Union Organising with ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Industrial Relations Actors: Sex Workers in Australia and the United States

With the recognition of significant decline of both labour union influence and the pervasiveness of joint union-employer regulation of the employment relationship in advanced economies, recent research in industrial relations has emphasised the importance of studying so-called ‘new actors’ (see, for example, British Journal of Industrial Relations (2006), Weil (2005a) and work on citizen advice bureaux in Britain (Abbott 2004) and worker centres in the US (Fine 2006, 2007a)). ‘New industrial relations actors’ are broadly defined as government and quasi-government regulatory organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which are, in turn, neither bodies of labour unions nor employers. The subtext to the recent interest in these ‘new actors’ is that they have emerged to try to fill some of the void left as a result of the decline of the reach of labour unionism and joint employment regulation. Another related subtext concerns whether such traditional institutions of labour market regulation are capable of being ‘fit for purpose’ in the ‘new’ environment of deregulation and globalisation, where new working patterns and forms of employment have emerged. Within these studies and commentaries, there is some debate about whether labour unions can use these intermediaries as surrogates and whether these ‘new actors’ signal a further step towards the continuing historical diminution of labour unionism.