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.

It’s a thesis, twinned with the contrasting spectre of the old Australian Settlement (a phrase which has sadly passed into the mainstream, given its distortions of history), which is somewhat derivative of assertions that Margaret Thatcher destroyed some sort of closed shop Keynesian scleroticism in British policy.

The problem has always been that it’s at best only partially true.

This story doesn’t fit workplace relations well. Labor effectively drew a line under workplace flexibility in 1993 with the Industrial Relations Reform Act and WorkChoices was anything but deregulatory. Both parties were more interested in deregulating product than labour markets, and only John Hewson’s Fightback actually embodied what is normally coded as ‘reform’ in these debates.

Now, Kelly is watching as his story unravels before his eyes, moved to write one of his oracular essays on Tony Abbott’s embrace of the Fair Work Act, echoed in more populist vein by the Master’s Apprentice, Peter Van Onselen.

Kelly’s also upset by Julia Gillard’s “little Australia” rhetoric, and joins a growing cast of characters berating big business for not pushing its agenda more effectively, and damning both parties for being “poll driven” (which they are).

On the supposed doom we face because ‘labour market reform’ has now receded from the horizon, Kelly writes:

there is public tolerance of the Labor Party’s great lie that the sole obstacle to more jobs is lack of skills rather than Labor’s laws discouraging hiring. For Australia’s future, it is a dismal start to election 2010.

Climate change, never an issue he’s been comfortable with, is ignored in Kelly’s doomsaying. Also absent is the reality of population flows which is just as integral to neo-liberal globalisation and just as resistant to seamless shaping as capital flows. In truth, Kelly’s vision has always been a limited one – a Fortress Australia navigating the seas of economic turbulence and opportunity rather than a node in a global network with a government rendered less powerful by the evisceration of the state and the deligitimisation of state action.

It’s notable that he provides no evidence for the contention that IR laws are the barrier to job growth. That’s because the nature of ideology is to assert rather than to prove. Kelly’s tragedy is that his ideological consensus has shattered, and therefore his words are empty.

But our tragedy is that there’s no real social democratic alternative on offer. Rather, the end of the neo-liberal consensus has seen what’s rightly described as a climate of complacency, and in this election, we’re seeing a populist consensus emerge, offering complacent solutions for turbulent times.

A boring election held in interesting times indeed.

In the wake of the privatisation imbroglio perpetrated by the Bligh government, expectations were that solidarity between Labor and labour wouldn’t be at the forefront of the Brisbane May Day March. Anna Bligh, and I believe Treasurer Andrew Fraser, disappeared to North America, first purporting to show an interest in bionics, and then holding a ‘virtual Cabinet’ with the provincial government of British Columbia.

What these ventures have to do with anything is anyone’s guess. Commenters on the Brisbane Times‘ story correctly pointed out that Peter Beattie is already paid 250k a year to represent Queensland’s trade interests in North America, and that a ‘virtual’ meeting could surely be virtual for the Canadians, and in Brisbane for the Premier.

To his credit, Deputy Premier Paul Lucas fronted the march, but was met with the jeers which the State Labor crew richly deserve. Kevin Rudd kept his distance, preferring to march with the LHMU, a union well back in the parade, and concentrating on the Resources Super Tax in his address, an initiative I warmly welcome.

In a nutshell, the impasse of Labor politics, and the scissions the Labour movement has fallen prone to, is encapsulated in the events of this day.

It’s a longer story, but I’ve previously argued that (late) modern Labor’s political Janus face results from at least two factors: the corporatised economism of state politics, where slogans about jobs mask a wholesale surrender to business interests; and the weakening of the links between workers, unions and the professional political class.

John Quiggin has provided us with some reflections on Labour Day:

Among his thoughts, he argues:

The old-style politics of class (with the working class represented by male manual workers, gathered in large, naturally solidaristic workplaces) is no longer relevant to the great majority of Australian workers. That doesn’t mean that class has ceased to matter, but it does mean that workers experience class and power relationships more in terms of individual experience than as collective interactions between classes. So, in particular, unions need to be seen more as mutual aid associations that protect their individual members against exploitation and unfair treatment than as vehicles for the mobilisation of the working class. The kinds of legal changes sought to reverse the generally anti-union trend of past decades needs to reflect this orientation.

