Enterprise Bargaining and Regional Prospects: The Effects of Rescaling Wage Regulation in Australia

Abstract

This article explores disparities emerging under localized collective (‘enterprise’) bargaining in Australia, and relates these to regional economic prospects. The purpose is to highlight how, driven by a rhetoric of globalization and international competitiveness, the ‘rescaling’ of wage regulation is recasting workers’ well-being and shifting the politics of regional development. This is situated in the context of growing cross-disciplinary dialogue concerning the spatiality of labour (industrial) relations. With the effects of the first decade of enterprise bargaining becoming discernible, the article considers the longer-term influence of increasing wage disparity produced by spatially disaggregated wage setting. The article backgrounds regional economic development in Australia, noting the heritage of a near-century of centralized wage institutions as a possible contributor to the very pronounced metropolitan primacy that has been established in this country. It questions whether increasing geographical wage disparity in Australia will act as a catalyst to rural and regional viability. The challenge for labour is to anticipate, find and create appropriate scales of action that can counter these outcomes.