How four decades of union destruction paved the way for algorithmic exploitation and corporate price-gouging

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Walk into any Coles outlet today and you’re not just buying milk. You’re feeding a surveillance machine processing 10 billion rows of data through Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, a versatile crew that also helps ICE hunt undocumented immigrants, works with the IDF and tracks targets for weaponised drones.

Its AI tools also supported automated decision-making in Gaza, according to a recent UN report. 

In early 2024, Coles signed a deal to deploy Palantir’s “Foundry” platform across more than 840 stores, analysing every transaction, every worker’s movement, every shift allocation, potentially down to individual seconds. Coles claims this will improve “store optimisation” and “team member allocation.”

AKA surveillance-style monitoring of workers’ speed, movements, and idle time, paired with behavioural profiling of shoppers through loyalty systems and purchasing history.

There was no hint of any discussion with any union, let alone the prospect of negotiation.

No dystopian future is needed. It’s already happening at your local checkout.

We don’t know where the data goes, and Palantir won’t tell us. Shoebridge is one of the few people in Canberra who thinks that might matter.

“We need rigorous guidelines in place around government procurement that prevents public money being handed to companies actively engaged in genocide and suppressing democracy,” he tells Crikey.

“A question the Albanese government needs to answer is, did anyone check these fundamental threats to democracy before signing up with Palantir?”

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The Human Face of ‘Optimisation’

But check out the supermarket. Workers across Victoria are monitored. One shelf-stacker in Ballarat, casual for six years and earning $22 per hour, says: “The computer knows where I am before my manager does. If I stop to help someone find a product for too long, it gets flagged on the roster system. If my aisle looks slow, I get questioned about how efficiently I’m working. The roster used to be based on managers knowing who could do what. Now it’s all data. And the data always wants more.”

She hasn’t joined a union. “There aren’t many of us left in retail now,” she says.

Union membership in Australia has fallen to 12.5% of employees; a historic low, from 53.4% in 1982.

Once, supermarket workers had a collective voice. Today, they are individual budget lines for an algorithm to optimise.

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How We Got Here: Four Decades of Union Disarmament

Australia didn’t stumble into this corporate power imbalance. We legislated it, bit by bit, government to government.

The 1983 Accord convinced unions to surrender wage indexation and strike capacity in exchange for superannuation. Union density stood at 53.4% in 1982. By 2023: 12.5%. The Accord rebuilt social services but helped to gut the industrial power that made those victories possible in the first place.

In a Neoliberal frenzy, we did away with tariffs and making things. Manufacturing work, where unions were strongest, collapsed from over a million jobs to around 863,000 as tariff cuts and globalisation shuttered car plants, textile mills, and steel foundries. Union membership bled away accordingly.

Next anti-union crusader, John Winston Howard weaponised this weakness. His Workplace Relations Act 1996 and WorkChoices 2005 banned pattern bargaining, crushed the 1998 Patrick waterfront dispute where balaclava-clad security guards with dogs locked out 1,400 wharfies simultaneously, and atomised workers into individualised enterprise agreements where bosses always held the upper hand.

The result? Wage theft estimated at $1.35 billion annually, by McKell, has become so routine that Fair Work recovers only part of what is owed. Coles underpaid salaried supermarket and liquor managers by about $115 million between 2017 and 2020, according to the Fair Work Ombudsman. . Woolworths admitted to $570 million in theft. Casualisation now affects 25 percent of workers with zero job security.

When you strip unions down to skeletons, you create the perfect habitat for corporate predation. Workers don’t negotiate. You endure. You even have to ask the boss for permission to withold your labour.

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Enter Palantir: The Algorithm as Boss

But why is a supermarket chain using technology designed for militarised data analysis?

Is it because algorithms don’t negotiate? They don’t strike. They don’t need meal breaks. They don’t recognise dignity, compassion, or burnout. They calculate your “maximum output per paid hour,” then pursue it relentlessly. Or is it more to do with legalising micromanagement? The new servitude.

Palantir’s Foundry platform processes data down to which worker stocks which aisle at what speed, which customer lingers at which product for how many seconds. Workers report experiencing increased work intensity, with half facing roster chaos with shifts confirmed less than 48 hours ahead. Many skip breaks to meet algorithmic targets. Labour costs fell 3.2% while sales rose 4.1%.

The system certainly works if you’re a shareholder.

Coles frames this as “improving customer experience.” Palantir calls it “operational intelligence.” Workers call it exhaustion. And there is that nagging doubt that Shoebridge voices about our data security.

And shoppers? We slid quietly into our own version of surveillance, handing over data for “loyalty discounts” that double as behavioural profiling. The supermarket doesn’t need to coerce us. It just gives us Flybuys points. An Everyday Rewards card cuts both ways. And don’t think you aren’t paying for it.

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Greed in the Aisles: Price, Profit, and Power

The numbers tell the story Coles won’t. Corporate profits explained 69% of inflation between 2020 and 2023, while wages accounted for just 18%. Coles and Woolworths together pocketed nearly $2.7 billion in 2023 profits while claiming “cost pressures” justified jacking up your grocery bill. Real wages have fallen 4.8% since March 2020; the longest sustained decline since records began in 1959.

Meanwhile, 3.7 million Australian households now face some form of food insecurity, according to Foodbank, including well over a million children going hungry.

Commonwealth Bank posted $10.2 billion profit in FY2023. Energy retailers’ profits jumped 127% while your electricity bill soared $600 annually. Insurance companies lifted premiums 28% while claims rose just 11%. At every turn, massive corporations are extracting record profits from Australian families barely keeping their heads above water.