I think this underplays the degree to which the union movement, particularly as represented by the ACTU, has long practiced a broader class politics transcending trade and occupational union particularism. While I also think that class politics has to move beyond a masculinised workerism, and to take account of the changed social and cultural conditions of twenty first century Australia, I’m not sure things are so simple as John suggests, though he’s surely right that the casualisation of work and a host of other social and economic changes have individualised work relationships.

But I don’t think unions need to return to being essentially mutual benefit societies. They do have a role in building solidarity where there is none, though this role may have to include creating the conditions for more solidaristic workplace relations, through rethinking how unions can intervene in shaping the labour market itself.

I think there’s a great need to develop an approach which does respond to the fracturing of class, the refashioning of the workplace, and the naturalisation of expectations around insecure work. It’s something I’d like to do more work on, and will be writing further about, but it’s also something I think is well worth a preliminary discussion on a very fractured Brisbane Labour Day.

NB: My previous May Day post is here.

(a) It’s been intriguing to see the focus of political discussion narrow to the Parliamentary dramatics. Journalists – and one suspects, many Liberal MPs – appear to have completely lost sight of the effect that Turnbull’s stand might be having on the public. I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a lot of sympathy for him and his position. Yet those normally obsessed with Newspoll now equate politics with a bunch of lunatics gathered in Nick Minchin’s office, rather than even stopping to think about how all this might be playing with voters. I wonder whether Newspoll will be asking questions about the Liberal leadership this weekend – its owners might not like the answers;

(b) The Liberal Right have shown themselves to be completely unelectable crazies. Liberals are not Republicans and Australia is not America. This appears to be news to some, and it’s hard to know why;

(c) Conversely, text messages and phone calls and emails from Liberal party members and Andrew Bolt’s followers do not equate to a shift in public opinion. The Libs’ only chance of being an effective opposition, and gathering votes in the centre, is to go with Turnbull’s position. The much vaunted ‘base’ will not vote Labor in a pink fit, and a stack of Liberal seats would be at risk if a Leader is elected who is a reactionary on Howard era issues such as climate change denialism and industrial relations. That was clear enough from Kevin Andrews’ press conference where most questions were about the past, and his right wing stance. This is John Howard’s poisonous legacy to his party;

(d) Talk of Turnbull’s ‘management style’ is merely code for the Liberal right refusing to be led by one not of their own. ‘Consultation’ means caving in to dinosaurs. Who’s really the arrogant one in this equation? More likely to be Nick Minchin and his mates;

(e) If Turnbull is toppled tomorrow or on Monday, and leaves Parliament, who really believes an Abbott led Liberal Party would retain Wentworth in a by-election? This is the craziness – Members like Michael Johnson in Ryan calling for Turnbull’s ousting while holding a ‘leafy’ and very marginal seat which has many moderate Liberal voters. It’s not the only one. Kelly O’Dwyer in Higgins, for instance, is going to face a lot of pressure to take a stand on climate change and the ETS in the lead up to the by-election for Peter Costello’s former seat. The Liberals’ actual base is multiple and plural, and they can’t hold it by playing only to the revanchists.

Update: Turnbull’s press conference is now on YouTube.

Elsewhere: Politically Homeless.

Elsewhere: Club Troppo, The Stump.

Update: Fresh post – Abbott will stand for the leadership on Monday.

Why is there still such a pay gap between men and women in full-time paid work?

This working week is still catch-up time for women on average weekly ordinary-time earnings. Until Tuesday September 1 they will earn less than men did to last June 30. So a coalition of women’s groups is asking for action to close the pay gap. The gender gap was reduced by 19% between 1972-79 (up to 80%), after the male minimum wage was abolished and equal pay for work of equal value approved. It has been up to 86% and now it’s back to 82.5%. So why is this happening, considering women are now better educated, more likely to be in paid work and there are measures in place supposedly to deal with prejudice?

The figures from various industries are interesting and counter the idea that most of the gap is just that women work fewer hours and years. Even when women are in the same industries as men, they earn less, but ABS figures show the gap is biggest in the male-dominated areas, e.g.

Finance 31%, property and business services 26%

mining 25%, government 7%, education 10%

hospitality 12%

In 2008, the pay gap between men and women in finance grew from 24% to 28%, which raises an interesting question about the effects of global financial crisis and who has benefited, after maybe contributing to its causation?

