Gabrielle Henderson/Unsplash Profound changes are ahead for online advertising. At the recent Google Marketing Live event, the tech giant outlined expanded artificial intelligence (AI) systems for digital ads. What will that look like? Picture ads integrated directly into your conversation with an AI chatbot.

Or a discounted price that only you see because an AI system served it based on your browsing behaviour, intent to buy the product, and what’s available locally. And, of course, generative AI tool suites for producing online ads start to finish.

Meta and ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) have similarly accelerated the rollout of their own AI-driven advertising systems. Meta is expanding tools that automatically generate and personalise ad images, video backgrounds, captions and targeting across Facebook and Instagram feeds.

Facebook is offering tools to create personalised ads based on users’ interests and behaviours. Meta Bytedance’s TikTok Symphony suite can generate promotional videos, scripts, AI avatars, dubbed voiceovers, and creator-style content from simple text prompts or product links.

At the same time, ads on these social media platforms are becoming harder to recognise. As one example, Instagram and Facebook recently eliminated their familiar “sponsored” labels in favour of smaller “ad” markers. It may look like a minor interface tweak, but it signals something larger: the steady erosion of clear boundaries between advertising, entertainment, recommendation, and ordinary social interaction.

Dissolving into the flow Social media platforms have engineered ads to mimic organic content. Just think of influencer and creator partnerships, AI-personalised search results, or brands using memes. Increasingly, online ads are less of an interruption to the content you consume.

Instead, they’re designed to dissolve into the flow itself. When companies buy advertising space on social media, ads are automatically disclosed as a commercial message. With partnerships and AI-personalised results, the platforms currently offer limited forms of disclosure.

The result is a blurring of the lines. Products, ideas and political messages are spread through ads that look a lot like all other, non-sponsored content. And the less an ad feels like an ad, the more effective it often becomes.

This is precisely where public accountability starts to break down. For several years, researchers like us, working through projects such as the Australian Ad Observatory and the Australian Internet Observatory, have documented how difficult it already is to observe and analyse online advertising systems.

Our work has examined everything from political advertising and astroturfing campaigns, the marketing of alcohol and unhealthy foods, and the veracity of “green” claims made by advertisers. In many cases, this work depends on relatively simple but crucial forms of signalling.

Researchers need to know what counts as an advertisement, who paid for it, where it appeared, and why it was shown to particular audiences. But those signals are weakening. Blurry and harder to audit A blurred system is harder to audit.

Audiences should be able to recognise when they’re targeted with ads. Without clear ad disclosures, we can’t easily detect or question commercial influence in our feeds and search results. New AI tools intensify this challenge.

Instead of seeing discrete ads in your feed, you might be getting a stream of product suggestions and discounts nobody else sees. This means regulators and researchers can’t even audit them. These personalised, disguised ads could also make product recommendations that are biased and potentially harmful.

For instance, you might be telling an AI assistant that you’re stressed, and suddenly be offered a discount on a case of wine. AI-driven dynamic advertising is highly concerning for products that are unhealthy, harmful or regulated – such as alcohol and gambling.

If ads appear one moment and are gone the next, it’s almost impossible to make sure they comply with relevant regulations. The danger is not simply that users may encounter more advertising. It’s that the underlying commercial and promotional logic and messaging become even harder to see.

Read more: OpenAI will put ads in ChatGPT. This opens a new door for dangerous influence We’re not powerless Australia’s emerging digital duty of care framework offers an opportunity to confront this problem directly.

Much of the current discussion has focused, understandably, on harms such as misinformation, scams, abuse, or risks to children. But opaque advertising systems are also a public interest issue. They shape political communication, consumer behaviour, health information, financial decision-making, and civic trust.

If platforms increasingly profit from blurring advertising and ordinary communication, then stronger positive obligations around disclosure and transparency become essential.

Minimum disclosures for digital advertising on social media should include: consistent and clear human and machine-readable advertising labels across formats and services accessible ad archives for public-interest scrutiny, including AI variations inclusion of meaningful and accurate information about targeting and delivery, and clear identification of AI-generated or AI-mediated advertising, including specifics on how AI was used.

This is not about banning advertising. Nor is it about returning to some imagined “clean” internet untouched by commerce. Advertising has always adapted to new media and will continue to do so. But there’s a fundamental difference between visible persuasion and persuasion that disappears into the infrastructure.

Without clear signals on what is and isn’t an ad, we lose one of the few remaining ways to understand who is shaping the information environments we increasingly depend on every day.

Daniel Angus receives funding from the Australian Research Council through Linkage Project LP190101051 ‘Young Australians and the Promotion of Alcohol on Social Media’.

He is a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society, and QUT Node Lead for the Australian Internet Observatory.

Nicholas Carah receives funding from the Australian Research Council through Linkage Project LP190101051 ‘Young Australians and the Promotion of Alcohol on Social Media’ and Discovery Project DP250102499 ‘The Australian experience of automated advertising on digital platforms’.

He is an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.

He is Deputy Director of the Australian Internet Observatory and Deputy Chair of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education.

Lauren Hayden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/online-ads-are-becoming-harder-to-spot-but-were-not-powerless-to-stop-it/

Workers prepare to burn imported plastic waste at a dump in East Java, Indonesia, in 2018. Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images Picture a pile of trash the size of Manhattan and taller than one and a half Empire State Buildings.

That’s how much plastic waste the world is predicted to be generating every year by 2050 if nothing is done to change course. It’s easy to think of recycling as the solution, but the vast majority of plastic waste now ends up in landfills, or worse.

A large amount of plastic waste gets shipped overseas. In a new study, my colleague and I analyzed what happens when plastic waste is shipped to lower- and middle-income countries, where open burning is a common way of dealing with excess waste.

The result, we found, is pronounced increases in toxic air pollution.

Plastic waste burning and health impacts Between 40% and 65% of total municipal solid waste is openly burned in low- and middle-income countries, largely as a result of 2 billion people around the world having no municipal solid waste collection.

Open burning occurs both intentionally and unintentionally, the latter when open dump sites containing organic waste spontaneously combust due to heat generated as the waste degrades. A worker carries a basket of plastic waste, wood and coconut husks to be used as fuel to fry tofu at a factory in Sidoarjo, Indonesia, in 2025.

Burning waste is a common way to cut fuel costs, but studies have found high levels of microplastics in the tofu from these factories, toxic ash inside the buildings and hazardous levels of air pollution.

Robertus Pudyanto/Getty Images When plastic burns, it releases particularly toxic air pollutants. Fine particles can penetrate deep into people’s bodies, along with gases that include carbon monoxide, styrene gas and hydrogen cyanide. It also releases persistent organic pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and dioxins.

These particles and gases have been linked to health risks ranging from respiratory and cardiovascular disease to cancer and reproductive and neurological disorders. The ash from open burning can also contaminate soil and groundwater with persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals and other toxicants, creating more chances for people to be exposed to them through food and water.

The global plastic waste trade Large amounts of plastic waste are shipped around the world – some to be recycled and much to simply be disposed of in landfills or incinerated. In 2024, 9.34 million metric tons of plastic waste imports were reported, according to the United Nations.

Where this exported plastic waste ends up has been shifting. In 2018, China stopped importing plastic waste, causing the total amount of plastic waste moving among countries – at least through official channels – to drop dramatically. Between 1992 and 2016, China’s plastic waste imports made up 45% of global imports.

In 2018, the flow moved to other countries, largely in Southeast Asia but also other locations, including Turkey. In 2018, Indonesia became a net importer of plastic waste. The majority of this waste came from Western Europe, Australia and North America.

What happened to Indonesia’s air quality We harnessed data from multiple monitoring systems, including satellite observations and cargo ship tracking signals, to understand where these plastic waste imports went and how much air pollution was released by openly burning this waste.

As of 2020, the World Economic Forum and Indonesia’s government estimated that 48% of Indonesia’s plastic waste is openly burned.

We found that particulate matter air pollution – of great concern for health – increased an average of 3.3% at the locations of large open waste dump sites in Indonesia after China’s ban in 2018-19 relative to expected business as usual, based on data from 2012-17.

We found increases up to 1.68 micrograms per cubic meter.

Based on risk estimates from a global study of mortality associated with long-term exposure to outdoor fine particulate matter, this corresponds to an approximate 1.5%, 1.9% and 3.5% increase in mortality risk from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer and lower respiratory infections, respectively.

New constraints on the plastic waste trade In 2021, Indonesia restricted the import of nonhazardous waste to 15 specific ports and in 2025 banned the import of plastic waste altogether.

In mid-2025, Malaysia followed suit, allowing plastic waste only from countries that have ratified the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal – a treaty that the U.S. has never ratified.

For these bans to be effective, these countries must also find ways to contend with illegal plastic waste shipments and paper imports contaminated by plastic waste. Where plastic waste exports went in 2024. The chart does not include waste disposed of within the country where it was produced.

UN Comtrade, Ellen Considine, created with Flourish, CC BY-ND Meanwhile, negotiations for an international, legally binding treaty on plastic waste, started in 2022, have stalled.

In mid-2024 the European Union did pass a new regulation on waste shipments, prohibiting exporting plastic waste to countries outside the group of wealthy countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from November 2026 to at least May 2029.

The effectiveness of these and future policies at reducing air pollution – and other kinds of environmental degradation – can be evaluated using methods like ours. Ways to reduce plastic waste As of 2021, only 5% to 6% of U.S. domestic plastic waste was recycled, according to estimates from the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and Bennington College.

