The same worker can start the day in hospital scrubs, spend the evening behind a cafe counter, and finish it delivering meals after dark, each shift for a different employer who has never met the others. All three owe her a duty of care for work safety, yet none can see the full day she has worked.
Almost one million Australians now work for more than one employer at the same time. In the December 2025 quarter the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 976,400 multiple job-holders, equal to 6.5 per cent of everyone in work, and that rate has sat at a sustained high since mid-2022 (ABS 2026). The pattern is not spread evenly across the economy. Health care and social assistance has the largest number of multiple job-holders of any industry, and accommodation and food services is among the highest. By occupation, community and personal service workers, who staff much of both, are the most likely to hold a second job, at 10.7 per cent (ABS 2026).
Much of this is appears driven by economic pressure rather than preference. Survey evidence indicates that most workers with more than one job take on the additional work to cover necessary expenses, and that around half of Australian workers report living from one pay to the next (ADP 2025). Labour market analysis attributes much of the growth in second-job holding across 2023 and 2024 to cost-of-living pressure, and expects the rate to remain high while household budgets stay stretched (KPMG 2026). This matters for work health and safety in a way that is easy to miss. The financial pressure is itself a recognised psychosocial hazard, and it shapes how a worker behaves in every workplace they attend, including whether they feel able to report fatigue or decline a shift.
These are the people who staff our hospitals, aged care homes, disability services, cafes, and venues. In many cases they are the same workers, moving between an agency shift on Monday, a permanent part-time role midweek, and a hospitality job over the weekend. For work health and safety, this creates a problem our model laws handle only at the edges. Each employer owes its own duty to the same person, but those duties are separate, they stop at the boundary of each employer’s undertaking, and no employer can see, or lawfully reach into, the rest of the worker’s week. The question this raises is not whether people should hold more than one job, which is lawful and, as the economic figures suggest, increasingly necessary. It is how each employer meets a duty it can only ever partly see.
Separate duties that stop at the boundary of the undertaking
The model Work Health and Safety Act gives a worker with several employers a duty from each of them, but it does not make those employers responsible for one another. Under section 19, every person conducting a business or undertaking owes a primary duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of its workers while they are at work in that business. The reach of that duty is set by section 18. What is reasonably practicable turns on what the duty holder knows or ought reasonably to know about the risk, and on its capacity to influence or control the matter. Its fair to say that an employer cannot manage what it cannot see outside of the workplace and has no lawful means to discover what occurs in a person’s private life. Section 14 makes the duty non-transferable, so an employer cannot contract out of its own obligation, but nor does it inherit anyone else’s (Safe Work Australia 2023).
This is where the multiple-employer case differs from the situations the harmonised laws were drafted around. Sections 16 and 46 are both triggered by more than one person holding a duty in relation to the same matter. The same matter is a genuine common one, such as the same work, workplace, or engagement of a worker. A labour hire agency and its host share that matter, because the worker performs the host’s work at the host’s direction. Principal contractors and subcontractors on one site share it too. In those cases the duties are concurrent, and section 46 requires the parties to consult, cooperate, and coordinate their activities, so far as is reasonably practicable (Safe Work Australia 2022). That duty is enforceable. It was the basis of the first prosecution of its kind, Boland v Trainee and Apprentice Placement Service Inc [2016] SAIRC 14, in which a labour placement organisation was convicted for failing to consult, cooperate, and coordinate with the host employer of an apprentice who suffered serious injuries on site.
On the better view, two unrelated employers who happen to share a person do not share a matter. The hospital owes its duty over the work the nurse does for the hospital. The licensed venue owes its duty over the work she does for the venue. These are separate matters, discharged in separate undertakings, so neither section 16 nor the section 46 coordination duty connects them. That reading sits with how the regulators frame section 46, and with the labour hire and shared-site situations in which it has so far been enforced, although it has not been squarely tested for a worker with two unrelated jobs. Just as importantly, one employer has neither the right nor usually the means to contact another, and what a worker does in an unrelated job, or in the gig economy, is in the main their own affair and a legitimate one. Workers do hold duties of their own under section 28, to take reasonable care for their own health and safety, to take reasonable care that they do not put others at risk, and to comply with reasonable policies such as a fitness-for-work declaration. That duty is real, but it sits alongside the employer’s rather than relieving it, and it does not turn a structural problem into a question of individual worker conduct. The practical consequence is that each employer must discharge its duty inside its own undertaking, not by reaching into someone else’s.
