Australia’s Federal Government moved to pass legislation today which will ensure workers in the digital economy are fairly compensated for their work. The new regulations, promised by the Labor Government prior to the 2028 election, will require platforms operating in Australia to meet national minimum wage requirements; addressing the economic inequality facilitated by the digital economy.
The precarious nature of work in the digital economy has dominated industrial relations issues over the past decade as the influence of digital platforms on mainstream work has continued to grow. The erosion of workers’ rights has been described by experts as symptomatic of the new iteration of capitalism, with risk being transferred from the employer to the worker.
Since launching in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis, Uber has never employed its drivers directly. Instead, its drivers are ‘partners’ and treated as independent workers, occupying a grey area between ‘employee’ and ‘independent contractor’. This has been previously confirmed in the context of Australian employment law – in a 2018 finding by the Fair Work Ombudsman and a Fair Work Commission ruling regarding Uber Eats in 2020. In both cases, Uber and Uber Eats ‘partners’ in Australia were unsuccessful in arguing against the platform to establish their employment rights.
Uber’s labour relations have long been the subject of criticism, with concerns that drivers were working for less than the local minimum wage and were not permitted to undertake collective bargaining. A 2018 report by the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute found that the average hourly wage for Uber drivers across Australia was $14.62, approximately 20% less than the 2018 minimum wage of $18.93. The state capital with the lowest wage was Perth, where Uber drivers earned a mere $10.83 per hour after fees and expenses – a little over half the minimum wage.
“Uber has long used the excuses of flexibility and ‘being-your-own-boss’ to flout employment laws and provisions for its enormous Australian workforce.”
The new legislation is welcomed by industry groups such as Ride Share Drivers Association of Australia (RSDAA), who since 2016 have been working to promote the rights of ride share drivers participating in Australia’s digital economy. An RSDAA representative who spoke to CSN said, “Uber has long used the excuses of flexibility and ‘being-your-own-boss’ to flout employment laws and provisions for its enormous Australian workforce. These long overdue regulations will provide improved working conditions for so many hardworking Australians.”
Under the new regulations, a percentage cap will be imposed on commission and fees taken by the platforms that dominate the digital economy. This is also a significant win for digital workers on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, where workers complete digital ‘human intelligence tasks’ for clients that cannot be conducted by artificial intelligence, such as completing surveys, transcribing audio or video, and recording information from images.
A 2016 study by the Pew Research Centre found that around half of the US-based Mechanical Turk workers surveyed reported earning less than USD$5 per hour on average. While Mechanical Turk has been described as a ‘digital sweatshop’, with workers struggling to make $30 a day, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos became the world’s first trillionaire in 2026.
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