neoliberalism - Lamp Online

Campaigns for safe staffing of hospitals and nursing homes are part of the union movement’s overall campaign for a fairer society, says Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary Sally McManus.

The ACTU’s “Change the Rules” campaign is aimed at giving working people a greater say over the rules that govern wages and working conditions, ACTU Secretary Sally McManus told the NSWNMA annual conference.

“We are talking about changing the rules that have led to record inequality, which is now at a 70-year high,” she said.

“Within that broad campaign there are lots of battles within industries and across the whole of the workforce. The one that you are having for safe staffing is one of those.

“Your safe staffing campaign for ratios is not just about your working conditions and you being run off your feet. It’s also about fairness for the whole of society.”

Sally said the share of income held by the richest 1 per cent of the population had been steadily rising since neo-liberal approaches began to dominate economic policy in the 1980s.

“The idea that the only people entitled to make the rules are those people at the top is an ideology called neoliberalism.

“The idea is that you get rid of everything that stands in the way of the market and everything that stands in the way of companies returning the best profits they can to shareholders.”

Sally said private sector wages were growing at 1.9 per cent per annum while prices were rising by 2.1 per cent.

“That means the wages of 85 per cent of working people are going backwards because they are not keeping up with the cost of living. At the same time, companies are earning big profits and the average pay increase for a CEO is 12 per cent.

“We need the power to demand decent pay rises and ensure we get our fair share.

“It is about organising, sticking together in our unions and putting enough pressure on decision makers until they agree.”

Sally said the ACTU was seeking two major reforms to achieve a fairer society.

“The first is to make sure everyone pays their fair share of tax so we have enough money to fund health and other basic services.

“A total of 732 profitable companies don’t pay tax in our country. And 62 people who made more than $1 million last year paid no tax – not even the Medicare levy.

“The second reform is to change your rights at work to make them stronger and ensure we have the bargaining power to win fair pay rises.”

Changing the rules would also help deliver greater job security, she said.

“We have a huge problem with job insecurity with less than half of Australian workers in full-time, permanent jobs.

“Employers can decide whether someone remains a casual forever or remains on a fixed-term contract that gets renewed over and over again.

“Employers use labour hire to take away job security and one in ten workers in Australia are here on temporary work visas.”

She said the trade union movement had always fought for a fair go.

“Remember our history and all the times people have had to fight, in tougher circumstances than we are in now, to bring about fairness.

“It’s our historical responsibility to do the same. So be mighty, be unbreakable in our unions and let’s change the rules!”

Deregulation drives down wages – IMF

For the first time, International Monetary Fund research has acknowledged that policies that take rights away from working people have caused wages to fall.

Workers are missing out on wage rises because the deregulation of job protections has gone too far, International Monetary Fund (IMF) research has found.

In a study of 26 advanced economies including Australia, the IMF researchers found “a statistically significant, economically large and robust negative effect of deregulation on the labour share” of national income.

Research recently released by the Australia Institute found the decline of the labour share of GDP since 1975 was costing working Australians $16,750 per year each, on average.

ACTU Secretary Sally McManus said electricity prices, housing, childcare, transport and health insurance premiums were rising much faster than pay, which meant “working people need every cent of that $16,000 a year”.

“Right now, big business has too much power and corporate bosses and wealthy shareholders are taking more for themselves and leaving us struggling,” she said.

Australian economist Saul Eslake told the Sydney Morning Herald a number of influential mainstream economists around the world were now finding that job protection deregulation had gone too far and the evidence presented by IMF researchers was “difficult to ignore”.

In August, workplace relations Professor Emeritus Joe Isaac AO, FASSA from University of Melbourne argued workers and unions need more power to address the growing problem of wages falling behind productivity growth.

“Although a number of factors appear to have been involved in this development, an important explanation is also to be found in the change in the balance of power in favour of employers and against workers and unions,” he said.

“As changes in industrial relations laws have contributed substantially to this imbalance, a return to the earlier laws may be necessary to restore the institutional mechanism for wages growth.

