Australia’s weird new Federal Budget that advocates rapid wages growth: a quick critical note

Here, Greg Jericho joins with other mainstream economists in agreeing with the lead analysis of Jim Stanford’s Centre for Future Work, that LNP government’s Budget expectation (requirement) for wages growth is not happening and shows no prospect of happening.

Again the usual high quality info from Greg. But this time, the analysis about why and what might be done is quite shallow, even absent.

Greg’s statistical causation focuses on underemployment. There are other deep factors at play than competing statistical tendencies.  But what establishes and further enables underemployment, and what is its connection to unemployment?

Another deep factor in keeping wages low is the Fair Work Act 2009 systemic, repressive scheme of penalties against workers who seek to exercise their SOLIDARITY power to improve their wages or to improve their job security. The Turnbull government’s only major change to Labor’s own version of this anti worker, anti solidarity wage and conditions fixing regime in the FWA is the harsher penalties against construction workers, including their extension to workers and their unions who do work in association with construction.

This is because Labor’s regime for bargaining and national wage fixing is working perfectly well for employers, not workers, as it was designed to do. This is one of the essential planks of neoliberalism, or Labor’s “neolaborism”, that is not going away … yet.

It beggars belief that this government, and arguably an alternative Labor government, will change the FWA so that workers can help solve their weird wages problem in the macro economy.

The other factor in keeping wages low is the union movement’s failure, so far, to develop a significant strategy that will genuinely restore worker’s right to strike and other forms of collective action, that will include rights to deal with international competition on wages etc., include climate change transition as a bargaining issue, and put worker solidarity back into both minimum legal rights and the development of society.

Mixed up in all of this is the “little matter” of profits. The discussion about profits, or its absence, in Australia is pathetic. Not just the volume of profit, but also what profit is, the exploitation of humans and nature upon which it depends, and profit in relation to total investment, that is the combination of investment in machines, hardware, software development, etc and the workers who bring all of that to life through their labour. We cannot understand the significance of the “wages problem” without grappling with profits and investment. Traditionally, Keynesians are not very good at that. So, we turn instead to our potential as union activists to do it properly?