Tag: casualisation

CAUGHT IN THE CRUNCH: The Surveillance State Comes to Your Local Supermarket

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. 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. Workers across Victoria are monitored, with one shelf-stacker in Ballarat saying: “The computer knows where I am before my manager does.”

The Precariat Grows: Labor’s Toothless Reforms Can’t Stop the Casualisation Juggernaut

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 says The Australian Council of Trade Unions. 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