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Abraham Eparaima Ropitini – Post #02

After a month of reading, writing, reading and re-writing, I have completed my project – a literature review on the Seasonal Worker Programme for the Australian Workers’ Union. It’s been produced independently but I’ve been having weekly catch-ups with my supervisor at the AWU, who has helped to steer me in the right direction in terms of the project’s intended purpose. It has no use to the union as a strictly academic output, so my early drafts providing insight into gaps in the literature and suggestions for further research have been deemed unnecessary. I was eager to make sure the output would have as much utility as possible for the union, so the project became less of a literature review and more of a literature summary driven by three guiding questions:

 

  • What’s the rationale for the programme and what’s its future direction?
  • What have been the main criticisms of the programme?
  • How is vulnerability to exploitation managed, and [added after a few meetings with my supervisor] can you make any recommendations on ways this can be improved?

 

The last question introduced a significant degree of subjectivity to the project and I suddenly felt like my balanced coverage of perspectives held by all stakeholders in the programme began to turn into an opinion piece about trade unions and regional labour mobility in the Pacific. Reading my final draft made me really cringe – the opening section of my output is well referenced and each paragraph has content drawn from the literature, but the latter part is muddy with my own points of view. However, I can say that this did help me to find my feet as an outside consultant who has been trusted to make recommendations, and after realizing that, I felt a bit more confident in submitting it.

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