Workchoices and Independent Contractors: The Revolution That Never Happened‪.‬

The contributions that form the centrepiece of this special edition, from Margaret Gardner, Keith Hancock, John Niland and Ron McCallum, offer diverse insights both as to the policy debates that have shaped Australian workplace relations over the past 25 years, and as to the opportunities and challenges that now confront the Rudd Government. But one feature they share is that they have virtually nothing to say about the regulation of work performed outside the confines of the traditional employment relationship. Their focus is unremittingly on employers and employees. From one point of view, this might seem odd. The 'increasing scope of atypical employment arrangements' to which Margaret Gardner alludes has not just been about employees working part-time, or as casuals, or on fixed term contracts, or away from a traditional workplace. It includes a large number of workers who provide their personal labour as 'self-employed' contractors, rather than as employees in the common law sense (Productivity Commission 2006). There has also been a burgeoning awareness, at least in the labour law literature, of the regulatory challenges posed by forms of work that fall outside the conventional categories of employee and contractor, whether performed by volunteers, franchisees, social security recipients, prisoners, and so on (Gahan 2003; O'Donnell and Mitchell 2006).