Week 9: The Closing Loopholes reforms

Australia's 2024 "employee-like worker" minimum standards, and what power they actually give the Fair Work Commission

A category built on purpose#

“Employee-like worker” isn’t a compromise between “employee” and “contractor” that fell out of a court ruling — it’s a category the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024 created deliberately, specifically because platform work didn’t fit either existing box well enough for either to apply cleanly. Naming a new category is itself a policy choice, not just a legal formality.

What the Commission can actually do now#

The Fair Work Commission can set minimum standards orders — binding requirements on pay and conditions — for workers in that category. One concrete power worth naming specifically: the Act also creates protection from “unfair deactivation” from a digital labour platform, built as a direct parallel to unfair dismissal protection for employees — a worker who is deactivated can now, in principle, bring a claim over that decision itself, rather than having no forum at all, which is exactly the gap Kaseris exposed the week before. That’s a real power, not a symbolic gesture, but it’s also bounded: it applies to the new category specifically, and doesn’t retroactively reclassify anyone as a full employee or extend every employee entitlement automatically.

Reading the sector’s reaction as evidence#

Some platforms adjusted terms proactively, ahead of any determination; others waited to be told. That difference is itself a legal-exposure calculation each platform made about its own position — and it’s worth more to your essay than either platform’s public statement about why it did what it did.

Before the session#

Read the assigned summary of the minimum standards order and identify one provision that maps directly onto a mechanism you studied in weeks 2–6.