Despite world-leading reforms, half of Australian workers remain trapped in insecure employment while the young bear the brunt.

The numbers don’t lie, even when the politicians do. Australia’s precariat; that swelling army of the insecurely employed, the casually contracted, the perpetually anxious, continues its inexorable growth despite Labor’s much-vaunted industrial relations “reforms.” When only half your workforce can rely on permanent full-time employment with leave entitlements, you don’t have an economy. You have a crisis in your social contract and your duty of care; a national emergency dressed up as “flexibility.”

Let’s cut through the cant. By 2021, a bare 50.5% of Australian jobs qualified as permanent full-time positions with leave entitlements, meaning half of all employed Australians now face one or more dimensions of insecurity in their work. This isn’t some unfortunate accident of market forces. It’s the deliberate result of a business model, embraced across both private and public sectors, that systematically shifts the risks of employment from employer to employee while minimising labour costs at the expense of job quality.

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The Grim Statistics of Insecurity

The Australian Bureau of Statistics paints a portrait of desperation that should shame any government claiming to represent working people. We now have a record 867,900 people juggling two or even three jobs, with 209,100 unfortunates working three or more positions simultaneously, the highest proportion in the entire history of ABS statistics. These aren’t ambitious go-getters embracing the gig economy’s supposed freedoms. They’re workers scrambling to cobble together a living wage from the scraps of casualised employment.

The Precariat By Numbers

• 50.5% of jobs are permanent full-time with leave entitlements
• 867,900 Australians working two or more jobs (record high)
• 209,100 working three or more jobs
• 9% youth unemployment—double the national rate
• 6.7% of casual workers wanting permanent work secured it in 2024
• $12.50/hour average earnings for food delivery workers after expenses

And it’s our young who cop it worst. Youth unemployment sits at roughly 9%, more than double the national rate, with growing numbers classified as NEET: not in employment, education, or training. After protracted education processes accompanied by massive debt accumulation, young people discover that entry points into the jobs they’ve trained for are scarce or non-existent, leading to a trajectory of casual and short-term positions with tenuous links to their education and limited potential as stepping stones to anything better.

This is the social contract, shredded. Study hard, accumulate debt, develop skills; and then discover the ladder’s been pulled up behind you.

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Labor’s Inadequate Tinkering

Now, to be fair, a courtesy Labor now rarely extends to workers, the Albanese government has attempted some repairs to our tattered industrial relations framework. Since taking office in 2022, Labor has introduced the Secure Jobs Better Pay reforms and two rounds of Closing Loopholes amendments passed in 2023 and 2024. In February 2024, Parliament passed what some hailed as world-leading minimum standards for platform workers.

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? World-leading! Minimum standards! But scratch beneath the progressive veneer and you’ll find reforms carefully calibrated not to seriously inconvenience capital.

From August 2024, gig economy and road transport delivery workers gained classification as “employee-like” workers, theoretically giving the Fair Work Commission power to order digital platforms to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions. Yet here’s the rub: these laws may actually serve to defend corporations’ right to implement ever-harsher exploitation by establishing a lower tier of “employee-like” workers without most basic rights.

Employee-like. Ponder that weasel phrase. You’re sort of like an employee, mate, just without the actual entitlements, security, regular hours, respect, or protections that real employees enjoyed back when Australia had a labour movement worth the name.

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The Brutal Reality for Workers

The human cost of this grand neoliberal experiment reveals itself in stark research findings. A Transport Workers Union survey from mid-2024 discovered food delivery workers earning approximately $12.50 per hour after expenses, well below minimum wage, with no insurance, personal leave, or workers’ compensation. Since the Australian transport gig economy began in 2017, eighteen food delivery riders and one rideshare driver have been killed. Their dependents received nothing, no workers’ compensation, no recognition, nothing, because these workers weren’t employees. They were “independent contractors.”

And here’s a detail that should enrage anyone with a functioning sense of justice: up to one-third of casual workers report receiving no casual loading whatsoever. They endure all the insecurity of casual employment without even the pittance of extra pay that’s supposed to compensate for that insecurity. Meanwhile, of casual workers who wanted permanent employment in 2024, only 6.7%, about one in fifteen, actually secured it.

The precariat isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature.

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The Mental Health Catastrophe

The psychological toll of all this insecurity compounds the economic devastation. When households become insecurely employed, they face five times greater odds of also experiencing housing affordability stress, a phenomenon researchers call “double precarity”, with devastating effects on mental health. People exposed to this double precarity report 2.4 times higher odds of mental health deterioration.

Currently, 67% of Australians experience housing stress, 75% of renters face rental stress, and 66% worry about the housing crisis’s impact on their mental health and general wellbeing. This isn’t coincidence. Home ownership pathways for recent generations have faltered, producing “generation rent” with its greater reliance on family wealth and increased precarity in Millennials’ life trajectories.

You can’t separate precarious work from the housing crisis. They’re conjoined twins of neoliberal policy, each feeding the other in a death spiral of insecurity.

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Who Benefits? Follow the Money

So if half the workforce suffers while juggling multiple jobs and battling anxiety about next week’s rent, who’s thriving in this brave new world of “flexible” employment?