It is now even harder to export plastic waste to other countries that could “recycle” it.

Part of the problem is lack of capacity: The Association of Plastic Recyclers estimates that current plastic reclamation facilities in the U.S. and Canada could at most increase their plastic recycling by 35% to 44%, depending on the type of plastic, leading to a total recycling rate of 7% to 9%.

Ultimately, both decreasing plastic use and increasing recycling will likely be needed to solve the problem. Beyond consumer choices, packaging reuse – creating packaging and return systems that put the same materials back to work – can reduce the need for new plastics.

Recycling experts call for harmonized design standards to help streamline processing and deliver higher-quality recycled plastics, as well as extended producer responsibility fees or taxes to raise the cost of producing products that aren’t recyclable.

The fees can provide needed funding to scale up recycling and other programs to reduce generation of plastic waste. Since 2021, seven states have enacted extended producer responsibility laws focused on packaging: Maine, Oregon, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Washington and Maryland.

However, it will take time to see the effects. Colorado’s final implementation plan, authorized in 2022, was approved only in late 2025. The first payment of extended producer responsibility fees to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment are scheduled to begin in mid-2026.

Ultimately, reducing and better managing our nation’s plastic waste can help prevent global health harms.

Ellen M. Considine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/a-lot-of-recycled-plastic-is-being-burned-overseas-and-causing-widespread-pollution-linked-to-health-problems/

Three-quarters of S&P 500 companies now tie a portion of their CEO’s pay to environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. They typically include carbon emissions, workforce diversity and worker safety, among others. The justification is straightforward: if shareholders want corporations to take climate change and social responsibility seriously, firms should pay their leaders for achievements on these dimensions.

This practice is encouraged by boards and large institutional investors. Read more: ESG bonuses are on the rise: Are they improving sustainability or just increasing executive wealth? Regulators are now trying to standardize the underlying metrics so investors can compare firms on a common basis.

The European Union has gone the furthest by directly regulating ESG rating providers. In 2024, the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board released its sustainability disclosure standards aligned with two global standards issued in 2023 by the International Sustainability Standards Board.

Around 40 jurisdictions have now adopted those standards or taken formal steps toward doing so. Why the push for standardization? One persistent problem concerns how ESG performance should be measured in the first place. Today, major rating providers — including MSCI, Sustainalytics, S&P Global and Bloomberg — rate the same firms very differently, even when assessing the same dimension of performance.

One influential paper found that the average correlation between major ESG ratings is around 0.54 — far below the near-perfect agreement between credit rating agencies. The same firm can look like a sustainability leader under one provider’s score and a laggard under another’s.

This divergence is widely seen as a problem, and the standard prescription is harmonization. The conventional view is that convergence on a common standard is unambiguously desirable. But is that really the case? In a recent paper, my co-reseacher Nicolas Sahuguet and I set out to answer a simple question: If executives understand how the metrics tied to their pay are calculated, how will they actually respond?

The answer points to an unintended consequence of the push for harmonization.

When targets get gamed Critics, including law professor Lucian Bebchuk at Harvard University and economist Alex Edmans at London Business School, have argued that tying executive compensation to specific ESG metrics invites executives to game the scheme and may end up exacerbating the agency problem of executive pay.

An executive who knows exactly how a carbon-intensity score is calculated does not need to actually reduce their firm’s environmental impact to improve that score. They can outsource emissions-heavy production to external suppliers or shift the firm’s activities toward those that improve relevant metrics without changing its underlying environmental impact.

None of this requires fraud — only an understanding of how the scoring system works. What our research shows To examine this, we built a formal model of the relationship between a manager and a socially responsible board.

The model accounts for the manager’s ability to anticipate how their decisions will affect their own ESG-based pay, and to game the incentive scheme accordingly. The picture that emerges is more nuanced than the debate usually allows.

ESG-linked pay can be second-best optimal, but it is never without cost. Because our model showed that the manager games whatever metric is used, ESG bonuses inevitably distort their decisions, diverting resources toward investments that improve the score rather than the underlying outcome.

The board accepts this distortion only when the alternative is worse — that is, when it genuinely wants the firm to do more for the environment or for stakeholders than what would maximize its stock price.

If shareholders already reward social performance through the stock price, as they increasingly do, equity-based pay is already providing adequate incentives.

Adding ESG bonuses on top is then counterproductive on two fronts: it distorts investment decisions through gaming and pushes the firm to over-allocate resources to ESG activities beyond what either shareholders or the board actually want.

This helps explain why the sensitivity of CEO pay to ESG metrics is usually small, even in firms that have made serious public commitments to environmental or social goals. That is not necessarily window dressing.

Boards keep this sensitivity low precisely to limit the distortion from gaming. Why disagreement has value Our model also generated a less obvious finding: the current patchwork of competing rating methodologies may actually be doing useful work.

When several raters use different methodologies, gaming becomes harder because what improves one score may not improve another. An executive who knows that Provider A weights one set of indicators, Provider B weights different ones and Provider C weights different ones still cannot easily satisfy all three without genuinely improving underlying performance.

A single official measure, by contrast, gives every CEO a clear target to optimize against. Once the methodology is public and predictable, the gap between hitting the metric and improving actual performance widens.

For harmonization to be a net improvement, the unified standard would need to be of substantially higher quality than the patchwork it replaces by a factor that scales with the number of providers being consolidated.

The central premise driving the harmonization push — that disagreement among raters is a flaw to be regulated away — deserves more scrutiny than it has received. That is a high bar. Disagreement among raters has costs, but it also has benefits.

By limiting a manager’s ability to game the metrics, multiple independent measures allows firms to provide more effective incentives across ESG dimensions. Regulators should consider preserving the discipline that comes from keeping those measures independent.

Pierre Chaigneau is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Finance.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/the-push-to-standardize-esg-scores-could-make-corporate-greenwashing-easier-not-harder/

If we do the maths, the target readership for this teen adaptation of Jacinda Ardern’s bestselling memoir A Different Kind of Power were at primary school when she was prime minister. Those were the days when Ardern’s “stardust” – as her particular brand of political magic was described – saw her reach extraordinary heights of popularity, both at home and abroad.

But, as we know from the adult edition of her memoir, Ardern had always struggled with the self-confidence and self-belief we normally associate with effective leadership. Review: What If You Could – Jacinda Ardern (Penguin) Facing down this imposter syndrome informs the new book much more than the various events she had to contend with during her time in office.

Dedicated to “the leaders of tomorrow – who just don’t know it yet”, it is more accessible and immediate, with much less political detail. Ardern always wanted her original memoir to speak to her 14-year-old self, dedicating it to “the criers, worriers and huggers”.

What If You Could expands on that, spinning her life experiences and challenges into a self-affirming guide to following dreams, being strong and ultimately creating a different kind of power. No celebration of impossible standards Deftly adapted by New York-based writer Ruby Shamir, the book spends no time dwelling on COVID.

Ardern’s time working for Tony Blair in London is gone. Leaving the Mormon church is summarised in one sentence. But both books begin with pivotal bathroom moments. In A Different Kind of Power, Ardern is in her friend’s toilet, taking a pregnancy test while waiting to learn if she can form a coalition and therefore become prime minister.

This time, she is in a high school bathroom stall before a debating competition, so nervous she’s cut her finger trying to open the jammed door. Cleverly, these different prefaces are united by the same passage: My whole life I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough.

That at any moment I would be caught short, and that meant no matter what I was doing, I had no business doing it. Instead, Ardern believed she was more suited to working behind the scenes.

She wasn’t tough enough, was too “idealistic and sensitive” for the political front line. And so the passages from the original memoir about her connection with Ernest Shackleton and the heroic age of Antarctic exploration are also gone.

Despite her own achievements – one of New Zealand’s youngest ever prime ministers, a woman in a male-dominated world who gave birth while still in office – the book avoids any celebration of impossible standards. Rather, she turns inward toward the psychological terrain, describing her feelings of being an imposter and the nagging fear of being exposed as a fraud.

Near the end of What If You Could, Ardern speaks directly to “everyone who doesn’t fit the old mould”. She encourages young people to channel the challenges of imposter syndrome into something positive: In fact, all of the traits that you believe are your flaws will come to be your strengths.

The things you thought would hold you back will in fact make you stronger, make you better. They will give you a different kind of power and make you a leader that this world, with all its turmoil, might just desperately need.

Read more: In her memoir, Jacinda Ardern shows a ‘different kind of power’ is possible – but also has its limits Corrective mantras to self-doubt If there is a whiff of the self-help genre here, it is also a welcome change from the kind of inspirational literature commonly aimed at young readers throughout modern history – heroic tales of courage, bravery, physical prowess and intelligence.

Aimed at encouraging good citizenship, often their goal was as much to encourage conformity, service and, if necessary, sacrifice.

More recently, however, books for young adults have tended to focus on individual agency, engaging readers by directly asking “what would you do?” The subjects may still be on pedestals, but the message is that you can follow in their footsteps and change the world.

To that end, each of the 17 chapters of What if You Could has a key aspirational heading that sets out a challenge and guides the reader beyond their own self-imposed limits: what if you could be sensitive and show you care, what if it’s okay not to have all the answers, what if you could face your fears.

