Labour Regulation and Casual Work in Australia

This paper examines the history of ‘casual’ work in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present.  It explores the way in which the consolidation of protective labour regulation in the twentieth century, structured around a norm of full-time ongoing work (SER), still preserved space for a category of casual work.  This space has been enthusiastically colonised by employers in several industries, initially small employers in the low-wage service sector, but then more widely throughout the economy.  This in turn functioned as a lever for broader demands for labour deregulation and increased labour flexibility. The result has been an expansion of precarious work in a diverse range of forms, within the framework of a markedly fragmented employment structure and a porous regulatory regime.  The paper looks in particular at the implications of the expansion of casualised part-time work, based predominantly on the labour of students and married women, in the retail sector.  It examines employer labour-use practices and trade union responses, focusing on the period from the 1980s.