Neoliberal policies have favoured large corporations, particularly mining, finance, and real estate, with removal of regulatory constraints allowing these sectors to operate with minimal oversight and generate significant profit margins. Governments and industry lobby groups present these changes as essential for national economic prosperity, a claim that might carry more weight if prosperity weren’t quite so unevenly distributed.

Business advocacy groups fight tooth and nail against meaningful reform. Organisations like the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs, and the H.R. Nicholls Society have consistently pushed for labour market deregulation that goes further than even Labor ministers are willing to countenance. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry complains that recent amendments “further centralise” regulations and reduce flexibility, by which they mean the flexibility for employers to treat workers as disposable.

Digital labour platforms like Uber have reshaped how hundreds of thousands work, with worker exploitation rife as people face pressure to meet unreasonable schedules and performance metrics, always risking account termination if they don’t keep up. These platforms built empires worth billions by treating human beings as algorithmic inputs, all while claiming they’re just neutral technology companies connecting willing buyers and sellers.

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The Bipartisan Betrayal

Here’s the inconvenient truth Labor would rather you didn’t dwell upon: the architecture of precarity was built by both major parties, with Labor laying much of the foundation during the Hawke-Keating years.

Since the Hawke-Keating government in the 1980s, neoliberal reforms included privatisation, extensive tax cuts, and creation of more flexible labour markets through restriction of trade union power. From the 1980s under Hawke Labor, through the 1990s under Keating Labor and Howard’s Liberal-National coalition, economic rationalism placed the market before state and society.

Labor’s recent reforms, modest as they are, represent less a repudiation of this history than a minor course correction. The party that once spoke for the organised working class now tinkers at the margins while the fundamental business model of casualisation and risk-shifting remains untouched.

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The Implications for Society

What happens to a society where half the workforce lives in permanent insecurity?

Precarious work arrangements erode the ability to envision the future, make commitments, buy property, and develop a lasting sense of occupational identity and community. Workers suffer inferior rights, entitlements, and job security alongside lower wages growth, making it nearly impossible for families to plan when they cannot rely on regular incomes but face rising costs and mounting debt.

The waste of young people’s talents and skills comes precisely when Australia’s productivity and growth potential face serious questions, with the existence of a precariat serving as a hallmark of social inequality. Since 2013, nominal wages have barely kept pace with consumer price rises, meaning real wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated for more than a decade.

And perhaps most concerning for the long-term health of democratic participation: the precariat tends toward values and interests less oriented to class identification and union involvement, people are less inclined to strike when their employment could be terminated at any moment. The erosion of non-wage income leaves workers alienated from labour solidarity and vulnerable to opportunism.

This is how you break a working class: fracture it into atomised individuals competing desperately for the next shift, the next gig, the next contract. Make them too exhausted and anxious to organise. Then tell them it’s all about flexibility and choice.

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What Needs to Happen

Labor’s reforms have made some small improvements, better than nothing, worse than necessary. The real question is whether any Australian government has the political courage to confront the fundamental business model driving casualisation.

What’s needed is restoration of a “decent work” agenda, with some proposing visions of citizen participation linked to provision of basic, unconditional economic security. That means not just tinkering with definitions of employment but fundamentally rebalancing power between capital and labour.

It means recognising that the proliferation of insecure work hasn’t occurred by accident, conscious business and policy decisions based on cost and risk allocation have been the key drivers. If policy created this mess, policy can fix it. What’s lacking isn’t technical solutions but political will.

The precariat grows not because it must, but because powerful interests want it to. Until Labor, or any government, is willing to name that truth and act on it, expect more soothing rhetoric, more inadequate reforms, and more young Australians discovering that the Australian dream died before they were born.

The ladder’s been pulled up. The only question now is whether we’ll watch a generation fall, or whether we’ll rebuild the social contract that once made Australia a place where working people could build secure, dignified lives.

The ladder’s been pulled up, yes. But ladders can be rebuilt; and this time, we know exactly who pulled it up and why. Every statistic in this piece, every documented exploitation, every researcher confirming what workers already knew: these aren’t just facts. They’re ammunition. Knowledge transforms individual grievance into collective understanding. Understanding enables organization. And organization is what power fears most.

Neither major party will lead this fight, they’re too invested in the neoliberal project that created the precariat. But that’s liberating, in its way. It means the solution won’t come from above. It’ll come from below, from the horizontal networks of workers sharing information, building solidarity, and refusing to accept that their insecurity is inevitable or natural. The precariat is learning that their individual precarity is a collective political problem requiring a collective political solution.

So to those juggling three jobs, those delivery riders earning below minimum wage, those young workers told there’s no alternative: you’re not lazy, you’re not entitled, and you’re not alone. You’re the majority now. And once the majority understands both the problem and their own power, that’s when the real reforms begin, not the kind that create “employee-like” workers, but the kind that restore dignity, security, and power to working people.

The question isn’t whether change will come. It’s whether we’ll organize to shape it, or whether we’ll let another generation fall first. Choose organizing. Choose solidarity. Choose to be ungovernable by those who profit from your precarity. That’s how social contracts get rebuilt, not through begging politicians for crumbs, but through workers collectively demanding the security that was stolen from them.

Knowledge. Solidarity. Organization. The precariat has all three within reach. That’s what should keep the architects of insecurity awake at night.

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