A view from the bench - 1951 State Basic Wage Meeting at the Hyde Park Barracks

'Unions and Finance: The US in Comparative Perspective'

As in other parts of the world, US unions have for many years tried to leverage their influence via strategic use of pension funds. This talk is a brief overview of the situation in the US with some comparisons to Europe and Japan

BLHG Seminar

The Board Room, Level 2, Faculty of Economics and Business, H69

12pm - 1pm, Wednesday 9 December, 2009

Professor Sanford Jacoby, UCLA

A light lunch is provided. Please RSVP*

Sanford M. Jacoby is the Howard Noble Professor in UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. He also holds appointments in UCLA’s Department of History and its Department of Public Policy. His research uses comparative and historical methods to analyse employers, labour market institutions, and the political economy of labour and corporate governance.

Jacoby’s first book was Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1985, 2004), which won the George Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management. In 1997 he published Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal, which received the Philip Taft Labour History Award. His most recent book is The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States (2005), the Japanese translation of which was judged by Nikkei Shinbun to be one of the top three books on economics and management published in 2005. He edited two collections: Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Employers (1991) and The Workers of Nations: Industrial Relations in a Global Economy (1995).

His research also has appeared in leading journals in several fields, including economics, history, industrial relations, and law.  He is co-editor of Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal and serves on the editorial boards of eleven scholarly journals in the United States and abroad. In recent years Jacoby has been a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Manchester.

Jacoby’s Guggenheim project studies the reaction of labour movements to financialization in several industrialized nations.  It focuses on pension fund activism, regulatory efforts, and corporate governance. Preliminary research was supported by UCLA, Doshisha University, and Waseda University’s Institute for Advanced Study.

All are very welcome to attend

* NOTE: As a light lunch is provided, please RSVP to blhg@econ.usyd.edu.au by close of business on Friday 4 December so we can finalise numbers for catering.

'Industrial language making and gender: considering the history of nicknaming in the NSW Railways'

BLHG Seminar Series

The Board Room, Level 2, H69 - Faculty of Economics and Business

12pm - 1.00pm, Wednesday 11 November, 2009

Professor Lucy Taksa, Macquarie University

A light lunch is provided. Please RSVP*

Professor Lucy Taksa was appointed Head of the Department of Business in the Faculty of Business and Economics at Macquarie University in August 2009. She has been Chair of the Board of State Records NSW since 2007 and is President of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. She was a non-judicial member of the Equal Opportunity Division of the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal (and its predecessors) between 1996 and 2007 and of the Legal Services Division between 2003 and 2007.

Lucy is currently on the Editorial Boards of Labour History, the Journal of Transport History, International Review of Social History, Economic and Labour Relations Review, and Problems & Perspectives in Management. She has published on the management, labour and Occupational Health and Safety history; workplace culture and labour politics; gender and technological change; adult, technical and management education; migrant workers, EEO and diversity management; and the management and interpretation of industrial heritage. Her current research interests include: humour and traditional masculine workplace culture; women and leadership; and the impact of the new liberal agenda on tertiary education.

All are very welcome to attend.

* Please RSVP blhg@econ.usyd.edu.au by close of business on Friday 6 November so we can finalise numbers for catering.

Academic Association of Historians in Australian and New Zealand Business Schools (AAHANZBS)

Inaugural Conference

The Women's College, The University of Sydney

14-15 December 2009

Conference Organiser - Greg Patmore

The inaugural conference of AAHANZBS will provide an opportunity for researchers to present papers across the wide range of interests covered by the Association. We are interested in focussing on three themes:-

  1. The role of historical research in developing theoretical perspectives in business and management;

  2. How historical research aids our understanding of contemporary issues in business and management; and

  3. Teaching history in business and management schools.

Other highlights of the conference include a keynote address by Sandy Jacoby (UCLA) and a workshop for postgraduate research students. Full registration details will be forthcoming.

The symposium is organised by the Business and Labour History Group, Faculty of Economics and Business, The University of Sydney on behalf of the AAHANZBS and we acknowledge the financial support of the Faculty of Economics and Business, The University of Sydney.

All enquiries regarding the conference, should be addressed to the conference organiser at g.patmore@econ.usyd.edu.au

Forthcoming Conference Announcement

The Italian and Australian Cooperative Sectors - The Past, Present and Future

15, 16 and 17 February 2010

The University of Sydney's Labour and History Group has been instrumental in securing Italian academics from the University of Trento and the European Research Institute for Cooperatives and Social Enterprises to engage in a three year research project linking Australia and Italy. This will compare the cooperative movements in both countries - and will research key factors leading to a successful cooperative sector and also the factors that inhibit a cooperative sector.

The research programme will start with a three day symposium at the Sydney University Village entitled - "The Italian and Australian Cooperative Sectors - The Past, Present and Future". The three day symposium will feature the latest theoretical and empirical work on cooperatives from Professor Carlo Borzaga and Dr Ermanno Tortia from the University of Trento.

The key theme of the Symposium is to compare the research in Italy and Australia in four cooperative sectors - the retail sector, credit union sector, worker and indigenous cooperative areas - and define areas for the future research of the project. Professor Greg Patmore, Dr.Leanne Cutcher, Dr Nikola Balnave and Anthony Jensen will present papers.

The Symposium will be part of full week of activities in Sydney. Following the Symposium, the Co-operative Federation of NSW will hold a two day Cooperative Opportunities Conference at the same venue and will devote some time to developing these themes from a practical perspective.

The aim of the week is to start a discussion and research project on how the cooperative sector can achieve its potential in Australia in a world defined by a new set of economic, social and environmental parameters.

A conference registration form and a programme outline will be posted in the near future.

For further details please contact Greg Patmore on g.patmore@econ.usyd.edu.au.

The Australian Settlement and the Fisher Government

Conference, University of Sydney,

30 April 2010

Call for Papers

Conference convenors:

Mark Hearn, Modern History, Macquarie University; Nick Dyrenfurth & Harry Knowles, Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney.

Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be submitted by 12 February 2010 to: N.Dyrenfurth@econ.usyd.edu.au

This conference is supported by the Business and Labour History Group, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Sydney.

The Australian Settlement and the Fisher Government Conference

In April 1910, Andrew Fisher, the Scottish-born former child miner, led the Australian Labor Party to a sweeping victory at the fourth federal election held since federation. By virtue of its double majorities in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, Labor became the first social democratic party to hold office in its own right anywhere in the world. This one-day conference marks the 100th anniversary of this momentous achievement and seeks to analyse the record of the second Fisher government (1910-13), locate its ideological tenor and establish its place in Australian political history.

The scholarly brief of this conference requires a broad focus, to explore both the achievements of the Fisher Government, and its place in the development of the liberal post-Federation nation-building project. The ‘Australian Settlement’ is a term that has come to describe the project enacted by the Commonwealth Parliament before the First World War, with Labor’s support. The legislative program of the Australian Settlement included: tariff protection of Australian industry, the ‘White Australia’ restriction of non-white immigrants and compulsory industrial arbitration, initiatives that sought to develop Australian society within a liberal democratic framework.

Recent research has called for a more critical and wider understanding of the Settlement. This conference provides an opportunity to draw together new research into the more complex and contingent dimensions of the Settlement and the Labor Party’s relationship with it. Issues to be addressed include: the role of organised labour, and the relationship between liberalism and labour movement ideology; the terms of citizenship offered by a gendered and racially exclusionist settlement; the role of defence policy; the nature of Australian liberal governance, and the transnational context of nation building.