The end of the post-World War II 'long boom' in the mid-1970s proved the beginning of a process of political-economic change that has fundamentally transformed labour law, both in Australia and across the developed world more generally. This is a phenomenon with deep ramifications for social justice. The dissolution of productive industry, the fragmentation of employment categories, the rise of profound employment precarity and an increasingly hostile legal environment for trade unionism have been of immense significance for key social justice issues, including income inequality, the rise of a new working-underclass, and the marginalization of organised labour. By combining the concepts of the Parisian Regulation Approach with an explicitly Marxist jurisprudence, this study offers a theoretically rigorous yet empirically sensitive account of legal transition, with key case studies in the metal, food processing and retail sectors. Given the similar development logic of post-World War II capitalism in Western societies, this theory, although operationalised in the Australian context, can be used in the effort to explain labour law change more broadly.

This book is an original contribution to literary geography and commentaries on the work of David Ireland. It plots the relationship between the spaces and places of 1970s Australian capitalism as it evolves through Ireland's 1971 Miles Franklin prize-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. In particular, the book theorises the relationship between space and place in literature through two highly innovative arguments: a focus on the spatial unconscious as a means to assess and track the spatiality of capitalism in the novel form; and the articulation of a regime of space through the perceived, conceived and lived constitution of space. Drawing together concepts from radical geography and structural Marxist literary theory, it explores the dominance of the regime of abstract space in the Australian context. The text also examines the nature and possibilities of place-based strategies of resistance, and concludes by suggesting opportunities for future research and plotting the ways in which The Unknown Industrial Prisoner continues to speak to contemporary Australia.

The end of the post-World War II 'long boom' in the mid-1970s proved the beginning of a process of political-economic change that has fundamentally transformed labour law, both in Australia and across the developed world more generally. This is a phenomenon with deep ramifications for social justice. The dissolution of productive industry, the fragmentation of employment categories, the rise of profound employment precarity and an increasingly hostile legal environment for trade unionism have been of immense significance for key social justice issues, including income inequality, the rise of a new working-underclass, and the marginalization of organised labour. By combining the concepts of the Parisian Regulation Approach with an explicitly Marxist jurisprudence, this study offers a theoretically rigorous yet empirically sensitive account of legal transition, with key case studies in the metal, food processing and retail sectors. Given the similar development logic of post-World War II capitalism in Western societies, this theory, although operationalised in the Australian context, can be used in the effort to explain labour law change more broadly.