On The Job

On The Job is back and with new hosts: Kleo Cruse and Emma Hartley. This episode is for all workers with a reproductive system – yes, that’s you!

The social stigma attached to menstruation and menopause often means workers are enduring the pain of normal bodily functions in silence.

We chat to Ann-Marie Allan from the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and Kate Marshall from the Health And Community Services Union about how reproductive leave can help ease some of that pain.

The last pod in our summer series takes a look at one of 2022's best pieces of investigative journalism.

Since it arrived on our streets over a decade ago, Uber has prided itself on being a "disrupter" with little regard for convention.

At the heart of their business model is a fanatical commitment to upend the employer/employee relationship and create a new army of sole contractors working on their tech platform with Uber having no responsibility for them, and with drivers having no rights and entitlements.

This high-tech exploitation has made it a massive company that has caused controversy wherever it goes.

In July of 2022 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) dropped a trove of documents and emails from Uber's inner sanctum that reveal how the company was able to curry favour with governments and institutions around the world to achieve its aims.

This week in our summer series, we head back to August 2022 to examine the growing demands for food assistance from workers and their families.

The promise of the Australian Dream is that you should be able to work one decent, secure job and earn enough pay to put a roof over your head, support your family and thrive.

That all seems like a pipe dream in the current climate, where insecure work, no entitlements, climbing inflation, and a housing squeeze means that hard-working Australians are driven to the margins.

Many of them are turning to organisations like Foodbank to help them make ends meet.

Foodbank is Australia’s largest food relief organisation, operating on a scale that makes it crucial to the work of the front-line charities who are feeding vulnerable Australians.

Foodbank provides more than 70% of the food rescued for food relief organisations nationwide.

In the latest episode of our summer series, we head back to June 2022.

At the time, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk was launching a hostile takeover bid for one of the world's biggest and most influential social media platforms, Twitter.

At the same time, the Tesla founder has been playing footsy with the libertarian/alt-right, blabbing on about freedom of speech, and promising to unleash the dogs of hate speech and misinformation back onto the platform.

Now had did that all turn out for the man who was then, the world's richest man?

Is it healthy that one individual can amass such outsized wealth and influence whilst tens of millions of people struggle to make a living?

What is the danger that the billionaire class poses to the health of our society?

John L. Campbell is a sociologist and economist at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire in the United States.

Welcome to the first episode in our summer series, where we take a look back at some of the great conversations we had in 2022.

Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz is one of the world's great thinkers. Professor Stiglitz won the 2001 Nobel Prize for his ground-breaking work in economics.

Professor Stiglitz's work in pushing back against neo-liberal free market economic models and arguing for the importance of empowering workers and unions to build a more equitable economy is revered.

He served as an advisor in the Clinton White House, holds a professorship at Columbia University, and was the first person the Greek government called for help when it faced a financial meltdown in 2010.

He was is in Australia in July of 2022 to talk with Unions, workers, and the newly elected Labor government, and he joined me in conversation.