ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the developments and to locate them in a historical context by exploring elements of continuity and discontinuity in Australian pay practice. It describes the main contours of temporal and spatial variation and considers the implications for the future of performance pay in twenty-first-century Australia. The chapter provides an overview of the historical development of performance pay in Australia until the mid-1980s. It examines the resurgence of performance pay in the context of an increasingly decentralized system of bargaining. The chapter explores developments in performance pay practices in both private and public sectors. There has been a view that arbitration and national minimum wage setting were antithetical to flexible pay practices. While individual incentives remained to the fore, the postwar years saw a heightened use of group-based pay. The economic recession of 1981-1982 presaged a series of changes that eventually had a dramatic impact on Australian remuneration practice.