The " Gig " Economy !

Employing someone costs a lot more than what is put in the weekly pay envelop There is the cost of accident insurance and all those hidden costs.  Annual leave.  Long service leave. Maternity leave. Bereavement leave, and on top of all that the employer must deposit nine percent of the agreed salary into the employees superannuation account.

  No wonder many businesses prefer to have their hired help on a " casual " basis.  They pay a significant loading on the hourly rate paid to a permanent employee, but avoid all those extra costs.  We are now seeing many people who are " permanently casual. "  They work the same shift with the same employer, day after day for years at a time.

Should a business downturn make it necessary to shed staff, that permanent employee will probably be awarded a hefty " termination payment " by a court while the casual simply has the working hours reduced.

Now a new innovation has worked its way into the market place and it is called the " Gig " economy. The worker presents as a self employed business person who provides a service at a negotiated rate, and this is now prevalent in both the rapidly expanding food delivery sector and the innovative car and driver attached to new taxi services competing with the branded taxi fleets.

What is not clear is the degree of obligation those employed under this Gig economy can expect to receive should they sustain death or injury during the course of the service they provide.  Theoretically, they are an independent business and should have the necessary insurance in place to cover such risks but usually the rewards are meagre and this is unaffordable.

One particular trade is regarded as specially hazardous and that is the food delivery sector.  Speed is the utmost and riders of motorbikes or scooters find themselves weaving through city traffic to meet strict time deadlines.  There haver been more than twenty-five such crash reports this year, and one of these concerned the death of a young man who was an immigrant from China and who worked to support his wife.

His death occurred when he collided with a bus on a city street  and the bus driver has since been charged by police with four driving offences relating to this accident.  This man was not entitled to worker's compensation and it is unclear what his wife may expect to receive. She wants to expatriate his body back to China for burial.

All this is a grey area that will laboriously wend its way through the courts and be decided by overlapping precedent.  The uncertainty means that both employers and workers can not plan their cost structure with any degree of certainty and yet this is a rapidly expanding business model.

In this case, the food company involved paid for their worker's funeral and picked up the flight tab to bring his family to Australia but all such cases are being handled on a case by case basis.  It is now clear that this Gig economy is a step into the great unknown !