From next year, students in Australia will be forced to work conventional jobs for $8 an hour in order to get their degree. Listen to the rumbling of a massive placement strike on the horizon.

Our report aims to assess the Jobs Protection Framework and what we know about our industrial situations. It’s a ‘not these concessions right now’ perspective for those of us who want an effective and hopeful strategy for the long run.

‘Education-focused roles’ are entrenching a permanently lower tier of academic workers – cheap teachers rather than rounded scholars, liable to be stuck for good outside the career they anticipate.

In Australia, as elsewhere, the challenge to workers now could scarcely be greater after three decades of neoliberalism bearing down on them in the form of (in)human resource management and anti-union governments. Even the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 gave workers little respite – indeed, neoliberalism was, paradoxically, strengthened and emboldened as there appeared to be no mainstream alternative to it. Now the country is facing a crisis in which the worst is yet to come, for Australia is several weeks behind the European epicentres of the likes of Italy and Spain.

I’m one of the delegates in my workplace – I have been so for about a year. In that time, I’m proud to say, we’ve successfully increased union membership from 30% to 96%. How did we do this? By taking up political questions in the workplace that are relevant to broader society such as marriage equality, refugees and the racist demonisation of the South Sudanese community, as well as agitating and campaigning around issues at our workplace to improve our working conditions.

Public schools rely on the unpaid overtime labour and emotional blackmail of teachers. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve challenged why we are expected to complete an arbitrary task in our own time only to be told ‘we don’t get into teaching for the money’ and ‘we go that step further because it’s what is best for the children’.

But Wairoa has been hit the hardest. And it is here, in this small Hawke’s Bay town, that the debate about the future of New Zealand’s workplace relations policy really matters. Wairoa is a town deeply affected by the impacts of job insecurity and the legacy of an industrial dispute. Will the new government’s workplace legislation change that?

I had never been paid the award rate and at all but one venue, never been paid penalty rates either. Most will tell a similar story. In 2017, a survey of 624 hospitality workers by United Voice Union estimated that 76 per cent were being underpaid. Young people are the most vulnerable, and international students are affected disproportionately. Wage theft is in the bones of the industry.

An increasingly common experience is the ‘phantom lecture’. This is when surplus students can’t fit into the main lecture theatre and are told to go to a second theatre where they’ll find the main lecture streamed onto a screen. Except, that is, in the first week of this semester, when the university forgot to hire someone to set up the stream in the second lecture theatres and students were left staring at a blank screen.

That’s the root of the Fair Work Ombudsman’s cultural problem. There is one law for unions in this country, and another for wage thieves.

I am still learning how to protect my own consent – sometimes the hard way – but I am grateful for the ways in which doing sex work has helped me to clarify and articulate my boundaries, at work and beyond. I wish I could share what I have learned with 16-year-old me. I would tell her that refusing to partake in sexual acts is an inalienable right that requires no explanation. I would tell her that for someone to deny your right to consent – whether it be through physical force, guilt, or discriminatory laws – is indefensible.

The ‘free market’ line is a lie. Like many of the platform firms, Uber is a venture-capitalist funded monopoly-in-formation. As Srnicek writes, the point about platform capitalism is that it depends on ‘network effects’ to work: the more users it has, the more valuable it becomes, the more users it gets. The result, as with Facebook and Google, is monopoly. Uber’s price-cutting practices, hugely subsidised by venture-capital, are intended to expedite its own market dominance.

In many obvious ways the pros of being employed outweigh the negatives, though employment in the form of two or more casual jobs brings no greater feeling of security than the dole. Neither does being employed in a job you aren’t all that great at. The depression eases when the bills are being paid, but the relief is only temporary. For me, all the standing in line, all the being spoken down to all amounted to nothing more than the freedom to not have to report my income.

As a retail worker with more than ten years’ experience, I was saddened, though not particularly surprised, by the recent decision of the FWC to cut penalty rates in my sector. It strikes me as the logical outcome of the widening gulf between the ‘servants’ and the ‘served’ – a willed ignorance to the actual conditions of labour, that extends right through to the uniquely free-floating, disconnected lives of most of the political class.

However, since the early 1990s, research has shown that rather than hitting a glass ceiling, men working in the ‘female professions’ take a ride on what sociologist Christine Williams famously termed ‘the glass escalator’. In 1992, she wrote, ‘men take their gender privilege with them when they enter predominantly female occupations; this translates into an advantage in spite of their numerical rarity’.

The penalty rates decision can’t be seen in isolation: it is a symptom of an economy and society in flux, and the product of a system that has valued parliamentary and institutional power at the expense of organised labour.