Insecure work is toxic. . . . It is no good for anything, for families, for a sense of security [and] for public health, for any purpose. We have a lot of people who work very hard but have no safety net to fall back on and that is just not something we should settle for.

This is how Victoria premier Daniel Andrews described insecure work, thirteen days into Victoria’s stage four lockdown. Andrews was stating what his government had implicitly acknowledged when it brought in a $300 (later increased to $450) payment to help insecure workers without sick leave self-isolate while waiting on COVID-19 test results. Labor unions had been calling for measures like this from day one.

Genomic sequencing shows that the second wave of coronavirus can be traced almost entirely to breaches in Victoria’s outsourced quarantine program. Private security firms hired temporary workers, providing them with inadequate training and protective equipment, leading to multiple outbreaks and adding to the now overwhelming case against insecure work.