Via Domainfax:
Australia’s top union official has urged Labor to back a radical reform agenda and pledge to rewrite industrial relations laws in government, including the introduction of industry-wide bargaining powers.
In a written speech to be delivered at the John Curtin Research Centre on Thursday night, ACTU secretary Sally McManus said the enterprise bargaining system – introduced by the Keating government – was outdated and incapable of giving workers their “fair share” of productivity increases.
“We have an imbalance of wealth and power in our country,” Ms McManus said.
This is true. But it is not enough. We also have a shortage of profits in the country as the economy bogs down into a swamp of rent-seeking, over-consolidation, hopeless competitiveness, zero multi-factor productivity gains, exhausted economic structure and empty calorific growth. This as the post-mining and post-housing boom adjustments come together in lost decades of poor income growth.
In this environment, boosting labour’s pricing power will only result in lower profits, job losses and lower wages.
We need reform. Massive, wholesale reform to go along with some stiffening of industrial relations. This may still mean falling real wages for a time. But it will also mean that the burden of adjustment is shared by capital.
Without new sources of national income growth, wages simply won’t rise.
