ILPC 2026

New forms of solidarity?  Precarious work and temporary migrant workers in Australia

This paper draws on findings from a project of interdisciplinary research in two industry sectors in Australia which are characterised by an increased use of temporary migrant workers in precarious jobs: a) food services; and b) agriculture, forestry and fishing.

The paper argues that the increased use of temporary migrant workers in these sectors signals a process of reconfiguration of employer practices, which increasingly rely on more intensely precarious work, characterised by abusive working conditions and wage rates under the legal minimum. It draws out the broader implications of this process for class composition and class politics, offering an analysis in terms of class fragmentation rather than in terms of the emergence of a precariat. An immediate effect of the reconfiguration of employer practices is to disrupt traditional forms of worker solidarity.  But at the same time it creates conditions for new forms of solidarity, both at the workplace, where temporary migrant workers labour alongside local workers under similar conditions of precarious work, and in the broader community, where community organizations and trade unions are slowly becoming more active. The paper discusses two incipient symptoms of a possible countermovement in Australia: a) the intensified enforcement activity of the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO); and b) successful campaigning on work insecurity by individual trade unions.  At the same time it outlines the barriers to development of new forms of solidarity.

The research project incorporates background industry research, interviews with government representatives, employers, trade union officials, and activists in community organizations, and a special program of in-depth interviews with over 80 temporary migrant workers (plus selected local workers) from three main visa sub-classes.  The in-depth interviews provided powerful evidence on experiences of precariousness both inside and outside the workplace, indicating that societal structures, starting with immigration status and exclusion from social welfare, as well as debt and other inherited social obligations, act to amplify the negative effects of precarious work and to obstruct the prospects of complaint and resistance for most temporary migrant workers (Campbell and Price 2016). Temporary migrant workers appear here as highly vulnerable workers (Burgess et al. 2013).]

References

Burgess, J., Connell, J. and Winterton, J. (2013) ‘Vulnerable workers, precarious work and the role of trade unions and HRM’, The International Journal of Human Resource Management 24(22), 4083-4093.

Campbell, I. and Price, R. (2016) ‘Precarious Work and Precarious Workers: Towards an Improved Conceptualisation’, The Economic and Labour Relations Review 27(3), 314-332.