Bulletin

Issue: March 2006

Research in Action

The market rules – Ok! But what about social justice in a neo-liberal world?

Are justice and equal opportunity in the workplace possible in today’s deregulated labour market brought about by surging neo-liberalism and dominant trans-national corporations?

And if it not, how can Australia regulate to make social justice compatible with market forces?

These are fundamental questions to which Professor Margaret Thornton will seek answers under an ARC-funded Australian Professorial Fellowship.

Professor Thornton, who holds the University’s Richard McGarvie Chair of Socio-Legal Studies, has received $551,000 over five years to ascertain the effects on equal opportunity of market forces, globalisation, free trade agreements and corporate power.

‘As far back as the Whitlam era, Australia began the process of reducing trade barriers to protect Australian industries, a trend accentuated under Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating and now being vastly accelerated under the Howard Government,’ Professor Thornton said.

‘The basic premise is that in order for Australia to compete successfully on the world economic stage, it must change the manner of production and how workers are treated.

‘The political swing from social liberalism to neo-liberalism is profoundly affecting society’s commitment to social justice, for it is the market and capital accumulation that are now extolled. Reliance on the market and “user pays” for everything can produce only inequality between citizens.

‘This view of the world is currently being hastened in Australia by the introduction of the new industrial relations legislation which aims at maximising productivity and profits. Ironically, it runs counter to current government laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace on the ground of race, sex, disability and age.

‘The principles of equal employment opportunity are thwarted by employers’ demands for “flexibility” which have made work precarious and insecure. Not only are wages low, tenure parlous and conditions poor, the workplace may have disintegrated altogether. Equal opportunity now seems to mean being treated equally badly as everyone else!

‘Corporations have enormous power to shape the nature of work the way they want it. Australian governments of all political shades are bowing to the pressure they exert by threatening to move production facilities offshore.

‘In exchange for their business they demand preferential treatment that places them above the law. Free trade agreements, such as that with the USA, want to reduce or do away with worker protections altogether.

‘My project will study the contradictory status of equal opportunity measures including the operation of the anti-discrimination legislation in the context of the ascendency of the market.

‘It will analyse free trade agreements, restructuring trends and new forms of workplace contractualism, as well as discrimination complaints, EEO policies and jurisprudence.

‘I am interested in the study of both the global and the local socio-political factors that go to create an unequal society. The transformation of work has significant gender ramifications, for example, as it does for family relations and the work/life balance.’

Professor Thornton will also look at the situation in the United Kingdom, the European Community, Canada and New Zealand, to consider whether there are ways to staunch growing social inequalities in the light of the paramountcy of market forces.