The absence of question marks in the book’s title and chapter headings is deliberate. Each serves as a corrective mantra to wash away self-doubt. Ardern affirms the power of traditionally gendered qualities such as being sensitive and caring.

And she grounds her own progressive politics in the language of answering calls for change and doing things differently. Her most personal feelings are explored in chapters about facing your fears, choosing your own path and following your passion, all of which address imposter syndrome and insecurity.

The final chapter echoes a currently fashionable self-affirmation catchphrase, “I am enough”, reframed here as “what if doing your best is enough”. Ardern then returns to those high-school years and recollections of how hard being young can be.

But adult life can be difficult too, she says, so you need to “be kind to yourself”.

No doubt there will be those for whom such notions – “you are not weak, you are human […] you are enough, just as you are” – will be reminders of why they resisted Ardern’s politics in the first place.

But in this time of global conflict, political cynicism and mean-spiritedness, they also represent a graceful, positive sentiment that world leaders – current and future – could do worse than adopt.

Katie Pickles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/jacinda-ardern-turns-her-own-imposter-syndrome-into-self-help-wisdom-for-young-readers/

Hybrid work can create unexpected problems and less certainty to workers’ routines than if they go either fully remote or fully in-office. LYCS Architecture on Unsplash, CC BY A truce of sorts has quelled the return-to-office wars that have raged in the post-pandemic workplace.

Hybrid work policies, which require some in-office work while allowing flexibility to work from home, have become commonplace. In 2023, only 20% of companies had implemented hybrid policies. That number had shot up to 38% in 2024 and to 42% in 2025, according to the workplace survey Flex Index.

Hybrid work supporters can point to research suggesting that hybrid policies improve employee retention and decrease turnover. Some human resource professionals agree, citing their personal experience, with some job seekers seeing hybrid work as a bare-minimum expectation as they consider opportunities.

As business scholars who study management and communication technologies, we have discovered a more complicated picture. Our research shows that employees actually have more mixed feelings about hybrid work, with some becoming disillusioned. In fact, a hybrid solution may not always be the sustainable compromise it’s hyped to be.

A changing workplace landscape We tracked a group of employees from three large companies in the financial services sector starting in 2022. Coming out of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, one company decided to go fully back to the office, one chose to stay fully remote, and one adopted hybrid policies.

In each case, not surprisingly, employees had mixed responses to whatever the policy was. It was clear, though, that the hybrid policy had the fewest fans.

While office work was preferred by 50% of employees in the back-to-office company, and remote work by 62% of employees in the fully remote business, only 44% of employees in the hybrid workplace told us they were happy with their company’s policy.

When we checked back with our participants in 2025, it looked like most employees in each company were now on board with their company’s chosen policy: The share of approval rose to 60% for back-to-office, 72% for fully remote and 63% for the hybrid format.

Notably, these companies also experienced very low turnover, so the sample of workers remained largely the same. At first glance, the almost 20-percentage-point jump in the approval rating for hybrid work would suggest it had turned into a golden compromise over time.

But a closer look reveals an unstable support base. In the other two scenarios, all of the employees who preferred in-office or remote work back in 2022 were still on board with their company’s policy in 2025.

In contrast, in the hybrid company, only half of those who preferred hybrid in 2022 had the same outlook in 2025. The other half now said they preferred either in-office or remote work. The hybrid policy had gained new support, but it had lost half of its original fans.

Those who now embraced the office spoke about better collaboration and relationship building opportunities.

“Because I like my team and my work is somewhat collaborative, I tend to find it more enjoyable and productive to be in most of the time,” said one worker who said their preference changed from hybrid to in-office.

Meanwhile, those who switched to preferring remote work often spoke of personal arrangements as a key driver. “My wife and I have made decisions about childcare based on me being able to work from home,” is how one employee put it.

Sticky versus fluid preferences The upshot: Back-to-office and fully remote work policies create more durable, or “sticky,” preferences for those respective types of work. In contrast, hybrid policies form preferences that are more fluid. In our book “The New Workplace,” we explore this divergence through the eyes of employees.

One reason the nonhybrid policies create sticky preferences is that they help employees set routines with predictability. And people like predictability in their work and life. But going to the office every day isn’t just predictable.

It offers an added bonus of work-life separation. “I need structure!” was a common refrain we heard from office-preferring participants, who spoke of work and life “bleeding together” without workplace boundaries. Hybrid work promises greater in-person collaboration, but only if workers go to the office at the same times.

Campaign Creators on Unsplash, CC BY Working remotely every day is predictable in a different way. It offers the added bonus of increased autonomy and freedom. Remote-preferring participants prized their independence so much they described their employer’s remote policy as “golden handcuffs” that kept them there even though they otherwise might leave.

Hybrid policies, in contrast, create competing demands that challenge employees, forcing them to constantly switch between work and home modes. This requires both personal flexibility and adaptability – psychological traits that few people naturally possess. Even hybrid-preferring employees spoke of having to “train my brain” and “flip my mind” as they tried to adjust to the format’s unpredictability.

In the long run, some adapted to hybrid successfully by developing a new skill we called task-location fit. They learned to do focused, heads-down work at home and collaborative work at the office.

This was the crowd that remained on “team hybrid.” But others got tired of trying to adapt to the competing demands of hybrid – what we called paradox management fatigue – and decided either fully in-office or fully remote work was best for them.

This fatigue, in the end, is what made the hybrid preference fluid.

“I still value the flexibility to be able to work from home when needed, but I think getting out of a consistent rhythm has made me prefer working in the office,” said one worker who came to appreciate full-time in-office work.

A second reason hybrid policies lose fans is poor implementation. One error, we believe, is when companies hire across geographies. Most participants worked on teams where at least some, if not most, team members were in a different city, state or even country.

This defeated the purpose of an in-office requirement, as it effectively required remote team meetings. “I can Zoom from my home,” many participants said. Another mistake, in our view, is letting employees choose their in-office and remote work days.

While this lives up to the flexibility promise of hybrid, it leads to a half-empty office that’s lonely for those who come in. Furthermore, employees know they’ll find their teammates in the office under a back-to-office policy, or that their teammates will be available online under a fully remote policy.

But a “choose-your-adventure” hybrid policy removes the certainty of how, when, and where to reach teammates. The worst of both worlds? With these challenges, no wonder Dropbox recently called hybrid work “the worst of both worlds” and declared the company will stay fully remote.

At the same time, given the rising adoption of hybrid work, employers that are jumping on that bandwagon need to figure out how to prove the critics wrong and make hybrid work more sustainable. For example, employers can implement a structured hybrid schedule by setting one or more days when employees have to come in.

While this may sacrifice some personal flexibility, structured hybrid solves the coordination challenges. When everyone’s in the office at the same time, it won’t feel empty – and co-workers will collaborate more smoothly. Managers can also make the physical office a place of community where people want to be.

This means investing in livening up the office. In our research, participants’ stories were steeped with nostalgia for the days of company picnics, Oscar-style end-of-quarter celebrations, and disco-at-the-office parties. They said they also appreciated the little things, like pizza at the office or a food truck in the parking lot.

Participants wished these social activities would come back, even with a hybrid work schedule. Finally, companies can better align hiring and team design practices. Hiring across geographies allows locally unavailable talent to join the ranks.

But geographically dispersed teams aren’t hybrid – they’re fully remote. To solve this contradiction, managers should assign employees to teams based on geographic location. When that’s not possible, they should provide teams with a generous travel budget and encourage periodic in-person team gatherings.

These are just some tactics that can help companies make hybrid work.

As one manager, a believer in hybrid work from the start, said: “I continue to see huge benefits for my team members feeling like they can show up as their best selves at work because hybrid allows for work-life integration.”

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/hybrid-work-is-not-always-the-golden-compromise-employees-expect-even-as-more-companies-implement-it/

Graham Platner, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, speaks at an event hosted by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in Orono, Maine, on May 24, 2026. AP Photo/Robert F.

Bukaty Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class?

The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed. Or it’s Connecticut Sen.

Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.” Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates – tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders – whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.

Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form. “We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.” How does he define the working class?

“Essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth.” The theory is all the same: Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats.

The New Deal did it – Democrats can do it again. I’m a political scientist who has written extensively about rural and working-class communities. I believe it is an open question whether these reformist Democrats are really interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms.

Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, the right messenger, the right phrase. “Fight the oligarchy” probably isn’t going to do it.

Working-class voters have a worldview. For 50 years, it has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s – not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats did. Working-class identity Since the early 1950s, the American National Election Studies has asked respondents whether they think of themselves as members of the working class.

This article uses my analysis of that data.

While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35% of voters for the past 70 years, 38% in 2024.

Working-class identity is something more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It is a specific way of looking at the world. There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society.

In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.

Working-class voters have never been a predominantly Democratic group – not even at the height of the New Deal coalition. Based on the American National Election Studies self-report measure, the working-class share of the Democratic coalition peaked around 56% in 1960 and has fallen more or less continuously since, sitting at just about 30% today.

Meanwhile, the share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for half a century: A majority did so in 1958, but not since. Working-class voters have not become Republicans. Only in 2020 and 2024 – the first time in the survey’s history – did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then by narrow margins.

The data shows a working class that is politically homeless: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party. Economic abandonment So what drove them out?

A segment of the progressive left has a ready answer: Democrats abandoned working-class voters economically – on trade, wages and industrial policy. Working-class voters responded rationally. Fix the economics and the coalition comes back. Trade is where the argument is strongest.

