Labor reshaping Australia’s IR system to fit the union vision

They call this sort of work "insecure" when the actual employees would call it "flexible." (If you want to know what this means in reality, have a chat with your next Uber driver, and as likely as not you'll find they're financing a degree, or the deposit on a house, but can't afford to be tied down to someone else's timetable.)

There was an attempt by the tax department, which also hates the gig economy for its own tax-related reasons, to treat some of these as employees.

The High Court of Australia struck it down, deeming that a commercial contract is a contract, not an employment arrangement.

The Labor government is now proposing to change the legislation so that the Fair Work Commission can set minimum standards for gig workers.

Based on past performance, this is likely to make life harder for these workers, and less flexible.

The best protection against low pay is full-employment, and the buffer that gig work provides at the margin actually makes this more likely, than in a system where everyone is an employee.

There are costs that employers wear on their employees' behalf, which contractors wear on their own behalf. Costs like the risk of resignation or learning to do the job, and sometimes even office space and overheads.

When the employer has to bear the risk of taking on the employee, they are much more hesitant than when the employee is a contractor and bears the risk themselves. Contractors are also able to fill in cracks in a way that employees can't, for example making a full-time job out of fractions of jobs at different employers.

Productivity is the key to Australia's recovery, but yet again Labor is acting against the country's best interests.

This should probably be no surprise. Labor is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the union movement. It has been since the day it formed in the aftermath of Australia's shearers' strike.

You might think the government works for you, but in reality, they work for the union movement. It's an employment contract that's been in place for 130 years and shows no signs of being terminated by either party.