Table of Contents
Employment in the public sector has been caught up in the winds of change which have radically reshaped the legal environment for labour relations more generally in the last two decades. It has not been immune from the pressures for change in the private market sector.
In Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand — to name but three jurisdictions which have shared a common approach in the past to employment in the public service, and in the public sector more broadly — legislation and practice has reformed and revised the concepts and structures which govern the employment relationship in the public arena. These changes demonstrate a number of common influences and themes but with several variations in timing and content. There have even been some revisions to new concepts, as governments of various political persuasions come and go in the political cycle and as they adjust and ‘fine tune’ or modify earlier reforms.
The contributions in this book weave together the themes of, and influences on, public sector employment in contemporary Australia, whilst exploring parallels and differences between public sector employment in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, with some discussion of whistleblowers’ legislative protection, including developments in the United States.
This introductory chapter identifies the common threads of these themes and influences which are analysed and emerge in the other chapters. The themes include:
the processes of changing industrial relations and legislative frameworks, both general industrial relations legislation and specific public sector legislation, and the influences exerted by those processes themselves;
the move to individual contracts and more general individualisation in public sector employment, with impact on the rights and obligations of public sector employees and of their government employers;
the trend to outsourcing of functions previously undertaken by government workers and the associated diminution of the size of the public sector;
changes in the nature and approach of the role of government generally;
the influence of general labour market reform on Australian public sector employment relations and changes in the nature of the employees engaged in the public sector in terms of gender and level of education;
the move to decentralised and agency-based bargaining and the problem of the maintenance of centralised control over public servants;
the impact of accountability mechanisms, such as whistleblowers on the public sector, and the role of unions in bargaining; and
parallel influences in some other countries.
Each chapter, then, deals with a separate but linked aspect of employment relations in the contemporary public sector.