But the unions need to do more if their members are not to be shortchanged in the long term. Marching, with its rallying cries, is energising for a morning but doesn’t build a future for workers in a world on course for the greatest change since Copernicus figured the planet was round. Nor does it do anything for those outside the unionised workforce – either fitting in a side gig on a public holiday or slipping away for another long weekend.

The unions are back at the negotiating table even though their membership continues to decline and is being ringfenced to the services end of the economy (education and health in particular) largely funded by government.

There have been many aspects of union behaviour to dislike over the past quarter century but their ability to stand up for decent tenure for employees and rigorous safety conditions keeps them relevant – even if the growing tech-based and professional workforces no longer buy that the “people united will never be defeated”.

All my life, I’ve been hearing and reading about the future of work – how our jobs will change, how we will transition through multiple careers and how we will enter a leisure age when we work less and more freely.

It’s mainly poppycock driven more by fate than forethought. Two recent phenomena have changed the future of work – one is the rise of technology and particularly robotics and artificial intelligence; the other is Covid which at considerable cost has delivered us the ability to work from home pretty much where and when many of us like.

As Labour Day passes this year, it’s worth thinking about how work will continue to evolve as technology evolves.

It’s been a decade since two Oxford professors, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, wrote a seminal paper on the future of work, identifying that more than one-quarter of the jobs in western economies would be supplanted by technology through this decade.

I spent a lot of time with Michael Osborne both in Brisbane and Canberra when he came to Australia to help the Queensland University of Technology advance its interest in and advocacy of how we needed to prepare for the social change that would come with such displacement.

Professor Osborne has since downgraded his estimate as co-writer of a follow-up paper in 2017 which put the risk at more like one in five jobs – the difference being about 10% of the workforce. Like all intelligent people, he changed his opinion as the facts changed. And the facts that changed in that five years included the certainty that the planet would embark on a labour-intensive retrofitting of its energy systems to reduce emissions as well as a labour-intensive reset of its agricultural industries to meet nutritional needs of a wealthier and hungrier world.

Then came Covid and the change in approach to where we work as well as the realisation by many that they didn’t really need to work so much. The focus has become finding workers rather than workers finding jobs.

But the tech threat has not gone away. ChatGPT will chop away at many professional functions; robots continue to get better and cheaper.

The big question, the one trade unions thinking about their members’ future need to think about is whether tech will replace workers or supplement them to continue to deliver better working conditions that also deliver the productivity gains we particularly need in Australia.

This is just one of many issues with technology which I wrote about in my book Wake Up – The Nine H#shtags of Digital Disruption six years ago. But it’s the one that cuts to the heart of our wellbeing as a society that can’t offer adequate and meaningful employment is a society in decline.

The Federal Treasurer, Dr Jim Chalmers, understands this very well. He co-wrote a book Changing Jobs on this back in 2017 and cast a very sceptical eye over what unchecked technology might do to humans. My fellow author and journalist Tracy Spicer has an excellent book, Man-Made, due out this month on the traps built into technology that entrench gender biases.

Yesterday’s marchers would do well to do the work themselves to understand what threats they might face. It’s easy to reject tech. Certainly the clusterbomb of the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government’s robodebt program creates the excuse to wish technology away – even though its intent was the noble cause of reducing fraud on taxpayers (still one of the top budget issues in voters’ minds, according to public pulse research just released by SEC-Newgate).

But robots, AI and their distracting cousins social media and online shopping and gaming are set in jelly as part of our lives. Those who reject it lose relevance but working to understand and harness it promises hope of a future for those who will give it a go.