Casual Work and Casualisation: How Does Australia Compare?

Abstract

It is widely recognised that the category of casual work and its recent pattern of growth in Australia are somewhat unusual in cross-national comparison. But there is continuing confusion about what this means. This paper seeks to define more exactly the distinctive features of the Australian case. The first half of the paper introduces the phenomenon of casual work and casualisation. The second half takes up three different ways of comparing the category of casual work—looking in OECD countries for other examples of a category of ‘casual ‘, for parallel examples of ‘temporary’ work, and then for a substantive equivalent to casual work irrespective of its label. It concludes that the Australian experience is indeed unusual but it is not aberrant. The distinctive features include not only the size of the casual workforce (both regular and irregular) and the trajectory of growth over the past two decades but also the size of the shortfall in rights and benefits that divides casual and permanent employment and the way in which casualisation is facilitated by the distinctive system of labour regulation in Australia.