Regulating State Employment: The Origins and Development of Public Sector Appeal Systems in NSW, 1880-1980

Abstract

The publication of Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital1 sparked renewed interest in contemporary managerial strategies and their origins. Much of the subsequent discussion focused on the evolution of bureaucratic management techniques in private sector firms. Despite contributions by such writers as Patmore and MacDonald,2 our understanding of the development of labour management practices in Australian public sector organisations remains scanty. This is no more evident than in the case of public sector appeal systems which have been a distinctive feature of public sector employment in Australia since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Typically they enable individual workers to challenge management decisions affecting internal labour market opportunities. There has been no research specifically focusing on the evolution of public sector appeal mechanisms3 and broader studies touching on appeal systems have failed to give any comparative or detailed analysis of their development.4 Yet, the history of appeal systems is critical to an understanding of modern personnel practices in state employment and past and present tensions in public sector industrial relations. These include the struggles between parliament and public servants for ultimate control of government employment, between public sector managers and unions over the question of public servants' access to arbitration, as well as the ongoing battle over the prominence of the seniority principle in the internal labour market, an issue at the heart of many union campaigns. The neglect of public sector appeal systems by labour process historians stems partly from their more general neglect of state employment, based on the view that managerial strategies flow from capitalist goals. Several recent studies however, have argued that the differences between public and private organisations are overstated and that public sector managers are subject to much the same efficiency and control imperatives in relation to labour management as private sector managers.5 With some notable exceptions,6 histories of labour management have tended also to treat bureaucratic practices as a set, to which can be ascribed common origins, rather than examining closely the evolution of particular practices. Moreover, research on the state's regulation of dispute settlement has ignored appeal systems arguably because of their involvement in apparently individual rather than collective matters. Studies have therefore concentrated on arbitration systems to the neglect of alternative regulatory forms which both predated the establishment of arbitral mechanisms and have continued to regulate specific areas of public sector employment. Organisational and labour process theorists have explained bureaucratic controls and internal labour markets in terms of the efficiency and control imperatives