INDIVIDUAL AGREEMENT-AWAKING IN AUSTRALIAN WORKPLACES: INCIDENCE, TRENDS AND FEATURES

There appears to be a growing consensus that employment arrangements in Australia are becoming increasingly ’individualised’. According to Deery and vValsh (1998), this trend towards individualisation is reflected in declining levels of award coverage, falling rates of trade union membership, and changing employment practices (including, for example, greater use of performance-based pay, individual appraisal systems, and mechanisms for direct communica-tion with employees), and has been fostered by legislative change, which has created much greater scope for employers to introduce individually negotiated employment agreements to supplement and/or replace award conditions. Fur-ther, there is evidence, at least in recent years, of a shift away from conventional employment arrangements towards greater reliance on contractors (Wooden 1999). While use of contract labour need not necessarily involve agreements negotiated directly with individual workers, it is clear that in many instances the hiring arrangements are based on direct contracts for service between the hiring organisation and individual workers. Despite suspicions that individualisation is assuming greater prominence, there is a dearth of reliable quantitative data on the incidence of individual agreements, the types of firms that introduce them, the reasons why they do so