Today in Parliament, Abigail spoke in support of regulating algorithmic management and workplace technologies, arguing it is a necessary step to protect workers from intensifying exploitation, surveillance and safety risks driven by big corporations.

Abigail said:

What a kerfuffle the business lobby has created over this piece of legislation, whipping itself into a lather and spreading fear and misinformation in defence of the right of billion‑dollar corporations to brutalise and dehumanise their workforce. I needed a laugh this week. A particular bit of the speech from the Hon. Chris Rath absolutely made my day. He said:

It does not matter if it is BHP or Commonwealth Bank using sophisticated cloud technology or AI—

this is the funny bit—

or a one-man band tradie using an app on their phone or Google Sheets to manage some of their invoicing; they will be captured by this. Mark Morey will start looking through their files. That is essentially what the Government is doing…

What sole trader is calling the union on themselves? What sole trader is going to call a union and say, "I have just done the unhealthiest thing. I have created an algorithm and got it to direct me to break the law. I am calling you in to come and inspect." That is just extraordinary. For the member to go on to say that somehow all these small businesses that do not even have algorithmic decision‑making or any kind of work‑intensifying technologies are somehow presenting a safety risk and that there are so many work health and safety entry permit holders in New South Wales that they would be inspecting every small business encapsulates what this campaign from the businesses has become. How absurd! But I thank the member, because it was very funny.

The full court press of opposition to this simple and modest piece of legislation marks a pronounced regression in the industrial approach by Australian businesses—or, perhaps more accurately, a shift in public presentation by these businesses, emboldened by big tech arrogance, to embrace wholeheartedly a more authoritarian management style.

It is an indisputable fact that, nearly universally, to lesser and greater degrees across industries, the nature of the organisation, distribution and allocation of work has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. One particularly obvious site where that has occurred is in the nature of people's working arrangements. Australia now ranks as the eighth largest site of online gig work in the world, and it continues to grow. Traditional employment models are being increasingly degraded with employers through decades of restructuring efforts, seeking to move risk away from themselves and onto individual workers in pursuit of the power and economic advantages that accompany those ad hoc and discretionary forms of employment.

Widespread casualisation, subcontracting and labour hire arrangements have increasingly undermined the employment arrangements that characterised decades past and that were hard won by workers and overwhelmingly supported by the public. That gradual but steady restructuring of the employment landscape was permitted to progress largely unaddressed, while wages were allowed to stagnate and the relationship between wages and productivity became increasingly decoupled. Entitlements such as paid sick leave, annual leave and superannuation have become foreign concepts to many workers, particularly young people and migrant workers. That compounds and exacerbates inequality, as key industries become increasingly dominated by small groups of the most powerful companies.

The scale and stealthy nature of that change that has transformed traditional working arrangements has been empowered by technologies that undermine worker agency, increase work pressure and assault job security. That is, of course, not an entirely new phenomenon. Technology has always interacted with and informed the way we work, and so too managerial styles are subject to development and innovation, for better or for worse. The bill addresses one feature of workplace technological change—how work is allocated and whether it is driving a degradation of worker safety in the process—while leaving other insidious developments like pervasive workplace surveillance unaddressed. This is a very modest piece of legislation in that regard, and I do not believe for a moment that its passage will come close to addressing the powerful forces of capitalist exploitation in our workplaces. I hope that this can mark a step towards a world in which we can win a more democratic and equitable future of work where the limits and influences of new technologies can be collectively agreed upon, where their enhancements to economic and productive output can be more equally distributed, and where workers are able to be agents in their development, and not just subjects, as they build shared power and solidarity.

As I said, the issues the legislation seeks to address are not new. They are best understood as the most recent frontier in the perpetual drive by massive corporations to extract ever increasing productive capacity out of their workforce with minimal regard for the health and economic outcomes of their workers. Post the Industrial Revolution, factories became the major location of this exploitative managerial style. Frederick Taylor is credited as being the leading innovator in the systematic observation and study of work and workers through his infamous time and motion studies. That work informed the theory of scientific management and came to be known as Taylorism, a management style that would exemplify the workplaces of the twentieth century.

