Labour Standards, Safety Nets and Minimum Conditions‪.‬

One day in the 1990s, I found myself sitting in a hospital cafeteria with a group of people I had just met. We were eating cheese and tomato sandwiches, drinking terrible coffee and talking about work. The nurses in the group--midwives--were chatting about the challenges and rewards of shift work and delivering babies in their small Tasmanian town. About how scheduled shift times and the arrival of babies did not always mesh. I was in fact in the middle of one of the key processes by which the minimum standards for Australian workers have been fixed for about a century. The cafeteria group consisted of Commissioner Frawley of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC), representatives of nurses and health workers unions (from the Tasmanian branch offices and in my case the union's national office in Melbourne), local shop stewards from within the hospital, midwives, senior nurse managers, hospital management and senior health service industrial relations officials. The Commissioner was 'on inspection': informing himself by direct interviews with workers and managers at their workplaces about the 'dispute' which unions had 'notified' to the AIRC under the then federal Act.