AUWU Launches New Tool to take on Job Agencies

This is our most ambitious attempt to organise against the cruel, unregulated, employment service industry.

Today, we’re excited to launch ROAR – our new digital tool to help unemployed workers educate themselves, support each other, and take immediate action against bad job agencies.  We’ve charted every employment service provider in the country, with a live map, allowing unemployed workers to see existing reviews of individual providers and contribute their own.

We hope that this will help job seekers make informed choices to boycott the worst-reviewed agencies, and provide crucial information to other people entering the system.

This online community of users will help us identify, and ultimately organise against, specific sites and agencies that are harming job seekers without recourse. The government is completely useless – negligently so – at holding bad actors in this industry to account, so again it’s up to welfare recipients to do it for them.

For too long, the Max Employments and Sarina Russos of this country have abused and tormented the poor for profit. This has to stop. We’re sending a firm message to these corporations: If you punish our members, we will stand up for them and fight back. 

As well as using the app to help advocate for its members, the AUWU plans to also organise pickets, protests and rallies outside individual sites that are harming members. If job agencies make it to our “Wall of Shame”, they can expect to hear from us.

Quotes attributable to AUWU National Secretary and app designer Daniel Levy:

“For too long the unemployed have been cast to the four winds in this inhumane system. They are left with a provider who emiserates them for profit, and forces them to obey cruel demands or face payment cuts. Complaints to the Department go directly to the garbage bin – we have never once seen one of these agencies sanctioned.  Even Kafka would have struggled to imagine a bureaucracy so uselessly brutal.

It’s worth highlighting that, while we could scrape jobsearch.gov.au for jobactive and DES comments, we could not do that for the Community Development Program which does not offer a commenting feature, which operates primarily in Indigenous communities. These participants are subject to a deeply racist system that literally gives them no voice.

I am proud to have designed the ROAR app to give a voice to the brutalised unheard in our moral disaster of a welfare system. In future months we will use the app to put maximum pressure on the system and its worst actors - this cruelty cannot continue.”

You can use the ROAR app by navigating to https://auwu.org.au/roar-app

You can fill out the AUWURS Survey and rate your provider by navigating to https://auwu.org.au/auwurs-survey

Mobile versions for Android and iOS devices will arrive in the next week.

Media contact: media@auwu.org.au and 0407509444