JULIA Gillard has used an international forum to deliver a tough message to Australia's workforce: if you're stressed by change, get over it because worse is to come and it may involve moving to another country.
And she has flagged that the days of Australians working up to retirement and then stopping are also numbered as older employees are required to supplement retirement incomes with part-time work, well past the current age of 65 or even the planned retirement age of 67.
But there will be tax benefits to doing so.
Appearing at an APEC business leaders' forum in Honolulu, Ms Gillard fielded questions on topics from the Qantas grounding - it was within the law but "extremist"; to skills in the workplace - employers should not complain about lack of skilled employees while there is unemployment; the role of industrial relations laws - they have not tilted too far towards unions; and the future of work as trade becomes more borderless.
She said the future workforce "will need to be a workforce that is highly adaptable, highly resilient because the pace of change will stress people".
"I think it will be a workforce increasingly mobile, it will be more and more common for countries to have guest worker arrangements. It will be more and more common for people to choose to live part of their life in another nation, so more mobile but in all of that I stress again, we can't forget the foundation skills," she said.
And Ms Gillard had an uncompromising message to people seeking work in countries such as Australia.
"If you don't have the ticket that gets you into the rest of the conversation, and that comes in the way of literacy and numeracy, then the rest of it will always be locked away from you," she told the business leaders.
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