Monday 29th of April 2024
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ship of fools ....

ship of fools ....

It is not about who can or should lead the Labor Government. It’s about the rotten anti-worker policies Labor serves up to we workers. That’s why Abbott and has ship of fools is leading 56% to 44% in the two party preferred vote in the latest Nielsen poll.

If only Kevin rather than Julia were in charge the shit sandwich that Labor sells us every day would taste so much better, wouldn’t it? No, of course not.

Workers aren’t fools. Let’s look at the big picture of why workers might be feeling pissed off with Labor.

First there has been an unrelenting shift of wealth from labour to capital under Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd and Gillard. The share of national income going to capital is now at is highest ever and that to labour its lowest since figures began to be kept.

Ian McAuley’s graph from New Matilda shows the magnitude of the shift over time, especially since 1983 with the election of the Hawke Labor government.

It is no accident that as profit rates around the developed world and in Australia fell, this wealth shift from labour to capital occurred. Shifting wealth to the rich and business is the way capitalists think they can resolve the systemic crisis of capitalism.

But there are other tactics the bosses have used too to address falling profit rates.

According to Brigid Van Wanrooy of the University of Sydney Workplace Research Centre Australians work long hours. The average hours worked is about 44, well above the standard 38 hour week. Much of that extra time is unpaid and worth about $72 billion to the bosses.

Then there is increasing job insecurity. The idea of a secure job is being destroyed in industry after industry not only in terms of permanent employees being at threat of losing their jobs but also non-secure employment (casual, fixed term, part-time, sessional and the like) replacing secure employment.

Unemployment or rather the threat of being unemployed haunts many workers. In Australia unemployment is officially running at 5.4%. Partly this is due to low participation rates. People are discouraged looking for work and so drop out. It is also a matter of governments fudging the figures since one hour of paid work takes you off the unemployed list.

The real unemployment figures are much higher. Based on interviews with nearly 4000 people in January 2013 Roy Morgan Research has put the real rate of unemployment in Australia at 10.9%, more than double the government’s figure of 5.4%.

On top of that, and based on the same interviews, 8.8% of the workforce were under-employed and wanted to work more hours. Adding these two figures together just under 20% of the workforce, according to Roy Morgan Research are unemployed or under-employed.

Maybe the shift in wealth to the rich, the increase insecurity in employment and the high real level of unemployment and under-employment, coupled with Labor in power, trapped by its systemic embrace of neo-liberalism and running the system for the bosses doing nothing or even worsening these trends, explains why the current ALP government is one the nose.

Add to that Labor’s repulsive social policies, such as its locking up of refugees in concentration camps, its continuation of the racist Northern intervention, its attacks on single Mums and consequent loss of some of the middle class vote, and Labor’s support is hemorrhaging. The blood spurt is probably fatal for Gillard now or in September (if she lasts that long).

Ironically the socially repulsive policies are aimed at convincing the very people alienated by high unemployment and under-employment, job insecurity and seeing Gina Rinehart quadruple her wealth to $29 billion to vote Labor. But why settle for the carbon copy on refugees and indigenous Australians when you can vote for the original?

All Labor’s pandering to the backward sections of the working class does is give greater credence to the Liberals on these issues and push Labor further to the right in a downwards tumble  for the Hansonite vote.

Profit rates in the developed world have been failing since the late 60s, a  consequence of what Marx identified as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  Neoliberalism has addressed some of this fall partially but not to anything near the levels of the 50s and the 60s. But the tendency has proved stronger than the countervailing tendencies such as lengthening the working day, shifting wealth to capital, cutting government expenditure, curbing union rights etc.

Without a massive devalorisation of capital, something the too big to fail policies across the globe have so far resisted, capitalism in all likelihood cannot recover and will be doomed to deeper and deeper recessions and weaker recoveries, or as we now seem to have in Europe and North America what Andrew Kliman calls the ongoing and long term Great Recession.

This means the economic base for reforms has dried up. The consequence is Labor is either dismantling the social welfare system (single Mums is the latest instance) or its reforms are spin. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is a voucher system, not reform. The dental health ‘reforms’ are built on abolishing acute dental care for the poor; Gonski is about reinforcing the gap between rich private schools and working class ones; the support for the equal pay case was belies the fact the gender pay gap is higher under Gillard than under Howard in 2004; the recognition of prior ownership does nothing to address the real issue of sovereignty; the carbon tax is a market non-solution to the environmental crisis the market has unleashed. The Minerals Resource Rent Tax is a tax that deliberately doesn’t tax the big mining companies.

This is reformism without reforms, the promise of reforms without their substantive reality.

That is why Labor is so on the nose with so many workers. The lack of a viable working class left wing alternative, let alone a socialist alternative, means for many workers the only option seems to them to be Tony Abbott.

It is because Labor’s policies have been the policies of neo-liberalism, of kowtowing to the rich and powerful, with occasional rhetorical flourishes of class war merely showing how far removed we are from it, and the fact that the ALP offers no class analysis of society and no way forward for workers that Tony Abbott will be the next Prime Minister.

Rather than this being a rupture it is a continuation of Labor’s politics of neo-liberalism.  As Hawke and Keating led to Howard, so Rudd and Gillard are now leading to Abbott.

The solution for workers seems clear enough. Fight both brands of ne-oliberalism, not with television advertisements but with strikes.