And it’s not the arrival of family responsibilities as new graduates often show clear gender differences, even in the same professional areas, e.g. law and medicine. There is evidence that 40 years after the first decision started the process of equal pay for work of equal value, we are still not there.

The facts are that the cultures of the workplace, community and related attitudes of men and women have not shifted as dramatically as the public rhetoric suggests. We still have a workplace model that survives almost unchanged since the industrial revolution when men first moved out of the home and into the workplace. This became the public sphere and became more important and regulated than what was left outside.

Workplace reform shortened official hours (but they’ve gone up unofficially), emphasised the value of hours worked (the more the better) and assumed the presentism (being there) was an unquestioned good, even when technology offered wider options. The private sphere and its needs were excluded except for some idea of family wages, now defunct. Changes of assumptions about good workers, good bosses, hours and place based locations shifted marginally and women who joined were expected to “fit in” with some minor adjustments.

So it is not surprising we are still under-paid for similar jobs. There are bits that could be fixed by using existing legal and educations processes that can be used to alleviate the differences. Signals of continued discrimination include:

* Women get paid less for the same jobs, sometimes despite better qualifications and experience, often because they don’t ask for more
* Women are less likely to apply for higher-paid positions but tend to more qualified when they do
* Women tend to do many lower-paid jobs because they echo the feminine private roles; e.g. care and support roles and few men will do them
* These types of jobs are paid less than similar skill jobs usually done by men; e.g. child care versus car care because feminised skills are undervalued
* Women are more often in publicly funded jobs in NGOs, etc, which pay minimum wage rates and awards.

Harder to fix assumptions include deeply held views about what is highly valued in the workplaces and out of them:
* Full-time work hours are overly long and not getting any shorter and people ignore the higher productivity of most part-timers
* Women still do most of the unpaid care/domestic work, so cut back paid-work hours to take this on
* Women still have to conform to different criteria of male-defined workplace behaviours for women to be acceptable; i.e. need to be nicer not tough, not aggressive
* Workplaces cultures still value limited male-defined skills and credentials excluding “soft skills” as natural attributes that do not need to be paid for

Data for May showed full-time ordinary time earnings rose by 6.5% for males and 5.2% for females, showing how women’s pay is going backwards. So women’s groups are asking women to wear red to work next Tuesday to illustrate their deficit and give their boss a red rose to remind him we too have thorns, if this gap does not decrease.

Update: SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog, noting the appearance of sexism in the comments thread attached to this thread, which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, but is as disappointing as it is predictable.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/08/25/unequal-pay-for-work-of-equal-value/feed/ 171 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/07/07/fair-pay-commission-still-a-misnomer/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/07/07/fair-pay-commission-still-a-misnomer/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:53:18 +0000 Mark Bahnisch http://larvatusprodeo.net/?p=8861 Julia Gillard has criticised the decision of the Fair Pay Commission to award no increase in the federal minimum wage. She accurately notes that the decision will have an impact on other workers as well, because the safety net is the floor which underpins bargaining.

However, Gillard and Kevin Rudd might themselves bear some of the responsibility for this decision, which will – rightly – be a political problem for the Labor government. The Commission was heavily criticised by Labor in opposition, and next year it’s due to be abolished, its functions rolled into the AIRC’s replacement – Fair Work Australia. If the criticisms made of the process and of the narrow economic orthodoxy of its chair, Professor Ian Harper, have merit, it surely should have been open to the ALP to hand back the wage setting powers to the AIRC earlier. The ‘softly, softly’ approach to IR reform is full of contradictions, one of which will unfortunately now impact on those least able to afford to shrug their shoulders at the political game. It isn’t a good look for a Labor government.

Elsewhere: Via Andos in comments on another thread, a link to a useful interview on ABC Radio with ACOSS. The point is made that research from the OECD (and from other sources, I might add) debunks the notion that there is a strong correlation between small rises in minimum wages and unemployment.

Update: Matt C notes in comments that the FPC’s own modelling of its previous decisions shows only a minimal effect on unemployment of a decision not to increase the rate.

Elsewhere: Rob Corr.

