Call for Abstracts
A Special Stream in the 26th Annual Conference of the Association of Industrial
Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, February 8-10 2012.
Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Equality Bargaining in Australia
Convenors: Sue Williamson (S.Williamson@econ.usyd.edu.au), Marian Baird, and Rae
Cooper
Researchers examining equality bargaining have considered how a wide range of equality
provisions are negotiated into collective workplace agreements. These include entitlements
for specific population groups, such as gay and lesbian employees or indigenous employees,
as well as a range of provisions to progress gender equality, including family provisions such
as paid parental leave, domestic violence leave and pay equity audits. This stream calls for
contributors to examine the practice as well as the theories of equality bargaining in the
context of collective workplace bargaining in Australia.
Contributions are welcome which examine bargaining processes, such as the way in which
equality provisions are included in unions’ claims; how equality items are negotiated,
including whether equality items are traded off for other items, and how equality items come
to be incorporated into final collective agreements. Contributions examining the impact of
wider contextual factors on bargaining for gender equality are also welcome, such as the
effect of gender in terms of union leadership or workplace negotiators, and the prospects of
the Fair Work Act and other regulatory regimes for promoting equality bargaining.
500 word abstracts are to be submitted by 1 December 2011. Please submit papers via
the Authors’ Centre on the conference website.
For more information about the conference and authors’ guidelines etc see
http://www.aomevents.com/AIRAANZ2012