호주 노사관계제도의 변화

The changing system of industrial relations in Australia

Although Australia had been not only British colony but also British federal country, the Australian industrial relations has been developed as the compulsory arbitration, which was totally different from the British voluntarism. The Australian compulsory arbitration had been established by a grand compromise between union and management under the circumstance of both the geographical characteristics of “far from England, the world centered nation” and the economic structure. This is why the Australian compulsory arbitration is called “tyranny of distance.” Until the 1950s, the Australian economy had accomplished the full-employment and low inflation and had maintained high GNP level through exports of gold and wool and tariff policy protecting the domestic manufacture. However, Australian economy has shown the structural defect because of the participation of England into EU in the 1960s, the worldwide stagflation and globalization since the 1970s and appearance of Asian New Industrialized Countries. The long-term economic recession transformed Australian economy into the open economy system since the 1980s, brought about the deregulation policy for improving international competitiveness and enabled the reforming industrial relations to be a major issue. The regime change since the 1980s changed the industrial relations system along with the destruction of the compulsory arbitration through a continuous amendment of labor law. In particular, Australian industrial relations showed very complicated changing process and introduced a new system for every amendment. This is because the industrial relations of Australian changed gradually unlike New Zealand which accomplished the Big-bang type reform. This paper attempts to investigate the development of trade union and employer association, the characteristics of the compulsory arbitration and the characteristics of collective bargaining and conflict in terms of a historicaI study of the characteristics of the Australian industrial relations under the compulsory arbitration. And this paper investigates the procedures of such the system changes reforming the Australian industrial relations since the 1980s as the social accord, enterprise bargaining under managed decentralism and coordinated flexibility, and workplace relations reform.