Today during an adjournment speech in Parliament, Abigail warned that multinational corporations are driving a dangerous surge in workplace surveillance, algorithmic management and automation, highlighting Amazon’s exploitative AI-driven practices and DP World’s plan to replace skilled Australian wharf workers with unsafe, unreliable automated systems while also calling for solidarity with unions resisting this new wave of technological exploitation.
Abigail said:
Artificial intelligence and automation in the workplace have been steadily building, but this year the dangers of new workplace technologies reached fever pitch. International mega corporations are increasingly introducing surveillance, automated decision-making, algorithmic systems and technologically driven work intensification. That is a dangerous trend. One particularly notorious employer, Amazon, has been in the news again recently. The Transport Workers Union [TWU], the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance [MEAA] and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association [SDA] have joined this week to protest Amazon for dodging taxes, exploiting workers and threatening Australian jobs.
Amazon's practices are relentless and exploitative. Of particular relevance is Amazon Flex. The TWU has made it clear that that platform is one sided and stacked against workers. It destroys fair pay, forces drivers into below minimum wages and creates unattainable delivery timetables that create shockingly unsafe conditions. The SDA has told us of the truly appalling conditions being faced by workers in Amazon warehouses. We know what is coming down the line if those practices are not curbed.
Amazon has been repeatedly 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 into Australian workplaces. The United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions report entitled The "Injury-Productivity Trade-off": How Amazon's Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses was published in December last year, 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 study's findings.
But it is not only work intensification for warehouse workers that is coming to our workplaces. Multinational mega corporations do not only want to use technology to force workers to work harder. The new game in town is outright automation and worker replacement. That is what is on the cards for Australian stevedores working for DP World. DP World is a Dubai royal family-owned logistics company that controls one-third of Australia's port infrastructure. Earlier this year DP World announced that it plans to spend $600 million replacing skilled Australian wharf workers with automated processes. That announcement was made without regard for the consultation requirements of its own enterprise agreement. Evidence from international container operations shows that automated container terminals are not as productive as those employing highly skilled stevedores, are consistently slower and more expensive, and are less safe for workers.
DP World proposes to cut the jobs of Australian workers driving saddle cranes in Brisbane and Melbourne ports and replace them with slower, less accurate and less safe robotic cranes. DP World's Australian operations also depend on machinery that is adversely affected by heat, rain, insects, radiofrequency interference and software glitches. DP World was struck by a nationwide cybersecurity crisis in 2023 when hackers took control of its computer systems resulting in a three-day Australian container terminal shutdown.
With all of those shortcomings and vulnerabilities, why is DP World pursuing that course of action? It will not even deliver productivity improvements, and it is vulnerable to hackers and sabotage. The only possible justification is that it wants to smash the organised movement of workers who operate our ports. It wants to choke off and starve out unions, and it is willing to invest whatever it takes and wear whatever short-term losses are required to achieve that aim. The Maritime Union of Australia [MUA] is alive to that attack and has mounted a powerful resistance.
In response to calls from the MUA, the Lisbon People Before Profit anti-automation conference sent an emphatic message of international solidarity earlier this month, backing in the MUA's fight against DP World's plans for automation. That international solidarity recognises that DP World is planning to use Australian ports as a testing ground for its global campaign of port automation and artificial intelligence use. The global behemoth dreams of waterfronts without wharfies, dockers and longshore workers. That is another test case for how global capital will try to smash working class people with automation and digital systems that degrade the quality of work. I call for solidarity with the TWU, MEAA, SDA, MUA and every union engaging in struggle against the latest insidious wave of technological exploitation.
Read the transcript in Hansard here.
19 November 2025