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The worker and the company

BLT participants: Dr Anthony Forsyth, Paula Darvas, Alice de Jonge, Anne O'Rourke, Carolyn Sutherland, Eu-Jin Teo

Outline

Traditionally, workers have been treated as “outsiders” by company law and the institutions that it has created. Recent corporate collapses and the James Hardie episode have highlighted the vulnerable position of employees within corporate enterprises. To some degree, corporate law has been “stretched” to accommodate employee concerns.

However, Australian corporate governance reforms in the last few years have not resulted in any significant advance in the recognition of employees’ interests. At the same time, trade unions, lawyers and others representing employees have increasingly resorted to corporate law mechanisms (eg “shareholder activism” strategies at company AGMs, attempts to “pierce the corporate veil” to ensure corporate group liability for employee entitlements, etc).

BLT researchers are exploring these developments, in the context of the current Australian legal position relating to the treatment of employees as corporate “actors” (eg employee rights in insolvency); and the corporate governance reform process in the UK, where greater consideration has been given to employees than in the corporate governance debate in Australia.

Several researchers are also focusing on the recent "Work Choices" changes to federal labour laws in Australia, which effect a shift from regulation of workplace relations under the constitutional “labour power” to the “corporations power”. This radical departure from Australia’s traditional conciliation and arbitration system will have profound implications for employers, unions, industrial tribunals and other industrial relations players. It will also place the corporation at the centerpiece of labour regulation for the first time under Australian law.

Current and proposed activities

2006

  • Eu-Jin Teo gave a presentation at the Law Institute of Victoria in relation to a number of the constitutional issues that are raised by the Work Choices amendments to the Workplace Relations Act.
    view presentation (pdf, 114kb)
  • Dr Anthony Forsyth and Professor Stephen Bottomley, ANU, College of Law, have written a  chapter (pdf, 223kb) in "The New Corporate Accountability: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law", to be published by Cambridge University Press.
  • BLT jointly organising "Corporate Governance and Labour Management Workshop" with the Corporate Governance and Workplace Partnerships Project, University of Melbourne Law School.
     December 2006

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Group Director

Anthony Forsyth
Email Anthony Forsyth
Tel: + 61 3 9903-2917

  
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