ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three 'moments' in Australian industrial reform. They are the equal pay decisions of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (ACAC), the introduction of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 and the dismantling of the arbitral system. The chapter explores the interaction between the industrial relations regime, the social welfare regime and broader issues of social and economic policy in shaping the current gender settlement in Australia. It examines the role of these forces in first entrenching and subsequently undermining the strong male breadwinner family while retaining the 'unencumbered' worker as normatively given. The chapter argues that while changes in family law, in social welfare law and industrial relations law joined with changing social attitudes in undermining the male breadwinner family as a viable social and economic unit, the organisation of capital and the structure of industrial relations law and policy still take the model of the 'unencumbered citizen' as normatively given.
