From Union Inspired to Industry Led: How Australian Labour’s Training Reform Experiment Turned Sour

By Tony Brown

Australian labour set out on a grand attempt to restructure vocational education and training in the 1980s and the 1990s.

The reforms were intended to go beyond the scope of previous worker education by aiming at complete systemic change by linking skill development to wages through the award system. This paper locates labour's training reform in the wider program of economic modernization. It argues that unions provided the inspiration for the new system but by the early 1990s has lost the initiative as enterprise bargaining was introduced and as employer associations re-asserted control and established a new training market. That training reform's original expectations were not delivered demands closer attention and analysis. Learning the lessons of this experiment is an essential step for labour in developing a positive agenda for workers' education in the future. Suggestions that sustained advances could be achieved without confronting the issues of ownership and power and by avoiding conflict were fundamentally flawed.

(Journal of Industrial Relations; vol. 48, no 4, September 2006)