Workers Tell AI Inquiry of Algorithmic Rosters, Checkout Warnings and Cloned Voices
Beyond the apologies from AI companies, some of the most pointed evidence at the federal parliamentary AI inquiry came from workers, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Over two days of hearings in Sydney and two in Melbourne, the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence heard voice actors, bank staff and retail unions describe how AI is already changing their jobs.
Jacqui Duncan, NSW president of Equity, the performers’ division of the media union, has voiced more than 5000 commercials but owns none of them. She told the committee that last financial year she earned about 30 per cent of what she had consistently made in the three years before, and she now works a second job. “I never gave consent for my work to be taken,” she said. Simon Kennedy, president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, said members were 62 per cent down on work over 12 months and argued that consent, not payment, was the core issue.
The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, which represents 200,000 retail, fast food and warehouse workers, said AI already sets rosters, assigns tasks and increasingly decides who is performance managed. Its submission described a supermarket worker with more than 30 years of service who received a final written warning generated by a camera-based checkout system, despite an error rate of roughly 0.18 per cent. At Aldi’s NSW distribution centres, it said, new picking benchmarks arrived without consultation. Aldi rejected claims that the benchmarking puts staff safety at risk and said it consults its people.
What it means in practice
Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn was pressed by Labor senator Tony Sheldon over a long-serving employee who trained a chatbot and was then told it would take over her job; Comyn said he had apologised before and did so again. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry told the inquiry there was “insufficient evidence demonstrating systemic workplace harms arising from AI” and said existing safety, unfair dismissal and consultation laws already apply. Support for displaced workers looks thin by historical standards: Victoria’s $14 million package works out at about $2260 per worker, against roughly $380 million in support when Ford, Toyota and Holden closed their Australian car plants.
The hearings extend themes from the earlier clash between AI giants and Australian creatives and from the Rishworth roundtable on workplace AI guidance. They will also feed into Andrew Charlton’s systems-regulation plan for frontier labs, which he said the Medicare incident would shape.
What to watch: the committee reports on November 30, with options ranging from mandatory reporting of AI incidents to a levy on AI companies to pay creators and an expert AI panel inside the Fair Work Commission. None of its recommendations will bind the government, which has so far preferred existing laws to new ones.