Arts workers, a broad field that includes actors, musicians, stage technicians, ushers and many more, are getting more formal recognition in industrial tribunals. How so? The Pacific labour scheme seems an ongoing source of exploitation and unregulated abuse; American unions seeking a path to growth whilst here we see a real decline in wages and higher unemployment. And AI impacts us in many ways creating more jobs, often terrible gig worker style, and destroying others in areas we may not have anticipated.
Contents
- Australia’s arts workers are finally being recognised by the Fair Work Commission. What changes now?
- ‘We are not in a safe place’: women reveal being abused while producing the food Australians eat
- 6 Ways to Rebuild Unions at the State and Local Levels Now
- The collapse of real wages and the path to recovery
- Real wages in Australia decline for the third consecutive quarter
- Australian labour market – unemployment continues to rise
- An AI job boom? Here’s what the tedious, temporary work in data labelling is actually like
- Female‑dominated jobs are actually the most exposed to AI
Australia’s arts workers are finally being recognised by the Fair Work Commission. What changes now?
Madeleine Thornton-Smith and Kin Goodwin
The Fair Work Commission has made a provisional decision to include the arts in the modern award system, by adding the word “arts” to its Amusement, Recreation, Events and Arts Award (AREA) 2020 award.
In the Fair Work context, “awards” are legal documents that contain details on minimum pay rates and conditions of employment (including allowances, overtime and penalty rates). So this decision is a significant milestone for arts workers and their advocates.
What will the addition of this one word mean for arts workers and their rights?
In 2022, the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) launched the Recognise Artists as Workers campaign, garnering significant industry support. Not long after, the federal government launched its national cultural policy, Revive. This was the first time since 2002 that issues of work in the sector were explicitly addressed by the federal government.
In 2025, NAVA, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) and the Australian Museums and Galleries Association made a submission to the Fair Work Commission to expand the coverage of the previous amusements award.
The proposed amendments to the amusements award will cover workplaces such as public and commercial galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, community arts organisations, arts festivals and touring exhibitions.
It will impact a range of arts workers, from those in front-of-house roles to studio technicians and arts administrators.
‘We are not in a safe place’: women reveal being abused while producing the food Australians eat
Gemma Tarpey-Brown, Cathy Vaughan, Karen Block and Laurentina mica Barreto Soares
Migrants who enter Australia through the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, produce much of the fresh food Australians buy from the supermarket.
Our ongoing research speaks to women in the scheme, as well as those who stay behind in their home countries while their partners come to Australia. Their experiences reveal the need for urgent reforms to end exploitation and abuse.
There’s been reporting that migrant workers employed in food systems are systematically exploited, but they often don’t feel safe to report mistreatment.
While migrant men and women linked to the scheme face exploitation, women also experience serious violations of their sexual and reproductive rights.
Given a body of research showing temporary labour migration in the Asia Pacific exposes women to gendered harms, we wanted to find out how can we make it safer.
We interviewed three groups of people:
- migrant women in Australia
- women in Timor-Leste who stayed behind while their partners came to Australia
- and people from health, social, legal and migration services and government departments.
6 Ways to Rebuild Unions at the State and Local Levels Now
Francisco Diez
If US unions are going to grow, they will need new state and local policy.
Over the summer, primary victories for pro-worker candidates running for US Congress like Abdul El-Sayed have stolen headlines. But the numerous candidates who won downballot, like Janeese Lewis George for mayor in Washington, DC, could have significant impacts on workplace organizing in the coming two years.
Whether we like it or not, laws — not just on the federal but also on the state and local level — shape the opportunities for and constrictions on union organizing. For unions to grow at the scale the moment demands, workers and policymakers must reshape those laws so that organizing can expand. Workers need to use every strategic option available. That includes using state and local policy and government action.
State legislators, city council members, governors, and mayors can do more than pay lip service to supporting workers’ ability to organize. Here’s how.
- Expand Who Can Organize, Who Can Bargain, and Who Can Strike
- Remove Barriers and Lower Costs for Workers to Organize
- Supporting Workers Taking Forceful Action
- Eliminate the Corporate Race to the Bottom on Workplace Standards
- Create New Opportunities for Workers to Meet and Join Worker Organizations
- Enforce Rights in a Way That Brings Workers Together.
