Work/Family Conflict and Australian Labour Law
| Centre Members: | A. Chapman |
There is now a considerable body of Australian and overseas literature on the issue of work and family conflict, as it has become known. Much of the Australian scholarship seeks to understand this problem as being the product of developments in work organisation, the labour market and employment relations over the past 30 years or so. Feminist scholarship has much to offer to our understanding of poor work and family outcomes. This literature reveals the ways in which market work in many Western countries is organised around a normative, or ideal, worker. Most accounts interpret this ideal worker as developing from a (male) breadwinner / (female) housekeeper model of work and family, dominant in many Western societies for more than one hundred years.
In Australia, close attention has not been paid to the role played by legal regulation in producing this normative subject of the labour market. This project examines the role of Australian labour law in producing an ideal worker in a form that is inimical to better work and family outcomes.
This project is being undertaken by Anna Chapman as part of her doctoral studies in the Centre for Socio-Legal Research, School of Law, Griffith University. The doctorate is being supervised by Centre Associates, Professor Richard Johnstone and Professor Rosemary Hunter.
A number of papers and draft manuscripts were prepared in 2004, including two conference papers and a book chapter for an edited collection to be published by Oxford University Press (in 2005). In addition, in 2004 Anna Chapman collaborated with colleagues in the Management Faculties at Monash University and Griffith University to undertake an examination of sole parents in the labour market. This work resulted in a conference paper and an article forthcoming in the International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations (2005).