Brendan Churchill

Wealth inequality is rising in Australia just as the country enters a period of substantial intergenerational wealth transfer. While wealth is known to be linked to health and wellbeing, we know less about whether parents' wealth continues to matter for wellbeing across adulthood, and through which mechanisms it operates. Using data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, this article examines associations between parental wealth and four domains of wellbeing (general health, mental health, life satisfaction, and financial wellbeing) among adults aged 25 to 50 ( n = 1039). Linear regression models show that higher parental wealth is associated with better general health and higher financial wellbeing, even after accounting for respondents' own income, wealth, and other characteristics. Part of this relationship operates through homeownership, pointing to housing security as a key pathway linking family resources to wellbeing in mid‐adulthood. By contrast, receiving financial help from parents is associated with lower contemporaneous wellbeing and strengthens the estimated parental‐wealth gradient. This pattern suggests that transfers often function as responsive support during periods of hardship, rather than simply conferring advantage. Overall, the findings highlight intergenerational inequality as an adulthood‐spanning, relational process, and underscore the growing role of family wealth in sustaining wellbeing amid housing insecurity and welfare retrenchment.

Work mediated by digital labour platforms is often framed as flexible and autonomous, yet accessing paid tasks commonly requires extensive unpaid effort. Drawing on 65 qualitative interviews with Australian workers on project‐based platforms (including Airtasker, Fiverr and Freelancer), we develop the concept of anticipatory labour: the unpaid, future‐oriented work through which workers search for tasks, evaluate jobs and clients, and negotiate terms before any paid work begins. Anticipatory labour is not peripheral but constitutive of participation in platform labour markets, demanding sustained time, attention and emotional energy amid uncertainty and competition. We show that anticipatory labour is gendered. While all workers engage in these practices, women perform more anticipatory labour and experience it more intensely, often alongside unpaid domestic and care labour. Women's anticipatory labour is also more affectively charged, shaped by hope, anxiety and self‐doubt as they manage risks to reputation, safety and future employability. Men, by contrast, report less anticipatory labour and more confidence in securing work. We argue that anticipatory labour operates as a mechanism of platform governance, shifting responsibility for employability onto workers and converting unpaid time and emotion into the conditions of participation in the gig economy. In doing so, platforms reproduce gendered inequalities while sustaining the promise of flexibility.

Recent technological advances and globalised distribution of work have accelerated the rise of remote-first organisations where everyone works remotely, yet the effects of this approach on working parents remain underexplored. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 25 mothers and 16 fathers from 31 remote-first organisations, this study examines the gendered impact of standardised remote-first flexibility on work–family reconciliation. Findings show that remote-first work enhances location and schedule freedom, allowing parents to sustain a dual devotion to work and family. Fathers used this flexibility to increase engagement with domestic tasks and caregiving, while mothers focused on meeting work demands (in addition to caregiving responsibilities). The use of remote-first working arrangements increased employee trust and empathy among working parents, reducing flexibility stigma concerns. While fathers resisted tendencies to overwork, the remote-first model perpetuated the gendered flexibility paradox for mothers, leading to increased labour expansion and self-exploitation in both paid and unpaid work.

Over almost two decades, young people's employment opportunities have been significantly impacted by events like the Global Financial Crisis (2008–2009) and the COVID‐19 pandemic (2020‐). Thus, underemployment has become a more pervasive and persistent feature of young people's labour market experiences. This research focuses on three forms of underemployment: (1) temporal‐; (2) wages‐ and (3) skills‐related underemployment and whether young people who are working less, earning less or using less of their skills are in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ quality jobs. Drawing on data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey (2009–2022), this research explored three dimensions of job quality: job demands and complexity, job control and job security amongst underemployed employed men ( n = 6091) and women ( n = 6331) aged between 20 and 34. The findings indicate that young people who experienced some form of underemployment also had poorer‐quality jobs. Critically, all forms of underemployment were associated with less subjective job security. The findings highlight the need to pay greater attention to the types of jobs young people find themselves in, particularly, those in which they are not working at their full capacity.

The gig economy is where individuals and businesses provide work for an on-demand workforce, either online or in-person. It is an attractive alternative for both men and women when the traditional labour market no longer works. But it also presents challenges: it is a site where gender inequalities in the traditional workplace are reproduced. Drawing on pre-existing quantitative and qualitative research from across North America, Europe and the Global South,1 this chapter illustrates how the gig economy is gendered across three domains: (1) how men and women participate in the gig economy, including their key motivations and reasons for entering the gig economy; (2) the differences in earnings between men and women across platforms and the gender pay gap; and (3) the experiences of working in the gig economy with a focus on discrimination, safety and harassment. The chapter concludes with a discussion of directions forward, including a call for better data to capture the dynamics and diversity of the gig economy and gig workers.

Underemployment is an increasingly persistent and pervasive feature of contemporary labour markets and there is some evidence to suggest that underemployment is an important social determinant of health and well-being. However, the evidence base has tended to focus on hours-based underemployment more than others like skills-based underemployment. Moreover, the gendered dimensions of underemployment remain under-researched despite evidence to suggest that women are more likely to be underemployed. Drawing on 21 annual waves (2002–22) of data from the Household, Income, Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, this longitudinal study employed Mundlak modelling to examine the association between two forms of subjective underemployment and mental health in working-age (25–64 years) Australians (n = 18,285). Underemployment was operationalized in two ways: (1) hours-related underemployment; and (2) skills-based underemployment. Mental health was assessed using the MHI-5 scale. All models were stratified by gender. Results suggest that hours-related underemployment has a more negative effect on women’s mental health while skills-related underemployment has a more negative effect on men’s. Theoretically, this article highlights how subjective forms of underemployment are like unemployment, acting as a stressor for mental health because they partially deprive workers of the benefits of full employment. This study provides robust longitudinal evidence of the detrimental impact of underemployment on the mental health of working-aged Australians, highlighting how inadequate forms of work have negative health consequences. Thus, greater effort from both governments and employers is needed to implement policies and programs that help workers reach their capacity to mitigate against the negative health effects of underemployment.

Over 2.6 million Australians provide informal, unpaid care to a family member or friend who lives with a disability, long-term health condition, terminal illness, or frailty. Inevitably, all informal care experiences come to an end, though the circumstances may vary; for example, the person being cared for may recover or improve, others may take over caring duties, or caring may end in bereavement. Former carers have been shown to experience profound aftereffects of caring, including poor health, loneliness, limited employment opportunities, and financial precarity. Current carers have been shown to have concerns for the care recipient after their caring ends, and for their own post-caring life. In this chapter we explore such contexts in terms of loss, to reveal some of the hidden aspects of transitions out of caring. Drawing on data from focus groups with Australian carers, we examine the challenges in discussing how caring might end, cultural taboos around ‘not caring enough’, and feelings of loss amidst the uncertainties of life after caring. In making visible lived experiences of loss in transitions out of caring, we hope to contribute new ways of thinking about how best to support carers and care recipients.