If you run a production floor or a warehouse in Southeast Queensland, the 2032 Games probably sit in the "interesting, but not my problem" pile. Six years out. Someone else's project.
The dates say otherwise. The work that competes with you for workers does not start in 2031 — it is already underway, and the pressure on the labour market builds long before the venues are finished.
What is actually in front of Queensland
The Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority is delivering 17 new and upgraded venues within a $7.1 billion funding envelope. The anchor venue — a 63,000-seat stadium at Victoria Park — had its location locked in on 31 March 2026, and enabling works started on site on 1 June 2026. That is not a 2031 problem. That is this year.
Construction Skills Queensland puts a number on the Games pipeline specifically: roughly $11.2 billion of venue and village construction between now and 2031-32, with average labour demand climbing to about 5,000 workers a year across 2028-29 to 2030-31 and peaking at close to 8,000 workers in 2030-31. Brisbane accounts for about 68 per cent of that pipeline value, the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast for roughly 15 per cent each.
But the Games are the smaller story. CSQ's wider outlook has Queensland's total construction pipeline growing from $60 billion in 2025-26 to a peak of $75 billion in 2027-28. Against that, the average workforce shortfall runs at 19,100 workers a year across the seven-year outlook — and peaks at 35,000 workers in 2027-28.
Read the peak year again. It is 2027-28, not 2031-32. The tightest point in the Queensland labour market arrives roughly eighteen months from now, driven by transport, energy, housing and mining work — with the Games venue build layering on top of it afterwards, not instead of it.
Why a construction shortfall lands on a manufacturing floor
Queensland's building and construction labour pool was around 284,600 people in May 2025. Manufacturing employed 171,000 people across the state in November 2025 — 5.7 per cent of the workforce, and close to a fifth of the entire national manufacturing workforce.
Those two pools are not sealed off from each other. A forklift operator, a machine operator, a leading hand, a storeperson, a production supervisor — none of those people are locked into one sector. When 35,000 construction roles go unfilled in a single year, the pay rates and the recruitment effort go up, and they go up in the same suburbs your production workers live in.
You can already see the pressure in the manufacturing numbers. Queensland manufacturing employment fell about 5 per cent over the twelve months to November 2025. Median hourly earnings for permanent full-time manufacturing employees in Queensland reached $40.80 in August 2025, up 8.5 per cent in a year — roughly 30 per cent growth across five years. Nationally, 66 per cent of manufacturing employers were unable to fill an advertised role in the December 2025 quarter.
The training pipeline is not filling the gap either. National manufacturing training completions have fallen from around 13,000 to around 10,000 since the pandemic, and completion ratios in Brisbane (4.1 per 100 employees) and on the Gold Coast (3.4) sit below regional centres like Cairns and Mackay. The metropolitan SEQ corner — the same corner absorbing the Games build — has the thinnest local training pipeline in the state.
The upside nobody mentions
It is worth being straight about this: the infrastructure program is not purely a drain on manufacturers. It is also demand.
Queensland manufacturing capital expenditure hit $2.8 billion in 2024-25, up 6 per cent on the year before, and part of that has been attributed to industrial firms pre-positioning for Games-related work — steel fabrication in particular, where supply chain proximity matters. Queensland now produces around 20 per cent of national manufacturing output, up from about 16.5 per cent in the mid-2000s, on $28.0 billion of real value-add in the year to June 2025.
So the SEQ manufacturer sitting in the middle of this has both sides of the same problem: more work coming in, and a harder market to staff it from. Which is exactly why the workforce question cannot wait for the order book to fill up first.
Labour supply is built, not bought
Here is the part most businesses get wrong. They treat labour hire as a purchasing decision — something you go and get when you need it, like hiring a scissor lift.
It does not work that way in a tight market. When a provider gets a call from a business they have worked with for three years and a business they have never heard of, on the same morning, with one suitable worker available, that worker goes to the relationship the provider actually has. Not out of favouritism — because the provider knows that site, knows the supervisor, knows what "suitable" means there, and knows the placement will hold.
A provider who has worked your floor before knows which line needs someone who can read a run sheet without being walked through it, which shift suits a worker with a long commute, and which of your supervisors will spend the time to bring a new person up to speed. None of that is transferable from a phone call in a week when everyone is short.
That understanding takes time to build, and it is built during the quiet periods — not during the surge.
What to do in the next twelve months
Map your peaks against the pipeline. If your production peaks fall in the same window as major SEQ project mobilisations, you are competing head-on. Know that now rather than in the week you need forty people.
Check your provider is licensed in Queensland. Under the Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017, any business supplying labour hire workers in Queensland must hold a licence, and hosts can only engage licensed providers. Penalties apply to both sides. In a tight market, unlicensed operators become more visible, not less — verify the licence before you are under pressure.
Give your provider forward visibility. A rolling view of your next quarter, even a rough one, lets a provider hold capacity for you. A provider working blind can only react.
Start the relationship on ordinary work. Use a provider during a normal month, on roles you could fill yourself, so both sides learn how the other operates. The businesses that scale without chaos are almost always the ones who did this first.
Ask who employs the worker. If workers are subcontracted on or passed through a third party, accountability is split — and split accountability is exactly what fails under pressure.
EIR Labour Hire
EIR Labour Hire has been supplying workers across civil, construction, manufacturing, and warehousing since 2003 — over 22 years — with a licensed Queensland operation and clients across South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland.
We place labourers, forklift and machine operators, production workers, tradespeople, and admin support. Our workers are employed by us directly, screened face to face, and matched to the environment they are going into. And we stay close to the operations we supply, because a provider who only turns up when you are desperate cannot help you when the market is tight.
If your operation is in Southeast Queensland and your next two years look busier than your last two, that is a conversation worth having now — not in the quarter you are already short.
Sources: Construction Skills Queensland, Horizon 2032 (2026 Edition, March 2026); Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority; Queensland Government, Delivering 2032 delivery updates (March and June 2026); Manufacturing Skills Queensland, State of the Sector 2026: Queensland Manufacturing (April 2026, prepared with Ai Group Research & Economics from ABS data); Jobs and Skills Australia Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey (December 2025 quarter); Queensland Major Contractors Association, Queensland Major Projects Pipeline Report 2025(November 2025); Infrastructure Australia, 2025 Infrastructure Market Capacity Report; Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 (Qld).