union boss Sally McManus on the push for shorter work hours in the age of AI

Written by: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Sitting beside Treasurer Jim Chalmers at next week’s three-day economic reform roundtable will be a handpicked list of invited business, policy and union “thought leaders ^[1]” – all coming with their own ideas for what needs to change.

Among them will be the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ Secretary, Sally McManus, who made headlines again this week with the unions’ push for a shorter working week – including a four-day week ^[2] in some workplaces.

This followed other reform ideas for the roundtable, including changes to negative gearing ^[3] and changes to how much we tax our mineral wealth.

So is the ACTU is being too ambitious, by bringing so many big reform proposals to the roundtable? McManus says it’s the right time to do it.

You can’t come to the table and not have solutions that are appropriate in that circumstance. So the things we’re putting forward we think are things that should be discussed in terms of solutions or ways forward to address those bigger issues.

So we didn’t think, ‘oh, well, we’re gonna go in there with no ideas’. The union movement really never does that. And we’re going to have a different view of the world, obviously, to others. But that’s always a positive thing though too, isn’t it? Like having different views, a clash of ideas out of all of that. Hopefully something good comes out of it.

Despite the government seeming negative on the idea of a four-day work week, McManus says having the discussion remains important – even if change never happens overnight.

To be clear, we weren’t asking for a change to the workplace laws, for the government to do something. We were raising this in the context of a discussion, both around productivity and around AI, as an important part of the distribution of benefits of […] productivity growth out of less jobs out of AI. So that’s the context we’re raising this particular issue in. And it’s not as if it’s a new idea […] Unions are out in lots of industries arguing for shorter working hours as we speak.

On AI, McManus remains agnostic on how the technology should be regulated, but warns acting soon is crucial – because the longer we wait, the more tech companies are getting away with.

We want to see everyone benefit from new technology, not just the big tech companies that will certainly benefit. And I’m concerned that they like the fact that there’s delay on any action in terms of what they’re doing.

At the moment obviously they’re hoovering up data, all of our data […] and the work of a whole lot of people and using it to train their models […] They are the ones that will then benefit from [that], not the rest of us.