Scott Morrison as Manager of the Economy.

(source)

The election campaign is on. Scotty from Marketing went to the National Press Club to spruik his credentials as economic manager.

In a long, long speech – so long, in fact, that Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce seemed to struggle to stay awake – Scotty uttered more than 5 thousand words, not counting his answers to the journos present for the Q&A session following the speech.

In well over the half an hour allocated to the speech, he spoke about a lot of things, among them “jobs, jobs, and more jobs”.

Amidst that logorrhea (not to confuse with diarrhea), the word “wage” – the main, if not the only, reason why people take on jobs – was used a grand total of … drum rolls please … 8 times. Do you think our wages are an afterthought for Scotty? What makes you think of that?

(Incidentally, seven out of those 8 times, the word “wage” preceded “subsidy”, so he wasn’t really interested in the money workers get, but in the money he saved employers from paying.)

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Now, God knows I don’t think much of Scotty’s cognitive abilities. But I believe his disinterest in wages, manifest in that speech, is not a product of negligence; I think it’s deliberate.

Look at the chart opening. Note that since 2013, when the COALition took power, wages have grown below the already miserly 3% mark. During the recent COVID recession it even dipped below 2% and only now, with the “recovery” it again surfaced above 2%.

No wonder he is not keen on saying the W word.

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Wage stagnation isn’t accidental either. Neither casual jobs, wage theft,or JobKeeper rorts are accidents. All that is the result of deliberate policy choices: “It’s a deliberate design feature of our economic architecture.”

 

And the thing is, those wages the chart above considers are nominal (that is, before inflation). Now, this is what inflation looks like:

 

(source)

 

You may not like that. I know I hate it. But we have to give Scotty and his gang this: they achieve their real, if seldom openly acknowledged, goals. Scotty from Marketing may not have known it, but he undersold himself: he does achieve perfection. It’s only that his perfection is not what we want.

As your paycheck fails to keep pace with inflation, you will need “jobs, jobs, and more jobs” just to remain where you are.

Join your union.