The ‘flexibility’ of the labour market is, of course, something that is extremely unlikely to be revisited (although it’s very disappointing that so little has been done in the terms of the Labor governments to rethink how employment safety and a social right to employment could be created, which is eminently possible even in a flexible labour market). It’s this job insecurity, a consequence of how neo-liberal economies are supposed to work, which establishes the conditions for a ‘carbon tax = job losses’ message to be so powerful.

Yet there’s something a bit strange about seeing every last job as sacred, an attitude best exemplified by the rhetoric of Paul Howes.

Part of the relative failure of the political strategy to sell the carbon price plan (which I discussed on Saturday) is the inability to deepen the message about a low-carbon economy future having the ability to create good jobs. Indeed, in my own mind, I’ve had something of a question mark as to whether there’s evidence to support that contention.

As the Brookings Institution comments:

The “green” or “clean” or low-carbon economy—defined as the sector of the economy that produces goods and services with an environmental benefit—remains at once a compelling aspiration and an enigma.

That’s by way of introduction to an extremely interesting research report which sought to quantify and measure the composition of employment in the ‘clean economy’, and to make comparisons with the US economy as a whole, and with jobs in polluting industries.

In a post at Ethicaljobs.com.au, the report’s findings are summarised:

…jobs in US-based environmental industries have now overtaken fossil fuel-based jobs in sheer numbers, and that they also offer median wages that are 13% higher than other industries.

The research found 2.7 million green jobs in 100 US cities in a large diversity of industries, from organic food and farming jobs, through manufacturing (solar panels, wind turbines etc) through to public transport jobs.

Not only did the report find that jobs in these industries are on average 13% better paid, it also found that “the clean economy offers more [job] opportunities and better pay for low- and middle-skilled workers than the national economy as a whole . . . [since] a disproportionate percentage of jobs in the clean economy are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education in moderately well-paying “green collar” occupations.”

For jobs in clean technology specifically, the research showed that median wages were even higher – 20% higher than in other parts of the economy. Median wages for such clean technology jobs were $46,343, compared with $38,616 for all other occupations across the country.

Over the period studied – 2003-2010 – clean-technology jobs in the US also grew faster than the rest of the US economy – by 8.3% per year, compared with 4.2% a year for other occupations.

The report also found that environmental jobs employed more people across the country than fossil fuel industries – 2.7 million employees compared with just 2.4 million in dirty industries like coal and oil.

I haven’t had the chance, for time reasons this morning, to read the full report so I’d be interested to see whether there is also a direct comparison between clean jobs and jobs in polluting industries on income, as well as one with the median wage across the US labour market. Another caveat might be that a tendency for wages to decline over time has been observed in older ‘new’ industries – IT being the most telling example. But the relative maturity of some of the firms and sectors in the US might allay such a concern.

It does strike me as very interesting indeed that many of these jobs have been created in manufacturing and export-oriented sectors.

The report also, implicitly, highlights the fact that a number of US states have emissions trading schemes in place and a number have achieved significant emissions reductions (even allowing for decreased emissions stemming from the GFC and lower economic activity).

Someone ought to commission similar research in Australia!

In any case, it’s not a bad occasion to take a historical perspective on employment in Australia. While the headline rate of unemployment does indeed remain as low as it’s been for decades, other measures suggest that Australia has not reached the stage of “full employment”, let alone the drastic general labour shortages sometimes claimed to exist.

As well as the unemployment rate, the graph above shows the labour underutilisation rate. Unfortunately, the ABS’s official definition of this statistic isn’t available, but as I understand it, as well as the unemployed, it includes those working fewer hours than they are willing and able to. While this broadly tracks the unemployment rate, it’s not exactly the same; notably, while nominal unemployment is virtually as low as it’s ever been, labour underutilisation rates are still well above those from the earliest years in which this data was collected. Perhaps that helps to explain why wages have stubbornly refused to “break out” generally, despite ever more hysterical warnings from various employer groups.

The third line, the total number of hours worked by Australians per quarter, also shows up the effect of the GFC quite strikingly; while nominal unemployment didn’t rise all that much, the dip in the total number of hours worked appears quite substantial in the context of other variations over time.

For what it’s worth, in the longer term the mass retirement of the baby boomers seems likely to push Australia towards full employment. And it may well be that while there might theoretically be more labour available, there is a mismatch between the skills that employers want and potential employees have to offer – structural underemployment, if you will.

But, on the face of it, we have some way to go before we reach the situation where everybody who wants work can get as much of it as they choose.

Spurred on, this time, by the release of 1980 Cabinet papers (resources boom #1) and remarks by Howard government Reserve Bank appointee, Donald McGauchie, we’ve had a fresh round of dire warnings of a “wages breakout”.

This, on top of the usual shrill demands for “reform” in workplace relations – it’s a given, apparently, that the Fair Work Australia Act empowers unions.

