Labour Hire: A Casual Affair With Work

The labour market in Australia has seen enormous changes over the past three decades. For eighty years there was a standard model of permanent full time work. The years from the end of WWII to the mid 1970s have been accepted by many labour market analysts as the measure of labour conditions. Since that time there have been significant developments in the casualisation of the workforce, with approximately 30 % of the labour force in Australia working in casual employment conditions. A significant part of this casual labour force is employed by labour Hire (LH) firms. LH firms serve many purposes and can be categorised in a number of ways, their principal function is buying and on-selling labour. This paper will examine the use of blue collar LH and accounts of its growth as a part of the historical development of the labour process. LH firms provide employers with various degrees of flexibility and one of the questions to be addressed concerns whether this development represents a strategy inherent in the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. That is, do market forces require alterations to certain societal structures and organisations to enhance the use and introduction of LH into the workplace to provide both flexibility and discipline? A second question to be addressed concerns the future of LH in the context of the implementation of the Howard government’s recently enacted Industrial Relations and Welfare to Work legislation, the emasculation of the Industrial Relations Courts and the Trade Union movement, and the resultant growth in the Reserve Army of Labour. Will the flexible arrangements contained within this legislation ultimately negate or reduce the rationale for LH firms