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.

Nancy Fraser on Feminism.

“What it really means is that they [mainstream feminists] want to be equal to the [wealthy,] straight, white men of their own class.”– Nancy Fraser.

Nancy Fraser [A]

Feminism is a part of the Zeitgeist and particularly among Australian – perhaps I should say English-speaking – identity Leftists it’s a thing, as kids like to say nowadays. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about it. So, I’ve been trying to do some much needed catch up.

I must confess some of that effort proved to be – to my surprise – rather rewarding, although what I’ve learnt from that exercise was far from being entirely hopeful.

A Worker’s Story.

The basic elements of the story: a worker complains about wage underpayment; his/her employer resorts to violence; co-workers side with worker; conflict ensues; unions intervene.

That story is common in capitalism. The latest version of it only adds secondary elements to the same script: the cast of characters use a foreign language, the action is shot on location in Adelaide.

The War on Superannuation.

Superannuation always was a dumb idea, from the very start. It’s not just that often super funds are terrible at doing what they are supposed to do: provide decent returns to account holders. It isn’t either that that poor job frequently costs account holders an arm and a leg; or that bosses steal the contributions their staff make to their super accounts; or that it creates a pot of money lots of greedy bastards have their greedy minds set on; or that it allows COALition governments to shower their supporters and only their supporters with all sorts of handouts, which then become untouchable.

Bad as all that is, it’s mere manifestations of the idiocy intrinsic in superannuation, not the main reason why it’s a really terrible, terrible idea.