Anthony O'Donnell's "Inventing Unemployment: Regulating Joblessness in
Twentieth Century Australia" is about to be published by Hart/Bloomsbury.

This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy
across the past 100 years. It poses the question 'How does unemployment
happen?'. But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work
relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so
as to produce something we call 'unemployment'? And how has that changed over
time?

Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories – the 'employed', the
'unemployed', those 'not in the labour force' – are fraught, and do not
always easily correspond with people's working lives. Across the first
decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and
advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with
the problem of which forms of joblessness should be classified as
'unemployment' and which should not. This book traces those debates. It also
chronicles the emergence and consolidation of a specific idea of unemployment
in Australia after the Second World War. It then charts the eventual
unravelling of that idea, and relates that unravelling to the changing ways
of ordering employment relationships.

Bringing together discussion of employment law and unemployment law, this
book will be of interest to labour lawyers and social security scholars
alike.

Available here:
https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/inventing-unemployment-9781509...