Two major announcements hit this week that deserve more attention than they got.
Coles is outsourcing its finance, HR, technology, and marketing functions to Accenture. A significant number of roles will be made redundant, replaced by offshore operations run through Accenture’s overseas centres.
Qantas is doing something similar. Around a thousand back office positions are going, again moving to Accenture.
The companies framed both decisions as improvements to the customer experience. You can judge that claim for yourself.
This isn’t AI. It’s something older.
What’s worth noting is that these cuts aren’t being driven by robots or language models replacing knowledge workers. This is old-fashioned labour arbitrage. Take a function that costs a certain amount onshore, move it to a country where it costs less, retain the difference.
The AI story gives companies political cover for restructuring decisions they were already inclined to make. But the mechanism here is offshoring, not automation.
That distinction matters for anyone watching the employment market, because the downstream effects are different. Offshoring creates a structural headcount reduction. Automation can sometimes be absorbed through redeployment or productivity gains. A thousand jobs moving overseas do not come back when the economic cycle turns.
The rate cut connection
Here’s the irony. The RBA meets next week, and the smart money says they’ll hold. One of the central reasons the RBA has kept rates higher for longer is that unemployment hasn’t risen enough to be confident inflation is fully contained.
Coles and Qantas just did a small part of the RBA’s work for them.
Whether that moves the needle on Tuesday is unlikely. But if this kind of corporate restructuring continues across other large employers, the employment data will shift, and when it does, the case for rate cuts gets stronger.
For anyone waiting on lower rates before making a financial decision, the conditions that precede them are beginning to take shape. It may not be imminent. But the pieces are moving.