Workers’ Mail: IR Omnibus Bill and Superannuation.

 
Michele O’Neil, ACTU President, emailed workers these days. I want to share some passages from her email, so as to explain Australian readers the situation we face and to ask for their help.

O’Neil explains what the Morrison regime wants with their IR Omnibus Bill:

• “Give employers the power to bring in workplace agreements that reduce workers’ job security and cut take home pay and conditions. Specifically, the Bill will allow workplace agreements to be exempt from the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT).
• “Wreck secure jobs by giving employers the power to wrongly classify workers as casuals even when they have ongoing regular work.
• “Remove overtime payments and certainty about hours from part time workers.
• “Hand multinational corporations the power to dictate wages and working conditions through 8-year long ‘Greenfield’ agreements - leaving workers on large construction projects with no say over their conditions and rights, and no ability to address serious work health and safety concerns.
• “Weaken the wage theft laws that are in place in Victoria and Queensland.”

I subscribe to her appraisal and will try to complement it.

It’s not like the future, before those IR reforms, looked rosy for Australian workers. Currently wages growth is 1.4% (ABS last September) and is forecast to remain under 2% in nominal terms until the end of 2022 – according to RBA Governor Philip Lowe (last February 3). The forecast of Deloitte Access Economics, however, manages to be less upbeat: last January they reported we could have to wait for up to five years to have wages growth of 2%.

And get this, even if wages growth were to rise back to 2%, whether in two or five or 20 years, 2%-2.5% denotes a poor performance, even by our already subdued standards::

(source)

You can see in that chart something its author, Leith van Onselen, seems to be blind to: nominal wages growth has been falling almost in a straight line since 2007. On that light, forecasts of 2%-2.5% wages growth look not so much as a real improvement, however weak, but as wishful thinking: something like “Dear God, pretty please, with sugar on top, may wages growth stop stalling”.

But if Morrison and his gang get away with passing his IR Omnibus Bill, one can pretty much kiss goodbye even to that tenuous hope. For one, because enterprise agreements are a main if not the main driver of wages growth:

(source)

The real wage growth stagnation that has troubled Lowe for a while and that Onselen recognises might well be here to stay.

Unlikely? Maybe less than it seems. Indeed, it’s already reality for some workers. Last November NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet gave between 300 and 400 thousand NSW State Government employees very bad news: the Berejiklian regime decided to cap their nominal wages increases to 1.5% per annum, supposedly until 2023. For those workers, under-2% wages growth is already well and truly locked in; God only knows for how long.

Okay, but you are not a NSW public servant, so why should you care? The advice “Dirty” Harry Callahan is famous for giving is appropriate: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

----------

This brings us to another, closely related, topical issue. Ever since Tim Wilson started his crusade against the July super contributions increase, lots of people came out of the wood work to support him.

Peter Martin and Leith van Onselen are the latest examples.

The thing is Martin and Onselen don’t seem to understand what is it they are opposing. Never mind that, for they are damn sure to oppose it and are ready to argue that: so they frantically juggle words in an attempt to articulate an argument.

I’ll try to help them. Let’s begin with the basics: superannuation contributions guarantee is something employers pay employees, yes? If Martin and Onselen are generous enough to grant me that, then they shall agree too that that sounds kinda like wages.

That is because the super contribution is a part of the total remuneration workers earn. The difference between wages and super contributions is that bosses pay wages directly to workers, but deposit super contributions to workers’ super accounts on their behalf. Either way, once effectively paid, that money belongs to workers.

So? Simple. Let’s go back to the NSW public servants example. To the Berejiklian 1.5% wage rise one would need to add the already legislated super contributions increase of 0.5% to get the growth rate in NSW public servants remuneration: 2.0% altogether. Scrap the 0.5% – as Martin and Onselen ask on Tim Wilson’s behalf – and NSW public servants are left with 1.5%. Full stop. End of the story.

That’s as easy to explain as it’s easy to understand. And pretty much the same is likely to apply to every single worker in Oz. So, feeling lucky, punks?

----------

Cases can be made that superannuation sucks big time, and that this particular July increase in the super contribution rate from 9.5% to 10% could have negative side effects in the current circumstances.

I’ve myself already made the first case. I suppose it falls on me, a Marxist, to make the second case for mainstreamers Martin and Onselen.

Here goes. Under capitalism recoveries from depression require that capitalists invest. The easiest way is to make investment more profitable. Well, allow nominal wages increase, a little, not much; but make sure real wages fall. Capitalists profit at the expenses of workers, but that is precisely the point. Profit expectations lead to investment, which lead to production and employment: recovery.

The July legislated increase goes against that logic. So, it must be scrapped. Again, that’s as easy to explain as it’s easy to understand. No need to juggle words, no hand waving required.

Ah! But in making that case people may see that under capitalism, workers are always second to capitalists. I don’t think Wilson, Martin, or Onselen really want to make that case: it’s not very palatable. Thus, Jedi mind tricks.

---------

Let’s go back to O’Neil’s email. She began it thus:

“We’re not letting the Government get away with punishing workers.

“I’ve just been up in Townsville with these passionate workers to tell politicians from all sides of politics that the Government’s new bill is unfair – it’s going to hurt workers, and it’s going to hurt the economy.

(photo credit: ACTU)

“These workers were addressing the first hearing of the Senate Inquiry into the IR Omnibus Bill.

“The inquiry hearings are important because they give union members a chance to give personal evidence about how this Bill will reduce job security and cut pay for them and millions of other workers.  

“Now, we need to make sure that by the end of these hearings in a few weeks, Senators understand how extreme this Bill is.

“You can help by sending the Senate an email.”

Please, help us and if you work in Australia help yourself. This is the link to the ACTU email. To get involved, you can join your union and/or donate.

PS,

OMG, James Campbell – Murdoch-paid talking head – just went the full SJW today before my very eyes in “Insiders”. I could hardly believe what I heard. The bloke was all about the “other” and, without using the word, Aussies’s “rice-ism” (as “racism” is pronounced here). He’s been doing Identity Politics 101 and is eager to show it.

More seriously, David Speers made some wise choices: having called Sally McManus for an interview, he did not have Peter Hartcher as a panelist. Imagine poor Pete quaking with terror, fearing for his personal safety, as Uber-thug and militant McManus stepped into the studio.