Description
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) Inventing Unemployment: Regulating Joblessness in Twentieth-Century Australia by Anthony ODonnell
This monograph examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy over the past 100 years with strong comparative and historical references to Britain and Canada. It treats unemployment not as a simple economic variable that waxes and wanes according to prevailing economic conditions but as institutionally constructed derived from standardised conventions about how to count it administrative rules about social security eligibility and benefits and prevailing labour law and management practices.It poses the question ‘How does unemployment happen?’ in a specific way: how does theway we regulate work relationships gather statistics and administer a social welfare systemproduce something we call ‘unemployment’ and how has that changed over time? Attempts to divide the labour market into two discrete categories — the ‘employed’ and the ‘unemployed’ — have tended to ignore large numbers of people whose working lives do not allow them to be placed unproblematically in either category. The book traces the emergence and consolidation of this bipolar ordering in Australia after the Second World War as well as its eventual unravelling and relates both to changing ways of ordering employment relationships.