Regulating for Job Quality? Wages and Working Time Under Australian Labour Law

Abstract

Although the term ‘job quality’ is not known to Australian law in any formal or technical sense, there are various ways in which labour regulation in Australia can be seen to have embraced the idea. These include the richly textured way in which industrial tribunals came to regulate minimum wages and working time, under the conciliation and arbitration systems that operated for most of the twentieth century. We trace the evolution of Australian law in relation to these and other aspects of labour regulation, concluding by charting some of the ways in which the current Fair Work Act 2009 constructs and creates notions of job quality.