This edition features the launch of Backpacker Dispatches: Working Holiday stories from Australia, our latest report capturing the lived experiences of Working Holiday Makers across the country. You will also find:
- current research opportunities
- upcoming events and;
- recent publications exploring migrant work rights and global labour issues
Are you interested in having your research featured in our Quarterly?
Or perhaps you'd like to collaborate or volunteer with us?
Get in touch with Sherry Huang at [email protected]
Research Webinar: Backpacker Dispatches report launch
23 Oct 2025 | Online Event | 6-7PM
Join us for the launch of our latest research report, ‘Backpacker’ Dispatches: Working Holiday Stories from Australia.
Lead author Lea Knopf will reflect on her experiences as a Working Holiday Maker, as well as those of fellow workers she met, interviewed and learned from along the way.
Lea will be joined by our own Sherry Haung, who first arrived in Australia on a Working Holiday Visa and is now completing her PhD on the working conditions of temporary migrant workers.
Together, they will discuss how participatory approaches can centre the voices of migrants.
The launch will be an opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of life, work, and travel on a Working Holiday Visa, and to consider how these experiences can inform a fairer and more inclusive temporary migration program.
Kaldor Centre Conference
23 Oct 2025 | UNSW Sydney (with hybrid attendance available) | 8:30AM-6:30PM
The Kaldor Centre Conference 2025 is a landmark gathering on refugee protection in Australia and globally. This year’s theme, Building Bridges: Advancing Refugee Protection in a Divided World, brings together policymakers, practitioners, researchers, civil society and people with lived experience for a day of dialogue and strategy.
Keynote speakers include Mohammed Naeem, Senior Director for Advocacy Strategy at Refugees International, and Hugh de Kretser, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Precarious Migrant Worker Seminar
On Tuesday 15 July, we hosted researcher Panos Theodoropoulos at Solidarity Hall, where he shared insights from his fieldwork in the UK’s warehouses, kitchens and factories. The discussion explored class struggle, resistance and the power of collective action under neoliberalism.
Special thanks to New International Bookshop, Search Foundation and Interregnum for their support.
Call for participants
Research on Temporary Migrant Workers in Australia’s Food Supply Chain
Sherry Huang, a PhD candidate at La Trobe University, is conducting a study on the working conditions, power dynamics, and collective actions of temporary migrant workers in Australia’s food industry.
The project is seeking participants with experience in agriculture, horticulture, or food processing to take part in confidential interviews. Insights from participants will help deepen understanding of the challenges migrant workers face and inform efforts to improve workplace rights and protections.
- Participation is voluntary and strictly confidential.
- For more information or to take part, please contact [email protected]
Reports and articles
Lutfun, L.N., Copolov, A. & Azizi, R. (2025). The everyday lives of gig workers in Melbourne.
Urban Geography. This study examines how food delivery riders in Melbourne experience exclusion in the gig economy. Based on interviews with 17 riders and participant-produced photographs, the findings show that riders often face barriers when accessing restaurants and delivering to customers, reflecting both spatial and institutional exclusion. Without designated rest areas, riders resort to waiting on bikes or using public benches between jobs. Despite these constraints, riders adapt by using urban public spaces to build social networks, which support their mental wellbeing. The study highlights the need to recognise gig workers’ everyday struggles and the creative ways they navigate urban environments.
Jones, T., Volgger, M., Niner, S., James, A., Cheer, J., Adams, S. and Baron, P. (2025) Safe and secure accommodation solutions for seasonal and vulnerable workers in regional industries, AHURI Final Report No. 447, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne.
This research examines how to better accommodate workers in regional Australia to ensure a healthy, safe, and productive workforce. It provides evidence and a policy framework for governments and industry to supply secure housing for seasonal and vulnerable workers, including collaborations with Aboriginal organisations. High demand for labour and rising housing costs have left many workers in precarious, overcrowded, and unaffordable conditions, hindering recruitment. The study highlights how industry treats this largely migrant workforce as disposable, leading to substandard housing and limited power to seek improvements. Addressing this requires coordinated policy action across all levels of government, industry, and advocacy.
Oxfam Australia, & Human Rights Law Centre. (2025). Unravelling exploitation – Exposing the need for responsible business laws in fashion supply chains.
Oxfam Australia’s Unravelling Exploitation exposes systemic labour rights abuses in global fashion supply chains, particularly in Bangladesh, where subcontracted and home-based workers face poverty wages, excessive overtime, unsafe conditions, and child labour. Despite Australia’s 2018 Modern Slavery Act, reporting requirements have failed to deliver real change, allowing brands to continue profiting from exploitation. Drawing on testimonies from workers, the report links poverty wages to modern slavery and highlights abusive purchasing practices by fashion brands. Oxfam and the Human Rights Law Centre call for stronger, enforceable due diligence laws, mandatory remediation, and bans on goods made with forced labour to protect workers’ rights.
International perspectives
International Trade Union Confederation (2025) Artificial Intelligence and digitalisation: A matter of life and death for workers.
The ITUC report highlights how automation, AI, and algorithmic management, often promoted as liberating workers from dangerous or monotonous jobs, instead create widespread harms. Workers face cognitive overload, strain injuries, stress, depression, and intensified surveillance through algorithms, wearables, and GPS tracking. Excessive monitoring erodes health, job security, and privacy, while platform work and algorithmic management fall outside traditional safety regulations. New conditions like technostress and cybersickness are emerging, alongside rising injuries and fatalities. The report calls for a new system where technological benefits are shared fairly, and workers, through unions, are fully consulted in design, implementation, and purpose.
Crawley, H., Ghimire, A., Marcelin, L. H., Oucho, L., & Smit, A. (2024, September). No identity, no protection: How lack of documentation drives modern slavery. United Nations University Centre for Policy Research.
The United Nations University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), in partnership with the Freedom Fund, investigates how lacking official documentation elevates the risk of modern slavery. Focusing on Brazil, Kenya, and Nepal, this mixed-method study reveals that approximately 850 million people worldwide lack legal identity, especially women, youth, migrants, and rural populations—making them invisible to policymakers, excluded from essential services, and vulnerable to exploitation. Barriers such as bureaucratic inefficiencies and corruption hinder documentation access. The report calls for legislative reform, community engagement, digital solutions, and global cooperation to close this documentation gap, critical to achieving SDG 16.9 and protecting human rights.
Theodoropoulos, P. (2018). Barriers to migrant worker unionization: Examining the impact of structural and subjective barriers to migrant worker unionization in the UK. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(3), 317–335.
This study explores why migrant workers in the UK, despite being heavily concentrated in precarious jobs, remain largely absent from trade unions. Using interviews and auto-ethnography, it highlights both structural barriers—such as exclusionary union practices—and subjective factors, including migrants’ limited awareness of or engagement with unions. A key finding is the near-total absence of unions in many migrants’ daily lives, reinforcing disengagement. To address this, the study calls for unions to move beyond traditional, hierarchical, class-centered models and instead adopt intersectional, inclusive, and non-hierarchical approaches to outreach, organising, and empowerment of migrant workers.