In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters groups favored limits on imports to protect American jobs. By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while a majority – 54% – of working-class voters continued to do so. Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization in their interest.

Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix. What fairness requires In 1984, Democrats and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equally would mean fewer social problems.

A divergence opened after 2008 and accelerated after 2016, with Democrats now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to think we should worry more about equality. In 1986, half of mainstream Democrats and a slightly smaller percentage of working-class voters agreed with the idea that Black Americans don’t succeed because they don’t try hard enough.

By 2024, Democratic agreement had collapsed to 13%. Working-class voters declined too, but to 32%. The gap that opened between them is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It is a story about the Democratic Party’s rapid post-2008 shift toward a worldview that places far greater explanatory weight on structural barriers and far less on individual effort and personal responsibility.

Working-class voters, who historically have understood their own lives through a framework of hard work and earned reward, did not shift so dramatically. Alignment becomes division On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt.

Democrats moved left. In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.” By 2024 a 25-point gap emerged.

On whether religion is an important part of their life: a near-zero gap through the early 1990s, but 17 points by 2024. On abortion, a 3-point gap in 1980 became 30 points in 2024. Regarding whether immigration levels should be increased, the two groups were virtually identical in 2000 – around 8% support – but by 2020 Democrats were at 48%, working-class voters at 24%.

But even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust the institution being asked to deliver it – a distrust decades in the making. How the ‘system’ plays In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money.

By 2024 that gap reached 27 points – not because working-class voters lurched toward anti-government extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change. Working-class voters are 17 points more likely than Democrats to say people like them have no say in what government does.

In 2024, 88% of working-class voters and 75% of Democrats said government is run by a few big interests. Both groups agree the system is captured. Yet the Democratic policy response, invariably, is to expand the system. On support for expanding government – from healthcare to jobs to environmental programs – Democrats and working-class voters have diverged dramatically since the 1980s.

By 2024, there were approval gaps of between 20 and 30 points on providing government health insurance, environmental spending and a guaranteed jobs program. On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.

Not all class war Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn’t hear them. Democrats, over the same period, have grown more comfortable with the institutions working-class voters have increasingly less faith in.

This distrust is the accumulated residue of specific experiences: deindustrialization that happened on government’s watch, trade deals that economists endorsed and workers paid for, a 2008 financial crisis response that saved the banks and foreclosed on their homes, an opioid epidemic that regulators missed entirely.

To be fair, this is precisely what the new crop of reform candidates say they want to fix. The argument that the right candidate can move the needle is not crazy. Candidate quality matters. Personal trust can substitute for institutional trust, at least at the margins.

But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change.

Reducing that to class war jams working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are actually saying.

Nicholas Jacobs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/democrats-dont-get-why-theyve-lost-most-working-class-voters/

MAYA Lab/Shutterstock Around the world, countries are moving towards a more digital way of life. Governments have promoted digitalisation of public services to improve efficiency, cut costs and meet modern demands for speedy responses.

Yet this push for the digital has caught some people by surprise. Many older adults now feel they face another hurdle in living an independent life. Across Europe, digitalisation of services is rapidly changing older people’s lives.

The post-pandemic movement of booking appointments, vaccines and basic services online accelerated things. Banks and insurance companies now operate mainly online, with in-person options getting rarer by the day in many countries. Our recent study focuses on Finland, the most digitalised country in Europe.

Finland’s first national strategy report on digitalisation was back in 1995. This laid the groundwork for online public services, well before initial steps in the UK and other countries, and when using email was not even an everyday experience.

Finland’s ombudsman for older people estimated recently that the country has between 500,000 and 600,000 residents over the age of 65 who lack digital skills, or don’t have enough skills for independent digital tasks, even if they would otherwise be able to cope independently in their day-to-day lives.

This is about 40%-45% out of a total population of about 1.3 million in that age group. However, across political divisions, digitalisation continues to be seen as a self-evident good. Our study involved talking with over 40 older people in Finland, and analysing over 40 policy documents as part of a larger European study.

Many of our research participants in their late 60s, 70s and 80s had a hard time keeping up with technological and software development. With the erosion of person-to-person contact, daily situations involving medical or financial issues meant dealing with chatbots or, after a long wait, with people who could not answer their questions.

As one of our participants put it: It is very difficult to get hold of someone at a bank, for example. Even if I just want to ask something, I have to hold indefinitely, and if I then get hold of a person in the end, they do not know.

On the phone, they always say, that the answer for this or that is available digitally. But then they cannot answer questions I want an answer to. Many of our participants were concerned about how digitalisation of services has proceeded at such a fast pace.

In-person visits to banks and health centres can become very limited, even impossible. Older people are worried about not being able to talk directly with a doctor or nurse in person, or being denied contact with a human when dealing with financial matters.

Information about essential health and social welfare is sometimes only available online.

Older adults have been particularly concerned about the digitalisation of medical appointments. lunopark/Shutterstock Finland ranks highest in Europe on the EU’s Digital Economy and Society Index, which measures states’ levels of digital infrastructure and skills.

Yet according to the Finnish Digital Skill Report 2023, only half of 65- to 74-year-olds have basic digital skills. Of 75- to 89-year-olds, as few as 22% have such skills, and one-third do not use internet at all.

The report also reveals that 89% of Finns help their family members in digital matters. When skills or technology are not up to date, many older people rely on someone else to access vital information or manage their finances.

But not everyone has family or trusted neighbours who can help out. Meanwhile, online fraud has taken new, more sophisticated forms, causing people to lose both assets and dignity – this is of special concern for older people.

Such fears create uncertainty, and, for some, isolation. About 20% of Finnish 65-74 year-olds and about 30% of those 75 and over feel quite or very unsafe in their daily activities in the digital environment .

Debating digitalisation Some may argue that, as some services have been digitalised from the 1990s, how long can people continue to claim they are being digitally excluded, rather than simply choosing not to use technology?

But this view ignores how digital exclusion works. Isolation, ill-health, disabilities, uneven skills, changing software constantly updating and access to devices are all part of older people’s challenges. Learning new IT skills at work is a totally different matter to coping when old, alone or without support.

There is a clear mismatch here between government policy on digitalisation of services, and the reality of people’s lives. The government does not provide digital support for older people. Many non-governmental organisations, as well as some of the larger cities such as Helsinki, do provide some digital assistance and basic training, but the national pattern is patchy at best.

The needs of older Finnish people have not been considered enough in the government’s efforts to digitise services, nor have there been sufficient impact assessments in planning and carrying out reforms. People with lower income or fewer resources, less or no digital access, fewer digital skills, fewer opportunities to learn or less support have experienced severe consequences.

People with no online presence struggle to manage their day-to-day lives and may miss out socially. Our research participants themselves suggested various possible solutions or improvements that would help them, such as maintaining continuous access to face-to-face, offline services and making digital support free and accessible.

These issues are not unique to Finland. But if even people in Europe’s most digitalised country are struggling, it’s likely to be even more acute for older adults in other countries in the coming years.

As one of our participants said: “There are so many that do not really manage.” They need to be supported if we are to bring society fully into the digital age.

Jeff Hearn receives funding from The Research Council of Finland and JPI MYBL .

He is affiliated with the British Sociological Association, and the International Sociological Association.

Charlotta Niemistö receives funding from The Research Council of Finland and JPI MYBL. She is affiliated with Åbo Akademi University.

Hanna Sjögren receives funding from The Research Council of Finland and JPI MYBL.

She is affiliated with the University of Helsinki.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/finland-is-europes-most-digitalised-country-but-older-people-are-still-left-behind/

Digital “cardiac twins” offer advantages for advancing healthcare by providing precise, noninvasive monitoring and early detection of diseases, but distinguishing between biological differences in cardiovascular physiology remains a challenge. ART STOCK CREATIVE/ Shutterstock, CC BY AI-powered digital twin technology could transform how doctors understand and treat heart disease.

But if the medical data used to build these virtual models overlook biological differences between women and men, the promise of truly personalised medicine may remain incomplete. Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape how doctors study and treat heart disease.

One of the most ambitious ideas is the “digital twin”: a computer model built from a patient’s medical data that allows researchers to simulate how a disease might develop and how treatments might work.

In cardiology, these models combine medical imaging, clinical records and biological data to create a virtual version of the heart. In the future, doctors could potentially test treatment strategies on this digital model before applying them to the patient.

But an important scientific question is emerging: What if the medical data used to build these models are missing important biological differences between women and men? As digital health technologies move closer to clinical practice, ensuring these tools reflect the full diversity of human biology is becoming increasingly important.

In our research at Aix Marseille University on patient-specific computational models of inflammatory heart disease (MYOCAR3 funded by Civis Alliance), we are beginning to see how differences in immune responses between women and men could influence how these diseases develop and how they might appear in future digital models.

The promise of digital twins in heart medicine Digital twins are attracting growing attention across Europe as a way to advance precision medicine. Instead of treating patients based on average responses observed in large populations, researchers hope to build personalised models that capture the unique biological characteristics of each individual.

Several European initiatives are exploring this approach. The European Virtual Human Twin Initiative (VHT), supported by the European Commission, aims to accelerate the development of digital twin technologies for healthcare. Other projects, such as SimCardioTest, focus on building patient-specific cardiovascular models to improve diagnosis and treatment planning.

These efforts bring together engineers, clinicians and data scientists to better understand complex heart diseases. But the success of these models depends heavily on one crucial factor: the quality and representativeness of the data used to build them.