Oh really? In a very useful post at We’re All Dead, Matt Cowgill does some myth busting on the current state of play in labour market hysteria.

Among other stats, Cowgill shows that the wages share of national income continues to head downwards, and is at its lowest point since 1964.

A reasonable observer might surely think:

(a) There’s a fairly pure case of ideology in the strict sense of the word in all this hoo-hah – “common sense” which is completely contradicted by facts;

(b) Fair Work Australia actually does incorporate a lot of the thrust of WorkChoices.

Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian women earned just 82.5% of the average male rate of pay across the country in 2009. On average, a female worker would have earned more in 1985?—?and will be $1 million worse off over their lifetimes than their dads, brothers and partners.

That rather understates the size of the problem, because that differential refers to full time earnings, and 57% of women in work were full time, with 43% being part time or casual in 2009. As the recent House of Representatives Standing Committee Report on Equal Pay, Making It Fair, observed:

In August 2007, the average mean earning from all jobs for women was $680 per week (compared to $1022 for male employees) partly reflecting women’s greater participation in part time employment. On a comparison of full time employment earnings, women on average earned $910 per week and men earned $1131 weekly.

The point I’ve been making in my commentary and analysis of the Abbott parental leave plan is that there seems to be a perception that women in the workforce are much better off than they actually are. Otherwise it would be impossible to conclude that income replacement was ‘generous’ or ‘fair’. My argument has been that the Coalition’s approach would further entrench existing inequalities. In that context, it was interesting to note the comments from Eric Abetz on the 7.30 Report tonight. Abetz was responding to a case which starts tomorrow in Fair Work Australia seeking to revalue the work performed (very largely by women) in the community sector.

To say that Abetz was hardly filled with enthusiasm for a case which would raise women’s wages by around $100 a week would be an understatement. Pay equity was a principle no one would disagree with, he observed, but it appears that in practice, it’s never the right time to do anything about it.

This, of course, is the whole problem. The principle was accepted in Australian law in 1972, but the practice has lagged behind, and is now trending backwards.

The method by which the ACTU, the ASU, and the Equal Pay Alliance are proceeding is by a test case based on principles of work value. The Coalition removed the power of FWA’s predecessor, the AIRC, to hear such cases, opposes anything but minimal safety net awards, and rejects the principle of industrial tribunals determining pay rates by an assessment of the skills and values worked.

So, if they were still in government, this campaign could not succeed. And it they return to government, it will not succeed. The Labor government, by contrast, is intervening in the case in support of the union position, and Julia Gillard made a cogent argument as to the timeliness of properly valuing community sector workers’ skills and experience tonight.

The audacity, and gross hypocrisy, of the claim that the Coalition cares about working women has been exposed for what it is, only two days after Tony Abbott’s IWD speech.

Elsewhere: Useful background and context at Business Spectator.

The Government is “actively considering” a joint submission from the Adelaide exhaust system and shock absorber manufacturer Tenneco and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union that it provide accredited training and also pay the wages of the company’s 600 workers for days the company is forced to halt production.

I think we’re seeing an increasingly corporatist trend in economic policy, and what’s rather intriguing is that the usual voices of neo-liberal orthodoxy aren’t running around the shop demanding “let the free market rip!” (unless I’m missing something). Perhaps that’s because these sort of moves appear widely supported by big business.

If the Tenneco plan goes ahead, it puts some flesh on the government’s rhetoric about the need to preserve skills through a downturn due to the underlying shortages in the labour market. It might also be argued that directing wage subsidies to those already in skilled full time employment is preferable to targeting retraining and labour market measures to those same workers if and when they’re on the dole.

But it’s also legitimate to raise a number of questions – about the viability of such businesses, and the bouyancy or otherwise of labour markets for workers with such skills, and probably more close to the actual point – whether these sort of schemes would only be available in manufacturing. I think that’s probably the case, and I think this has more to do with the Rudd government’s strong preference for support of the manufacturing industry than anything else.

I’m not sure it’s just about the unionised nature of such firms, either. I don’t think anything similar would be contemplated for unionised cleaners for instance, or child care workers, at the lower end of the private sector income food chain. It may be that a case could be made for this sort of program in the public interest, but ought it not to be made according to the actual reasons for selectivity, and the equity (as well as efficiency) justifications and implications set out?

Ross Gittins has an article in the SMH on the relative wealth of university students. It is interesting reading. I was helped out by my folks for the final year and a half of my PhD in a direct way. My mum also used to send me cash every now and then during my candidature so I could buy some broccoli.

Two things that Gittins does not discuss that are important to talk about.

