The 10th Path to Full Employment Conference and the 15th National Conference on Unemployment will be held at the University of Newcastle from Thursday, December 4 to Friday, December 5, 2008.

This is also the 10th Anniversary of CofFEE which hosts the Conference and some special events and speakers are planned. Information will emerge in the coming months.

Keynote Speakers

The following keynote speakers have been confirmed. More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks

Professor Robert McCutcheon

Robert McCutcheon is a Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His work on labour-intensive methods in public works is well-known throughout the world.

Between 1965 and 1971 Robert McCutcheon worked as an engineer (on power stations and for consulting engineers) and as Chairman of the South African Voluntary Service (SAVS). During the SAVS work he developed an interest in community development in relation to housing and the provision of low-cost infrastructure. He pursued further studies in this field by reading for an MSc (1972) and a DPhil (1980) at the University of Sussex (School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences).

From 1975 to 1987 he worked in Iran, Botswana and East Africa. He was responsible for the initiation and implementation of several projects and programmes of road construction and maintenance using labour-intensive methods. In Botswana and Kenya, he was employed by the International Labour Organisation as a Chief Technical Adviser/ Project Manager.

From September 1987 to December 2007 he was a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. From 1994 to 2000 he was Head of the Department of Civil Engineering.

In 1992 he founded the Research Centre for Employment Creation in Construction and since then has been its Director. Since 1992 he has been a Director of Employment Intensive Engineering Consultants and since 2004 of Liteworks (Pty) Ltd (a company specialising in training and project implementation).

He has written extensively on employment-intensive engineering: including technical, economic, managerial, organisational, institutional and socio-economic aspects related to employment generation, skills development and contractor development, during the use of employment-intensive methods in the construction and maintenance of physical infrastructure, with particular scope and depth in relation to roads. He is also interested in low-income housing technology and policy.

Dr Bob Birrell

Bob Birrell is Director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research and Reader in Sociology at Monash University.

He is joint editor of the quarterly demographic journal People and Place. Bob has a degree in economics from Melbourne University, in history from University of London (first class honours) and a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University.

He has acted as an advisor on immigration issues to both Labor and Coalition governments and was a member of the Commonwealth Government's National Population Council from 1987 to 1993. Recently he was a member of the independent Review of the General Skilled Migration Program which reported in May 2006.

Bob is currently a member of the Department of Education, Science and Training's International Education Advisory body. Bob's research interests range across Australia's past and present evolution as a nation, including the current challenges of globalisation and the integration of Australia's ethnic minorities.

More details are available at Bob's homepage.

Ton van der Bruggen

Ton van der Bruggen studied sociology at Tilburg University . He started his career at Royal Philips Electronics in the commercial sector, then from 1971 worked as a management consultant and later as head of personnel departments of several Philips companies in the Netherlands. In the period 1992-2004 he worked as the manager of the Philips Employment Scheme, the most successful employment project in the Netherlands to date.

Started in 1982, the Philips Employment Scheme aimed to make a recognisable contribution in combating long term unemployment and preventing the unemployed from social exclusion. Nowadays the Philips Employment Scheme is seen as a Philips contribution to socially responsible entrepreneurship.

In the period 1992-2004 Ton van der Bruggen was the initiator and designer of several new learning programs in the Netherlands, such as the learning in context and the from work to work methods, as well as the so called Combi method. A special learning method giving own employees vocational training while offering long term unemployed a chance on the job market without disrupting the production process.

Ton van der Bruggen is now a senior consultant for the Philips Employment Scheme. He is also a senior consultant for NUON, a Dutch electricity company that made works with trade unions and government to run programmes designed to combat youth unemployment.

He also advised the Dutch government and the Youth Welfare and National Probation Board helping them to establish programs to create positive role models, based on permanent jobs and, in cooperation with the business sector, the founding of small and medium sized enterprises for the unemployed.

Professor L. Randall Wray

Randy is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (CFEPS), as well as a visiting Senior Scholar at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

He is a past president of the Association for Institutionalist Thought (AFIT) and has served on the board of directors of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE).

Professor Wray has focused on monetary theory and policy, macroeconomics, and employment policy.

More information about Professor Wray and C-FEPS is available here