Part-time Employment, Gender and Employee Participation in Illawarra Workplaces

By Raymond Markey, Jo Kowalczyk and Simon Pomfret

The growth in non-standard employment has major implications for the effectiveness of employee participation mechanisms in the workplace, whether direct or indirect (representative).

Representative forms of participation, such as consultative committees in particular, do not seem as easily accessible to casual or part-time employees. Since the majority of casal and part-time employees are female, women may also be disproportionately excluded from participation by their employment status. However, the literature on participation rarely addresses these major contextual issues. This survey analyses survey data from the Illawarra Regional Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (IRWIRS) to test the hypothesis that part-time employees' access to participatory mechanisms in the workplace is less than that enjoyed by their full-time colleagues, and finds that it is confirmed for the Illawarra region.

(Journal of Industrial Relations; vol. 45, no. 1, March 2003)