Update: New post.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/07/07/fair-pay-commission-still-a-misnomer/feed/ 266 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/12/10/what-if-you-held-an-ir-scare-and-no-one-came/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/12/10/what-if-you-held-an-ir-scare-and-no-one-came/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:13:25 +0000 Mark Bahnisch http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/12/10/what-if-you-held-an-ir-scare-and-no-one-came/ I’ve noticed some wild leaps of logic, if that’s the right word, in the “analysis” of Julia Gillard’s Forward With Fairness IR bill. Apparently, everything that may have happened in the past that would scare employers (probably including a return to braces and steel capped docs among the well dressed unionists) will. In almost all cases, if you actually look at the detail of the legislation, the claims made are unsustainable. Ambit claims, presumably…

Andrew Crook had a good piece in Crikey yesterday tracing the origins of all this hoohah:

With business cosying up to Kevin, and Malcolm striving for popular relevance, a cadre of crack News Ltd hacks have been dispatched to wage an IR guerilla war by proxy. Union bashing has been the raison d’être of buttoned-up reporters like Brad Norington for years — when Norington refers to the dreaded return of the ‘IR club’ he could easily be talking about himself. But confronted with a watertight consensus after extensive consultation, the Oz has continued to push an adversarial line that attempts to revive the pitched battles of the 1890s.

…

On Saturday, Norington re-entered the fray, clearly miffed by the lack of love from the Australian Industry Group’s Heather Ridout. In an excruciating piece, Norington gets close to accusing the business lobby of false consciousness — a charge usually leveled at the Oz’s enemies on the Left. What looks like an off-hand comment about the “weird” direction the IR debate is taken as evidence of a looming stoush. Of course, Ridout’s overall backing of the bill remains strong, subject to qualifications.

The tone for the crusade was set by the solemn pontifications of Paul Kelly, of course. Whatever you may say about “class warfare” in this country, apparently the fight must go on even if the red ranks of workers and the corporatist captains of mainstream industry associations have effectively vacated the field.

It’s safe to say the bruising industrial conflicts of earlier eras have petered out, but not for the old guard at News, who’ve been relishing the chance to re-open old wounds. Even if the labour movement was able to somehow use Fair Work to revitalize, it’s doubtful whether unions, with membership in freefall, could achieve anything like the wage gains achieved during the 1960s. The business lobby knows this — that’s why it’s willing to placate the ALP’s union mates by allowing for the in-principle return of collective bargaining. Rupert’s warriors should be sleeping soundly — in a globalised economy the impact on profits of a piece of softly-softly legislation from Down Under will be basically nil.

The irony in this stoush with no stoushing partner is that an extreme level of frustration is on display – even the columnists are probably aware that it would be political suicide for Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberals to oppose the bill.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/12/10/what-if-you-held-an-ir-scare-and-no-one-came/feed/ 13 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/11/26/gillards-new-ir-laws-and-the-business-response/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/11/26/gillards-new-ir-laws-and-the-business-response/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:41:12 +0000 Mark Bahnisch http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/11/26/gillards-new-ir-laws-and-the-business-response/ Julia Gillard is certainly capable of a sophisticated negotiating strategy, and it’s been interesting to observe that the process of formulating the legislation to implement Forward With Fairness and replace WorkChoices – while managed largely behind closed doors – was accompanied over the year by a fair bit of crowing from business that they’d extracted more concessions than in the two documents released before last year’s election. However, the ALP caucus and the ACTU also belatedly secured more of what they wanted – particularly in last resort arbitration, multi-enterprise bargaining for low paid workers, good faith bargaining and union entry and records inspections rights. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if such changes were always contemplated, and certainly explicit attention to the needs of workers with poor bargaining power spread across a number of work sites (for instance cleaners or employees in light manufacturing) was part of the election policy. What is entirely predictable is the tenor of the business reaction, which you can get a sense of quickly by reading this story from yesterday’s Australian. Unions are back and the sky will fall in! In fact, the points business objects to really just serve to underpin bargaining. There’s an element of balancing equity with efficiency, which has always been part of the IR framework in Australia, but we certainly haven’t “gone back to the future”. In many ways, the legislation could legitimately have gone further in redressing some of the imbalance of power in the bargaining process.

