Perfect flexibility? Experimental employment relations at an Australian theme park

Australian employers have sought flexibility in the deployment of labour in two key areas: work practices and working time. While not mutually exclusive, different manifestations of flexibility have customarily been associated with different groups of workers. In this article we present findings that point to the emergence of new composite forms of flexibility that cut across a workforce. We analyse the conditions that are propitious for what we term composite flexibility and how this managerial regime works in one workplace. Our study concludes by finding such employment relations experiments have produced work-time and employment arrangements that are fundamentally at odds with conventional types of employment practices normally associated with large firms in developed economies. Introduction It is almost twenty years since articles on workplace flexibility began to appear in the industrial relations literature. Since the publication of Piore and Sabel’s aptly named Second Industrial Divide, proponents and skeptics have debated the merits and dark side of employment flexibility, while the continuous search for flexibility, nimbleness and leanness has become nothing less than a mantra in corporate circles. 1 This project was part of a wider project undertaken by David Peetz, Andrea Fox and the above authors. We wish to acknowledge that contribution of David, and Andrea to this paper. This project was undertaken with the assistance of ARC Grant C00106852 and The Department of Industrial Relations, Queensland. Research indicates that there has been a clear expansion in this type of work in developed countries throughout Europe (Aparicio et al: 1997: 596; Brewster et al: 1997, De Grip et al: 1997), the USA, Japan and Canada (Quinlan: 1998). In Australia, the marked growth of casual employment has been one of the most pronounced developments in the labour market in the last two decades. The early literature identified different forms of flexibility, which were juxtaposed to the then existing Fordist employment norms. The watchword now became adaptability; “accommodation to ceaseless change, rather than an effort to control it” (Piore and Sabel: 1984, p.17). This implied new relationships between firms, (e.g. networks, alliances, supply chain management) and flowing on from this new relationships between employers and employees, (e.g. sub-contracting, transitions from job control/demarcation to multi-skilling), (Piore and Sabel: 1984, p.204; Castells: 1996; Katz: 1985; Kochan et al: 1986). These tendencies were formalised into a typology of flexibility in two short articles by Atkinson (1984a; 1986), where the notions of functional flexibility, numerical flexibility and financial flexibility were first coined. The latter was portrayed as entailing the development of new institutions and norms for arriving at a renegotiated work-effort bargain. They included such practices as movements away from centralised wage setting bodies and greater reliance upon payment for performance plans (pay for knowledge,