“We don’t feel free at all”: temporary ni-Vanuatu workers in the Riverina, Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seasonal worker programmes are promoted as a quadruple win, bringing benefits to participating countries, employers and workers. These benefits, however, are most often framed as economic, while the social costs of such schemes have received less attention. In 2009, Australia introduced a short-term agricultural employment scheme to provide unskilled labour for farmers, and temporary work for migrants from Pacific island states. The scheme has contributed to economic development in Australia and in the participating island nations. Migrants from Vanuatu constitute the largest group from the Melanesian states. Temporary ni-Vanuatu migrants in the Riverina region of New South Wales, Australia, have received substantial cash incomes, but this has come at some social cost, as they constitute an un-free precariat. Institutional structures have not responded by providing adequate pastoral care or monitoring, or changed employment, residential, and visa conditions. Parallels exist between the present employment scheme, century-old plantation systems, and similar labour migration schemes in New Zealand and Canada which emphasise the exploitative contexts of temporary agricultural employment schemes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".