If, although as one would imagine there’s some equivocation going on, the opposition allow the laws to pass substantially unaltered, the business whining will be futile. That in itself may push the opposition into a more negative stance. The passage of the laws through the Senate early next year could get interesting.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/11/26/gillards-new-ir-laws-and-the-business-response/feed/ 91 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/24/government-moving-too-slowly-on-ir/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/24/government-moving-too-slowly-on-ir/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:00:25 +0000 Mark Bahnisch http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/24/government-moving-too-slowly-on-ir/ …45% of Australians think so, according to this fortnight’s Essential Research poll. As a bit of an addendum to my earlier post about Julia Gillard’s speech last week to the National Press Club on the detail of the Forward with Fairness bills which will shortly be introduced into parliament, I should also note that many Labor MPs have been concerned by reports they’re receiving from constituents about continuing abuses of workplace power. This is more the everyday bastardry that WorkChoices encouraged, rather than the headline anti-union moves of big corporations like Telstra. A lot of voters assumed that WorkChoices had already been “torn up”, and there’s significant pressure on Gillard to bring forward some of the implementation dates for aspects of the new legislation.

The whole “keep business satisfied” implementation agenda might have seemed like a good idea last year. It’s not looking so flash now, particularly as the ACTU finally wakes up to the fact that they’ve effectively been locked out of the policy making process.

Elsewhere: More discussion of the poll at The Poll Bludger. Also interesting is the comparison with ratings of attributes between Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd (with the proviso that the data on Rudd dates from June). Turnbull will be worried at the 47% “out of touch” figure. How do you actually turn that around? Brendan Nelson didn’t do so by emoting and going trucking.

]]> http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/24/government-moving-too-slowly-on-ir/feed/ 16 http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/18/julia-gillard-and-the-unions/ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/18/julia-gillard-and-the-unions/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:50:40 +0000 Mark Bahnisch http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/09/18/julia-gillard-and-the-unions/ Earlier in the year, writing in On Line Opinion, I thought that Labor’s “Forward With Fairness” industrial relations policy was best interpreted as an attempt to entrench a new workplace settlement acceptable to all parties – and I still think that’s the Rudd government’s main game. However, it’s now becoming clearer that an element of union bashing is involved – the tired old Third Way game of establishing supposedly electorally popular distance from teh evil labour movement, and also that the “balance” being struck is tilted quite significantly in the direction of employers. Among other things, this explains the dissent in the ranks of unions toward the lacklustre public performance in holding Labor accountable from Sharan Burrow and Jeff Lawrence. It’s also becoming clearer – with the resurrection of demands for “statutory individual contracts” by Julie Bishop as a condition of Senate passage – that the model hasn’t succeeded in producing consensus.

Julia Gillard outlined the results of consultations and more of the shape of the policy which will be embodied in legislation soon to be introduced into Parliament in an address to the National Press Club yesterday. The transcript is here. Commentary is largely focused on the unfair dismissal changes for small business, and there’s a sample of the reaction in a good article summarising union and academic views in The Age. But equally important are the machinations going on in the Industrial Relations Commission over “modern awards”, where employers have been presenting what are basically award-stripping ambit claims, and some odd interventions from Gillard herself [the process was examined in a previous LP post by Senator Rachel Siewert of The Greens] and the rather weak protections for collective bargaining that have been outlined.

It’s all very well to say that Fair Work Australia will be able to make good faith bargaining orders, but if they’re only weakly enforceable, and if there’s no power to arbitrate in the face of, well, bad faith, then it seems somewhat of a fig leaf. The ongoing legal maneouvring Telstra have engaged in, which has just had a setback with employees rejecting a non-union collective agreement in a Commission ordered ballot, is a case in point. Differential pay offers (which have nothing to do with rewarding merit and performance and everything to do with de-unionisation), legal stalling, failure to recognise bargaining agents and “wait them out” negotiating are all weapons in the armoury of management strategy, and it’s far from clear from what Gillard had to say that these tactics couldn’t be employed by business under the new laws.

Many Labor MPs aren’t happy campers at the moment, among others. Kevin Rudd’s cosy meetings with Fairfax management have not gone down well, and MPs are concerned that their constituents have been let down. IR is going to be back on the political agenda in a big way in the very near future, and the sentiment in the community for employment rights and the union’s third party campaigning skills now represent as much of a political danger for Labor as they were a political plus in the 2007 federal election.

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