On a day when newly appointed Industry minister Tim Ayres said Australia’s trade unions needed a stronger voice in managing the impact of technology in the workplace, the union movement has called for a federal boycott of Big Tech in government procurement.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the Shop, Distributive & Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) want the Albanese government to prevent federal contracts going to Big Tech multinationals “unless they meet basic standards of ethical conduct”.
In a joint statement issued on Tuesday, ACTU president Michele O’Neil said the government should use the existing Commonwealth Procurement Rules (CPRs) to prevent public contracts going to companies like Amazon and other Big Tech providers.
“The Australian CPRs are clear: public contracts should not reward suppliers engaged in unethical or unsafe behaviour – including tax avoidance, labour exploitation, or other unethical behaviour,” Ms O’Neil said in a statement.
“It’s time the Government used its massive purchasing power to demand higher standards from companies like Amazon.
“If you don’t pay your fair share of tax, if you deny workers their rights, if you track every second of their working day — you should not be rewarded with public money.
“AWS is not the only option. There are ethical alternatives in providing cloud computing services.”
The call comes as InnovationAus.com reported that AWS had been awarded contracts worth nearly $300 million in just the first two months of its three-year whole-of-government purchasing arrangement with the Commonwealth.
The Digital Transformation Agency, which manages the so-called “single supplier arrangements,” has said it will not disclose the true costs of the AWS arrangement due to unspecified reasons of “commercial in confidence”.
The AWS arrangement is the only one of seven whole-of-government supplier arrangements with multinational tech firms that the DTA has declined to provide a value – drawing criticism from Independent Senator David Pocock for its lack of transparency.
The ACTU, SDA and TWU have called out what it says is “bad behaviour” by Big Tech companies in Australia and elsewhere around the world, citing tax minimisation, union busting and invasive worker surveillance practices.
They say government should use its significant purchasing power to change bad behaviour both here and abroad.
The unions commended the government for “standing up to Big Tech” in its regulation of social media platforms. They say government must now enforce its own procurement standards “and use the power of public contracts to raise the bar for corporate conduct, here and around the world.”
Senator Ayres on Tuesday told a conference that trade unions should play a bigger role to “make sure that AI adoption makes jobs better.”
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