We like to think we are an enlightened, postfeminist society, but in reality it still takes real courage for a domestic violence victim to come out to her employer, especially in such lean and mean economic times where steady and reliable jobs are difficult to find and hold. In a neoliberal society, where it is often assumed everyone should be productive, disciplined and ‘in control’ of their lives, especially at work, it can be embarrassing and risky to admit you do need help.

Let’s be clear about how dire this situation is: an Australian trade union representing young, low-paid workers, who are disproportionately women, was found by the independent umpire to have knowingly pushed the wages and conditions of their members below the minimum legal standards. Why would a trade union do such a thing?

Today, it is no longer uncommon for businesses to place regulations on their employees’ behaviour beyond the workplace. Such provisions will now often form part of an employee’s contract; sometimes couched in terms of a specific social media policy, or else as a general exhortation against bringing the company into disrepute.

Liberals see a commonality between ‘union interests’ and ‘business interests’ – that is, that both are merely sectional. But there is great danger for progressives holding this view.

I’ve had chefs throw hot pans at me. I’ve had customers throw glasses at me and flick their cigarettes at me. I’ve had guys at bars push their fingers up my arse and grab my tits while I was working. I have never reported it because I was afraid of losing my job. Instead, I have tried to laugh it off. I’m earning minimum wage, and speaking out has a cost, always.

The measure of a law degree's value is no longer equivalent to that of the career it might lead to, but rather the possibility of such a career. Its value, no longer tied to the real-life concerns of students and early graduates, has come to incorporate such things as prestige, privilege and exposure – not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves. The law degree has taken on the character of a dream.

CUB employees are just one of many groups working under large multinationals – in this case, UK-based SAB Miller – who claim they are being exploited and cut off from entitlements through contracting and subcontracting agreements. As the unions involved in the current dispute point out, the lot of workers doesn’t exactly come off as fair when SAB Miller have an operating income of around $4.4 billion, and its CEO Alan Clarke receives a multimillion-dollar annual payout.

Today, the history of the cameleers (or ‘Afghans’ as they were known then, though they came from an area that stretched from Afghanistan to what is now the most north-western part of India) is mostly used as a liberal lesson about multiculturalism. That is, the cameleers’ contribution to the federation’s economy becomes the premise for an enlarged, more inclusive nationalism.

Indeed, what is most illuminating about the World Aid report is the difference on display between company policy and company practice when it comes to the rights of production workers. Almost all of the companies evaluated by Baptist World Aid had supply and production policies in place, and 23 of the 87 companies (73 per cent) received an A rating or above for those policies. Despite that, only 4 companies received a rating over a C+ for ‘worker empowerment’: a rating based on workers receiving at or above a living wage.

It’s the largest document leak in history: 11.5 million files and 2.6 terabytes of information detailing how our global elite avoid their responsibility to the rest of us. The Panama Papers have allowed us to peek behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and glimpse the very mortal old men pulling the levers of state. But we already know they play by different rules. We have long known, for instance, that the global elite use tax havens. Yet, what’s truly damaging about these leaks is that they demystify the process.

Last week’s announcement that Fairfax newsrooms are to suffer cuts of ‘the equivalent of 120 full-time employees’ is terrible news not only for those Fairfax journalists and other newsroom staff who will be made redundant and have to struggle to find work in a shrinking and intensely competitive pool of job opportunities. It’s also bad news for the survivors of the cull, who will face the unenviable prospect of producing news with fewer colleagues, making a traditionally high-pressure job even more stressful. And it’s very unwelcome news for the general public.

Think about your own life. What would you do if the full-time working week was reduced to 30 hours?

Workers find it hard to engage in conversations about the future – and this includes talking about climate change – if they are being forced to only ever focus on their lives from minute to minute, day to day. This is one of the impacts of insecure work. Climate change needs action and we need to create affordable renewable options for ordinary people.

Having workers’ representatives monitoring safety matters. Last month, when a concrete slab crushed two men to death on an East Perth worksite, it transpired that the CFMEU had been refused entry to the site sixteen times. As the national security crusaders tell us: if you’re doing nothing wrong, then you’ve got nothing to hide. Yet it’s one rule for the employers and it’s another for everyone else.

The ‘half pay scam’ Adele Ferguson and Sarah Danckert identified wasn’t elaborate – pay people for half the hours they actually work, then cook the books – but the trap that kept the employees in there, most of whom were international students, was a vicious one. Should anyone overworked and underpaid eventually raise their hand to complain, they would be pointed to the breach of their own visa conditions (international student visa holders can usually only work a maximum of 20 hours, a limit their masters are obligated by law to be aware of) and their employer would threaten to dob them in.

The fact is, we teachers are teetering on faultlines characteristic of today’s universities: between university traditions, and government funding and strategy; between knowledge and skill, theory and practice, education and training; between students as learners and as ‘paying customers’.