When medical data fails to represent everyone Over the past decade, researchers have increasingly recognised that biomedical research has sometimes treated male biology as the default. A widely cited analysis published in Nature reported that male animalshistorically outnumbered females by roughly five to one in many preclinical studies.

In cardiovascular medicine, this imbalance matters. Heart disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, responsible for nearly 18 million deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization. Yet heart disease does not affect women and men in exactly the same way.

Symptoms, disease mechanisms and responses to treatment can differ. Inflammatory heart disease provides a striking example. Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, can occur after viral infections and, in rare cases, after vaccination. Global estimates suggest that myocarditis affects around 1.8 million people each year and occurs two to four times more frequently in men than in women, particularly among young adults.

Research published in journals such as Circulation suggests that these differences may be linked to variations in immune responses, hormonal influences and cardiac tissue biology. For scientists developing digital heart models, this raises an important question: if datasets do not fully capture these biological differences, can digital twins accurately reproduce how the disease behaves in different patients?

From sex differences to gender-sensitive medicine These concerns are part of a broader shift in biomedical research towards what is known as sex and gender-sensitive medicine. This emerging field recognises that both biological sex and sociocultural gender factors influence health, disease progression and responses to treatment.

Researchers are increasingly working to integrate these dimensions into medical research, clinical practice and healthcare education. For example, the University Hospital Zurich Heart Centerhas developed consultations dedicated to gender-sensitive cardiology. Researchers analyse international datasets, identify patterns across large patient cohorts and generate new clinical data to better understand how sex and gender influence cardiovascular disease.

At the same time, European scientific collaborations are working to strengthen how sex differences are considered in research.

The European Initiative COST Action EU-SABV is the first Europe-wide effort that focuses on improving how “sex as a biological variable” is integrated into biomedical research, helping ensure studies produce findings that are both rigorous and relevant for diverse patient populations.

Together, these efforts aim to generate better data sets, the essential foundation for reliable digital health technologies. Building better digital medicine Digital twins represent one of the most exciting frontiers in cardiovascular medicine. In the future, these models could allow doctors to simulate disease progression, test therapies virtually and tailor treatments to individual patients.

But the promise of digital medicine ultimately depends on the data that shape these models. If those data fail to reflect biological differences between women and men, even the most advanced algorithms may miss part of the picture.

Ensuring that digital twins reflect the full diversity of human biology will, therefore, be essential. Only then can these technologies fulfil their promise of truly personalised medicine, not for an “average” patient, but for every patient.

This article was co-written with Morgane Evin (PhD – Aix-Marseille University) Hao Gao, (PhD – University of Glasgow) and Dr Franck Thuny (Hôpital Nord, APHM in Marseille). A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers.

It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

L’auteur remercie l’Alliance européenne des universités civiques pour le financement de la bourse CIVIS 3i pour l’étude de recherche MYOCAR3.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/ai-digital-twins-are-transforming-heart-care-but-will-they-work-for-women/

Globally, about one in five people in jobs live in poverty. A key reason lies in how global supply chains are organised. From agriculture to tourism, many jobs are embedded in systems that keep wages low, even as they generate value for international markets.

This has brought renewed urgency to the living wage debate. In 2024, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) formally endorsed general principles for defining and calculating living wages across different national contexts, including guidance on wage-setting and implementation.

Living wages are pay for work that is high enough for the worker and their family to sustain a decent life. We are researchers working on living wages, labour conditions and sustainable livelihoods, including those in global value chains in Africa.

We argue that the growing recognition of living wages shifts the question from whether workers should earn enough to live on to how to make it happen. But turning this idea into reality is far from straightforward.

Our recent article, based on evidence from Africa, shows that some well-intentioned efforts to raise wages can backfire, while alternative approaches tailored to the local context are beginning to show more promise. Our research is focused on socially innovative organisations in Africa.

It shows that change is possible. But only if the focus shifts beyond compliance in the form of tick-box approaches and policing, and instead fosters collaboration between buyers, suppliers, workers and other actors across the value chain.

This also requires moves away from constant cost-cutting through low wages and precarious work and towards supply chains that support sustainable livelihoods. Why workers in global supply chains earn so little Our research has analysed living wages, labour conditions and social innovation across supply chains in sectors including agriculture and tourism.

It showed that global supply chains often place suppliers and workers under intense pressure to reduce costs. This is because today’s global economy is organised through complex supply chains that stretch across countries. Products like fruit, coffee or clothing are often produced in lower-income countries and sold in wealthier markets.

Read more: Ghana’s cocoa farmers are trapped by the chocolate industry These systems create efficiencies and economic opportunities. But they also concentrate power in the hands of large multinational buyers, such as supermarkets or global brands.

These companies typically control pricing, standards and purchasing conditions. As a result, lead companies capture most of the value, while suppliers – and especially workers – receive a much smaller share. In some industries, producers capture only a fraction of the final retail price.

To remain competitive, suppliers are under constant pressure to reduce costs. In this environment, wages are often treated as a flexible expense. This can lead to a “race to the bottom”, where countries and companies compete by keeping labour costs low.

When good intentions go wrong Our research shows that over the past two decades, many governments and companies along supply chains have tried to improve working conditions through standards and certification schemes. These include specific requirements related to labour conditions, health and safety, and sometimes living wages.

But such compliance-based approaches can fail to deliver better outcomes – and can even make matters worse. Read more: Technology and supermarket chains can help strengthen southern Africa’s food systems South Africa’s fruit export industry offers a telling example.

Supermarkets in Great Britain and Europe impose strict quality and labour standards on fruit producers. At the same time, they push for low prices and high volumes. To be able to meet these standards, farmers face higher costs, but without higher payments from buyers.

Many respond by cutting labour costs: replacing permanent workers with seasonal ones, increasing workloads, or reducing benefits. As a result, standards that were designed to improve labour conditions end up contributing to more precarious work.

What works better: collaboration, not just compliance If standards-driven approaches are not enough, what does work? We analysed examples in depth through case studies. The cases presented here focus on inclusive tourism in South Africa, speciality coffee in Uganda, and chilli farming in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

We found that these more collaborative and locally grounded approaches can make a difference to workers’ livelihoods. Our first example is Nando’s PERi Farms initiative. The restaurant group works with smallholder chilli farmers in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, providing technical support, access to inputs and guaranteed purchase agreements.

This has helped farmers increase their incomes and invest in education and housing. Mountain Harvest, a social enterprise in Uganda, focuses on coffee. The organisation works directly with farmers and pays higher prices for coffee beans to improve farmers’ lives.

The company also supports farmers’ income diversification through crops like macadamia and avocado. An in-depth understanding of the local coffee farming context has allowed Mountain Harvest to improve conditions specifically for women employed seasonally as coffee bean sorters, a group who are often overlooked in supply chains.

In South Africa’s tourism sector, the NGO Fair Trade in Tourism has developed a certification standard that goes beyond compliance. It combines living wage requirements with mentoring, peer learning and support to strengthen businesses.

We found that participating businesses reported better working conditions, higher staff retention and improved service quality. Why these approaches succeed All three examples share key features. First, they recognise that wages cannot be increased in isolation.

Higher wages require changes in how value is distributed along the supply chain – including fairer prices paid to suppliers. Second, they rely on long-term relationships rather than short-term transactions. Stable partnerships give suppliers the confidence to invest in their workforce.

Third, they involve collaboration across businesses, non-profit organisations and local actors. This grounds interventions in local realities. Finally, they treat workers not just as a cost, but as humans who make important contributions to the quality and sustainability of the business.

What needs to change Achieving living wages will require more than standards or regulations. Companies need to rethink their sourcing practices, including how they set prices and manage supplier relationships. Governments and international companies must ensure that labour standards are supported not just by enforcement and fair trade conditions but through collaboration.

And consumers, too, play a role in supporting businesses that prioritise fair wages.

Ines Meyer receives funding from the Department of Science and Innovation via the National Research Foundation for the SARCHI Chair she holds.

She is affiliated with the Living Wage South Africa Network, a registered non-profit organisation.

Annika Surmeier and Molefe Maleka do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/global-supply-chains-keep-workers-poor-three-case-studies-show-how-the-cycle-can-be-broken/

Will the Hollywood gossip outlet be able to hold those in power to account? Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images Headlines on sex, drugs, sports and divorce always attract eyeballs. In fact, the entire tabloid industry has been built on the public’s hunger for scandal and schadenfreude.

TMZ is no exception. Through the years, it has become the go-to source for celebrity gossip, salacious affairs and public meltdowns. So what to make of TMZ’s decision to recently launch a Washington bureau – TMZ DC – to cover the Beltway’s feuds, scandals and power struggles?

While some congressional staffers have been apprehensive about this new venture, I’m excited to see how it plays out. I’ve studied and written about how aspects of TMZ’s business model and audience engagement tactics can be replicated by local media to serve the public good.

Now that the outlet is setting its sights on the nation’s political actors, there will be an opportunity to see whether its controversial methods translate into holding those in power to account. You are now entering the ‘thirty mile zone’ Celebrity journalism had been around since the creation of 18th-century scandal sheets, which published gossip about European aristocrats, royals and political elites.

In the 19th century, the penny press emerged in the U.S. – cheap newspapers that competed for the public’s attention by running articles detailing crimes, scandals and lurid accounts of city life. Newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer supercharged this approach through what became known as “yellow journalism,” a sensational, emotionally charged style of reporting that flourished in the late 1800s.

