Our Associates

The Centre for Future Work is pleased to work with a team of Associates. This is a group of distinguished policy thinkers who support the Centre in advancing our research agenda.

Al Rainnie is an Adjunct Professor at Adelaide University and a Cornish Associate of Exeter University. His work has focussed on the political economy of work and employment, with a particular focus on regions, renewables, and Just Transitions.

Recently he has co-authored reports for SAUnions on the future of Whyalla Steelworks. Al was also the author of a report for the MUA, Greenpeaceand a number of other unions and community/environmental groups on Decommissioning Offshore Oil and Gas. He has also written widely on the illusory job creation claims made for AUKUS.

His most recent book (with Darryn Snell and Mark Dean) is Australia’s Regional and Industrial Future: Beyond Militarisation and Green Capitalism (Routledge 2025).

Michael’s research concentrates on the evolution of economic policy. He has written books on the history of macroeconomic policy in Australia, central banking in China, and workplace and economic democracy. His interests include the history of monetary theory and policy, labour institutions and macroeconomic policy, and socialism and social democracy.

Anis Chowdhury is a highly regarded development and heterodox macroeconomist. He has published close to 100 research articles and more than two dozen books, and has also penned numerous opinion pieces on contemporary economic, social and geo-political issues.

Anis has held senior United Nations Economic and Social Affairs positions in Bangkok and New York. He recently served as State Minister of Finance in the Government of Bangladesh led by Nobel Laureate Muhmmad Yunus.

Anis obtained MA and PhD degrees in Economics from the University of Manitoba (Canada) and BSc (Hons) and MSc from Jahangirnagar University (Bangladesh). He taught at the University of Manitoba, National University of Singapore and the University of New England.

Anis was a visiting fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER, Helsinki) and Institute of South East Asian Studies (ISEAS, Singapore). He was the founding Chief Editor of Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy (Routledge) and currently serves as Managing Editor of the Asia Pacific Sustainable Development Journal (UN-ESCAP).

Anis is a native of Bangladesh and has called Australia home since 1987.

Dr Ben Eltham is a lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, where he teaches in the Masters of Cultural and Creative Industries. His research focus is Australian cultural policy at the federal level.

In addition to his academic work, Ben writes widely as a journalist and essayist about Australian culture and the arts for journals such as Crikey, Overland, The Guardian and Meanjin Quarterly.

He is a member of the national freelance committee of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and the Monash University branch of the national Tertiary Education Union.

Ben is currently writing a book about the working lives of Australian artists.

Dr Elizabeth Humphrys is a political economist of labour and work, and the Head of Discipline of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She researches the impact of economic crisis and climate change on workers, and control within the labour process. Elizabeth takes a multidisciplinary approach, also drawing on sociology and history, to seek ways to make work safer and more equitable.

Elizabeth’s current and recent projects have investigated: climate change and work health and safety; impacts of neoliberalism on labour; industrial and social contexts of hi vis clothing in Australia; experiences of disabled professional workers; and the 1970 West Gate Bridge disaster. Her book, How Labour Built Neoliberalism, was described in the Sydney Review of Books as a ‘tremendously important’ contribution to understanding economic change in Australia’s recent past.

Elizabeth is an Editor of the journal Social Movement Studies and has designed and taught curriculum on the future of work, global political economy, digital literacies, and Australian history.

Dr Shaun Wilson is an applied social researcher with a focus on the relationship between employment and welfare states, particularly in the Anglo democratic countries.

In 2021, he authored Living Wages and the Welfare State with Policy Press (an imprint of Bristol University Press), which documented the unexpected defeat of the neoliberal consensus on minimum wages resulting in new potentials for rebuilding the foundations of welfare states centred on wage-earners.

He is presently completing a new book with Cambridge University Press’s Element series on Contentious Politics, called Global Living Wages, which chronicles the emerging relationship between living wages movements in the global south and the politics of building new welfare states. He is also completing an ARC Discovery project focused on worker wellbeing among the delivery drivers.

Shaun is also interested in survey research: he is Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and was a Chief Investigator of the Australian Cooperative Election Survey in 2025.

Shaun is planning to work on future projects on voter support for the 4-day working week in Australia using new data available through the Work Orientations module, conducted as part of the International Social Survey Program. He has also researched union members’ voting behaviour as well as voter support for new housing compacts in Australia. Shaun is currently an honorary professor of sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney.