What does the Australian census tell us about how artists earn their living?

Around 3.3 million people were engaged in ‘non-traditional’ work in 2004, representing approximately one third of all employed people. Overall, this number had grown since 1998, but non-traditional work’s share of the total workforce remained largely unchanged. Non-traditional work is mostly a temporary or transitory experience, except for a few groups of casual employees, such...

In 2003, over a quarter of all wage and salary earners were employed on a casual basis, and in the period since 1988 more than half of all new jobs created have gone to casual workers. Casual workers today are drawn from a wide cross-section of the Australian population. In this Research Note Tony Kryger...

Barbara Pocock, John Buchanan and Iain Campbell examine policy options to contain the expansion of casual work in Australia. The first part of the paper briefly summarises the evidence on casual work and why it is a problem in Australia. The second part looks at some of the factors that have facilitated its growth. The...