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This from Alan Kohler is a useful history lesson in Australia’s own wrangling of productivity, manufacturing, tariffs, government spending and revenue, jobs and living standards.

The situation we’re in now, on the cusp of all in AI, means asking how individual, generational and regional community experiences of #underwork challenge the assumptions of a national formula for productivity as a proxy for good times. Data validity depends so much on what you’re asking.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-11/us-tariffs-keating-chalmers-productivity/105581020

Kate Bowles

@kate@aus.social replied · 3 months ago

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.

https://mastodon.social/@campuscodi/114949668927182961

#underwork

Kate Bowles

@kate@aus.social replied · 3 months ago

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

Kate Bowles

@kate@aus.social replied · 3 months ago

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.

Kate Bowles

@kate@aus.social replied · 3 months ago

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.

#underwork

Kate Bowles

@kate@aus.social replied · 3 months ago

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.

Kate Bowles

@kate@aus.social replied · 3 months ago

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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Insurgo Formica

@InsurgoFormica@aus.social replied · 3 months ago

@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.

Herman 🇪🇺🇺🇦🇾🇪🍋

@Herman@mastodon.world replied · 3 months ago

@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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