Casual Employment and the Feminisation of Precarious Work in Australia
Australia's labour market has undergone a profound transformation over the past few decades, with casual employment emerging as one of the most significant, and concerning, trends reshaping how we work. What makes this shift particularly troubling is how it has disproportionately affected women, creating what researchers term the "feminisation of precarious work."
The Rise of Casual Australia
Casual employment in Australia has grown exponentially since the 1980s. Today, approximately 2.6 million Australians work in casual positions, roughly one in four workers. Unlike permanent employees, casual workers receive no guaranteed hours, no paid sick leave, no annual leave, and no job security beyond their next shift. In exchange, they're meant to receive a 25% loading on their hourly wage to compensate for these missing entitlements.
But here's the rub: that casual loading was designed for truly temporary, irregular work. It wasn't meant to become a permanent feature of Australia's employment landscape, nor was it intended to support workers who end up in long-term casual arrangements that look suspiciously like permanent jobs, just without the protections.
Why Women Bear the Brunt
Women make up a disproportionate share of casual workers, particularly in industries like retail, hospitality, healthcare, and education. This isn't coincidental—it reflects deeper structural inequalities in how our economy values different types of work and workers.
The "ideal worker" in traditional employment models has always been someone available full-time, with minimal caring responsibilities, and able to prioritise work above all else. For many women juggling unpaid care work - whether looking after children, elderly parents, or managing household responsibilities - casual work initially appears to offer flexibility that permanent employment doesn't.
However, this supposed flexibility often becomes a trap. Casual workers typically can't refuse shifts without risking future work, meaning the flexibility flows primarily to employers, not employees. Women find themselves caught between unreliable income and the caring responsibilities that make traditional employment difficult to manage.
The Hidden Costs of Precarity
The feminisation of casual work carries enormous hidden costs, both for individual women and society more broadly. Without access to paid sick leave, women in casual positions often work whilst ill or lose income when they can't. The absence of annual leave means no guaranteed time for rest, family commitments, or dealing with life's inevitable challenges.
Perhaps most significantly, casual employment makes it nearly impossible to plan for the future. Securing a mortgage becomes extremely difficult without guaranteed income. Starting a family feels financially risky when you don't know if you'll have work next week. Career progression stagnates when you're not considered a "real" employee worthy of training or development opportunities.
The superannuation implications are particularly stark. With irregular hours and lower overall earnings, many casual workers, disproportionately women, are accumulating far less retirement savings than their permanently employed counterparts. This compounds the existing gender gap in superannuation, setting women up for poverty in old age.
Industries Built on Insecurity
Certain sectors have become almost entirely dependent on casual labour. Walk into any major retailer, and you'll find that most floor staff are casual employees. The same pattern emerges in hospitality, where casual work has become so normalised that permanent positions are increasingly rare.
In healthcare and education, sectors dominated by women, we see a particularly insidious form of casualisation. Highly qualified nurses, teachers, and university lecturers find themselves piecing together casual shifts across multiple employers, never quite achieving the job security or professional development opportunities that their qualifications should command.
This isn't just about individual hardship. When entire industries rely on casual labour, it undermines working conditions and bargaining power for all workers. It becomes a race to the bottom where employers compete by cutting labour costs rather than improving productivity or innovation.
The Policy Response
Recent changes to industrial relations laws have attempted to address some of these issues. The "right to disconnect" and new pathways for casual workers to convert to permanent employment represent important steps forward. However, these reforms don't address the fundamental economic pressures that drive casualisation in the first place.
Employers often choose casual labour not because their business genuinely requires flexibility, but because it's cheaper and involves less commitment. Until we address these underlying incentives, casual employment will continue to grow, and women will continue to bear a disproportionate share of the costs.
Beyond Individual Choice
It's tempting to frame casual employment as a matter of individual choice; some people want flexibility, others want security. But this narrative obscures the structural forces at play. When women are systematically excluded from secure employment opportunities, when caring responsibilities aren't properly supported by social policy, and when casual work becomes the only available option in entire industries, we can hardly call it a free choice.
The feminisation of precarious work reflects broader inequalities in how we organise our economy and society. It's not just about employment law, it's about how we value care work, how we support families, and what kind of society we want to build.
Looking Forward
Addressing the feminisation of casual work requires more than tweaking employment laws. We need comprehensive policy responses that include better childcare support, more flexible permanent employment options, stronger protections for casual workers, and genuine enforcement of existing rights.
Most importantly, we need to recognise that the current system isn't working for women, isn't working for families, and ultimately isn't working for Australia. A modern economy should provide genuine opportunities for secure, well-paid work that allows people to plan for their futures and care for their families.
The feminisation of precarious work isn't just a women's issue, it's an economic justice issue that affects all of us. It's time we treated it as such.
What are your experiences with casual employment? Have you or someone you know been caught in the flexibility trap? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
I have mainly worked as a casual or on contract since I was 15 - and even in my few permanent jobs, I've been treated as if I was temporary - so roughly 50 years.
Even when women don't need 'flexibility', men usually assume that you do, and use it as an excuse to pay less than a man in the same position. I'm not imagining it - I have been told it in interviews.
While I worked in retail when I was young, I have mostly worked in IT, and in the last ten to 15 years there has been another scourge of employment - fixed term contracts. They claim to pay the same as if you were permanent - with leave etc., but of course no access to training - but unless it's with a government department with published salary scales, there's no way of knowing. It's always less than standard contracting rates, with none of the security of a permanent role to compensate for the lower pay.
You may think that IT contractors shouldn't complain, but when women in the industry are mainly on short-term contracts (with gaps while trying to find more work), and men seem to end up on secure long-term multi year contracts - and due to contract secrecy clauses have no idea what each is being paid - it's hardly equitable.