In the recession in many countries experiencing a lot of unemployment. Such as Spain A quarter of the workforce is now unemployed(Gregory, Milner & Windebank 2013).olonjjnujjjl
Something unexpected happened in Australia during the 2008/2009 Global Economic Downturn
(GED) which has implications for the Australian workplace of the future. This “something” was
the use of “flexible work practices”, namely the increased use of part-time work, a reduction in
hours worked by full-timers, the use of purchased leave, and video-conferencing as an alternative to
travel, all to manage the downturn in the volume of work and revenue. It was unexpected both
because the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s had been “managed” by large scale redundancies3
,
and because the concept of “flexible work practices” has been dominantly (and narrowly)
interpreted as referring to women returning from maternity leave on a part-time basis