1) ‘Student’ is a structural subject position within the labour market. There are ‘student’ jobs. ‘Students’ get a discount on a lot of things from movies to public transport. The character of the labour of a ‘student’ is primarily based in the service industry and organised around affective labour. The economy (and hence capitalists) need students to carry out ‘student’ labour. I worked in a servo the four years of my undergraduate honours degree, only moving home for my final honours year to make sure I did well.

2) The nature of being a student has shifted from my parents’ generation to my generation. My mum got paid to go to teachers’ college and she was there fulltime (like 9 to 5 fulltime, not 20 hours a week ‘fulltime’). Given the option to go to uni for 2 years and get paid to do it compared to going to uni for up to 4 years and stuff around trying to balance study, work and the rest of life, I don’t know, but I think many students would take the two year option.

Why has this shift occurred? Two reasons.

Firstly, see point 1. Gittens does not mention this. Students don’t have much money sure, and ‘living like a student’ is probably a life enriching, if not humbling experience for many sons and daughters of privilege, but studying also ‘costs’ them at least two years of life and four years of bullshit labour that is required for the service-based economy to function.

Secondly, ‘fulltime’ students don’t show up on unemployment stats. Here is the ‘international standard’ definition of unemployment from this report:

[P]eople are unemployed if they did not work for at least one (paid) hour in the previous week, were actively seeking work and were able to accept a job in the next week if it were available.

Therefore, there is a governmental incentive to make unemployment figures look lower than the real employment problem in Australia, and most developed countries worldwide, under-employment.

My point is a simple one. Gittins sets up the problem for students in the economy as a lack of disposable and necessary income. This is wrong. The real problem is the structural position of students as having to become ‘student labour’ and hence a large proportion of the surplus labour used to control the casualised service industry workplace.

These sorts of surveys demonstrate one of the weaknesses of opinion polling – we’re left to speculate on the reasons. It really would be extremely helpful if polling groups were to supplement such research with qualitative forms of enquiry such as focus groups, or qualitative aspects to the survey instrument.

But since we have to speculate, my guess would be that one or more of the following factors might be in operation:

(a) “The economy” itself is something of an abstraction in most people’s minds, and unless they can feel the impact of economic stats directly or by anecdote then it remains an abstraction. This is exactly the dynamic that explained the failure of various “beautiful sets of numbers” to give John Howard and Peter Costello any traction last year, and for that matter, vitiated the arguments in favour of WorkChoices. So, if there’s something of a lag beween the financial aspects of the crisis and their impact on “the real economy”, then it may be that expectations also show something of a lag;

(b) Relatedly, people tend to extrapolate to the future from the recent past, and more powerfully from their own experience than from history or meta narratives. So we would expect attitudes to employment and the labour market to reflect the most recent patterns, particularly among younger and more skilled workers. It may also be a realistic (at this point) implicit understanding of the fact that “the economy” is a much more disaggregated creature than it once was, with different sectors both occupationally/industrially and geographically more weakly correlated with overall trends. In that sense, if people are aware of continuing tightness in the market for particular jobs in their field, there’s a reasonably rational belief that the underlying skills picture may continue, and/or that their sector may be somewhat insulated from broader nationwide and global developments.

(c) “Unemployment” itself has a different subjective meaning due to the casualisation of the labour market and the increase in contracting. It may be that a recession no longer poses the threat of a non-existent secure permanent job disappearing just like that for many people, but rather a shift in hours or longer gaps between contracts. “Unemployment” as a lived category means something different from both its statistical and legal meanings.

I think I’m missing something here (though not surprised by the fact that whenever generationalism rears its head, the originary dissing of Gen X is reinscribed each time). Maybe it’s because the experience of the 80s was very different in Australia (and the UK) than in America, and this even similar cultural themes and texts and musical forms were read through distinctive lenses.

I feel so sorry for Generation X. They grew up without a unifying enemy. They grew up constantly criticized as a do-nothing care-nothing generation. They started the Internet boom but would eventually lose out to the young upstarts from the next generation, the Googles and Facebooks of the world. They truly are The Lost Generation, sandwiched between the crisis of Nixon and the crisis of today. Now, my generation is the second-born prodigal son, the boy-king who snatched the crown of influence directly from his parents, bypassing the first-born’s rule entirely. We are fighting the War on Terror. We are innovators in tech and energy and media.

Err… whatevs. Anyone who runs around talking about themselves as the incarnation of Gen Y triumphalism might care to chew on one of the few sociologically sound distinctions between Gen X and Gen Y – the differing attitudes towards security, expectations and the labour market caused by the presence and absence of deep recessions respectively. But, bitchiness directed towards the author, David Mekelburg, aside, I’d like to point out that one defining 80s generational coming of age film, St Elmo’s Fire, had, years before “Greed is Good”, already pointed to the emptiness of the material world Madonna was later to ironise. Just sayin, you know. I think the 80s – in pop cultural terms – were a much more complex assemblage of themes and desires than this stuff recognises.

So I give you Jules: