Acumen

The trade union movement’s push to reform Australia’s enterprise bargaining system looks set to be a major issue at this week’s Jobs and Skills Summit.

The role of the city is changing. To find out how, we surveyed more than 2,000 Victorians living in Melbourne, its suburbs and regional centres in April 2022.

With the world experiencing inflation levels not seen since the 1980s, central banks are caught between warning of the dangers of an 1970s-style inflationary spiral, and contributing to that spiral by talking about it.

On August 9 2022, Australia’s COVIDSafe app was officially decommissioned, and all its features removed. People were encouraged to uninstall the app. Reports of its closure have made international news.

Unemployment is on the way down. Cost of living and interest rates are on the way up. And employers are desperate for staff. So what exactly is going on with the Australian economy?

Despite the escalating environmental crisis, with its impacts on human rights and ecological communities, both states and corporations have rigidly clung to capitalist principles of extraction and unlimited growth. This has led to the resurrection of the concept of ecocide as a means to prevent and punish the destruction of the environment.

Since the 24th of February 2022, when Russia, on the orders of Vladimir Putin, began a large-scale military attack on Ukraine, we have been witnessing that over 1,000 companies from different industries have publicly announced they are voluntarily curtailing operations in Russia (Yale School of Management 2022). On the 19th of May 2022, we organised the Panel with the internationally recognised experts in different fields of knowledge and disciplines, all of which in various ways relate to corporate political responsibility – a concept that views companies as political actors that have human rights-related duties.

Remedy is rare for victims of corporate human rights abuses through judicial mechanisms. To address this gap, the authoritative text dealing with issues pertaining to business and human rights, The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, included principles endorsing the use of non-judicial mechanisms to resolve human rights claims.

In the past decade, the conditions experienced by Qatar’s migrant workers have dramatically improved. While these reforms owe much to the international legal system, they also expose some of the system’s weaknesses. Nevertheless, the widespread outrage concerning the rights of migrant workers in Qatar would likely have fallen on deaf ears without the efforts of international legal

On Monday 30th May Crown Casino made global news headlines when it was fined AU$80m for illegally accepting Chinese bank cards at the Melbourne Casino.

Intimate partner aggression (IPA) is a prevalent human rights and social issue generally perceived as a private domestic matter. In reality, though, IPA affects and harms many aspects of its victims’ lives, including their work

The way a patient experiences their journey of care through the health system is critically important not only to the quality of life for the individual involved, but also the effectiveness, cost and community support for the care system that delivered it.

On 7 April 2022 the RMIT Digital CBD research team released a report proposing DAO pilots for Melbourne. In short, for ten years we have spoken about smart cities as public-private partnerships (PPP). Say between Cisco or IBM and the city of Melbourne. Today DAOs can offer non-hierarchical data governance models.

As a large number of retail investors rushed into financial markets during the pandemic, finfluencers have also enjoyed growing popularity in Australia. Finfluencers talk about investment trends and options on social media and there are ongoing concerns that they may mislead novice investors. Finfluencers have just received a wake up call from ASIC, which is likely to bring some of their business to an end.

Unlike children, adolescents take control over what they eat and how they spend their money. To remain healthy, they have to exercise self-control – forego the immediate pleasure of high-calorie foods for the prospect of being healthy in the future. These eating habits, established early on in life, tend to stay with individuals later on in their lives, contributing to the obesity epidemic. In Australia, one in four children (25%) are overweight or obese and it is predicted to increate to one in three by 2025.

As social restrictions have eased, many businesses have already had, or are now starting to have, conversations with their people about returning to the workplace. However, it’s unlikely that we will be returning to what we were used to prior to the wave of lockdowns.

Two of Netflix’s top trending series, Inventing Anna and The Tinder Swindler retell the true stories of convicted con artists, who fleeced their victims through the well-established ruse of presenting as members of high society.

The current organising drive at Starbucks stores across the USA illustrates both the difficulty for unions in countering the power of multinational companies – and, more importantly, the momentum that can be generated when workers decide they want to contest that power through collective action.

Australia is once again falling short of its international obligations - this time with respect to the Optional Protocol Against the Prevention of Torture (OPCAT).

Some of the worst human rights conditions globally are found in Rajasthan’s stone quarries. In 2013, our team conducted fieldwork in this very dry, rocky and mineral rich state of India. Since then, the UK and Australia have enacted Modern Slavery Acts. In an article in the Journal of Industrial Relations co-authored with Dr Tim Connor and Associate Professor Fiona Haines, we explored whether the legislation will help the workers we interviewed.