Through struggle and advancements won by workers, the most pernicious forms of that Taylorist style of management were overcome and workers began to enjoy a higher degree of dignity and safety at work. But with the age of algorithmic management technologies, workplace surveillance and increasingly powerful artificial intelligence software, a new development occurred by the name of "engineered standards". In the context of a warehouse worker, engineered standards considers the role of a worker and breaks it up into smaller tasks that are assigned a universal and standardised time limit. That means that, irrespective of a worker's individual circumstances or capabilities—or indeed the nature and conditions of the workplace on the day—that time limit for that task remains the same and will be enforced.

Workers are held by management to what it considers to be that 100 per cent time limit, and what is typically referred to as a pick rate. Workers then face harsh disciplinary proceedings, which may include termination, if they fail to perform at 100 per cent in every task on every day. Pick rates are not designed in such a way that they allow for any of the realities or idiosyncrasies of a real workplace, or the natural rhythms of human labour. Warehouse workers subjected to pick rates experience significantly higher levels of workplace injury, fatigue, burnout and, ultimately, staff turnover.

It is simply not possible to continually perform consistently and safely at what a management consultant, their spreadsheet or the work allocation software developed by that algorithm has determined to be a 100 per cent pick rate. The work health and safety statistics bear that out. Unrealistic key performance indicators and work rates drive stress, high turnovers and workplace injuries. While work intensification has been a constant issue across generations and workplaces, new technologies have ramped this up to boiling point through a steep change in power intensity and scope. This is not a theoretical idea; it is a real issue confronting workers today.

Unions like the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association [SDA] and the United Workers Union have been raising the alarm on behalf of their members, as they have seen these powerful forces unleashed by some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the country. Members will remember that last year industrial action was taken by workers employed by Woolworths in its warehouse and distribution centres in New South Wales and Victoria. That was because in early 2024, without consultation, Woolworths imposed a worker performance management program to be rolled out across all Woolworths distribution centres in Australia. It referred to the program as "the framework". It utilised exactly those kinds of engineered standards to enforce standardised measures of worker movement and speed.

Under the framework, should a worker fail to meet the designated speed of work at 100 per cent capacity of every measured minute of their shift, they would be placed on a 12-week coaching program referred to as "the glide path". The United Workers Union has made clear that it is not just that those engineered standards are flawed and inaccurate measures of worker capacity—although, of course, they are—but that it is a system designed to be coercive and punitive. In that framing, the perverse and harmful outcomes experienced by workers are a feature of the system and not a bug. The framework and its engineered standards had a profound impact on Woolworths warehouse workers. Workers reported unrealistic pick rates enforced by management and pressures on workers to cut corners to make rate and avoid disciplinary action. When placed on the coaching glide path involving coaching by management, one of the requirements imposed by the management checklist was picking with urgency, despite that contravening Woolworths's own code of conduct, which states that no job is so urgent that it cannot be done safely.

The risks of automated systems creating workplace hazards are not theoretical. In mid-2023 a Woolworths warehouse distribution worker, Basel Brikha, was fatally injured at work in a Sydney distribution centre in a tragic incident involving an automated pallet dispenser. Colleagues have described his tragic death as inevitable after having previously raised concerns regarding the safety of such machinery. Rushing work when working around automated heavy machinery like that is a disaster waiting to happen. Members of the SDA report similar concerns in their worksites, including Amazon warehouses. Amazon is a notorious employer for driving its workers to the brink under engineered standards similar to the framework. Amazon has repeatedly been found guilty of imposing horrifying working conditions in its warehouses globally. Its North American experiments are the thin edge of the wedge of what we can expect to be imported to Australian workplaces.

The report of the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions entitled The "Injury-Productivity Trade-off": How Amazon's Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses was published in December 2024 and its findings were devastating. It found that Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they actually are. Amazon imposes speed and productivity requirements on workers, commonly called "rates", and those requirements force workers to move at an extremely fast and often dangerous pace. To ensure compliance, Amazon tracks workers' movements throughout each shift. When workers cannot keep up, Amazon uses automated systems to initiate disciplinary procedures, eventually resulting in termination.

Workers are forced to move in unsafe ways and to repeat the same movements hundreds and thousands of times each shift, resulting in extremely high rates of musculoskeletal disorders. Although Amazon has safety procedures in place, the company's required rates make those procedures nearly impossible to follow. The report also uncovered evidence that Amazon is aware of the safety risks caused by the speed it demands of its workers, having initiated studies aimed at understanding how it can improve worker safety. But when those internal studies recommended efforts that might reduce workers' pace and potentially hurt the company's bottom line, Amazon chose not to act on the studies' findings.

