The Impact of Changes to Financial Management and Organizational Research Paper

The Impact of Changes to Financial Management and Organizational Culture - Research Paper Example Australian Industrial Relations of collective bargaining coverage too is falling, albeit under a quite different set of circumstances. Let us start with the obvious: Australia is a federation of states and territories. Nolan (1998) has provided a useful perspective of the Australian labour law reforms in the latter half of the last decade of the previous century. His concept was to undertake Australia as a federation and then state by state analyzing the status, of collective bargaining. Multi-employer awards, procured through conciliation and arbitration, at both federal and state level, were historically the primary forms of wage fixing. In 1990 such awards were estimated to cover some 5,652,200 employees – about 80 per cent of the labour force (McCarry, 1998). At the federal level in Australia, enterprise bargaining has been promoted through the Reform Act 1993, amending the Industrial Relations Act 1988 and the Workplace Relations Act 1996. (Patterson, 2001) The 1993 amend ment allowed for certified agreements and enterprise flexibility agreements; the Workplace Relations Act restricted the nature of awards and provided for Australian Workplace Agreements. Both certified agreements and Australian Workplace Agreements can be union-free and individual employment contracts. According to ACIRRT (1999) at this situation level, only New South Wales and Queensland (both underneath industry governments) have promoted legislation painstaking to protect reconciliation and arbitration and multi-employer awards. Victoria has ceded its industrial relations powers to the Federation; Western Australia has adopted a voluntarism system that has spread rapidly.