Fatigue
Fatigue is where the limits of a single employer’s reach likely do the most damage, because it accumulates. It builds across total hours awake, total hours worked, the timing of those hours, and the quality of recovery between them, and none of those measures respects the boundary between one employer and the next.
Safe Work Australia’s model Code of Practice on managing the risk of fatigue at work, published in September 2025, treats work scheduling, shift length, night work, and recovery time between periods of work as central controls (Safe Work Australia 2025). The supporting guidance recommends allowing at least 12 hours for a worker to recover between shifts (Safe Work Australia n.d.-a). A single employer can design a fully compliant roster on its own and still expose a worker to serious fatigue risk, because the recovery window it carefully provided is consumed by a second job it cannot see.
Consider a common case. An enrolled nurse finishes a night shift at a public hospital at 7.30 am, sleeps poorly through the day, then starts a 5 pm to 1 am shift at a licensed venue. On paper each employer has met its own obligations, yet the worker has had almost no real recovery, is administering medication or operating equipment while impaired, and is driving home in the early hours when the risk of a fatigue-related crash is at its highest. The hospital’s fatigue policy did its job within the hospital’s walls, but it could not reach the second roster.
Coordination between employers cannot be the answer, because for unrelated jobs there is no shared matter to coordinate over and no lawful channel through which to do it. What is left sits inside each employer’s own undertaking. An employer should design work to minimise fatigue so far as is reasonably practicable, and should consult its own workers, under section 47, about the individual factors that raise their risk. The fatigue guidance expressly lists second jobs, travel time between work and home, and caring responsibilities as factors worth asking about, and asking is both lawful and useful (Safe Work Australia n.d.-a). The employer cannot compel a worker to disclose other work, but it can build a fitness-for-work system that makes disclosure safe, treat a worker who presents as impaired as unfit for safety-critical tasks regardless of the cause, and act on what it observes in front of it. Only the worker can see the full picture of their week, which is a reason to make disclosure safe and easy, not a reason to treat the gap as the worker’s alone to close.
One caveat matters here. A code of practice takes legal effect only once a jurisdiction approves it. The September 2025 fatigue Code is a model instrument, and its current status should be confirmed in the relevant jurisdiction before it is relied on as the applicable standard.
Injury management in shared working environments
Injury management exposes a second fracture line. Workers compensation in Australia is administered scheme by scheme, and an injury sustained in one job generally creates return-to-work obligations for that employer and its insurer alone. The worker’s capacity for work, by contrast, is a whole-person measure. It is affected by everything the worker does across every employer.
This produces awkward and sometimes unsafe outcomes. A worker injured in their hospitality role may be certified fit for suitable duties of a particular kind. Their healthcare employer, with no role in the claim, may continue to roster them to tasks that aggravate the injury, unaware that any restriction exists. The reverse also happens: a worker on a graduated return-to-work plan with one employer may keep working their usual hours elsewhere, often because they cannot afford not to, which can undermine the recovery the plan was designed to support and raise the chance of re-injury.
Aggravation and causation can be difficult to untangle when the same part of the body is loaded by two jobs. A back injury that emerges during a manual handling task in aged care may have been primed by repetitive lifting in a warehouse role. Determining which employment contributed, and to what degree, is a question that compensation schemes are equipped to handle, but only if they know the other employment exists. Where it is not disclosed, the injured worker can fall through the gap between two systems that each assumed the other was managing the person.
The medical evidence that drives a return-to-work plan is rarely designed for this situation. A certificate of capacity records what a worker can and cannot do, but it is usually completed in relation to a single employer and a single role. It does not ordinarily ask the treating practitioner to consider the worker’s other jobs, and the worker may not think to mention them. As a result, a restriction that makes sense in isolation can be unsafe once the worker’s full set of duties is taken into account. Closing that gap depends on the worker disclosing their circumstances and on employers asking the right questions early.
Coordination between two unrelated employers is not a duty either of them owes, and neither can demand it of the other. What each employer does owe is its own primary duty not to expose the worker to foreseeable harm, which engages the moment it knows, or ought reasonably to know, of a relevant restriction. The realistic path therefore runs through the worker and their treating practitioner, with the worker’s consent, rather than from one employer to the other. Where the multiple jobs arise within a labour hire or host arrangement, the position changes, because there the parties share the matter and section 46 does require them to coordinate.
The compounding pressures
Two further pressures sit alongside fatigue and injury. The first is psychosocial. A worker juggling several rosters carries scheduling conflict, financial pressure, and chronic time poverty into every workplace. Each is a recognised psychosocial hazard, and each employer owes a duty to manage the psychosocial risks arising in its own undertaking, even where the underlying cause is partly external.
