Melbourne Law School Centre for Employment
and Labour Relations Law

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Higher Degree by Research

The Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law and its members are active in encouraging and supervising the work of students working towards a research higher degree. Candidates are supervised by a Centre Member and have the opportunity to participate in Centre projects and activities while completing their research. An overview of current research projects in the Centre for is available here.

The Centre welcomes inquiries about the higher degree by research program. Prospective applicants should contact Colin Fenwick with any further queries.

More information about the Faculty's higher degree research program and its requirements is available here.

Current Projects
Completed Projects 

The Legal Precariousness of Casual Employment (Completed 2006)
Joo-Cheong Tham (PhD candidate)

Are casual jobs inferior jobs? A key way this issue is framed in the labour law and industrial relations literature is to ask whether casual employees are legally precarious in the sense of enjoying fewer rights and benefits compared to those conferred upon permanent employees. The answer given by scholars in these fields tends to be 'yes'.

The characterisation of casual employees as legally precarious is, however, problematic because of its underlying legal understanding. Foremost perhaps, it erroneously ascribes a uniform contractual character to casual employment. Moreover, it wrongly presumes that the contractual arrangements under which a casual worker is employed necessarily determine their access to protection and benefits. Further, there has been insufficient appreciation of the complex interaction between various definitions of casual employment.

It is these difficulties that give rise to the principal question for this thesis:
Are casual employees in a legally precarious form of employment in so far as they enjoy fewer rights and benefits compared with those conferred upon ‘permanent’ employees? 

Promotion of Job Creation in Australia: Regulatory Objectives, Instruments, and Law (completed 2004)
John Howe

John Howe’s PhD thesis is an examination of three Commonwealth job creation programs from the perspective of regulatory theory.

In Australia, direct job creation programs represented a key response by the Commonwealth Government to the policy challenge of unemployment between 1974 and the year 2000. The emergence of job creation programs coincided with an evolving debate over the extent and legitimacy of the state’s role in economic regulation, especially in relation to the labour market. Notwithstanding this coincidence, there had previously been no systematic effort to explore the purposes and nature of job creation programs from a regulatory perspective.
 
Using three case studies of job creation programs implemented in Australia, John’s thesis tested propositions that are generated from regulatory theory, a field of scholarship broadly concerned with the relationship between the state, law and society. His research revealed that the programs were important policy initiatives implemented through a complex array of legal and non-legal regulatory techniques. His study improved our understanding of the connection between the regulatory regimes of employment and unemployment.


 


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