Underemployment is defined as working less than 35 hours in a given week and preferring to work more paid hours. In Australia, underemployment is well above the OECD average (OECD Employment Outlook 2010), is more widespread than unemployment and is prevalent amongst women, the young and unskilled. Most experiences of underemployment are temporary, but up...

This Positioning Paper introduces a research project that aims to provide an Australia-wide analysis of the consequences of underemployment for housing security. It explores the connection between an increasingly important but problematic feature of contemporary labour markets (underemployment) and a crucial dimension of housing research and policy (housing security).

Balancing work and family responsibilities is an increasingly significant concern not only for individual employees, their families and the broader community, but also for government and local communities. However little attention has been paid to the different ways in which constraints and opportunities for work and family balance operate across industry in regional and rural...

Robyn May, Iain Campbell and John Burgess argue that the Coalition government's next round of industrial relations reform will create further opportunities for employers to 'casualise' jobs. This is one of a series of papers analysing the Howard government's proposed changes to Australia's industrial relations laws, written by seventeen academic researchers in the fields of...

In this submission to the Federal Parliamentary inquiry on the work and family life balance, lain Campbell and Sara Charlesworth focus on the second term of reference, relating to measures to assist parents who wish to return to the paid workforce. They trace the changing size and composition of the paid workforce and the changes...