INTRODUCTION

This paper focuses on 3 current trends occurring in the Australian labour market, analysing their causes and effects. The chosen trends are structural unemployment, gender pay gap and skill shortage. The main causes of the first trend are increase demand for services and technological change, which have led us into a new era where highly skilled labour force is needed to operate more complex machineries and computer systems. The rapid technological change has caused structural unemployment, with workers willing to work but cannot because of their lack of required skills. The second trend, gender pay gap, illustrates how wide the pay gap between males and females is until today. The main causes of this current direction …show more content…

One of the biggest obstacles to gender equality in Australian workplaces is the stereotype of the male brad-winner employed in a full-time job. It is an obstacle that restrains opportunities for female promotion, better pay and career maturation because it obstructs women rewarding work while disregards non-professional activities. Further, by tradition some low remunerated professions and fields like teaching, nursing and service industries such as retail and hospitality, are predominantly chosen and dominated by females, and that has meant drawing evident gender lines in the Australian labour market. These factors have encouraged unfairness in woman’s and man’s salary and working environment. Smith (2003) points out that females do have restrained bargaining power, delimited right of entry to bargaining structures and very little way in to over-award salaries because of their segregation into low paid jobs and fields. Australian tradition has seen female workers relying on minimum salaries and work settings provided by the award arrangements. Van Gellecum et al. (2008) states that more recently, however, awards have been downgraded to ‘safety net’ level, and they can no more be depending on delimiting gender wage dissimilarities. The appearance of non-union collective agreements as part of the enterprise bargaining has contributed to the broadening of gender pay gaps. These kind of protocols endangered female worker because of the lower union