Indigenous employees across Australia are shouldering unfair loads at work, taking on cultural education and anti-racism initiatives with little institutional support.
Two in three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers say they have had extra demands placed upon them that their non-Indigenous colleagues have not, known as 'cultural load'.
The findings were made in 'Gari Yala', a new report by the Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research at University of Technology Sydney into First Nations experiences at work.
CEO of Reconciliation Australia, Karen Mundine, says the extra burdens are part of the systemic racism Blak employees have to navigate.
“Often First Nations people in workplaces feel obliged to do some of this work because they feel it’s important that they don’t want to get it wrong, they want to be helpful," the Bundjulung woman told NITV.
"But it starts to add up after a while."
Cultural load, which often falls on Indigenous workers by default and without consultation, could range from organising events for NAIDOC to being asked to speak on behalf of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
Mundine says the broader community is largely unaware of this the burden of cultural load, demonstrating the need to improve racial literacy and cultural safety.
Half of Blak employees doing a year of extra work
The impact of cultural load can significantly impact the careers of First Nation’s Peoples, Gari Yala found.
It's estimated that one in two full-time Indigenous employees were likely to work an additional year of unpaid labour across their career.
Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman says racism needs to be confronted by the systems and structures currently in place.
“You can’t have tokenistic measures like recognising particular days,” he told NITV.
"You need to actually bring about systemic change, you need to have truth-telling, you need to have proper anti-racism strategies for your workplaces, [and] you need to actually name racism rather than using euphemisms.
"The reason we haven’t seen change is because we’ve actually seen organisations reluctant to build their racial literacy and confront racism as a problem."
Gomeroi man, Brendan Moyer, says this dismissal of expert advice and concerns relating to the treatment of First Nations employees is another example of systemic racism at work.
“The lack of cultural safety and the systemic discrimination is where people and systems come from a perspective of privilege and they ignore those expert opinions, regardless of what has been committed,” he said.
That sentiment is echoed by Karen Mundine, who said system change is necessary in order to see progress.
“That comes with leaders deciding these things are important to ensure better outcomes.”
