The Melbourne LLB

Anna Chapman is a senior lecturer in the Law School and a member of the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law. Anna's research has focused on legal regulation and sexed, heterosexed and racialised harms and systems of power in the paid labour market in Australia. This work has engaged particularly with anti-discrimination law, unfair dismissal law and anti-vilfication statutory schemes. More recently Anna has commenced a project examining the relationship between law, work and care.

Anna is one of the Editors of the Australian Journal of Labour Law.   

Work and Family Conflict and Australian Labour Law

Several themes characterise Australian literature on work and family conflict, especially that written within the disciplines of labour law and industrial relations. Much of this scholarship approaches the topic from an understanding that work and family have pre-existing meanings that labour law and industrial relations merely act upon. Writings largely assume that work and family are naturally separate (though interlocking) spheres of life, and that work/family is a phenomenon of relatively recent origin, produced particularly by rising labour market participation rates of women. Most of the literature assumes family as a heterosexed Anglo-centric model.

This description of the assumptions that characterise much of the secondary literature on the topic of work and family is also apt to describe the premises of labour market legal regulation in the form of labour law.

Anna Chapman is currently engaged in a project that seeks to analyse the relationships between work, Australian labour law and family in a way that reveals the assumptions identified above, thereby attempting to move beyond them.

Member, Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law, Melbourne Law School

Member, Socio-Legal Research Centre, Law Faculty, Griffith University.

Member, Australian Labour Law Association

Member, Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand