Industrial Relations Reform and the Small Business Sector

By Jeremy Buultjens and Felicity Orme

Governments and business lobby groups have pushed industrial relations reform as a necessity to help small business.

They claim unions are an unnecessary impediment to their operation. The authors argue that small businesses are unlikely to be major benefiaires of changes to labour regulation. Small business already enjoys a substantial degree of flexibility under the award system, and the costs of decentraling bargaining would outweigh benefits.

(The Drawing Board: an Australian review of public affairs. vol. 3, no. 2, November 2002)