The collapse of real wages and the path to recovery
Greg Jericho
The rise of inflation above wage growth in 2022 and 2023 delivered the sharpest decline in the value of real wages since the Reserve Bank began its inflation targeting regime in the early 1990s.
Now, three years after the peak of inflation, it seems that recovery may be unachievable unless real wages are allowed to grow, or there is a redistribution of national income from profits to wages.
Prior to the pandemic, governments drove the decline in nominal and real wage growth through public sector wages caps of no more than 2.5% annual growth.
Such caps demonstrated the strong role the public sector plays in setting the overall level of wage growth across the entire economy, including the private sector.
While in the decade before the pandemic and the inflation surge of 2022 and 2023, the public sector depressed wage growth, now the public sector can lead the way by providing a guide to stronger wages.
Real wages in Australia decline for the third consecutive quarter
Bill Mitchell
Over the time shown, the real hourly wage index has grown by only 4.6 per cent, while the hourly productivity index has grown by 25.8 per cent.
The dip in productivity growth is mostly due to the parlous investment rates of Australian businesses as investment funds have been shifted into the financial markets chasing short-term profiteering.
If I started the index in the early 1980s, when the gap between the two really started to open up, the gap would be much greater. Data discontinuities however prevent a concise graph of this type being provided at this stage.
For more analysis of why the gap represents a shift in national income shares and why it matters, please read the blog post – Australia – stagnant wages growth continues (August 17, 2016).
Where does the real income that the workers lose by being unable to gain real wages growth in line with productivity growth go?
Answer: Mostly to profits.
Australian labour market – unemployment continues to rise
Bill Mitchell
There has been a sharp shift towards part-time work, a signal that a labour market contraction is coming. The latest data confirms that this contraction is now eating into overall employment and pushing the unemployment rate up. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the latest labour force data today (August 20, 2026) – Labour Force, Australia – for July 2026 – which showed that the labour market deteriorated in July. Employment growth was negative although the economy added full-time jobs, which offsets some of the severity of the decline. Overall working hours contracted sharply. Official unemployment increased but the increase would have been larger had the participation rate not declined by 0.2 points. Had the participation rate not declined in July, the official unemployment rate would be around 4.7 per cent rather than the published rate of 4.5 per cent. There are now 10.8 per cent of available labour not being used (either unemployed or underemployed), which makes a farce of the RBA’s claims that the labour market is tight. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present. There is substantial scope for more job creation given the slack that is present.
An AI job boom? Here’s what the tedious, temporary work in data labelling is actually like
Fan Yang
Amid all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI) both creating and destroying jobs, a troubling reality flies under the radar.
The tasks machines can’t perform well are often offloaded onto marginalised global workers who are struggling in precarious labour markets. They do ostensibly “automated” work under exploitative conditions.
Data work is an essential part of building and refining AI systems. Before AI models can “learn” anything, human data workers must categorise, label, test and moderate vast volumes of text, images, audio and video, to make the data usable for AI training.
This labour is performed by an expanding global digital workforce that prepares the datasets not only for big tech, but also high-stakes industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare and government agencies, including defence.
Part of the gig economy
Data work is not unlike other poorly regulated jobs in the gig economy.
Workers have no formal contracts and are not employees. They’re classified as “users”, and platforms simply call on them when there are tasks aligning with their expertise and track record.
User agreements exist primarily to protect the companies behind the outsourced work, such as requiring the workers don’t disclose any of the information they see.
The AI economy has created jobs. But many of these involve human workers correcting errors and handling tasks too difficult or ambiguous for machines to resolve. This work is often more cognitively and emotionally demanding than what it replaced.
And human workers don’t even know if they’re answering to human managers or AI agents. This weakens their right to bargain.
Data workers are effectively the disposable batteries of the AI economy.
Female‑dominated jobs are actually the most exposed to AI
Leonora Risse and Elise Stephenson
Women make up the majority of workers in the care sector where human interactions matter most – child care, nursing and aged care. So, policymakers might reasonably presume that women’s jobs are largely shielded from the impacts of AI.
But our analysis of recent data from government agency Jobs and Skills Australia shows that it’s actually female-concentrated segments of the workforce that are most exposed to AI-fuelled automation.
Internet job vacancy data, also collected by Jobs and Skills Australia, shows that vacancies for many of these jobs highly exposed to automation have been shrinking over the past three years. And by a larger magnitude than the slowdown across the wider workforce.
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