Work

Workers compensation insurance is mandatory across Australia, and every employer's premium starts with the same basic mechanism: multiply your total payroll by your industry rate, then let your own claims history push that figure up or down. The rate itself is not a guess.

Goldman Sachs Research has put a monthly figure on what was, until recently, largely a matter of conjecture: AI has shaved roughly 16,000 jobs a month from US payroll growth over the past year, enough to push the unemployment rate up by about 0.1 percentage points.

Every small business owner in Australia who has ever sent a Sunday-night text to a staff member now operates under a different legal reality.

This research is not a survey, not a model, not a projection. Stanford Digital Economy Lab researchers fed individual-level monthly payroll records from ADP covering more than 3.5 million workers into their analysis, and the numbers that came back were blunt.

Quit rates tell you something pay surveys cannot: how much staff actually want to stay. At Trip.com, the Chinese travel platform, a properly designed randomised trial found that letting engineers and other graduate employees work from home two days a week pushed that number down by a third.

KPMG Australia is reviewing its workforce as reports point to about 1,000 job losses and dozens of partner exits, more than 10 per cent of a firm of 8,967 people. Partner profit distributions are expected to fall about 20 per cent, and procurement bans run to 30 September.

1,820 former Qantas ground handlers, outsourced out of work in 2020, have still not received a cent of the $120 million compensation fund agreed in December 2024.

A Department of Employment and Workplace Relations report published 8 July 2026 found no significant AI-driven employment disruption in Australia through February 2026.