It is not only warehouse workers who are subjected to brutalising work conditions imposed by algorithms or software; it is health workers, freelancers, meat workers, delivery drivers and countless other industries. Meat workers are often made to wear wearables, causing workers to feel a sense of constant oversight. Ostensibly used to measure movement, heat stress or manual handling risk, they are just as often used to monitor worker productivity and enforce brutal production rates. The Australian Meat Processor Corporation produced a report on Teys Smart Vision, a computer vision activity-based monitoring software for use in abattoirs. That software used fixed video cameras and machine learning to "track product harvested from carcasses and measure time in motion for each product prepared at in scope boning and slicing tables". According to the report:

The project aimed to capture time in motion data that related to the corresponding carcase without changing the Beenleigh boning room footprint/configuration or impacting productivity. This approach meant that Teys could measure processing time each and every day without introducing additional productivity constraints or expensive investments …

That meat company did not want to invest in genuine productivity enhancements or facility upgrades; it wanted to use machine learning software to push workers harder to increase their meat production output. Meat processing is one of Australia's highest risk industrial sectors, driven largely by high-frequency laceration and musculoskeletal-related claims. General manufacturing reports approximately 9.6 serious injury claims per million hours worked, while meat processing facilities report rates between 19 and 29 claims per million hours. Workers are exposed to hazards such as continuous knife use, low‑temperature environments, carcass lifting and labour-intensive manual processes. Work intensification driven by machine learning will obviously drive even greater risk of serious injury.

Gig workers are similarly subjected to punitive and oppressive conditions via the applications that govern their work. Transport workers in the gig economy are not currently afforded the same protections as employees in the event that they are terminated without warning, procedural fairness or consultation. They are routinely terminated on the basis of poor performance without being provided an opportunity to respond. Gig companies claim to offer flexible work arrangements that give workers control over how they perform their work but, in practice, that flexibility rarely materialises. Rather than periodic human performance reviews, gig platforms continuously assess workers through automated data analytics, with every task monitored and scored. The growth of gig work has therefore replaced traditional human resource functions with customer ratings, data collection and algorithmic systems. That form of algorithmic management obscures who is actually making decisions about work performance, what rights workers hold and where they can raise workplace concerns.

Research shows that platforms such as Uber Eats rely on algorithmic surveillance, using data drawn from workers' personal smartphones to allocate work, set pay, discipline workers and, in some cases, terminate them. As a result, workers have limited opportunities to challenge negative assessments, and little discretion is applied to individual circumstances. We have all heard the reports of Uber directing drivers to disobey road rules, endangering the lives of those drivers and the public. Those applications have no consideration for the reality of the working environment for drivers and delivery riders. Riders will continue to be penalised and down‑ranked for slow delivery even if they are riding a bike on a stinking hot, 40-degree day and need to stop for some water, or if they choose to decline a delivery because they are exhausted and bordering on heat stroke.

Those circumstances and brutal work allocation practices need to be able to be interrogated and resisted. The examples I have given are just a fraction of the kinds of oppressive algorithmic decision-making and management software that workers are up against in the modern workforce. They pose clear and obvious worker safety risks that result from massive businesses trying to extract every possible percentage of profit out of fatigued and overworked employees. That is why it is so galling to see the hysteria and fearmongering against this legislation coming from the business lobby. It is incredibly disingenuous to claim that this legislation would impact on the operation of small businesses in any way—as if a mum-and-dad corner store is allocating work using pernicious and sophisticated software in this way. That is absurd. Exactly those software systems reinforce the market dominance of mega corporations like Coles, Woolworths, Amazon and Uber and directly undermine the economic viability of high street shops, family restaurants and small-producer farmers. In other words, the bill supports small business, not the other way around.

The misinformation and fearmongering surrounding this legislation is astonishing. Not least is the outrageous misrepresentation over what it will mean for right of entry permit holders. The legislation supplements and clarifies the existing regime for right of entry permit holders to enter workplaces and gather evidence when they suspect a contravention of the WHS Act has occurred. Under the existing regime, which will remain in force for the newly clarified powers, there is no blanket power to demand entry without reason. It must be attached to a reasonable suspicion of a contravention of the Work Health and Safety Act or regulations. The power can be exercised only when there is at least 24 hours notice provided to the person conducting a business or undertaking, unless there is a serious and immediate risk to health or safety.

