Shame on the Communists.

i hope that the voting public will remove its collective blindfolds and vote these inhuman silvertail bumbling halfwits out of office for the good of the country.

Observa

The problem with the plumber/nurse scenario is this. While they can command more for the service they provide because of huge demand/low supply the end result is that what they earn gets taken away by the reserve bank in higher interest rates.

Higher wages feed inflation. Raise interest rates to kill inflation.

So while the plumbers and nurses get their 15 minutes of economic sunshine it is soon taken away with higher interest rates and as you predict Dr Patel is your new plumber or nurse. The price you can command for your skill at unblocking shitty pipes or mopping up vomit plunges with the influx of cheap labour to plug the skills shortage.

The market sets the price and then changes the goalpposts when the worker gains an advantage.

Then there are two centres not far away with 1,000 employees each. Given that the National Retailers Association thinks the Spotlight deal a smart idea, we could have a nasty race to the bottom right there.

This all came up in Question Time on Thursday.

In any case, I have slaughtered the chook, flung the entrails all over the loungeroom, and examined them in microscopic detail. I fearlessly predict that after months of lousy publicity surrounding Serfchoices the Strine will run a splash on Spotlight’s Mt Druitt store and declare it a ‘good thing.’

Another was the development of a permanent underclass.

I’m going to say something more about your penultimate comment, but possibly not tonight.

Sanity has prevailed and this principle has been scrapped, heaven has helped us all.

One of the legal principles that the old IR laws was based on was that if an employer could not afford to give an employee a decent wage then they should not be allowed to have employees. This priciple has now been scrapped and heaven help us all

As Tim at roadtosurfdom correctly points out:

‘When he launched the new industrial relations legislation back in October last year, Mr Howard posed the following rhetorical question:

‘ “This is not, as the Labor Party and the unions have so falsely claimed an attack on the living standards of Australians. Why would I want to cut the living standards of Australians?”

‘Last Thursday in parliament he provided an answer. It was in response to the situation of Annette Harris:

‘Annette Harris, a former employee at Spotlight’s Coffs Harbour store in northern NSW, was offered her job back with a 2c-an-hour increase in return for trading off most of her previous conditions. Ms Harris, a life-long Liberal voter, would have received $14.30 an hour, 2c above the minimum rate she was previously paid, if she accepted the job.

‘But she would have lost $90 a week in take-home pay without overtime and penalty rates for after-hours and weekend work.

‘Here, in other words, was an Australian who, because of Mr Howard’s laws, was going to have her living standards cut. So, to reprise Mr Howard’s question, why would he want to cut the living standards of Australians, in this case an Australian by the name of Annette Harris?:

‘Mr Howard told parliament he had a simple response to Ms Harris’s claim that the cut was “absolutely disgustingâ€? and she would not sign up.

‘“At the end of the day, the test of workplace relations laws is the contribution they make to the general health of the economy,â€? the prime minister said.’

Annette Harris, the Spotlight employee who was the subject of the original post on this thread, provides her thoughts here.

We can write our own conditions and pay rates.

Spoke to some of the staff this afternoon, they are thrilled at the prospect.

Now we just have to work out what to write!

Imagine all the bonuses corporate managers are going to get from using WorkChoices to screw workers.

I’m with Kim and Kate, and I thought Belegdel’s original comment was well said.

In relation to this comment:

Also note the reduction in remuneration is probably to save the firm’s profitability. In that sense the employee is better off on $29K than with the doors closed, while he takes appropriate response action in the medium term.

Spotlight is a private firm and it is difficult to say just how profitable it is. Given its monopolistic character, unless you have ready access to Cabramatta from a comment above, and given its expansion program here, NZ and now Asia, it doesn’t look like a firm under stress. Quite the contrary.

Also the article you linked to on poverty as a temporary state in America lacks a bit of credibility to me. Why? It sounds impressive, but you’ll note that it was based on research done in the 1990s. Will Hutton when he did his research (this century) for his book The World We’re In found a what he called a ‘killer statistic’. It indicated that when you were poor in the US you stayed poor. There was less mobility from the bottom up than in Europe.

Certainly Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) found that the women she worked with for next to nix all thought they would make it some day. Her impression was that they wouldn’t.

Then there’s this from Holly Sklar:

It would take more than $9 in 2006 to match the federal minimum wage peak reached in 1968, adjusting for inflation. At today’s $5.15 an hour, it takes nearly two minimum wage workers to earn what one made 38 years ago.

The minimum wage sets the wage floor. When the minimum wage is stuck in quicksand, it drags down wages for workers up the pay scale as well. Hourly wages for average workers are 11 percent lower than they were in 1973, despite rising worker productivity.

It wasn’t always like this. Between 1947 and 1973, worker productivity rose 104 percent while the minimum wage rose 101 percent, adjusting for inflation.

The United States has become a downwardly mobile society. The American Dream is the American Pipe Dream for more and more people.

Strangely that scenario doesn’t fill me with envy, but it is a vista that WorkChoices opens up.

Bing Bango that is no reason to retaliate. If you watch any form of footy you’d know that it doesn’t impress the ref. A more restrained response would have given you the moral high ground.

I see our budding young cafe entrepreneurs are full of enthusiasm already. Won’t take em long to work out paying customers are never cockheads or asshats. Yes the folding stuff is always such a great catalyst for universal tolerance and understanding.