Ian Hampson

The training and licencing of aircraft maintenance engineers fulfils a crucial protective function since it is they who perform and supervise aircraft maintenance and certify that planes are safe afterwards. In Australia, prior to training reform, a trades-based system of aircraft maintenance engineer training existed in an orderly relation with the system of licencing, regulated by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA). Training reform through the 1990s gave rise to concerns that the training system could not be relied upon to deliver adequate numbers of trainees with valid qualifications. From 2007, CASA introduced new regulations, designed to align Australia’s qualifications and licencing with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). This process saw the aviation regulator effectively cede much quality control of training to an increasingly dysfunctional training system, giving rise to doubts about whether Australia’s international obligations for quality aircraft maintenance training can be fulfilled.

In a recent examination of modern-day “worker voice,” Peter Ackers argued that declining membership density should impel trade unions to disavow outdated radica...

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to explicate and test an intention-based model to explain transfer of training behavior. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) is utilized to examine the role of transfer intention in the transfer of training process.Design/methodology/approach: – A sample of 132 construction practitioners in Hong Kong was adopted. All measurement and structural models were assessed with structural equation modeling.Findings: – Results showed that the three antecedents positively affected transfer intention, while perceived behavioral control and transfer intention affected transfer behavior positively. Moreover, a post hoc analysis supported the mediating role of transfer intention in the relationship between the antecedents and transfer behavior.Practical implications: – Confirmation of the mediating role of intention has ascertained that it should be the core of a transfer of training model. To strengthen the transfer behavior, one has to find ways to increase the intention to transfer.Originality/value: – This paper examined an intention-based model of transfer of training based on the TPB. The latter has rarely been applied to the prediction of transfer behavior.

This article examines potential regulatory and safety problems arising from the outsourcing and offshoring of heavy aircraft maintenance. We raise questions about the advisability of using increasingly complex supply chains in the aircraft maintenance industry where safety standards are paramount. Greater disarticulation of maintenance work makes regulatory oversight more convoluted and expensive to do thoroughly and transparently. Using a Pressure, Disorganisation and Regulatory Failure model, the article highlights how new work arrangements involving increased use of supply chains are developing more quickly than adequate airline, union and regulator responses to the safety problems engendered by those changes. In often heated industrial debates between licensed aircraft maintenance engineers (LAMEs) and airline managers about business needs and safety, we urge that more attention be paid to LAME concerns about outsourcing.

This article reprises debates over ‘the social construction of skill’ (SCS), in the context of the rise of a service economy, and a diminished capacity for collective worker protection of job quality. After exploring the changed conceptual terrain in which the concept of SCS is deployed, it puts the case for recognising under‐documented skills in service jobs. It argues that real (because based on learning) but hitherto uncodified skills are beginning to be mapped in a corpus of interpretative research. A fieldwork‐based conceptual framework is offered for more fully codifying these skills. Such codification may give employers a handle for increased behavioural control, but may also help workers gain recognition and reward for real skills. We identify ‘stages of social construction’: first, skills' ‘detection’ and naming in job‐analysis interviews and second, skills recognition in qualifications and job/person descriptions. Increased remuneration and/or work reorganisation through political–institutional processes, driven by the agency of unions and professional organisations, HR departments or even management itself, may follow. The politics of the concepts' development (or not) in academic and policy communities – another facet of the SCS – we eschew here.

This paper uses evidence from an Australian research project into under-recognized skills in occupations, gathered through industry-level interviews and company case studies, to examine VET curricula. The project, funded by the Australian Research Council, focused on skill in jobs traditionally regarded in Australia as unskilled. As part of the project, the evidence about skill was compared with the relevant qualifications. The qualifications are contained in Training Packages, which form the basis of most formal VET training in Australia. The qualifications for the seven occupations were in three broad industry areas (manufacturing, services and property services) and had all been developed in recent decades, unlike apprenticed trades which have long-standing qualifications and curricula in Australia. The comparison exercise showed some mismatches between the skills that were found in the researched occupations and the content of the qualifications. Some of the issues are believed to have broader applicability beyond these specific occupations and qualifications and thus can provide evidence to improve the design of Training Packages themselves.

Aircraft maintenance outsourcing and offshoring is now prevalent in the airline industry. In the USA, the safety implications of this shift in work organisation have aroused serious concerns — concerns magnified by six serious incidents between 1995 and 2009. Subsequent investigations, audits and reviews of outsourced maintenance activities identified significant failures in regulatory oversight. However, the air safety enforcement agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — was slow to respond to these shortcomings, despite sustained criticism from other US government agencies responsible for transport safety and governance. This paper provides a case study of regulatory failure and the difficulty of reshaping regulatory regimes in the context of rapid changes to work organisation. It highlights challenges in regulating outsourcing and subcontracting — challenges not confined to the USA — as well as problems in reshaping enforcement regimes.

The sudden decline in Australian manufacturing associated with the current resources boom necessitates a renewed examination of the foundations of industry policy. Since the reforms of the 1980s, industry policy has been characterised by an economic liberal approach, the purity of which has been compromised by political pragmatism — particularly evident in the continued support for the auto industry. This article examines the issues raised by industry policy, and the history of industry policy in Australia, as a context for a review of a Report recently released by the Non-Governmental Members of the Prime Minister's Task Force on Manufacturing. This review finds useful proposals within the document, as well as a strong statement of the need for interventionist policy, albeit buried in the main text and an appendix. That this discussion is not front and centre in the Report's presentation indicates ongoing sensitivity about the main choice in industry policy — whether the government should selectively intervene, or leave the organisation of industry to the market.

Several recent publications and a special issue of the International Journal of Human Resource Management have addressed airline employment relations since deregulation. In these, the crucial role of aircraft maintenance is largely unexamined. Human Resource Management (HRM) prescriptions for airline success, particularly a ‘commitment’ model entailing increased trust and employee initiative, may be in tension with the heavily regulated nature of the aircraft maintenance labour process. The airline HRM literature with its emphasis on discretion-based definitions of skill sits uneasily beside a safety literature that commonly stresses procedural compliance. Safe aircraft maintenance depends on appropriate work organisation, along with utilisation and development of maintenance workers' skills and recognition of their collective voice. Proposals to reshape or bypass any of these in the interest of cost containment call for cautious evaluation. Although addressing international debates, we examine these issues in the Australian context.