Outwork and Restructuring Processes in the Australian Clothing Industry

Abstract

It has been estimated that there may be as many as 60,000 outworkers in the Australian clothing industry, compared to a factory workforce of less than 50,000. These figures are all the more remarkable when one considers the fact that outworking was effectively dismissed as an industrial anachronism in the early twentieth century. The paper examines the international debates which have surrounded the re-emergence of outworking in the 1980s before going on to explore its role in the contemporary Australian clothing industry. Here, the renaissance of outworking is related to specific restructuring processes which are at work in the industry's product and labour markets. In addition to the imperatives of cost-cutting and flexibility-enhancement arising from product market changes, labour market problems such as skill shortages and inter-sectoral wage competition are argued to have been influential in the growth of outworking in Australia. Labour market-related factors have received comparatively little attention in international debates over the re-emergence of outworking.

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