But an ACTU inquiry into insecure employment visiting Newcastle yesterday heard that the official figures disguised a grimmer reality.

Stevedores working ‘‘annualised hours’’ on the Newcastle waterfront told of working 13 consecutive nightshifts but being ‘‘starved’’ of shifts from October each year when they had clocked up enough hours to be paid overtime rates.

Academics at the University of Newcastle described spending years as ‘‘sessional’’ casuals, and of spending a decade or more on rolling contracts, never able to gain permanent ‘‘tenure’’.

Union officials described a world in which casual workers were almost invariably too scared to speak up about workplace wrongs because they knew they would lose their jobs if they did.

‘‘You don’t get the sack in this industry, you just get starved out of the job,’’ was how Australian Workers Union organiser Tony Callinan described the situation.

Political activist Harry Williams, who is part-way through a PhD on casual labour in the Hunter, quoted Friedrich Engels, who wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, to say: ‘‘The slave is sold once and for all, the proletarian has to sell himself by the day and by the hour.’’

Former Labor deputy prime minister Brian Howe, who is chairing the inquiry for the ACTU, said it seemed Australia was witnessing ‘‘a movement back to the labour conditions in play when Marx was writing’’ in the mid 19th century.

Mr Howe said the deregulated Australian economy had included ‘‘a massive experiment’’ in labour market changes in which the old ‘‘job for life’’ beliefs had disappeared.

Newcastle Trades Hall Council secretary Gary Kennedy said unions had made up some ground after WorkChoices but employers were still relying on casual workers to cut costs ‘‘in a race to the bottom’’.