TMZ repackaged this model for the digital age. After a three-year stint as host of the syndicated TV show “Celebrity Justice,” Harvey Levin founded TMZ in 2005 with backing from Warner Bros.

The name is a nod to Hollywood’s “thirty mile zone” – the roughly 30-mile radius around Hollywood that the entertainment industry uses to determine whether film and TV productions are considered “local” shoots or “on location.” TMZ’s former newsroom in Glendale, Calif., pictured in 2007.

Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images From the start, TMZ has come under fire for its aggressive reporting tactics and its prioritization of speed over sensitivities. Many of its posts hypersexualize women. Its articles often lack bylines, which allows it to promote its brand over the work of its reporters.

The outlet has also allegedly cultivated a network of paid informants, which violates journalistic ethical norms. And it treats any and all celebrities as fodder for clicks, no matter how humiliating or intrusive the story.

TMZ has covered celebrity deaths in ways that most mainstream media outlets wouldn’t consider. It posted Michael Jackson’s autopsy report in an accessible PDF file. It published an article about Kobe Bryant’s death in 2020 before authorities had widely confirmed the news.

And after One Direction member Liam Payne fell to his death in 2024, TMZ published a cropped photo of the corpse with identifying features. The ensuing outrage compelled the outlet to remove the images. TMZ takes its talents to DC TMZ’s content and approach were shaped by the web’s demand for speed, visuals and clicks.

However, while yellow journalism often resulted in articles that were exaggerated or misleading, TMZ usually takes pains to be rigorous and accurate in its reporting.

The outlet’s journalists have become experts at records-based reporting, which involves scouring publicly available information or filing public records requests to build stories via court filings, property and tax records, police reports, financial disclosures, corporate filings or government databases.

TMZ’s attention to the dockets in Los Angeles-area courthouses has long given the outlet an edge in being the first to report on divorces – from those of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and Britney Spears and Sam Asghari to, more recently, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s split.

But more importantly, this type of document-based, investigative reporting is just the sort of approach that I think is needed to produce more public interest journalism. The focus simply needs to move from face-lifts and custody battles to lobbyists and insider trading.

Media scholar Patrick Ferrucci and I have explored how TMZ engages and holds its audience through a mix of original multimedia content, document-based reporting, sports-themed coverage and sensational headlines. Yes, the outlet primarily focused on celebrities.

But we wondered why traditional news organizations weren’t taking a page from TMZ’s book and covering elected officials like the paparazzi covered celebrities. A reality show worth covering This isn’t TMZ’s first attempt at covering national politics.

In 2007, there was a proposal for a Washington branch. However, its parent company, Time Warner, nixed the venture, deeming it too risky to mess with the bureaucrats that regulate its empire.

But with spectacle, personality clashes and corruption increasingly defining American politics – not to mention a former reality TV show host serving as president – it was only a matter of time before TMZ would have a second go at it.

Plus, as TMZ DC Co-Managing Editor Charlie Cotton told Politico, the public deserves to know as much about public officials as they know about “The Real Housewives.” TMZ already had a history of covering politics and bad actors.

During the 2008 financial crisis, the outlet was able to channel its mean-girl energy into populist rage: After Congress approved US$700 billion to bail out banks, the outlet circulated images of bank employees partying with their bonus money.

In March 2026, before launching its Washington bureau, TMZ did something similar: It asked its audience to find photographs of members of Congress on vacation during a partial government shutdown that was forcing TSA employees to work without pay.

The call-out soon bore fruit. The outlet posted images of Sen. Lindsey Graham at Disney World that went viral, subjecting the South Carolina Republican to a news cycle’s worth of ridicule. TMZ’s descent on Washington has also coincided with the rise of news influencers: social media users with hundreds of thousands – sometimes millions – of followers who post regularly about news and politics.

They include V Spehar, Aaron Parnas and Heather Cox Richardson. Quick to post and churn out content, their segments often go viral. In a nod to their digital clout, the Trump White House has even held influencer briefings.

TMZ’s reporters share similarities with these influencers. They don’t necessarily have a traditional journalism background, nor do they strictly adhere to journalistic values. Ethics can be cast aside for clout or virality. Both understand the power of bite-sized content, with TMZ pioneering the short-form blog post to break news, and influencers using their own authentic voice to gain audience trust.

Now, TMZ is pulling from the best practices of these influencers: Its staff will increasingly post short videos of themselves on social media breaking down stories. Talking directly to the camera via vertical video feels more like personal interaction instead of a stagnated and removed broadcast.

This can be a key driver of audience engagement and trust. Though it hasn’t been a paragon of ethics, TMZ has largely earned the trust of the public and – perhaps begrudgingly – of legacy media.

Time will tell if TMZ DC can become a watchdog in today’s fractured media environment.

But with today’s political ecosystem now driven as much by virality as policy, I think TMZ is well positioned to go hard after the hypocrisy, backroom deals and scandals of the nation’s elected officials.

Angelica Kalika receives funding from University of Colorado Boulder CMDI grants.

She is affiliated with AEJMC, ICA, SPJ, Her Campus, and a list of other academic organizations. Let me know if you need my resume. But I don’t think any apply here. I do vote, but I don’t believe I would have to disclose who I vote for or how I’m registered.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/tmz-descends-on-washington-in-a-test-of-whether-tabloid-tactics-can-serve-the-public-interest/

In Backrooms, the latest horror film from production company A24, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark – a failed architect who accidentally slips out of reality. He ends up trapped in an endless labyrinth of yellow-tinted rooms, humming fluorescent lights and eerie, disembodied sounds – the “Backrooms”.

The film is an adaptation of a popular internet horror concept and urban legend, about an impossibly large, alternate-reality maze of claustrophobic spaces with architecture that appears uncannily familiar but menacingly alien. Yet the film also plays upon a deeper source of modern anxiety: the experience of trying to survive in an economy that fails to deliver on our vision for the future.

Movie audiences will (hopefully) never find themselves trapped in a nauseatingly jaundiced and never-ending labyrinth. But they may recognise Clark’s experience of living among failed promises, diminishing aspirations, precarity, social isolation and the growing fear of becoming obsolete.

Read more: Inside the Backrooms: the internet horror world built by its users Many may also appreciate – if not fully empathise with – Clark’s creeping resentment, sense of entitlement and vitriolic blaming of others for his loneliness and stagnation.

The film’s most profound insight emerges through the suggestion that the real nightmare began long before Clark entered the Backrooms. The trailer for Backrooms. Trapped before the Backrooms Clark finds himself ever more adrift from the life he expected to lead.

Instead of designing skyscrapers, he runs a struggling discount furniture store at a strip mall. His business is in terminal decline. Customers are scarce, bills are mounting and, unable to afford anything better, Clark sleeps on one of the display beds at his store, waking up to resume work ad nauseam.

His life appears to become ever more closed and contracted. For decades, education, hard work and ambition were upheld as routes to stable careers, a sense of purpose and upward mobility. Increasingly, however, scores of people find themselves highly qualified but underemployed, unable to afford accommodation and locked out of the professions they trained for.

Clark’s tragedy reflects a social experience described by the social theorist Steve Redhead as “claustropolitanism”. It’s the feeling of being “locked citizens” – hostage to circumstances that cannot be changed, dreams that are thwarted before they can be pursued and futures that appear even worse than the present.

Putting aside personal ambitions to take jobs that offer little fulfilment, and enduring difficult working conditions simply to make a living, are increasingly familiar realities in today’s crowded, high-pressure economy. For Redhead, such experiences are symptomatic of “a contemporary cultural condition where we are starting to feel ‘foreclosed’, almost claustrophobic, wanting to stop the planet so we can get off”.

Cut off from stable social ties, Clark’s growing resentment over his limited economic mobility further holds him back and creates tension between him and the people around him. When exploring the mysterious Backrooms, Clark ropes his low-wage store employees into a dangerous situation, treating them as largely expendable.

He resents his estranged wife’s desire to leave work in pursuit of higher education, a grievance that reveals a malignant sense of entitlement. He uses his therapist (Renate Reinsve), who is dealing with her own difficulties, as an emotional punching bag.

This reflects a significant feature of the claustropolitan experience.

In today’s heightened state of economic insecurity, social atomisation and perceived loss of options, where everyday life is marked by existential uncertainty and a diminished sense of control, frustration is often redirected away from structural causes and projected onto vulnerable groups.

The biggest threat to Clark becomes his misplaced anger that attempts to devour anyone who tries to help him. As the world itself feels like it is closing in on him, Clark is revealed as both a victim and participant in this nightmare.

The real horror of the Backrooms The Backrooms, as a concept, offers an important means of thinking about personal and economic anxieties as a tangible environment – anxieties that are reflected not only through enclosure, but by an irregular experience of movement and stasis.

In the film, nobody stops moving through nightmarish monotony, yet nobody seems to really get anywhere either. Characters drift with varying degrees of desperation through an endlessly expanding maze of corridors under the repetitive drone of overhead fluorescent lights.

But they never find anything better. There is a primal urge to run away from it all but – just as all options are found to be foreclosed in a claustropolitan economy – all exits are blocked.

The Backrooms film, perhaps even more than the internet legend it’s based on, offers a cautionary reflection on what it feels like to move through a society hemmed in by insecurity, limited opportunities and shrinking possibilities.

