Employment, spillovers and ‘decent work’: Challenging the Productivity Commission’s auto industry narrative

Tom Barnes, Joshua M Roose, Lisa Heap and Bryan S Turner

The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2016, vol. 27, issue 2, 215-230

Abstract: The 2013 and 2014 announcements by major car manufacturers that they would wind down all their remaining Australian automotive operations by 2016/2017 pre-empted the March 2014 release of the Productivity Commission’s final report into motor vehicle manufacturing. The Commission suggested that government subsidies had only delayed car plant closures and reiterated its longstanding opposition to industry policy and redistributive regional adjustment programmes by government. Industrialists, employer associations, state governments and trade unions have, however, questioned the Commission’s forecasts for both economic spillover effects and social impacts in regions affected by automotive plant closures. In addition to challenging several underlying assumptions used to calculate the Productivity Commission’s forecasts, this article argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the quality of future work. It extends insights from previous studies of industrial decline by proposing a new research agenda based on the idea of ‘social spillovers’.

Keywords: Automotive industry; decent work; horizontal and vertical spillovers; manufacturing industry policy; neoliberalism; plant closures; quality of work; regional adjustment; retrenched workers; social spillovers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O14 O38 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1035304616649303 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecolab:v:27:y:2016:i:2:p:215-230

DOI: 10.1177/1035304616649303

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Economic and Labour Relations Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().