Fairfax’s Ross Gittins has penned a good piece today in response to the Fair Work Commission’s decision to cut Sunday penalty rates for several hundred thousand low-paid workers:
Why do blue-collar workers get so alienated and fed up they vote for someone as mad as Donald Trump?…
How have the top few per cent of US households captured most of the economic growth for three decades?
Three main reasons, which apply in varying degrees to us.
First, because globalisation and “skill-biased” technological change have produced a small number of winners and a large number of losers.
Second, because far from using the tax-and-transfers system to require the winners to compensate the losers we’ve gone the other way, making the income-tax scale less progressive and tightening up on payment of benefits to people of working age.
Third, because although the economy has changed in ways that weaken organised labour, we’ve doubled down, weakening legislative arrangements designed to reduce the imbalance in bargaining power between bosses and workers…
The legislative attack has focused on removing union privileges, weakening workers’ rights and weakening workers’ bargaining power by discouraging collective bargaining and favouring individual contracts…
The mentality that produced these developments is “bizonomics” – something that sounds like economics because it repeats buzzwords such as “growth” and “jobs”, but isn’t.
In Australia, micro-economic reform has degenerated into a form of rent-seeking that’s saying the way to a prosperous economy is to keep business – the people who create the jobs – as happy as possible…
[But] if all you end up doing is transferring income from the workers to the bosses, far more people lose than gain…
All great points. But there’s one thing Gittins forgot to mention, and that is the Turnbull Government’s company tax cut plan. At the same time as welfare and penalty rates are being cut, the Coalition wants to gift an estimated $8.2 billion per year to foreign owners/shareholders in the vague hope that some of it will be returned in increased business investment.
