The government promised to get wages moving before the election. But the budget shows real wages falling significantly this year due to high inflation. Is that another “broken promise”?
Some in the media suggest so. “You went to the election promising real wage increases, and again the budget says that’s not coming any time soon,” said David “Kochie” Koch to Treasurer Jim Chalmers the morning after the budget. “Jim Chalmers admits electricity prices will soar, real wages are going nowhere for the next two years,” complained Perth’s Liam Bartlett in an interview with him.
And the opposition agrees. In his budget reply last night, Peter Dutton contrasted Labor’s preelection rhetoric on wages with the budget figures. And the opposition treasurer called it a broken promise yesterday morning. “It promised lower electricity prices, it promised stronger real wages, it promised dealing with cost-of-living pressures. It’s not delivering on any of those promises.”
Except Labor is doing something about wages. It’s giving unions greater bargaining power by re-introducing a form of multi-enterprise bargaining. And the opposition and parts of the media hate it. The government’s industrial relations changes “will lead to widespread strike action across the nation and be devastating for the Australian economy”, chuckling simpleton Michaelia Cash opined yesterday. It would “create a toxic industrial relations environment”, said the opposition treasurer.
“Of all the productivity-sapping threats posed by the Albanese government, a return to industry-wide wage bargaining to satisfy the demands of the ACTU has the most potential for harm,” The Australian belched yesterday. And at the Financial Review, they’re incandescent with rage, devoting multiple op-eds pieces to attacking it.
All this tells you is that for the first time in a decade and longer, we might actually see an industrial relations reform that will deliver higher wages growth, and it terrifies business and its media cheerleaders. “The Business Council wants Australian workers to have more money in their pockets,” insisted BCA head Jennifer Westacott in one of the many AFR attacks. Except, the past 10 years — hell, a lot longer than that, but let’s not get historical — prove that business does not want higher wages for workers and in fact will try to impose lower wages if they can.
That’s why the profit share of income has surged at the expense of the wage share, especially since around 2017.
That’s why labour productivity increases have been far ahead of wages growth in recent years.
That’s why, even with unemployment at 3.5%, wages growth is stuck at a pitiful 2.6% while corporate profits surge off higher prices.
The one area where the government is wimping it is in its pretence that the industrial relations changes won’t lead to more strikes.
Yes, they’ll lead to more strikes. That’s the whole point — businesses are not going to hand over pay rises out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ll need to be fought for. Greater bargaining power for unions and workers will make that fight a fairer one.
In the June quarter, the number of days lost to industrial disputes per thousand employees surged to 10.4 — the highest level for more than a decade. How does that compare to the 1980s? The current ABS series began in 1985 — between then and 1990, the average was over 55 days a quarter. And that was during the Accord years. Things were dramatically more fractious before Labor was elected in 1983.
We’re not going back to the ’70s and ’80s, despite what business and its mouthpieces say. But we might be going back to higher wages growth. The squeals from the corporate sector suggest it’s a real chance.
Business keeps telling us that wage rises are fine as long as productivity goes up – yet no one seems to be able to ask them if they will backpay a wage rise over the last decade when productivity went up and wages didn’t.
Last decade? That all?
The day that Jen Westacott, Dutton, Kochie or Liam Bartlett has to worry about a roof over their family’s head, or how they will find something to send their kids before sending them off to (public) school, is the day I’ll start to listen to their bleating about workers being paid too much. They’re worried that if those manning the Woolworths checkouts are paid enough to live on, their Woolies shares won’t increase their value enough to pay for their new Range Rover or luxury holiday. Poor dears.
…feed their kids…
After the traumatizing effects of looking at that photo that precedes this article, I am thinking of hiring myself a cheap lawyer (as Curly from The Three Stooges would have said) and suing Crikey for psychological abuse.
I mean, there should have at least been a ‘trigger warning’!!
I know a cheap lawyer with a bit of time on his hands. Christian some thing or other.
Only cheap by nature. I bet his legal services aren’t.
That’s true, Chips!
I thought that it was another Halloween mask story to follow up the Hanson pizza.
Or perhaps the re-emergence of The Creature From the Black Lagoon!
(I suppose that we should at least be thankful that there was no accompanying video of her ‘goose-stepping’ down the Halls of Parliament House!)
Great photo of the screaming harpy
At one stage, we really need to have a conversation as to whether a society should be run for the benefit of everyone in it, or if we accept that enriching the shareholders is the primary goal. Not sure how we can have that conversation because anything that takes profits away from businesses (even if it is geared at people living near the poverty line) our body politic make the most awful fuss about how society is going to be ruined by workers having it too good.
I would understand this argument more if it was said that “yeah, we’d like to have an egalitarian society, but those with money hold too much power to change course” instead of the doublespeak we currently get. As it stands, it just seems we’ve tacitly accepted that enriching the wealthy is what a society ought to be about.
Some lessons must be learned by each new generation. Here’s a lesson from the album Songs of Struggle and Protest, 1930-50. News from the States suggests a new generation of workers are paying heed…
If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong
But if you all stick together, now, ‘twont be long
You’ll get shorter hours
Better working conditions
Vacations with pay
Take your kids to the seashore
It ain’t quite this simple, so I better explain
Just why you got to ride on the union train
‘Cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay,
We’ll all be waiting till Judgment Day
We’ll all he buried – gone to Heaven
Saint Peter’ll be the straw boss then
Now, you know you’re underpaid, hut the boss says you ain’t
He speeds up the work till you’re ’bout to faint
You may be down and out, but you ain’t beaten
Pass out a leaflet and call a meetin’
Talk it over – speak your mind
Decide to do something about it
‘Course, the boss may persuade some poor damn fool
To go to your meeting and act like a stool
But you can always tell a stool, though- that’s a fact
He’s got a yellow streak running down his back
He doesn’t have to stool – he’ll always make a good living
On what he takes out of blind men’s cups
You got a union now; you’re sitting pretty
Put some of the boys on the steering committee
The boss won’t listen when one man squawks
But he’s got to listen when the union talks
He better
He’ll be mighty lonely one of these days
Suppose they’re working you so hard it’s just outrageous
They’re paying you all starvation wages
You go to the boss, and the boss would yell
“Before I’d raise your pay I’d see you all in Hell.”
Well, he’s puffing a big see-gar and feeling mighty slick
He thinks he’s got your union licked
He looks out the window, and what does he see
But a thousand pickets, and they all agree
He’s a bastard-unfair-slave driver
Bet he beats his wife
Now, boys, you’ve come to the hardest time
The boss will try to bust your picket line
He’ll call out the police, the National Guard
They’ll tell you it’s a crime to have a union card
They’ll raid your meeting, hit you on the head
Call every one of you a goddamn Red
Unpatriotic – Moscow agents
Bomb throwers, even the kids
But out in Detroit here’s what they found
And out in Frisco here’s what they found
And out in Pittsburgh here’s what they found
And down in Bethlehem here’s what they found
That if you don’t let Red-baiting break you up
If you don’t let stool pigeons break you up
If you don’t let vigilantes break you up
And if you don’t let race hatred break you up
You’ll win
What I mean
Take it easy – but take it!
Written by: Lee Hays, Peter Seeger, Millard Lampell