The sight of Scott Morrison urgently convening a meeting with major industry groups last week to address supply chain problems caused by worker shortages was one of the more predictable policy failures of recent years.
With shelves already bare of essentials like meat and toilet paper across the country, it was only now, well into the reopening phase of the economy, that it occurred to the prime minister that large numbers of infections — the consequence everyone knew would result from reopening — would pose workforce issues at a time when a number of industries were already complaining about existing employee shortages.
Supply chains have been the subject of extensive focus from the outset of the pandemic, and increasingly in 2021 as government-fuelled demand met undersupply resulting from damaged international logistics systems, particularly around shipping.
After rising more than fivefold from mid-2020, freight container rates fell back a little in late 2021 but have risen again recently; extensive lockdowns in China are unlikely to help push costs back down to 2020 levels any time soon — although China has managed to rack up record exports for more than a year, so the problems haven’t exactly been crippling.
But Australia’s supply chain problems have been due primarily to a failure to understand the continuing importance of labour in their effective functioning, despite the growing sophistication and technology of delivery and storage systems.
And as recent years have demonstrated, Australian policymakers, and most of the business community, have little interest in workers — seeing them primarily as just another cost to be minimised by any means possible. Nothing better demonstrates this mindset better than an op-ed in The Australian Financial Review last week from two right-wing industrial relations lawyers, including a former Christian Porter adviser and Coalition Fair Work Commission appointee, that argued union militancy was a serious threat to economic recovery, that some unions were “waging war”, and that employers need to push unions out of the bargaining process with workers.
This is at a time when wages growth, at 2.4% for the private sector, is well below inflation, and days lost to industrial disputes per thousand employees in 2021 is set to be the second lowest on record after 2020. Some “militancy”.
One of the sectors the two authors argued was beset by militant unions was mining, where wages growth in the September 2021 quarter was the lowest of any industry. The other sector, transport, had wages growth that was equal fourth out of all industries — and right on the average for the entire private sector.
The persistence of fantasies about militant unions driving up costs isn’t confined to right-wing lawyers. The Coalition has, as we’ve recounted so often, presided over nearly a decade of wage stagnation, and at the moment is forecasting that workers will continue to endure real wage falls. Its industrial relations policy is to open Australia’s borders to as many temporary workers as is needed to drive down wages growth, to oppose or undermine minimum wage rises and support penalty rate cuts, and to encourage precarity of work through the gig economy and greater casualisation.
Even when confronted with stark evidence of the failure of its industrial relations policies in key sectors like aged care, the Coalition has done nothing: the application to significantly increase wages for aged care workers — a sector where crippling workforce shortages are inflicting untold misery on seniors throughout Australia — remains mired in the Fair Work Commission, with no support or urgency from the Morrison government, and no allocated funding to pay for it via grants to aged care providers.
What happens when you aim to create a workforce with minimal union involvement, poor wages growth, competition from temporary foreign workers and an emphasis on increasing precarity and casualisation? You produce a more fragile workforce, one more susceptible to disruption, and less invested in the success of the industry it serves.
Follow that up with a lack of COVID testing and a lack of planning for higher levels of infection, and you get broken supply chains, empty shelves and aged care residents locked in their rooms.
It’s a costly failure for business as well. Today, major retailer Wesfarmers is lamenting how Omicron is affecting the availability of “team members”, aka employees, forcing reductions in opening hours and reducing productivity: “These issues are expected to persist while COVID-19 cases and the number of team members requiring to isolate remain elevated.”
Morrison pulling yet more stunts like crisis meetings with industry will do nothing to help a damaged workforce. That starts with seeing workers as more than just another cost centre.
COVID19 has had one positive and instructive impact on Australian society. We are constantly told/brainwashed into believing how vital the rich and the elites are to the growth of the economy and the rise of living standards for all. Remember the old neoliberal favourite ‘the rising tide lifts all boats’ – of course they choose not to show how far some boats are lifted compared to others. Likewise the exertions of the rich are so great that they ‘trickle down’ to the undeserving plebs.
Because the immense products of the hard work and talents of the wealthy are so profound and good for all in our society they are entitled to tax breaks, and various other perks not available to others. For they are the ‘lifters’ in our economy, those who ‘grow’ national wealth and are indispensable not like the leaners/welfare, low income persons who are a burden on the economy.