This isn’t market efficiency. It’s organised theft.

We don’t lack groceries. We lack bargaining power, at the checkout and in the workplace. And we need to review our duopolies and monopolies. We have more of them than any comparable country, thanks to our size and our weak anti-competition laws, according to Crikey’s Bernard Keane.

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The Real Problem Isn’t Innovation. It’s Power Without Accountability.

Technology isn’t the villain. Concentrated power is.

In a country with weak unions, limited regulation of data use in employment, and a supermarket duopoly dominating supply chains, AI becomes a force multiplier for inequality.

Algorithms aren’t neutral. They reflect the values of those who deploy them.

• If the value is “efficiency,” then labour becomes burden.
• If the value is “profit,” then shoppers become revenue streams, not citizens.
• If the value is “growth,” then transparency and fairness become obstacles.

Australia hasn’t just digitised the grocery industry. We’ve automated its inequality.

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A New Fight, and a Fairer Future

The reversal agenda isn’t complicated:

• Resurrect pattern bargaining. Let unions negotiate industry-wide, not store-by-store where Coles holds all leverage. Institute co-determination models giving workers seats on corporate boards. Restore the collective power that built Medicare in the first place.
• Ban algorithmic management without human oversight. If Palantir’s tracking your toilet breaks, that’s surveillance, not scheduling. Require EU AI Act-style transparency: workers must know what data is collected, how decisions are made, who profits from productivity extraction.
• Tax windfall profits at 40%. Treasury modelling shows a 2% excess profits tax would raise $16 billion annually; scale that to 40% on truly obscene profits and you’re looking at $18-24 billion to fund social housing, not shareholder dividends. Make greedflation expensive.
• Prosecute wage theft criminally. Coles stole $115 million from workers 2017-2023. Not one executive saw a courtroom. Create a dedicated federal prosecutor with powers to pursue criminal charges. Make theft of wages carry the same penalties as theft of property.
• Break the duopoly. Give the ACCC real-time access to pricing data. Cap margins on essentials. Ban data transfer to foreign surveillance capitalists like Palantir. Make price-gouging a criminal offence.
• Build 500,000 social and affordable homes. Fund it by ending negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions that turned housing into speculative casino chips. Sydney’s median house price has reached 13.7 times median household income, double what it was in 2012.
• Eliminate corporate donations. Cap individual political donations at $3,000, introduce full public funding. End the $140 million rivers of mining and corporate cash that bought WorkChoices and keep Labor paralysed.

Mining lobbies will spend millions resisting. Murdoch will shriek about “union thugs.” Business will threaten capital flight. The question is whether Labor has courage or just slogans.

The Albanese government’s response so far? Paralysed incrementalism. Their “Closing Loopholes” legislation contains enough exemptions to drive a Coles truck through, with wage theft provisions neutered by “inadvertent underpayment” loopholes. On price-gouging, just rhetorical condemnation. No windfall profits tax. No price monitoring enforcement. No action on Palantir’s algorithmic management despite union complaints.

After the mining industry’s demolition of Rudd’s Resource Super Profits Tax in 2010, Labor has tiptoed around direct confrontation with coal and gas. Today, there are on the order of a hundred-plus new coal and gas projects in various stages of the federal ‘major projects’ pipeline, and independent tallies suggest the Albanese government has already approved around thirty new coal, oil and gas developments.

Yet neither Resources Minister Madeleine King nor her colleagues show any sign of drawing a line under new fossil fuel expansion. Small-target strategy has become surrender to corporate power.

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The Choice Ahead

Australia doesn’t lack expertise, resources, or imagination. What our “small target” federal government lacks is courage and political resolve to put them to work for the common good.

But the same ingenuity that built Medicare, invented Wi-Fi, and unionised entire industries can protect our human rights in the digital age.

The power imbalance we face is not destiny. It’s design. And anything designed can be redesigned.

These actions aren’t backward-looking. They are the foundation of new rights for a new era; rights protecting not just hands and backs but the conditions we work under, the data we produce, and the dignity we’re entitled to when we step into a shop, clock onto a shift, or scan a loyalty card.

The economy is not a natural disaster. It’s a human set of choices. So is the future.

The blackbirds, another invasive stranger from Europe, at large in our Western Victorian garden hunt without hesitation, strike without doubt. Humans confronting power require similar clarity.

Australia faces a binary choice: managed decline into algorithmic serfdom where corporations track your every move while extracting maximum profit from minimum labour, or confrontation with the forces engineering that decline.

History doesn’t belong to algorithms. It belongs to the people who refuse to be reduced to them.

The choice is fight or submit.

But here’s what history actually records: every significant social advance in Australian history came from organised resistance to concentrated power. Medicare didn’t arrive through compromise. The eight-hour day wasn’t gifted by benevolent employers. Women’s suffrage wasn’t granted out of paternalistic kindness. Each was won by people who refused to accept that algorithms, bosses, or empires had the final say.

The blackbirds in our garden hunt with clarity because instinct drives them. But humans possess something more dangerous to corporate power: the capacity to organise, to remember, to learn, and to collectively rewrite the rules we’re told are unchangeable.

Australia’s next chapter isn’t written in Palantir’s code or Coles’ profit margins. It’s being drafted right now in union halls, rental properties, and supermarket aisles where people are realising that the system exploiting them can be challenged, changed, and rebuilt.

The power exists. It always has. The only question is when we decide to use it.

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