspective

Violence At Work

World Employment Report 1998-99

Practices of External Providers of Employee Assistance Programs in Australiaby Andrea Kirk

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) have become a common feature of enterprise agreements in the 1990s. Many such services are provided externally and a major concern is ensuring the programs mesh well with in house occupational health and safety management plans. This article is based on a survey of members of the Employee Assistance Professionals of Australia. Few providers have properly developed mechanisms for intergration and their primary function is as counselling services for employees and families.

(Journal of Occupational Health and Safety Australia and New Zealand; vol. 15, no. 3, June 1999)

by L Nelson and P Holland

The emergence of 12 hour shifts appears to stem from the competition of globalisation and the deregulation of the labour market, in which enterprise bargaining has encouraged the development of new work patterns. This study used a qualitative approach in which case studies of ten organisations across a variety of occupations provided data.

(Journal of Occupational Health and Safety Australia and New Zealand; vol. 15, no. 3, June 1999)

ACTU Push to Limit Working Hours

The ACTU has released interim guidelines on overtime and working hours to help employees balance their rest, recreation and family needs. The guidelines point out the health effects and the effects on family and social life of long hours and extended shifts and call for a limit of 12 hours overtime per week, 12 hours work per day, as well as limits on consecutive shifts. These guidlines have been developed in response to the increases in stress and the increase in the length of the average working day.

(Occupational Health and Safety Bulletin; vol. 8, no. 172, 23 June 1999; ACTU OHS Unit)

Bargaining: the Year Ahead

ACIRRT presents a a summary of the current industrial relations situation. Wages have been fairly stable for some time because of:

� A low inflation economy

� Restructuring of the workplace. 70% of workplaces use casuals, on third use outsourced labour and one quarter use agency workers.

� Economic uncertainty is a strong factor despite continued growth according to official statistics

� Employers have dominated bargaining with much emphasis on productivity improvement and offsets for wage rises.

� Unions power has declined and unions pacesetters have backed productivity based agreements

� Fragmentation of the workforce with lower union density, more non union collective agreements and individual agreements (AWAs).

The outlook seems set to be more of the same, but some unions are seeking to increase their relevance be focusing more on non-wage issues (eg the AMWU, CFMEU and the FSU) but there is no co-ordinated shift in union strategy as yet, despite the focus of the ACTU on working time issues.

This issue of the report also contains Peter Reith: his IR Agenda

A summary of the government's proposed changes to the industrial relations system (the second wave)

(IR Intelligence Report; issue 4, 1999)

Organising: Trade Union Strategy in International Perspective

Carla Lipsig-Mumme, of the Centre for Research on Work and Society at York University in Canada, is the author of the URCOT publication The Language of Organising: Trade Union Strategy in International Perspective. In the paper she compares and examines developments in Canada, the USA and Australia. Political, economic and social change have transformed the working and political environments, with a great change in the nature of work and the states reduced willingness to guarantee basic social rights, thought to have been cemented by the post war consensus of a welfare safety net.

This neo-liberalism has had differing impacts on the different sectors of the workforce, undermining solidarity across sectors and further dividing workers across nation borders. Lipsig-Mumme notes that organising is a key word used in the three countries reviewed but the term has differing emphases in each nation state.

She asks, "Can existing unions move beyond their current strategic anachronism and transform themselves sufficiently, creating a new internationalism, integrating it with new organising and anchoring it in the new communities of identity? Or do new unions relying on new points of solidarity, have to be created?

(URCOT Newsletter; no. 3/99, May-June 1999; URCOT monograph, July 1999)

Violence At Work

Duncan Chappell and Vittorio Di Martino have produced a report rich in case study material and strategy guidelines to deal with workplace violence. It highlights best practice and successful methods of prevention and is directed towards government policy makers, employers and trade unions and health and safety professionals.

(Chappell, Duncan and Di Martino, Vittorio; Violence At Work. Geneva: ILO, 1998)

World Employment Report 1998-99

The latest ILO global overview focuses particularly on the role of training and recent efforts to improve training systems against a backdrop of a continuing depressed employment situation and accelerating globalisation. The ILO estimates that between 25 and 30% of the world's labour force of 3 billion people is currently unemployed.

The nature of work is, in many instances, also changing and the changing demand for skills requires the development of highly responsive training systems.

This report focuses on newly industrialising countries and unemployment, the chronically depressed state of African economies and countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Also looks at youth unemployment and the increasing problem of mature workers and unemployment, and the need for continuous skill upgrades and ongoing training.

(International Labour Office. World Employment report 1998-99: Employability in the Global Economy. How Training Matters. Geneva: ILO, 1998)

  View entire issue - print all of the articles!

  Issue 22 contents

»	Workers' Rights Butchered
»	Unions Back Shaw Plan
»	Buddy�s Buddy Still Singing Blues
»	Labour Calls Labor to Account
»	Olympic Gear - Labor Standards Should Apply
»	Ship of Shame into Darling Harbour
»	Cardboard King Seeks Warehouse Showdown
»	Nurses Enter New Years Fray
»	University Under Fire For Union-Busting Tactics
»	Inquiry to Lift the Lid on Public Service Bargaining
»	Currawong Back on Agenda
»	APHEDA Seeks Campaign and Marketting Officer

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Youth Wages Campaign a Must for the Union Movement
»	Cheers for Piers
»	Cheers from Geneva

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