The second is competence and induction. Workers who move frequently between employers, particularly through agencies, may receive abbreviated or repeated inductions, may not be familiar with site-specific hazards, and may carry assumptions from one workplace into another where they no longer hold. In health care this can extend to infection prevention, where inconsistent controls across facilities can allow infection to move between sites through staff who work at more than one of them. None of these risks is created by multiple job-holding on its own, but each is sharpened by it.
Gig work re-inforcing the issues
Gig work is where these difficulties remain highly complex. A growing number of the workers in this picture finish a conventional day job and then log into a delivery or rideshare app for the evening. For the day-job employer this is the least visible second job of all: irregular and on demand, leaving no roster, and usually carried out at night and on the road, where the consequences of fatigue are most severe. That employer’s duty does not reach the gig work and it has no means of controlling it. Its position is the bounded one set out earlier: design its own work to limit fatigue and ask about fitness for work, while recognising that it can neither see nor control what happens once the worker logs into the app.
The platform is in a different position. Under employment law, food delivery riders and rideshare drivers are generally treated as independent contractors rather than employees, and that classification has been contested for years. The work health and safety position does not turn on it. The model WHS Act defines a worker as a person who carries out work in any capacity for a business, and Safe Work Australia’s guidance is explicit that a delivery rider is a worker of the platform whose app they use, and that the platform is a person conducting a business or undertaking that must do whatever is reasonably practicable to ensure their health and safety (Safe Work Australia n.d.-b). A platform that engages, or influences and directs, a worker’s activities owes the primary duty of care, whatever label the contract applies (SafeWork NSW n.d.).
These risks are well documented in accident statistics. In the three months to late November 2020, five food delivery riders died on Australian roads, roughly one every eleven days, and the New South Wales taskforce that examined those deaths recorded more than seventy serious injuries to riders of a single platform in the same year (SafeWork NSW 2021). One rider was still logged into the app when he was killed, yet his death was not initially recorded as a workplace fatality because his last trip had been cancelled shortly before. In response, New South Wales established a joint SafeWork and Transport taskforce and, from 2022, made regulations requiring platforms to supply riders with high-visibility clothing and an insulated food bag, and requiring riders to wear the supplied equipment and carry a training record (SafeWork NSW 2022).
The fragmentation runs the same way here as elsewhere, only further. The platform cannot see the day job that preceded the shift, and the day-job employer cannot see the platform. The algorithm that assigns the work, and the surge and incentive payments that reward longer hours, sit within the platform’s control even though the worker’s total fatigue does not. New South Wales has moved on this directly. In February 2026 it passed the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026 (NSW), which inserts a new duty, section 21A, requiring a person conducting a business or undertaking to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that worker health and safety is not put at risk from the use of a digital work system, including the allocation of work by one (Parliament of New South Wales 2025). The Act awaits commencement by proclamation, and it is a single-jurisdiction reform that diverges from the harmonised model rather than a settled national position (Moore Australia 2026).
The implementation challenge for workplaces
The duty is easy enough to name, but discharging it is hard, and the economic conditions now driving the trend make it harder still. The central problem is that the information needed to manage the risk sits outside the reach of the party who holds the duty, and the people who hold that information have reasons not to share it.
The first difficulty is disclosure. A fitness-for-work or fatigue self-declaration only works if workers use it honestly, and a worker who has taken a second job to meet the mortgage or the weekly shop has a direct incentive not to report fatigue, because disclosure may cost them a shift and income they cannot do without. The same pressure that creates the hazard discourages the very reporting that would let an employer manage it. This is not a failing on the worker’s part but a predictable response to the position they are placed in, and it is the employer’s system, rather than the worker’s candour, that has to absorb it. A no-penalty culture helps, but it does not dissolve the underlying conflict between the worker’s safety and the worker’s income.
The second difficulty is visibility. No system aggregates a person’s hours across unrelated employers. Rostering and workforce-management software is built to optimise one employer’s coverage, not to track a worker’s cumulative load, and a fatigue pattern that is invisible in one roster would be obvious only if both rosters were laid side by side, which never happens. Privacy obligations compound this. The information that would make the duty workable cannot lawfully be aggregated or exchanged between unrelated employers without the worker’s consent, and there is no registry or shared record that would do it.
Gig work adds a further layer. A worker may run several delivery or rideshare apps at the same time, so even a single platform’s limit on continuous hours does not capture their total time on the road. Platforms also compete, which means a platform that imposes meaningful fatigue limits risks simply pushing the worker onto a rival app. Unilateral controls are therefore both technically partial and commercially fragile.
