Where did all the admin come from? What Australia's job numbers show

What the ABS counts

Every quarter the Australian Bureau of Statistics counts employed people by the kind of work they do. The series runs back to August 1986, with the older years coded to the same 2013 occupation groups used today, so a job in 1987 and a job in 2025 land in the same box (ABS, 2026a; ABS, 2026b).

Start with the big groups, as a share of everyone employed:

Occupation group	Aug 1987	Aug 2025
Managers	12.5%	12.9%
Clerical and administrative workers	17.9%	12.5%
Professionals	15.7%	27.7%
Community and personal service workers	5.6%	11.9%
Technicians and trades workers	17.8%	13.6%
Labourers	13.5%	8.1%

(ABS, 2026a. Employed persons, original series; 7.09 million people in 1987, 14.52 million in 2025.)

On these numbers the country isn't top-heavy. About one worker in eight was a manager then, and about one in eight is now. Clerks fell. Carers and other personal service workers doubled their share.

Look one level down

The big group called "Managers" hides a swap. The ABS splits it, and the other groups, into smaller ones:

Job group	Aug 1987	Aug 2025	Change
All employed people	7,092,000	14,517,000	2.0 times
Chief executives, general managers and legislators	42,000	131,000	3.1 times
Specialist managers	268,000	1,023,000	3.8 times
Office managers and program administrators	76,000	311,000	4.1 times
Business, human resource and marketing professionals	206,000	913,000	4.4 times
Personal assistants and secretaries	178,000	79,000	0.4 times
Farmers and farm managers	249,000	156,000	0.6 times
Factory process workers	233,000	158,000	0.7 times
Construction trades workers	257,000	404,000	1.6 times
Carers and aides	118,000	802,000	6.8 times

(ABS, 2026b. Full-time plus part-time, rounded to the nearest thousand.)

The workforce doubled. The people who run programs, manage specialist functions and handle staff grew about twice as fast as that. The people who used to type, file and keep diaries for others fell by more than half. Farmers, who manage by working the land, shrank too.

Some of that is good news. Carers and aides grew almost sevenfold, and health professionals nearly fourfold, as Australia chose to look after more people. But look at who replaced the secretaries. Nobody did. A generation ago one person wrote up the minutes, booked the room and filed the form. Now the manager, the nurse and the teacher each do their own.

Where the frontline's time goes

You can see it on a hospital ward. In a Sydney teaching hospital, researchers followed 57 nurses for 191 hours between 2005 and 2008. Nurses spent about 37% of their time with patients, and it didn't rise over the study. They switched tasks every 55 seconds (Westbrook et al., 2011).

The same team followed 19 doctors on the wards of a 400-bed Sydney hospital in 2006. The newest doctors, the interns, spent 22% of their time on documentation, "almost double the time they were engaged in direct patient care" (Westbrook et al., 2008).

Schools tell the same story. The Australian Council for Educational Research, which runs the OECD's international teacher survey here, named administrative workload among teachers' main sources of stress in the 2024 results, and found that general administration was linked to lower wellbeing (ACER, 2025).

None of these people are doing anything wrong. The system hands them the forms. How much of a working week that takes, and how to give the hours back, is the subject of Why aren't we working 15 hours a week?

Why organisations grow the top

In 1955 the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a joke essay for The Economist that turned out not to be a joke. The British Admiralty kept growing while the Navy had fewer ships. The Colonial Office had the most staff when there were hardly any colonies left. Parkinson gave two reasons: "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals", and "Officials make work for each other." By his count, the staff of a bureaucracy grew 5 to 7% a year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done" (Wikipedia, 2026a).

Sixty years later the management researchers Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini ran the numbers for the United States. In 2014 it had 23.8 million managers, supervisors and administrators, one for every 4.7 employees. They made up 17.6% of the workforce and took nearly 30% of the pay. Hamel and Zanini put the cost of excess bureaucracy at "more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP" (Hamel & Zanini, 2016). Their count includes frontline supervisors, so it isn't directly comparable with the ABS table. They expanded the argument in the 2020 book Humanocracy (Hamel & Zanini, 2020).

Their best example: General Electric's jet engine plant in Durham, North Carolina. More than 300 technicians, one supervisor, and more than twice as productive as its sister plants (Hamel & Zanini, 2016).

"If we did that, I wouldn't have a job"

A worker in a state justice department once found a faster way to get a routine job done and took it to her manager. The answer: "If we did that efficient method, I wouldn't have a job."

The manager wasn't lazy or wicked. The manager was right. In most organisations a manager's pay, title and safety grow with the size of the team and the budget, and shrink when the work gets simpler. Parkinson saw it in 1955: nobody inside is paid to make their own role unnecessary. Every layer has a reason to keep the layer below it busy, and the paperwork is how busy is proved.

That's a design problem, not a character flaw. Change what people are rewarded for, and the same people will cut the work instead of guarding it.

The places that took the layers out

Morning Star, in California, processes about 40% of the state's processing tomatoes. It has about 550 full-time staff and more than 2,500 seasonal workers at harvest, and no supervisory managers. Workers write their own job responsibilities, can buy equipment after consulting experts, and are paid on the basis of reviews from their peers (Wikipedia, 2026b).

W. L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, has worked this way since Bill Gore described a "lattice" organisation to staff in 1967. Everyone holds the same title, associate. There's no chain of command; people choose which leaders to follow, and leaders emerge as they gain followers. Gore was on Fortune's list of the 100 best US companies to work for every year from 1984 to 2017 (Wikipedia, 2026c).

Haier, the Chinese appliance maker, was a near-bankrupt Qingdao fridge factory when Zhang Ruimin took it over in 1984. After a customer complaint, Zhang had workers smash 76 faulty fridges with sledgehammers to make the point about quality. Later Haier split its workforce into hundreds of internal micro companies, each with its own profit and loss account, and Zhang built that into a management model called rendanheyi (Wikipedia, 2026d).

Flat isn't magic

It fails too. Valve, the games company, has no bosses outside its executives, yet some staff hold more sway through seniority or relationships, and a 2023 investigation linked its structure to a poor release record and a lack of diversity. Its co-founder Gabe Newell has said "there are plenty of great developers for whom this is a terrible place to work" (Wikipedia, 2026e).

When Zappos moved to a self-management system called Holacracy, about 14% of staff left in 2015, as the company deliberately kept only people who believed in it. The publisher Medium dropped the same system in 2016. One critic argued its rules focused on "administrivia" (Wikipedia, 2026f). A flat chart can grow its own paperwork. The layers matter less than whether the rules serve the work.

The tall poppy question

Australians describe themselves as egalitarian. "Tall poppy syndrome", the habit of cutting down people who stand out, is a term that grew up in Australia and New Zealand and has been described as a by-product of that egalitarian value (Wikipedia, 2026g).

So here's the question. A country that distrusts anyone who gets above themselves has built workplaces where the fastest-growing jobs manage, coordinate and report on other people's work. Why does the tall poppy rule stop at the org chart?

Count the admin in your own week

• Tally one week. Mark each hour as doing the work, or writing about the work. Include email, approvals, reports and meetings about meetings.
• Name who reads it. For each report or form, write down who uses it and what they do with it. If nobody can answer, that's the first one to question.
• Count the layers. How many people must say yes before you can spend $500 or fix a small problem? At GE Durham the answer was one.

Most of this work isn't anyone's fault. It's a rule nobody has had time to remove, and rules can be removed. Morning Star, Gore and a jet engine plant in North Carolina show the work still gets done.