‘Invisible Threads’: Homeworking, Labour-Market Relations, and Industrial Restructuring in the Australian Clothing Trade

By way of an examination of the contemporary reemergence of homeworking in the Australian clothing industry, some of the links between industrial and labour-market restructuring are explored. The growth of homeworking reflects not only the pressures placed on clothing firms to reduce costs and enhance production flexibility (increasingly, the ‘conventional wisdom’ explanations), but also represents an attempt on the part of these firms to reconstruct their urban labour-market relations. It is argued that labour-market considerations warrant attention alongside those considerations pertaining to the labour process which are usually prioritised in the literature on industrial restructuring. The case of homeworking reveals some of the ways in which labour-market processes (such as the gendered nature of labour supplies, the ethnic segmentation of the labour force, and the contours of interindustry competition for labour) exert a powerful influence upon the nature of industrial change. Moreover, questions about the development, by firms and by industries, of characteristic urban labour-market relations are also raised.