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Australia: regulate supply-chains to address the health and safety problems of precarious worker
The case of home-based clothing workers
Over the past 20 years the labour market has been significantly refashioned by the increased use of more flexible work arrangements. There is now a substantial and growing body of international evidence that many of these arrangements are associated with a significant deterioration in occupational health and safety. Moreover, there is an emerging body of evidence that these arrangements pose particular problems for conventional regulatory regimes. Recognition of these problems has aroused the concern of policy makers.
The regulatory strategy developed in one Australian jurisdiction (and now being ‘exported’ into others) seeks to counter this process via contractual tracking mechanisms to follow the work, tie in liability and shift overarching legal responsibility to the top of the supply chain. While home-based clothing manufacture represents a very old type of ‘flexible’ work arrangement, it is one that regulators have found especially difficult to address. Further, the elaborate multi-tiered subcontracting and diffuse work locations found in this industry are also characteristic of newer forms of contingent work in other industries (such as some telework) and the regulatory challenges they pose. Thus, should it succeed, this regulatory strategy could serve as a model for intervention in relation to other industries with analogous work.
