This publication contains a collection of articles examining the social and economic problems associated with the ‘gig economy’.

Australians continue to debate the Fair Work Commission’s recent decision to reduce Sunday and holiday penalty rates for retail and hospitality workers. This report investigates the prevalence of weekend work in other sectors of Australia’s economy - and confirms the overall economic importance of extra income generated by weekend penalty rates, not just in retail...

Off-Site Manufacture and Construction (OSCM) is at the heart of the modern construction industry. This paper explores the traditional thinking patterns of architects in China and predicts possible future roles for them. We foresee a study approach that focuses on the order and rules for OSCM, resulting in architects’ existing mindsets being changed to thinking...

NOTHING is more central to Labor’s view of what makes Australia such a great place to live in than our long tradition of having an independent umpire to stop employers exploiting workers. Former Liberal prime minister Sir Robert Menzies shared that view; like others in the centre-left and centre-right, he argued that it was a...

The growing prevalence of alternative work arrangements has accelerated with the rapidly evolving digital platform transformations in local and global markets (Kenny and Zysman, 2015 and 2016). Although traditional (offline) informal paid work has always been a part of the labor sector (BLS-Contingent Worker Survey, 2005; GAO, 2015 and Katz and Krueger, 2016), the rise...