Under the current right of entry regime, permit holders may enter the workplace; inspect work systems, plants, substances and structures; observe how work is carried out; consult with workers; warn workers about health or safety risks; inspect and copy WHS-relevant documents; and assist workers with WHS issue resolution. In order to exercise that power, they must hold a current WHS entry permit—and that, in itself, is no mean feat to gain, requiring extensive training and background checks to ensure that they are suitable to hold and exercise that power. They are only able to enter during working hours and are strictly restricted to inspecting areas relevant to the suspected risk and work health and safety documents directly relevant to the suspected risk. Employers are entitled to accompany and supervise the official at all times during their entry.

Abuse of any of these powers is strictly and swiftly punished and can see the permit holder stripped of their accreditation. Employers are entitled and encouraged to apply to the regulator or Industrial Relations Commission if they suspect the official is misusing their power, and it will be investigated thoroughly. Any claims of a union official suddenly having access to internal emails, payroll software or workers' personal details are not worth the tabloid paper they are printed on. However, The Greens do not believe the legislation goes far enough. We will advance a number of very modest amendments to strengthen it in important ways. I am really proud of my very small role in encouraging the legislation into existence. I was a member of the Select Committee on the impact of technological and other change on the future of work and workers in New South Wales. I thank the now Treasurer. That committee recommended this legislation in 2022 following multiple hearings over more than a year.

We have been waiting for this bill since 2022; it is not some new idea that has been sprung on the Parliament. When the Labor Government was elected in 2023, I met with the Minister for Industrial Relations shortly thereafter to understand their priorities and began what has been for the most part a very productive and collaborative relationship. In that meeting, and at just about every meeting since then, I have raised these reforms and asked the Minister when we could expect them. Last year I moved an amendment to other legislation that would have achieved the same effect. The Government declined to proceed with the amendment at that time but promised to consider it and bring it back to the Parliament. After a brief—and cute—appearance in the Government's Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment (Reform and Modernisation) Bill, it was then given pride of place in its own legislation, which we are debating today. Again, none of this should come as a surprise.

I acknowledge the union movement for their advocacy on these reforms, and their clear and far‑sighted vision for the dangerous trajectory on which workplace conditions are sliding in the age of algorithmic management, automated decision‑making and artificial intelligence. I particularly recognise the strong advocacy of Bernie Smith from the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association and Mark Morey from Unions NSW. Mark has become an almost constant presence of these parliamentary halls in recent months as he represents the rights and interests of workers across the State. Australian laws are failing to protect workers from intrusive and unreasonable surveillance, algorithmic management and artificial intelligence.

Those technologies are being used by management to exert greater control over workers, driving work intensification without any corresponding improvement in pay and conditions. The result is a shift of business risk to workers. With every movement of workers being closely monitored and quantified, paid work time can be minimised. Unsurprisingly, the use of workplace surveillance is creating worker burnout and toxic organisational cultures. The creeping stranglehold of technologically mediated work intensification is intrusive and dehumanising. It demeans the autonomy and the rights of workers.

Those technologies are prevalent across our society and they do not discriminate by industry or jurisdiction. Examples range from the arbitrary punishment of gig workers kicked off platforms due to metrics beyond their control to biometric scanning, eye tracking and digital wearables that track location, speech patterns and the content of conversations; sentiment and mood analysis; workplace competition and leaderboards displaying the outputs of workers; and the omnipotent surveillance tracking of browsing history, email and phone call contents. Workers find those practices demeaning. The practices create anxiety and stress, and pose a risk to the mental and physical health of workers.

Workers are not robots. They are not resources or inventory or machines. Workers are people with agency and autonomy. We need a thorough reform and updating of our workplace laws, including surveillance and monitoring, to ensure they are fit for purpose for the twenty-first century and to reassert workers' rights against the coercive power and imperatives of big business. At the moment workers and their unions are in a situation where they are bringing a spoon to a gunfight in the face of billion-dollar companies and their techno‑dystopian management softwares. This legislation will not do everything, but it is an important updating of our rules to hopefully prevent further decline of working standards. The Greens wholeheartedly support the bill.

Read the debate in Hansard here.

5 February 2026