Fatigue itself resists measurement. There is no roadside test for it, impairment often shows only once performance has already slipped, and the worker is frequently the last to recognise it. An employer is left managing a hazard it cannot see, caused partly by work it cannot control, in a worker who may be motivated not to report it. This is why the realistic goal is not to eliminate the risk but to reduce it within each undertaking, and to be honest about where each employer’s reach ends.
Is this even reasonably practicable?
A fair objection runs through all of this. If an employer cannot see or control a worker’s other jobs, is it reasonable and practicable to expect it to design or prepare for them at all? The model WHS Act answers with the same test that governs every duty. Section 18 defines what is reasonably practicable as what is reasonably able to be done, weighing the likelihood of the risk, the degree of harm, what the duty holder knows or ought reasonably to know about the hazard and the ways of controlling it, the availability and suitability of those controls, and the cost, including whether it is grossly disproportionate to the risk. Applied here, that test gives a bounded answer rather than a simple yes or no.
At the general level, we would argue that preparing for the risk is reasonably practicable, and that the bar is not high. The duty is triggered by foreseeability, not by certainty about any individual. In health care, aged care, and hospitality the prevalence of second jobs is now a matter of public record, and the national fatigue guidance already treats second jobs as a factor an employer should ask workers about (Safe Work Australia n.d.-a). On that footing a regulator could reasonably take the view that a competent employer in these sectors ought to know some of its workers will arrive carrying fatigue from elsewhere. In any event this adds no new duty. Fatigue is a hazard the employer must already manage whatever its cause, and external work is simply one more contributor. The controls that catch it are the ordinary, low-cost ones a sound employer should already have, so on the section 18 weighing they sit well within what is reasonably practicable.
At the specific level, in our view the answer is no, and the same test explains why. Tracking a worker’s external hours, contacting other employers, or aggregating hours across businesses lies outside the employer’s capacity to influence or control, is often unlawful on privacy grounds, and is not proportionate to the risk. The employer is not liable for the other job and is not required to prepare for it as though it were. The obligation also scales with consequence. It is strongest where a fatigue-related error could be catastrophic, such as a nurse administering medication or a worker operating plant, and lighter where the stakes are low. Whether any particular measure is reasonably practicable remains a question of fact, decided on the circumstances of the case.
This is where the worker’s own obligation belongs in the picture, not as a way to shift the burden but as the part of the framework that operates where the employer’s reach ends. Section 28 requires workers to take reasonable care for their own health and safety, to take reasonable care that they do not put others at risk, and to comply, so far as they are reasonably able, with reasonable policies such as a fitness-for-work declaration. The worker is the only party who can see their whole week, so their honest engagement with a fitness-for-work process matters in a way nothing the employer designs can replace. That obligation does not reduce the employer’s duty, which the law makes non-transferable, and it is realistic only where the employer has made disclosure safe and has given the worker something other than lost income to gain by it. The two duties interlock, with each party doing what is reasonable and within its reach.
What reasonable practice looks like
We would not discourage workers from holding more than one job. It is often an economic necessity, and it is entirely lawful. The task instead is to design work health and safety systems that acknowledge the shared worker, rather than assume a single-employer model that no longer reflects how much of the workforce lives.
In our practice we start with fatigue and fitness for work, because that is where the risk is sharpest and the controls are within reach. We recommend a fitness-for-work and fatigue self-declaration process that asks, without judgement, about total recent hours and other work, and gives workers confidence they can disclose without penalty. We also advise rostering rules that build in real recovery windows, avoid quick turnarounds between a late finish and an early start, and flag back-to-back patterns for review. Supervisors should be trained to recognise the signs of fatigue and impairment, with a standing instruction that a worker who presents as impaired is not assigned safety-critical tasks, whatever the cause. None of this requires the employer to reach into the worker’s other jobs.
Injury management, psychosocial risk, and induction complete the picture. Return-to-work planning should ask directly about other employment and, with the worker’s consent, take that work into account when setting suitable duties, rather than assuming a certified restriction tells the whole story. Psychosocial risk assessments should treat external pressures such as financial strain and scheduling conflict as in scope, because they shape how a worker presents regardless of their origin. For workers who move frequently between sites, particularly through agencies, we recommend consistent, role-specific induction rather than an abbreviated repeat, so that site hazards are not assumed to be already understood. Where the work is supplied through labour hire, the agency and the host should coordinate explicitly under section 46, because there they share the matter.