That of course is the real element missing from this story – the 30 years of one sided class war the bosses have waged against us with nary a peep from our side. That and the lack of a mass working class party arguing in the long term for the overthrow of capitalism and workers taking power  and for the defence of workers’ jobs and pay here and now have laid the groundwork for the 30 year onslaught against workers and the coming victory of Tony Abbott at the election on 14 September.

Labor: Making Abbott & His Ship Of Fools Look Good

 

a casual crime ....

WorkChoices might have been comprehensively rejected at the 2007 election, but the insecurity it represented is still a reality for Australia's casuals and contractors, writes Lisa Heap.

With a federal election behind us, a brand new government elected, and seats in the next Senate close to being resolved, now is the right time for Australians to start a national conversation about what's really happening in our workplaces.

Many Australians are struggling to deal with the impact of insecure work, and their struggles have not yet been properly recognised. This rising form of work is creating first- and second-class citizens, with temporary migrants relegated to an even lower rung on the ladder. We need a national conversation that goes beyond simply hearing from the usual industrial relations stakeholders.

Work may not define us but it has a major impact on our lives. Work also plays a critical role in the very constitution of a society. The interdependence of citizens through their work is one of the most important structural bonds of any community. We all need to be involved in this conversation about the future direction of our working lives.

The Howe Inquiry defined insecure work as work with unpredictable pay, inferior rights and entitlements, limited or no access to paid leave, irregular or unpredictable working hours, uncertainty over the length of a job, and a lack of input on wages, conditions and work organisation.

Many of these work features are what Australians so thoroughly rejected when they were put forward under the Howard Government's WorkChoices legislation. While that legislation was publicly debated, argued, campaigned against and ultimately banished by Australians at the 2007 Federal Election, no such action has happened around the rise of insecure work in Australia.

Both major political parties have failed to address the rise of insecure work, including at the recent federal election. As a result, employers are being allowed to sidestep regulation, avoid payment of fair minimum entitlements, and are creating cultures that damage through insecurity.

By creating an industrial relations system that protects the rights of 'standard' full-time, permanent workers but not the rights of non-standard workers such as causal workers or contractors, we have allowed millions of Australians to work under similar conditions to those WorkChoices promoted.

And this isn't a small group of workers who have less work rights than standard workers. Today, around 40 per cent of Australia's workforce are employed through non-standard means. It has also been found that permanent workers lose some job security when there is a rise in temporary or contract workers, mainly because these contractors may be used by management to drive down wages.

It is true that not everyone working in non-standard work arrangements are being exploited. Some, in highly specialised fields with relative power in the labour market, may choose contracting arrangements because they suit their needs. However, evidence shows that for many workers in insecure work environments, the choice is not theirs, they dislike the uncertainty, and their rights are adversely impacted.

Many argue that people who are casual workers choose to work this way because they like the flexibility that it offers. A survey of casual workers does not support this argument though. A 2007 study found over 50 per cent of casual workers indicated they would prefer ongoing work, even if it reduced their income.

This argument for casual work may have risen because until recently Australian awards and agreements did not provide comprehensive arrangements for ongoing part-time work. This meant that the flexibility needed for women to work and care for their family was only available through casual work and came at the cost of job security.

Casual work has also been linked with an increased difficulty finding and maintaining accommodation. Casual and freelance workers are more likely to struggle to pay their rent than those who are unemployed. In fact, casual and freelance workers make up 40 per cent of all homeless people. This is on top of the added difficulties many casual workers face trying to get a home or car loan or even to simply make financial plans.

These are all strong reasons for a national conversation about the consequences and morality of employing large numbers of Australians with fewer rights and entitlements than the rest of the country's workforce. But what this conversation also needs is to look at is what we do from here.

We can begin by looking at how awards and agreements define a casual worker. Often both define a casual worker with no more detail than "someone engaged as such". Under this formulation, almost any worker could be employed as a casual worker.

A definition of this type does not provide a guide to employers or workers as to when the use of casual labour would or would not be appropriate. Modern awards need to provide a standard definition of a true casual worker and union officials need to be better prepared to negotiate for clearer and more appropriate protections for non-standard employment in agreements.

Currently, classifying a worker as a self-employed consultant or contractor takes a worker out of employment regulation altogether. If a company sources workers through a labour hire company, they are able to legally put that worker at arms length and can avoid paying entitlements under awards or enterprise agreements that might apply if that person was directly employed.

We need to recast our laws so that every worker, regardless of how they are employed, has access to a suite of minimum entitlements and rights. The argument against this often includes that casual workers would prefer casual loadings rather than access to entitlements. In reality, this view is overstated, with more than 50 per cent of casual workers saying they would prefer ongoing arrangements.

We should also talk about creating a portable leave bank so that workers could maintain accruals for leave in an account that would travel with them from employer to employer. Such a scheme already exists in the building and construction industry in Australia, and could be extended into other industries.

And we also need to talk about developing a program and resources to educate people about workplace rights at their entry point to the labour market. People need to know their rights when they first start working, and we need outreach programs for vulnerable groups of workers such as seasonal migrants, refugees and workers on 457 and student visas.

It's time for Australia to seriously talk about the consequences of so many of us being employed through insecure arrangements and what can be done to improve the working lives of those who are in insecure work.

A more detailed discussion of the issues raised in this article is available in the new publication 'Pushing Our Luck: Ideas For Australian Progress' from the Centre for Policy Development.

Australia's Second Class Of Insecure Workers