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, I think, one of the most sustained applications of the PRA to Australian political economy – or, more particularly, to Australian labour law. … Few labour lawyers, industrial relations academics or labour historians would contest Heino’s periodisation of the broad shifts in Australian labour market regulation. It’s a story we know by heart. Many of us, though, by nature work with a more detailed periodisation based around shifts in political administrations, and we tend to stop short of offering a structural explanation of the shifts we’re observing, beyond the broad clash of ideologies or political fashions. Heino’s approach is a useful corrective to this." - Labour History, No. 115

"In summation, this book is highly theoretical and makes significant demands of the reader. Its endnotes and bibliography are impressively exhaustive, bolstering the authority and scholarship of the text. It is a book from which readers who variously engage with labour law could profit, especially those with critical perspectives, be they reformers or radicals. Heino’s achievement, using Australian examples, is to explain the ways in which labour laws come about, both as the products and as the shapers of specific stages of capitalism. Rather than being rooted in social justice interests or concerns, labour law regimes in capitalist systems are intricate parts and products of the system, driven by the class interests of the framers. Importantly, Heino argues that labour laws are variably contestable in their evolution, development and institution (and if they are not, they should be). His book has relevance wherever capitalism holds sway, and where rafts of labour law variously assist and enable the leviathan to keep afloat." - Law and History Review, Vol. 5, No. 2