Its ultimate message is that perhaps the most frightening labyrinth is the one we already inhabit.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/backrooms-why-being-trapped-in-the-films-endless-corridors-feels-a-lot-like-modern-life/

Chief Purpose Officers: Do firms really need them? For decades, the shareholder primacy model dominated corporate strategy, often displacing explicit discussions of broader organizational purpose. Today, in a world shaped by AI, economic uncertainty, and constant organizational change, many stakeholders want companies to stand for something more than short-term results.

As a result, the term “purpose”, defined as the reason a firm exists in society, has become a powerful business buzzword, especially following the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement on corporate purpose. However, the more companies talk about purpose, the fewer employees seem to believe them.

Research suggests corporate purpose may be “too good to be true”. Employees increasingly experience purpose rhetoric as vague, superficial, and disconnected from everyday work realities. Companies make ambitious promises about values and responsibility to connect with society, yet the day-to-day remains dominated by growth targets, efficiency pressures, and quarterly results.

Employees notice the gap between what organisations say and what they actually do. The emergence of CPOs and the importance of being ‘purpose-driven’ This growing complexity has fostered a new executive role that has quietly emerged: the Chief Purpose Officer, or CPO.

Ubisoft, Virgin Atlantic, Cisco, Sephora, and KPMG, to name a few, have introduced purpose-focused leadership roles in recent years. Their task is simple in theory but difficult in practice: making sure a company’s stated purpose influences real decisions.

Rather than competing with financial goals, CPOs help clarify how purpose and performance can be aligned, especially when leaders face difficult trade-offs about growth, stakeholders, and long-term responsibility.

Our recent study of 44 Chief Purpose Officers across industries such as gaming, travel, and beauty found that these executives work at the intersection of strategy, culture, and ethics to transform their organisations into more purpose-driven entities.

They help by connecting lofty purpose statements to the reality of organisational life. In practice, this means asking difficult questions during leadership meetings: Does a business decision align with the company’s long-term direction and with its purpose?

When does growth undermine the organisation’s purpose? How does the company create value for society? And where its activities cause harm, what changes are needed to transform the business? Some CPOs redesign hiring and reward systems so employees are evaluated partly on their contributions to strengthening the organisation’s purpose.

Others develop “purpose metrics” that executives discuss alongside financial performance. Some examples are surprisingly concrete. One executive told us their company had ended relationships with clients whose practices conflicted with its values. Another described leadership meetings where executives openly discussed their emotional reactions to climate-related events.

Some make purpose visible in simple, tangible ways. One CPO, for example, created a “light bulb wall”: each time an employee acts in a way that brings the organisation’s purpose to life, a new bulb is switched on.

Over time, the wall becomes a visible reminder that purpose is enacted through everyday decisions and small, repeated actions. At first glance, CPOs’ practices may appear unusual. In reality, they reflect a deeper transformation in management itself, trying to integrate moral and emotional considerations into strategic decision-making.

CPOs set out to reshape how organisations think about their societal role. They foster emotional engagement around shared values. They build relationships across stakeholders and departments. And they embed purpose into tangible structures such as incentives, metrics, and governance systems.

In short, they attempt to transform abstract ideals into operational reality. Can CPOs really make a difference? The big question is whether companies need a dedicated executive for this work. While the role may overlap with functions such as HR, CPOs add value by linking purpose to long-term strategy and governance.

As purpose is not static, CPOs support purpose evolution. They ensure that decisions reflect the organization’s responsibilities toward employees, customers, and communities, turning purpose into a practical guide for business. Critics argue that Chief Purpose Officers risk becoming symbolic figures with little real influence.

If one executive champions purpose while finance and operations teams control the actual decisions, nothing changes. As a result, in some organisations, the role can become a form of corporate theatre: a visible commitment to values without meaningful structural reform.

And lastly, purpose is also difficult to measure. Unlike sales or profits, its impact is harder to quantify. That makes it easy for sceptics to dismiss the role as another management fad. Our research suggests that CPOs only make a difference under certain conditions.

The organisation must genuinely use purpose as a decision-making filter and link purpose with strategy. The CPO must have both legitimacy and authority. They must report directly to the CEO and participate in strategic meetings.

Leadership must visibly model purpose, especially when it conflicts with short-term profit. If the CEO abandons purpose when it becomes inconvenient, the entire effort collapses into theatre. When these conditions are present, organisations can change in tangible ways.

Hiring practices evolve. Supplier relationships shift. Incentive systems are redesigned. Purpose begins to shape everyday decisions and becomes strategically relevant. So, do firms need Chief Purpose Officers? Increasingly, yes. In a business world marked by technological disruption, social pressure, and growing distrust of corporate rhetoric, firms face pressure from all directions at once.

They must remain profitable, innovate quickly, attract talent, respond to social expectations, and adapt to technological change. Purpose does not replace these goals. It helps connect them. This is where Chief Purpose Officers can make a difference.

Their role is about helping organisations clarify what they stand for when facing difficult trade-offs and competing priorities. CPOs cannot solve these tensions alone. But they can help organisations turn purpose from a marketing message into a tangible, organisational reality that can be experienced in the workplace.

Why Europe needs CPOs Society is raising the bar for responsible business. The European Union’s Corporate and Sustainability Reporting Directive and Green Deal now require large firms to align finance and operations with stated sustainability commitments and report on their impact.

Yet compliance alone does not create purpose. A company may report strong environmental performance while still lacking a clear reason for existing beyond shareholder returns.

A Chief Purpose Officer is one emerging and fragile answer that helps close this gap by ensuring that a company’s purpose genuinely shapes financial and operational decisions, driving the transformation of European businesses toward more responsible and sustainable models.

Ones to watch List of top executive appointments dedicated to upholding best practices: Richard Boele, Chief Purpose Officer, KPMG Australia Alexandra Michat, Chief Purpose Officer, Exo Travel Simon Cheetham, Chief Purpose Officer, Andrew Property & Purpose Priya Srinivasan, Chief People and Purpose Officer, Coty Laura Dunne, Chief Purpose and Proposition Officer, Lincolnshire Co-op Caroline Jeanteur, Chief Purpose Officer, Ubisoft.

Paradoxically, several CPOs in our study suggested that their ultimate success would be to make the position less necessary over time by embedding purpose into the organisations systems, routines, and decision-making processes.

Yet the very emergence of the Chief Purpose Officer points to a broader shift in modern capitalism: companies are increasingly expected to demonstrate how their purpose shapes how they create value, govern themselves, and respond to society’s demands.

The full research on how to implement purpose in organisations is available in “Dynamic Strategifying: How do Chief Purpose Officers make purpose strategic and strategy purposeful?”, published in Long Range Planning (2025), and “Too good to be true?

The ambivalent consequences and managerial challenges of purpose implementation,” in European Management Review (2026). A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries.

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Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/chief-purpose-officers-a-leadership-solution-or-another-management-fad/

Getty Images With the lid now lifted on Budget 2026, many small and medium New Zealand businesses will be poring over the detail to see what it has in store for them. Many may come away disappointed.

With the government having been upfront about its spending constraints, this budget was never likely to deliver a large new package for small firms. Instead, the budget delivers a mix of smaller compliance changes, infrastructure spending and energy transition support.

It also includes funding for advisory services, digital systems, early-stage capital initiatives and small-business capability programmes, alongside changes to research and development support. It might be asked whether this mix of small initiatives adds up to anything that will lift productivity.

But aside from offering direct support, budgets can also act as useful signals from government.

On this test, this budget appears strongest on encouraging restraint and resilience in a difficult economic environment, even if it is less clear how ordinary small and medium firms are expected to become more productive.

That is important because New Zealand’s productivity problem will not be solved by large firms, infrastructure projects or high-growth startups alone. It also depends on whether thousands of everyday businesses can lift capability, adopt technology and improve margins.

There is an important distinction here. Business support helps firms navigate rules or cope with pressure. Productivity policy helps firms change how they create value. If we look closely, there are measures in the budget to assist in both areas.

The hidden small-business budget Several budget initiatives are relevant to small firms. Simplified fringe benefit tax rules for private motor vehicle use will be welcomed by owner managers, trades businesses and service firms. Removing detailed logbook requirements may not sound transformational, but compliance time is time taken away from customers, staff, sales and cash flow.

The $1.2 billion gas transition loan guarantee scheme may help some energy-intensive firms shift to alternative energy sources. Infrastructure spending, trades training, advisory services and digital tools also have practical value. But these are mainly support measures.

They may help firms cope, navigate or adjust. The harder test is whether they help small firms become more productive. Some of the most interesting measures are less glamorous. Customer and product data sharing is one example.

The budget documents include support for an economy-wide framework to enable more secure data sharing between businesses, with open banking as an early focus. For smaller firms, access to finance is shaped by information. A viable business may have loyal customers and solid cash flow but still struggle to demonstrate its risk profile to lenders.

Better data sharing might make lending, switching providers and cash flow management easier. Electronic invoicing, or eInvoicing, is another example. For a small firm, a late invoice can mean drawing down an overdraft, delaying a supplier payment or chasing accounts after hours.

While eInvoicing will not solve late payment by itself, combined with stronger payment discipline it can reduce errors, speed processing, and improve cash flow visibility. Procurement is another overlooked lever, although the budget is less explicit here.