Where a client operates a digital platform, the levers are different again. The platform controls the algorithm that assigns work and the incentives that shape how long a worker stays online. We recommend app-based limits on continuous and daily hours, mandatory rest prompts, and incentive structures that do not reward dangerous hours or push workers through fatigue. The platform can also supply and require appropriate protective equipment and training, capture incident and near-miss data even where a trip was cancelled or the worker had just logged off, and review its algorithmic management against the direction set by recent reform such as the New South Wales digital work systems duty. A platform cannot see the day job that preceded the shift, but it controls a great deal of what happens during it.
The limits are real, and we are candid about them with clients. An employer cannot compel a worker to disclose other jobs, it has no general right to contact another employer, and privacy obligations constrain what can be shared without consent. The reasonable step is not surveillance but a system that makes disclosure safe and useful, that acts on what is disclosed or observed, and that coordinates only where another duty holder shares the matter, as in a labour hire arrangement.
The shared worker is now a structural feature of Australian workplaces rather than the exception it was several years ago, and our model WHS framework likely fixes the duty in the right place. It is each employer’s own duty, non-transferable, and bounded by what the employer can know and control. The framework does not require an employer to manage a job it cannot see, and it calls for coordination between employers only where they share the work.
What remains is for the work safety systems inside healthcare, hospitality, and the other industries that depend on these workers to do the part within their reach. This includes designing for fatigue, asking the right questions, and acting on what a worker discloses or shows. The person in front of them may have been at work somewhere else only hours earlier, and an employer that plans for that meets a duty it may already hold.
You might like to read What Defines the Work Safety Regulator or Managing Contractor Responsibilities
References
ADP Research (2025) People at Work 2025: a global workforce view, ADP, accessed 4 June 2026, https://au.adp.com/about-adp/press-centre/half-of-australian-workers-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-adp-report.aspx
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2026) Multiple job-holders, December 2025, ABS website, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/jobs/multiple-job-holders/latest-release
KPMG Australia (2026) Australian labour market update, February 2026, KPMG, accessed 4 June 2026, https://kpmg.com/au/en/home/insights/2026/02/australian-labour-market-update.html
Moore Australia (2026) NSW AI workplace laws 2026: what employers using digital tools need to know, Moore Australia, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.moore-australia.com.au/news/nsw-ai-workplace-safety-laws-digital-work-systems-2026/
Parliament of New South Wales (2025) Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Bill 2025: explanatory note, Parliament of New South Wales, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/bill/files/18847/First%20Print.pdf
Safe Work Australia (2022) Model Code of Practice: Work health and safety consultation, cooperation and coordination, Safe Work Australia, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-health-and-safety/consultation/consulting-cooperating-and-coordinating-activities-other-duty-holders
Safe Work Australia (2023) Principles that apply to work health and safety duties, Safe Work Australia, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/law-and-regulation/duties-under-whs-laws/principles-apply-work-health-and-safety-duties
Safe Work Australia (2025) Model Code of Practice: Managing the risk of fatigue at work, Safe Work Australia, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/doc/model-code-practice-managing-risk-fatigue-work
Safe Work Australia (n.d.-a) Fatigue: managing risks, Safe Work Australia, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/hazards/fatigue/managing-risks
Safe Work Australia (n.d.-b) Gig economy: WHS duties, Safe Work Australia, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/industry-and-business/gig-economy/whs-duties
SafeWork NSW (n.d.) Gig economy, SafeWork NSW, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.safework.nsw.gov.au/your-industry/gig-economy
SafeWork NSW (2021) Joint Taskforce into Food Delivery Rider Safety: final report, SafeWork NSW and Transport for NSW, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.safework.nsw.gov.au/your-industry/gig-economy
SafeWork NSW (2022) New safety laws food delivery riders need to know, SafeWork NSW, accessed 4 June 2026, https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/customer-service/media-releases/new-safety-laws-food-delivery-riders-need-to-know
A note from the author
This article is general analysis of the model work health and safety framework and is not legal advice. Several positions in it, including how the ‘same matter’ threshold in sections 16 and 46 applies to a worker with two unrelated employers, are the authors’ interpretation rather than settled law. Work health and safety duties are contestable and jurisdiction-specific, and readers should verify the position in their own jurisdiction and obtain advice on specific situations. Legislative references are to the model Work Health and Safety Act (sections 7, 14, 16, 18, 19, 28, 46, and 47); section numbering is broadly consistent across the harmonised jurisdictions but should be checked locally. Victoria operates under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic), outside the harmonised scheme. New South Wales has passed, but at the time of writing not yet commenced, the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026 (NSW). The section 46 decision referred to is Boland v Trainee and Apprentice Placement Service Inc [2016] SAIRC 14.