June 2024

Webinar: Stop passing the buck -Workers’ compensation and ‘gig’ workers

by Lisa Heap

Workers’ compensation and rehabilitation are amongst the most important legal issues facing the ‘gig’ economy. This reflects the potential vulnerability of these workers and their families, co-workers, and community to harsh and long term consequences from injuries. For a while, it looked like federal industrial policy might ‘solve’ the workers compensation problem by redefining ‘gig’/platform

“I studied economics to better understand the world and equip me with better tools to serve society”

Prof Anis Chowdhury, an Associate of the Centre for Future Work, was recently appointed Emeritus Professor at Western Sydney University, in honour of his decades of influential work in progressive macroeconomics and development economics. Prof Chowdhury’s address on occasion of his installment provides an overview of his evolution as a progressive economist and significant impact on global policy:

May 2024

April 2024

March 2024

December 2023

September 2023

‘Wages, employment and power’: Call for conference papers

The Centre for Future Work is hosting a stream at the upcoming AIRAANZ Conference. Join us as we continue the AIRAANZ and the Centre for Future Work traditions of bringing researchers and activists together to debate important issues in the world of work and industrial relations. The AIRAANZ (Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia

October 2022

Job Opening: Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow

by Jim Stanford

The Carmichael Centre at the Centre for Future Work invites applications for the Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow position. It’s a three-year posting, with awesome potential to explore a range of progressive issues related to unions, collective bargaining, industrial policy, and workers’ education.

Webinar on Wages, Prices, and Power

The Australian Council of Trade Unions is sponsoring a series of webinars for union members, delegates, officials, and leaders on the current crisis in the cost of living in Australia. The surge in inflation since economic re-opening after COVID lockdowns has obviously intensified that crisis. But the seeds for it were planted long ago: by a decade of historically weak wage growth, a speculative property price bubble, and a systematic efforts to weaken collective bargaining and unionisation.

September 2022

Work in the Care Economy Vital for Future Well-Being

by Fiona Macdonald

There is growing understanding that care work — including jobs in aged care, disability services, early child education and care, and others — is of growing importance to future employment and wage trends, as well as to the quality of life of Australians who depend on these social and community services. For too long, jobs in these growing sectors have been devalued. Government underfunding and weak labour and quality standards have reinforced the degradation of work in care sectors. But with intense labour shortages, public concern about inadequate quality, and the need to expand services to meet social needs, there is now more widespread recognition that care jobs must be improved, and quickly: with more funding, better training, limits on private delivery, multi-employer bargaining, and more.

June 2022

Enterprise Bargaining System no Longer Fit for Purpose

by Alison Pennington

The collapse in agreement coverage under Australia’s enterprise bargaining system in Australia in recent years, particularly in the private sector, has focused attention on the need for reforms that will give more workers the effective ability to collectively negotiate better wages and conditions. In the private sector, coverage by a current enterprise agreement has fallen by half since 2013: to below 11% of all workers by March 2021. No wonder wages are lagging so far behind inflation.

May 2022

More Resources on Australia’s Wages Crisis

The debate over wages, prices, and living standards heated up even further this week, with the release of new ABS statistics showing continuing weakness in wages despite the acceleration of inflation. The latest data from the ABS Wage Price Index (WPI) shows nominal wages grew just 2.4% over the 12 months ending in March. That is less than half as fast as consumer prices grew (5.1%), producing the biggest decline in real wages this century.

Webinar: Changes to the SCHADS Award and Next Steps to Improve Job Quality in Human Services

The Fair Work Commission recently announced important changes to the SCHADS Award (which sets minimum standards for workers in home care, disability services, community agencies, and other vital services) as part of its award review process. This culminates several years of research and advocacy by unions representing workers in these sectors, aimed at improving job quality and stability in these vital but undervalued positions. The Centre for Future Work provided expert testimony to the Commission as part of its review.

February 2022

International Collective Bargaining Experts Explore Future System Reform

Multiple negative economic and social consequences have emerged across Anglophone industrial countries from the retrenchment of collective bargaining systems, including slowing wages growth, rising insecure work, inequality, and declining productivity and growth – bringing urgency to proposals for collective bargaining reform.

January 2022

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Labour Market Implications of Australia’s Failed COVID Strategy

by Jim Stanford

As COVID and recession gripped the world, through 2020 and most of 2021 Australia recorded one of the best outcomes: lower infection, fewer deaths, and a faster, stronger economic recovery. That seeming victory has been squandered, however by the appalling and infuriating events of recent weeks. Purportedly in the name of ‘protecting the economy’, key political leaders (led by the Commonwealth and NSW governments) threw the doors open to the virus at exactly the wrong time: just as the super-infectious Omicron variant was taking hold.

November 2021

What Next for Casual Work? Professor Andrew Stewart webinar recording

Casual employment has dominated Australia’s labour market recovery from COVID-19. And the right of employers to hire staff on a casual basis in almost any role they choose – including jobs that on their face appear have permanent characteristics – seems to have been cemented by recent amendments to the Fair Work Act, and by the High Court’s recent ruling in the WorkPac v. Rossato case.

August 2021

Fair Pay Agreements: How Workers in NZ Are Getting Their Share

by Alison Pennington

Across the ditch, the Ardern government in New Zealand is undertaking an ambitious and multi-dimensional effort to address low wages, inequality, and poor job quality. NZ unions have just won the introduction of Fair Pay Agreements, planned for implementation in 2022. FPAs will allow working people to bargain collectively across sectors and start to correct the income and power imbalance between workers and employers.

July 2021

June 2021

A Review of Lapsis

by Dan Nahum

The increasing precarity of economic life for many people is being reflected in a growing output of film and TV, including the work of Ken Loach (‘Sorry We Missed You’, ‘I, Daniel Blake’), Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s 2019 documentary ‘American Factory’, Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’ as well as his ‘Snowpiercer’ film and subsequent TV series, the interplanetary class divisions explored by the Syfy Channel’s ‘The Expanse’, and Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning ‘Nomadland’. The Centre for Future Work’s first film review considers a new entry in this recent canon of art imitating life.

Video: Myth & Reality About Technology, Skills & Jobs

by Jim Stanford

We are constantly told that the world of work is being turned upside down by ‘technology’: some faceless, anonymous, uncontrollable force that is somehow beyond human control. There’s no point resisting this exogenous, omnipresent force. The best thing to do is get with the program… and learn how to program! Acquiring the right skills (usually assumed to be STEM or computer skills) is the best way to protect yourself in this brave new high-tech future.

December 2020

Call for Applications: Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Fellow

As recently announced, the Centre for Future Work and the Australia Institute are honoured to house the Carmichael Centre, a new research centre recognising and continuing the legacy of union leader Laurie Carmichael. A key component of the Centre will be the Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Fellow, a research and educational position funded for an initial 3-year period.

Profile: Combining Economics and Social Justice

by Jim Stanford

The Centre for Future Work’s Director Dr. Jim Stanford was recently profiled in a feature article published in In The Black, the journal of CPA Australia (the professional body for certified accountants in Australia). The profile, by journalist Johanna Leggatt, discusses the history of the Centre for Future Work, and Stanford’s philosophy of using popular economic knowledge to strengthen movements for social change and workers’ rights.

A Women’s Agenda for COVID-Era Reconstruction

by Alison Pennington

Women have been uniquely and disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting recession: losing more jobs and hours, shouldering a higher unpaid caring work burden, and undertaking essential and frontlines jobs. Without targeted action to rebuild women’s jobs and ease caring demands, decades of collective advances toward decent paid work could be eroded.

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