'Non-Standard’ Workers in Australia: Counts and Controversies

By Anthony O’Donnell

The growing interest in what lawyers and academics call non-standard or atypical employment arrangements is fuelled by the fact that such arrangements are accounting for a greater and greater share of the forms of employment.

Thus labour law is failing to offer its traditional protections to an increasing number of workers. This paper looks at data produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and their version of non-standard arrangements, the "criticism" of their definitions by the Productivity Cmn and other analyses of non-standard employment, and concludes with a suggested framework for understanding non-standard work in Australia.

(Australian Journal of Labour Law. vol. 17, no. 1, May 2004)