Unions are Australians’ last best hope of stopping Albo’s useful idiots of capital from wrecking the joint:
Unions have opposed scrapping requirements for employers to prove domestic shortages before recruiting overseas workers, warning against a business push for quick fixes to the migration system by the May budget.
However, delays of up to nine months for skills recognition for overseas workers could become the more immediate target for reform, as long waiting times for the skills assessments hold up visa approvals.
What is the point of a “Labor” party that is worse for labour than the liberal party?
That is the question unions must ask themselves as Albo’s Fake Left guts workers at the fastest rate in known history:
The major problem is that profits-driven inflation is too high and wage growth is too low:
On the profits side, it is:
- overly loose fiscal policy, largely at the state level;
- lack of competition everywhere;
- energy shock and global inflation.
On the wages side, it is some combination of corporate monopsony, the unions’ falling influence and, significantly, the role of mass immigration with its attendant features of wage theft, industrial relations abuse, and permanent supply shock.
The unions can’t address the supply-side factors. But they can address wages and declining influence in one fell swoop by demanding a large cut to immigration numbers to sustainable levels of around 100k.
Only the unions can do this for four reasons.
First, it is very difficult, nigh on impossible, to mobilise a popular movement without an existing infrastructure to do so. There is no other extant body to do it.
Second, it’s their job.
Third, Aussies are never going to get off their MAFS-distracted arses and do it by themselves. But they will quietly cheer the unions’ campaign.
Fourth, the unions have already laid the intellectual groundwork and are the only ones making any sense at all about mass immigration and living standards. At Albo’s gaslighting “jobs and skills summit” the unions struck an eminently sensible position:
SARAH FERGUSON: Let’s talk about the other, the number one priority for business, one of the other very important topics coming at the summit and that is business’ desire for a rapid influx of temporary workers to plug the skills gap which they say is stifling the economy right now.
You’ve said any union agreement to this would be tied to wage rises. Is that a realistic expectation?
SALLY MCMANUS: We do not want to see a return to what we had not that long ago where there was an open-ended visa system where visa workers were being used and abused. They were being underpaid.
It’s unacceptable that we return to that, and we’ve got a situation where wages are going nowhere. So there needs to be a solution to both. Like we can’t say we’re not going to invest in skilling up our own people and we’re going to say instead of giving people fair pay rises, we just want to return to a system where we can bring people in on visas.
SARAH FERGUSON: The second condition if you like that you’re putting forward is that all skilled migrants would be on a compulsory minimum wage of $91,000. That must surely be an ambit claim?
SALLY MCMANUS: Well, I mean, we’re talking about skilled workers and we’re talking about the areas that we really need them. If we’re talking about that, I think it’s fair.
Since that time, the unions have gone quiet while Albo’s useful idiots of capital have ripped a gaping hole in the borders and inundated Australia with cheap foreign labour.
The unions must stand up and defend their $9ok wage floor to the death, as well as expand it to permanent migrants. By definition, this policy shift immediately shifts the onus of the migration system to quality over quantity.
By doing so, unions will ensure:
- rising wages;
- stronger productivity as capital shallowing is replaced with deepening and the end of crush loading;
- much greater investment in training and rising conditions, and
- the end of wage theft.
There are multiple pressure points that the unions can lean on:
- boycott Labor funding;
- enlist the super funds;
- strike and march;
- a rhetorical assault.
Now is the time to do it. Albo useful idiots of capital have jumped the shark on mass immigration and are crushing living standards at visible speed.
