Publications

Flanagan, F 2026, 'A Transition with Teeth: Reconfiguring the Concept of Just Transition to Recognise the Imperative of Fossil Fuel Cessation' in Carr, C & Adams Stein, J (eds), Working Through Planetary Breakdown Labour, Skill and the Changing Climate, Routledge.

Schofield-Georgeson, E & Flanagan, F 2026, 'Ensuring that the Minimum Wage remains a ‘Living’ Wage: perspectives on housing and wage indexation from Australia' in Sychenko, E (ed), Beyond Minimum: Living Wage As a Human Right, Sustainability Factor and Contractual Clause, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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This Chapter outlines the development and implementation of the world’s first ‘living wage’ in late 19th Century Australia through a sophisticated state-led system of compulsory industrywide collective bargaining arbitrated by labour courts, together with a system of wage boards. This largely judicial approach was designed to index wages to worker needs, including the cost of housing. Minimum wage setting processes, pioneered in Australia, were highly influential in the United Kingdom and the United States in the opening decades of the 20th century. As well as charting this influence, the chapter discusses changes in the conceptualisation of the nexus between worker need and wages over time. It argues for the importance of understanding minimum wage setting mechanisms as existing alongside, and co-evolving with, other planning, distribution and price control mechanisms in the twentieth century regulatory state, particularly in relation to housing. We reflect on the limited adaptive capacity of current minimum wage setting mechanisms to recognise and support employee subsistence in the context of highly financialised housing markets since the turn of the twenty-first century and suggest ways in which the system might return to its former role in enshrining a 'living wage' in future.