Flexible labour has always been part of how construction gets done. Workers move between jobs, businesses scale up for busy periods, and rosters flex to match what’s happening on site. That’s not new. What is new is the scrutiny on how that flexibility is being managed, and whether the people doing the work are actually being looked after properly. The question worth asking right now is simple. Can you genuinely have both flexibility and legitimate employment in construction, or do you have to choose?
The ABN Trap Most Businesses Don’t See Coming
Ask someone to get an ABN before they start work on your site and it might feel like a straightforward administrative step. For a lot of construction businesses, it’s just how things have always been done. But under Australian law, telling a worker to hold an ABN doesn’t make them a contractor, and it doesn’t reduce your obligations as a business. If the reality of how they work looks and feels like employment, that’s what it is, regardless of the paperwork.
The ATO and Fair Work Ombudsman announced a joint crackdown on sham contracting in March 2026, with building and construction named as one of their primary focus industries.¹ In the 2024-25 financial year alone, the ATO received more than 7,000 tip-offs relating to the construction sector, with around 20 per cent involving allegations of sham contracting.¹ Businesses found to have misclassified workers face penalties of up to $495,000, back-payment of super and entitlements, and potential PAYG withholding liabilities on top.²
What Workers Are Actually Missing Out On
When a construction worker is pushed onto an ABN arrangement that doesn’t reflect the genuine nature of their work, they lose more than just a label. Super stops being paid, or is paid incorrectly. Workers compensation coverage becomes unclear. Leave entitlements disappear. Tax obligations fall back on the worker in ways they often don’t anticipate, and many never fully understand what they’ve signed up for.
From 1 July 2025, the superannuation guarantee rate is 12 per cent of ordinary time earnings, and it applies to casual employees just as it does to permanent ones.³ That’s not a small amount when you’re talking about someone working on site regularly across a season or a project. A worker on $80,000 a year who misses out on super is losing $9,600 in retirement savings annually.
The construction industry has historically had a higher-than-average rate of these kinds of arrangements. That’s partly due to the nature of the work, and partly because the system made legitimate flexible employment genuinely hard to access. The result is a workforce where a significant share of people doing real employment work have been carrying risk that should sit with the businesses they’re working for.
Flexibility and Legitimacy Are Not a Trade-Off
The argument that flexible work and proper employment protections can’t coexist in construction doesn’t hold up. It’s a systems problem, not an inherent conflict. What made casual employment complicated historically wasn’t the concept itself. It was the administrative infrastructure required to do it properly. Payroll onboarding, superannuation reporting, single touch payroll, workers compensation coverage, award compliance. For a small construction business without a dedicated HR function, that overhead made casual employment feel out of reach.
That’s exactly what modern employment platforms are designed to remove. When onboarding, payroll, super, and compliance are handled through a single system, the friction disappears. A worker can be engaged directly and legitimately for a single shift, with tax handled, super flowing, and workers compensation in place, without the business needing to build internal infrastructure to support it.
This is what genuine casual employment in construction actually looks like. Not an ABN arrangement that shifts risk onto the worker. Not a labour hire model that puts a middleman between the business and the people doing the work. Direct employment, done compliantly, with the flexibility that the industry genuinely needs.
The Businesses Getting This Right Are Already Ahead
With regulators actively targeting construction and the compliance environment tightening, the businesses that have already moved toward legitimate casual employment models are in a significantly better position. They’re not carrying hidden liability. They’re not exposed to back-payment claims or penalty notices. And they’re building a workforce of people who actually want to come back, because they’ve been treated properly.
Flexible work in construction is here to stay. The demand for casual labour across Brisbane, SEQ and NSW is only going to grow as the pipeline expands and project timelines compress. The question isn’t whether to use flexible labour. It’s whether the way you’re using it will hold up when someone takes a closer look.
The good news is that doing it right is more accessible than it’s ever been. The businesses choosing that path now are the ones that will be hiring with confidence when everyone else is dealing with the consequences of the shortcuts they took.