The documents include funding for procurement leadership and improving the experience of businesses interacting with government. For an innovative small firm, a government contract can provide revenue, credibility and a first reference customer. The budget does not present procurement as an innovation strategy, but that is the opportunity.

If New Zealand wants more innovative small firms, government can buy innovation as well as fund it. Startup policy is not small-business policy Budget 2026 also includes support across the wider business ecosystem, including startups and early-stage capital.

New Zealand needs ambitious startups and deeper early-stage capital markets. But startup policy is not the same as small-business policy. Most small and medium businesses are not seeking seed capital or pitching venture investors. They are established firms trying to manage costs, retain staff, respond to weak demand, adopt technology, improve systems and lift margins.

The Research and Development Tax Incentive changes show the same distinction. In-year payments and greater discretion around late filings may improve cash flow and administrative certainty for eligible businesses actively engaged in research and development.

But this is not a broad measure for most small businesses. The package also reduces the cap on eligible expenditure for non-administrative internal software development from $25 million to $3 million a year. The government says this will better target support toward activities that generate wider spillover benefits.

But some internal software development is central to innovation and productivity. At a time when firms need more sophisticated digital tools, narrowing support for this kind of software development sends a mixed signal. Building blocks, but no blueprint There are things in the Budget for small firms.

The issue is whether the measures add up to a credible blueprint for lifting productivity. A small business under pressure does not experience government policy as a set of discrete measures. It experiences the cumulative effect.

Does it become easier to access finance, adopt technology, reach customers, draw on expertise and meet compliance requirements without sacrificing productive time? Business understands fiscal constraints, but still looks to government for signals of vision and coherence.

That is the missed opportunity. In a constrained fiscal environment, the government did not need a grand small-business package.

It needed a clearer growth story for the firms that make up most of New Zealand’s business economy.

Rod McNaughton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/02/will-the-budget-boost-small-firms-not-in-the-way-we-might-think/

xavierarnau/Getty From July 1, many Australians can choose something that once sounded absurd: free electricity in the middle of the day. The federal government’s opt-in Solar Sharer Offer will give three hours of free power to households with smart meters in New South Wales, South Australia and southeast Queensland.

Victoria’s separate scheme will launch in October. Free power sounds like a giveaway. It isn’t. It’s meant to encourage people to use more electricity during the hours when solar power flows into the grid.

The real aim is to get people to shift the use of water heaters, pool pumps, air-conditioning and electric vehicle charging to the middle of the day. At other times, power prices will be slightly more expensive.

The main challenge for Australia’s power systems is no longer how to meet peak demand in the evening. We now have to use or manage the floods of very cheap solar during the sunniest hours when there’s more supply than demand.

If this imbalance isn’t managed, electricity voltage and frequency can move outside safe limits, equipment can trip, and the risk of outages rises. The scheme makes sense. But there are still questions about its fairness.

Electrified households will benefit most, while renters and other groups may benefit less. The challenge of solar abundance About one in three Australian homes now has solar. At times, this power source can supply 50% of total demand on Australia’s biggest power grid, the National Energy Market.

Wholesale prices have regularly gone negative in recent quarters. In big solar states such as South Australia, solar can supply more power than the state can use. Surplus power is exported, stored in batteries or curtailed – wasted.

The Solar Sharer Offer is meant to make better use of these floods of solar power. This financial year, the three hours of free power will be 11am to 2pm daily in NSW and southeast Queensland and 12 to 3pm in South Australia.

Australia’s energy regulator chose these times to match when solar output is highest, and network and wholesale costs are lowest. This may change year by year. The reason the scheme isn’t national is because it’s tied to the Default Market Offer — a regulated safety net plan for electricity customers – which only applies in NSW, SA and southeast Queensland.

Renters and people in apartments may find it harder to benefit from the free power scheme. Andrew Merry/Getty Who will benefit most? Ensuring fair access has been a constant challenge for household clean-energy schemes.

People who own their homes and have access to capital are usually better placed to benefit. This scheme has the same issue.

It’s easy to picture the ideal customer for three hours of free power – a homeowner with a smart meter, flexible hot water, electric vehicle, home battery and the ability to choose when power-hungry appliances run.

That’s great for them. But what about everyone else? For instance, you have to have a smart meter to be eligible. Only about 60% of households have one. The harder question is whether this offer is fair for other households.

Renters, apartment residents and people on embedded networks in retirement villages, caravan parks or shopping centres face another barrier. If they opt in without being able to make good use of the free power, they could actually be worse off due to the higher prices at other times.

These concerns were raised during the consultation process. Making it fairer The government is aware of these issues. The free power period is capped at 24 kilowatt hours a day, enough to cover several large daytime loads such as hot water, dishwashing, laundry, air-conditioning or part-charging of an EV.

The cap matters because offering electricity for free still incurs costs for energy retailers. To recover the missed revenue during the free window, retailers will boost other usage charges. Capping free power at 24 kWh a day limits how much high-consumption households can use at zero price, which limits how much revenue has to be recovered from usage at other times of day.

More needs to be done to ensure it’s fair. A key step is unglamorous but effective: helping households heat water during the day. Heating water takes a lot of power. Electric hot-water systems are often on controlled-load tariffs designed for overnight operation.

A South Australian trial moved close to 50% of water heating from night to day with little reported inconvenience. Where safe and practical, retailers and network businesses could shift the time these systems charge to the middle of the day.

Governments could help rentals and apartment residents by supporting the use of timers, smart controllers and efficient heat-pump hot-water systems. The same logic applies to other flexible loads. The free lunch is real.

The question is who gets a seat at the table.

Saman Gorji receives funding from the Recycling and Clean Energy Commercialisation Hub (REACH), supported by the Australian government’s Trailblazer Universities Program.

Alireza Ganjovi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/01/three-hours-of-free-power-a-day-sounds-good-but-is-australias-scheme-fair/

From July 1 this year, all Australian businesses will have to pay their employees’ superannuation on the same day as they pay salaries. If you’re an employee, that means your employer’s super payment will need to reach your super fund within seven days of pay day.

In the lead up to the change, the Australian Taxation Office has been encouraging employers to transition to “payday super” early. So you may have already noticed a change. Underpayment or failure to pay superannuation has become a growing problem.

The tax office recently said around A billion in superannuation is currently unpaid to workers. So what’s changing from July 1? How much is it likely to boost your super balance over time? And where can you get help if you need it, either as an employer or an employee?

What’s new from July 1? In Australia, all employees receive a minimum amount of superannuation on their wages paid into their nominated super fund. This is called the superannuation guarantee and is 12% of your wages (whether you’re full-time, part-time or casual).

Under the current rules, ending on June 30, most businesses pay superannuation quarterly. That money has to reach an individual employee’s super fund 28 days after the end of the relevant quarter. Although some businesses may have paid super more regularly, until now many individuals may have seen only quarterly deposits to their super fund.

This means it can be difficult for an employee to match the super on their payslip with the deposits into their fund. There are often delays between an employer making the payment and a super fund processing the payment.

Payday super is a new step to ensure payments are actually made to the super fund at the same time as they’re reported to the tax office. Thousands more for a typical worker over time If the main difference from July 1 is the timing when an employer pays super, does this make any difference for the employee?

Yes, it will. Even an employee without underpaid or unpaid super will benefit from more regular payments of super to their super fund. This is because earlier and more frequent payments will help super investments and returns grow faster.

Estimates vary of how much it could be worth over time. Last year, the federal government said it could add around ,000 in today’s dollars to average 25-year-old worker’s retirement balance. The Super Members Council – which represents superannuation funds with 12 million Australian members – separately estimated a typical worker could be ,400 better off in retirement if super was paid at the same time as wages.

Why was any change needed? Super Members Council analysis found younger Australians on lower wages, people in insecure work, lower-paid women, and migrant workers were particularly hard hit by lost super. One in two workers who earn less than ,000 a year have unpaid super.

A 2022 report by the federal government’s Australian National Audit Office showed workers in construction, retail, professional scientific and technical services, accommodation and food services were the most likely to have unpaid super. And very small and small businesses were the most likely to have underpaid their staff super.

But larger corporations have been caught out too. Just last year, supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles were found to have underpaid wages for about 28,000 staff, with an estimated final bill that could reach billion. Those underpayments included underpaid superannuation.

All too often, individuals only realised their super was unpaid, or underpaid, after it was too late, such as if their employer unexpectedly went bankrupt. That’s the key problem the new payday super rules aim to prevent.

How employers can get help If you’re an employer, payday super is a significant change to how you might have done business in the past. Super for employees can no longer be considered as a problem for down the track – and this will have cashflow implications.

If you haven’t already, there is still time to get prepared using these tax office checklists and videos for employers. Last week, the tax office said more than half of employers were still not paying super more frequently than quarterly.

But it’s also made it clear it will focus on education over punishment for employers trying to do the right thing in the coming financial year. How employees can get help While payday super is certainly a win for employees, unfortunately there will always be a minority of employers that deliberately or accidentally do the wrong thing.

If you’re an employee, especially if you have any reason for concern, follow these three quick steps: make sure your employer has your current super details understand where your super goes and regularly check your super fund balance against your payslip.

Communicate any errors to your employer in writing as soon as you can. Then you’ll have peace of mind the payday super rules are working for you.

There’s more easy-to-read information for employees on the tax office website.

Toni Patricia Brackin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/01/payday-super-is-coming-on-july-1-workers-will-be-thousands-of-dollars-better-off-long-term/