Thinking about this, and the future of global #underwork.
https://gizmodo.com/the-end-of-work-as-we-know-it-2000635294
The End of Work as We Know It
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And as a painful coda to Scott Farquahar’s #npc shenanigans shared earlier by @emmadavidson, here’s the other half (apparently the less warm one) firing 150 workers by video.
Sparkly new futurey jobs? No sign.
Beginning a thought about the prospect of mass global #underwork.
The definitions and thresholds of employment used by governments are way more granular than just “in work” or “has job”. So underworking is likely to be far more prevalent than the data derived from self-reported survey responses. And the vision of labour market transformation thanks to sparkly new futurey jobs is very light on detail about new job stability or income sufficiency.
https://www.abs.gov.au/methodologies/labour-force-australia-methodology/jun-2025
Why think about this as #underwork not underemployment? Because underworking is a human condition with human impact, like overworking. Underwork is a social situation.
And unless the sparkly new futurey jobs show up, AI driven underworking will expand the demographic of an established and generationally impactful underworking class: working under the level of wealth creation, working insecurely, with fewer protections, weaker access to fair work provisions, solidarity or safe protest.
These are long term political choices.
And the threshold of being countable as employed in Australia is one hour paid work a week, and can be not even that. So the unemployment rate references this number, not any common sense understanding of sufficient work to live on. It includes all the teenage workers 15 and up.
Within this are nested the underemployed who report themselves in a monthly survey of around 50000 Australians as employed and either having had expected working hours reduced, or preferring to work more than their normal working hours.
So this is how we get an official underemployment rate of 5.9% in Australia.
Why this matters: if you hear that 150 workers have been ejected from their seats, but you just heard that employment levels are both high and stable, you might think: that’s ok, there will be another job.
But when you factor in underemployment, which includes people already losing sufficient work and people who didn’t have sufficient work to begin with, things look tougher.
Political choices that favour business and growth are long-term social choices about how we live, who gets to flourish, who gets by, who gets trapped in #underwork.
US labour market data makes the news, in a predictable way, by confounding the Tantrum in Chief. The thing to notice though is that the science of estimation always makes people testy because labour market vitals feed into consumer confidence and political futures. Meanwhile behind the data, every point is a person, a family, a community. #underwork
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/hiring-expected-slowed-july/story?id=124238397
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This from @scottsantens on UBI is detailed and clear. Work related poverty is expanding; capitalism is failing humans as well as the planet. Capitalism as a system cannot deliver us from its own intended impacts. So, something new is needed, and urgently.
Curious about how US monthly labour market data is estimated? As in Australia, sample surveys.
The US takes a granular view of “not working” in the survey period, including the subcategories of “discouraged worker” and “marginally attached to the labor force”. Among workers, “involuntary part-time workers” are what Australia would call the underemployed. This is the social experience that is rapidly becoming lifetime or even generational #underwork.
The language of labor underutilization used in US reporting moralises the problem of work, making it a problem that affects government and business rather than a social harm that affects people and communities.
Caveat: I’m not a statistically literate person, far from it. I’m really just thinking about how employment reporting is a languaging practice, a storytelling practice, and all kinds of political vibing. Trump’s tantrums make this clear, but it was already there like climate change: however you count whatever you count, the underlying lived experience of trying to get through these times is that water is rising faster than we’re prepared for.
Quietly horrifying correlate to the rapid spread of #underwork is the triumphalism now associated with #overwork.
We need to stop treating these as separate phenomena. They are the two sides of the work coin flipping. As Levitt describes, overworkers are colluding with the business ideal of competitive advantage, but in working two jobs inside one salary they’re also ensuring the rise of involuntary part-time work.
AI will win this race.
https://financialpost.com/fp-work/howard-levitt-work-life-balance-dead-employers
Meanwhile, salaries and sign-on bonuses in the AI sector give us a glimpse of the sunlit uplands where talent is rewarded with immediate and dizzying wealth. Work redefined as elite level competitive sport aligned to willingness to show up all hours is life changing for very few whose life goal is to, I don’t know, buy islands.
But these aspirational shenanigans are not disconnected from the social crisis of #underwork, far from it.
https://www.afr.com/technology/sign-on-bonuses-of-150m-ai-talent-war-heats-up-20250701-p5mbr1
“AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.
AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company.”
Louder for the governments at the back, spruiking sparkly new futurey jobs to persuade us to siphon our remaining water to cool their data centres: replacing old jobs with new jobs is not the business model here because of course it isn’t. Short term, this is about creating both worse jobs ( @pluralistic ‘s reverse centaurs) and ultimately mass #underwork.
And then there’s this, from the future of futurey jobs that are already right here.
“Was I working in a real click farm or a fake click farm? It seemed entirely possible that this “labor” I was engaged in could have been real and profitable. It also might have been window dressing.”
https://slate.com/technology/2025/08/indeed-job-recruiter-text-message-scam.html
So back to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (noting that from now on the US BLS is an octopus in a tank surrounded by drunk punters waving cash), the underutilisation rate is a tick under 10%.
That’s one of those stats like shark bite data: fine if you’re not the bitee, but tricky if you are.
As the Australian government talks up AI, it needs also to be talking up UBI and staring down the inevitable conservative objections. The future of #underwork needs a clear plan, especially given how many of the sparkly new futurey jobs that are AI adjacent will make themselves AI redundant in the fairly near term.
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/unemployment-rate-41-march
@kate it seems to me the most obvious role to be replaced by AI is the CEO and their executives. I'll believe AI when that happens.
@kate “This unvarnished perspective reveals a fundamental truth about the corporate embrace of AI: it is, at its core, a quest for efficiency and profitability. And in this quest, human labor is often seen as a liability, an obstacle to be overcome.”.
The dehumanization of society for profit continues. #AI #forcedlabor
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