In Australia, decades of public funding have led to the creation of a multibillion-dollar industry that produces no value, manufactures no products, and employs no labor. These late-capitalist enterprises instead profit by not employing labor. It’s the business of unemployment — and business is booming.

Australia is witnessing the rise of the new digital workhouse. Unlike the workhouses of old, the digital workhouse of today is an invisible web of algorithms, e-government websites, and scattered “Work for the Dole” sites, managed by anonymous bureaucrats and owned by private employment service providers. It’s a uniquely neoliberal form of decentralized coercion, and it has two purposes: to discipline and punish unemployed workers, and to privatize what remains of the welfare state.

With 1,635 outlets nationally, there are now more employment service providers than the total number of McDonald’s franchises in Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea combined. The industry’s primary resources are virtually limitless: for any single job vacancy, 15.71 workers apply. Over three million people want work or want more work, and nearly one in five unemployed fifteen to twenty-four year olds today have been out of work for fifty-two weeks or more.