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.
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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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@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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