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The Neoliberal State and the Gendered Prosecution of Work Injury
Suzanne Jamieson
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Sydney, NSW
Abstract
This paper concerns women workers and their work injuries in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. It explores how the State, through its relevant agencies (in this case, the WorkCover Authority of NSW), implements gender-neutral occupational health safety legislation to prosecute employers who breach their legislative duty to protect the health and safety of women workers.
The paper's findings are based on an examination of work injury prosecution outcomes. The paper finds that the public administration of gender-neutral laws is no guarantee against gendered workplace health outcomes.
Keywords
women workers, work injury prosecution, gender-neutral law, occupational health and safety legislation, State implementation, gendered outcomes
Article Text
The role of the State in pursuing occupational health and safety prosecutions is arguably more contested than ever before in an era of globalised competition and neoliberal political hegemony that influence the behaviour of governments of both political colours across Australia. The role of the State in relation to the degree and nature of regulation itself remains central in an epoch where the dominant rhetoric, if not reality, is one of deregulation (Parker 2002: 12-13). All areas of employment regulation fall within the ambit of this debate and given the centrality of these matters to the lives of workers and the owners/directors of capital, it is no wonder that these debates are as fraught as they are. Indeed there is significant evidence that the very nature of the employment relationship is changing as work itself changes, and that the labour law regimes designed to deal with these matters, which have their roots jointly in nineteenth century statutes directed to Masters and their Servants and the then developing law of contract, can no longer provide appropriate regulatory regimes (McCallum 1998, Stone 2004).
The laws relating to occupational health and safety (OHS) have been rewritten in NSW within the past five years. The state's occupational health and safety is now legally regulated by the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2000 (NSW). The new Act reflects the changing nature of work, work relationships and the falling levels of trade union membership upon which the previous Occupational Health and Safety Act 1983 (NSW) was predicated (Jamieson and Westcott 2001, McCallum 1997). Other reforms in the 1990s saw the removal of the older style factory-style legislation which had provided workplaces with specification standards that could be enforced by the WorkCover inspectorate. The removal of the previous laws from the statute books saw the elimination of all mention of the specific OHS concerns of women workers such as weight limits. This paper does not argue for the return of laws based upon women's difference from men (Minow 1990, Rhode 1989) but that these legislative events signalled the completion of the process by which women workers became invisible to the State (Jamieson 2001). This has significant consequences for women workers in an age in which workers' concerns are increasingly muted by the dominance of neoliberal principles and practices of governance.
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