Employer associations in a deregulated environment : the case of the Australian Retailers Association

![CDATA[This paper examines the responses of the Australian Retailers' Association to the deregulation of industrial relations. The acceptance of enterprise bargaining both by employers and trade unions in Australia calls into question the ongoing role of employers' associations. This question is nowhere more relevant than in the retail industry, which provides more than 46 per cent of private sector employment in Australia. In the regulated industrial relations environment of the 1970s, the old Association not only coodinated the retail companies' input into industry awards, but also controlled most aspects of the personnel practices of retail companies. Even the large retailers at the time did not have proactive personnel policies; for example, one of the largest retail companies in New South Wales, Grace Brothers, did not employ a Personnel Manager until 1970. Howerver, all of the large retailers now have significant human resource sections and Mortimer's (2001) case study of Woolworths clearly shows the use of an enterprise agreement as a change agent to achieve the organisation's strategic objectives. Further, the rhetoric of dereguation is not limited to large companies as it is suggested that small business will also expand and achieve structural efficiencies as it is able to tailor (or contain) labour costs. The way in which the Australian Retailers' Association has redifined its role in response to changing conditions is examined and assessed in the context of evidence from large and small retail businesses (Mortimer, 2001; Mortimer, Whiting and Bond, 2001) and in relation to the responses to change of other employers' associations (Mortimer, Still and Bond, 2002). The paper concludes that the ARA has been successful in redefining a meaningful role for itself in the contemporary industrial relations system.]]