Covid19 has shown these pretenders to be no more than greed driven egoists who have turned every trick to increase their wealth and power in this time of crisis. It is the wealthy and the elites who made money out of the suffering of others, who have been able to work from home and relative safety and gain other advantages
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It is the low income, casualized workforce that had to carry the additional burdens of COVID19. It is these ‘salt of the earth’ workers in less respected less well paid and less secure jobs who have emerged a the real heroes of COVID19 not the deadwood fat cats and their political cronies
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And now Mr ‘Its not my job to carry a hose’ seeks to reduce the safety aspect and well being of these crucial workers to save his fat hide. Morrison’s attempts – in conjunction with his fat cat mates to force workers back into potentially dangerous work situations simply shows what a user Morrison truly is
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Workers are merely a means to an end to save Morrison from looking like the incompetent clown that he is when it comes to forward thinking and planning in a crisis situation.
Morrison delights in the photo op so Morrison rather than just sit in a truck do something useful like drive it. You might while you are at it tell your other fat cat mates to make themselves useful like stock some grocery store shelves rather than always playing the role of the parasites on society.
Problem is a lot of the workers vote for this.
Reading the Herald Sun or Daily Telegraph, watching legacy tv media and listening to talk back radio (unions are disappeared in all); then reinforced by societal narratives, too easy.
Do they though? They vote for the lies that are Spun not the reality of those lies…
The sizzle of the sausage is the selling point, not the actual unnamed animal related by-products (™ ® CMOTD) extruded into semi digestible tubes.
Put another way, election campaign promises are the auctioning off of, yet to be stolen, public goods – it’s not the fault of the politicians that voters are so greedy as to want and stupid to think that they will receive what is proffered.
Or perhaps it is…?
Smack dealers don’t go around injecting unwilling people.
The real essential workers over the last two years – cleaners, carers, shelf stackers and the entire medical workforce up to nurses. just to mention a few – are also the most vulnerable, to covid and/or lay-off.
That must be why they are so well paid and valued…oh, ummm
How about we consider all workers “essential” – they all keep the economy ticking over, after all. It’s just that some are still seen as ‘more essential’ than others. A truly just society wouldn’t be assigning more worth to one job than another.
I can think of entire categories of ‘workers’ without whom society would be orders of magnitude more just and equitable.
Just for starters lobbyists, PR, advertising, economists, lawyers (particularly the sub (very) species corporate tax avoidance specialists), the list goes on & on.
I’m sure that other commenters have the least favourite bete noirs.
Remember when Christian Porter and Sally McManus were talking at the start of the pandemic two years ago, and each said they found the relationship constructive and cooperative. Has Morrison ever actually had a cup of tea and a chat with Sally? Did Turnbull or Abbott? I always found it peculiar that Turnbull accused Shorten of being a class traitor because he accepted invitations to dinner with the Pratt family. I would have characterised that as meeting with Australians at all levels, something the Liberals, by refusing to talk with the unions, disdain to do.
This stuff; ie doing good for society as a whole is way over the heads of Morrison and his collection of idiots he calls a cabinet. They are paralysed by the stunning reality that neoliberalism corrodes society and, therefore, have no other ideas.
At one point in my life, I half-believed the trickle-down hogwash, if only because Howard did more for my single-income family than Keating did. But over the years, it’s become increasingly clear – the rich getting richer does not help the poor (or even the middle class) get richer. If it did, wage inequality would be decreasing. It isn’t – it’s increasing rapidly.
There is less and less sympathy for those struggling in life – unless, like Morrison, you’ve got rich and powerful friends who can help. All this while it becomes increasingly impossible to have a career, due to the rampaging casualisation of the workforce. No problem for Morrison, though, with a massive taxpayer-funded pension – and not attached to a pesky Indue card, either.
A pox on you, Howard. You sold me a lie. And sold us Dominic Perottet, just to make sure the country is dragged down (by poor NSW COVID response policy) even further.
Now Now Come the revolution it will be peaches and cream for all!
More likely, as Alice pointed out, “Jam tomorrow…”.
Unfortunately the comments in this report are true I worked in retail and seen how they cut the work force down to the bone and required more of those who was left to take up doing more with less with no real increase in pay. It is time the public understood between the governments and the employers only looking at profit over people and many unions only interested in getting the best were they can for their members that when things like this happen then this is the end result , I hope those who like to bash unions are happy with the outcome of their actions
One of the reasons that the Nordic nations that is, Finland, Norway and Sweden are more egalitarian societies compared to Australia is that unions in those nations still wield some clout
In Germany for the last 60yrs they have routinely been on the boards of the major companies which, by sheer coincidence, are also the most successful.