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Globalisation, militarism and fundamentalism are driving global inequality argues Kate Lappin.

“Capital is not held in the hands of women,” Kate Lappin, a leading women’s rights activist, told this year’s NSWNMA annual conference. She noted that half of the world’s wealth is owned by just eight men, as a recent report from Oxfam found.

Lappin is the regional coordinator for the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), an organisation that represents 200 women’s rights organisations. She spoke at this year’s annual conference about the links between neoliberalism and inequality.

In recent decades, neoliberal ideology has seen the “barriers to foreign corporations and foreign investment moving across borders progressively dismantled”. The process has occurred in both developed and developing countries, she noted, resulting in “unchecked economic exploitation that has allowed inequality to prosper”.

As Lappin explained, neoliberalism has allowed companies to source cheap labour around the world. And this process has not only increased inequality between developed and developing countries; it has also led to increased inequality within countries.

Lappin noted that “in 1965 the ratio of a CEO salary in Australia was 20 times that of an average worker, now it is 113 times. In the US it is 345 times”.

The economic changes introduced by neoliberalism means the wealth of Amancio Ortega, the founder of the clothing chain Zara, is “82 million times more” than what a Bangladeshi garment worker who makes clothes for his company can make in a year, she said.

Wealth concentrated in the hands of corporations

Recent decades have seen global wealth concentrated in corporations: now 69 of the world’s largest economies are corporations, Lappin told NSWNMA annual conference. And 10 of the world’s wealthiest corporations together have more wealth than 180 countries combined.

This concentration of capital in corporations has given business disproportionate power in the political and social decision making of individual countries. “Capital gives you power – democratic power, economic power or personal power,” observed Lappin.

Lappin pointed to corporations using legal action to protect profits in developing countries. A French company suing Egypt for raising the minimum wage, and Chevron suing Ecuador for a bill of $9.5 billion to clean up environmental contamination are just two examples of corporations trying to exert power over nations.

Unfettered by national boundaries and restrictions on investment and employment, land in developing countries has also increasingly been purchased by big agri-business, she said.

This “land grab” has disproportionately affected women, who’ve previously made a living out of local plots. Now these workers are being “pushed into the production chain for low wages”.

With so much capital in the hands of large corporations, governments have become indebted to powerful interests. Big corporations seeking low tax havens have successfully pushed for advantageous tax systems in developing countries, Lappin said. The low tax ratios of Asian countries average 14.8 per cent, compared to Australia’s tax ratio of 27.8 per cent and an OECD average 34.2 per cent.

Relatively low taxation means less money for basic health and education services, which disproportionately impacts women. And as the gender pay gap widens, families focus more of their money and resources on boys, who are seen to have a greater earning potential.

Lappin said the APWLD has estimated that a truly sustainable future requires a major investment in services. The APWLD is calling for “663 million more health care workers and 340 million child care workers globally”.

Neoliberalism drives inequality

With women overrepresented amongst the world’s poorest, the links between capitalism and patriarchy are clear to her member organisations, Lappin said. The APWLD sees a link between neoliberalism, growing inequality and issues such as a rise in women being trafficked.

In thinking about systems that “drive inequality”, Lappin said APWLD member organisations “have identified a nexus of three global structures that work with patriarchy to drive inequality, and that is globalisation, militarism and fundamentalism”.

Together, these trends are leading us not just to a crisis of gender inequality, but to an environmental crisis, Lappin said. “When we organise the global economy through GDP only, and consumption is the only way we can imagine that we can increase living standards, we will end up with both the climate itself changing and people increasingly pushed off their land.”

Encouragingly, Lappin said the feminist movement in the Asia Pacific is organising with other social movements to challenge globalisation on behalf of women in the region. She said the way forward can be found in the history of solidarity strikes that changed the world.

Lappin pointed to the Australian maritime workers who boycotted Dutch vessels between 1945 and 1949 in support of Indonesia independence, the international strikes against apartheid, the Sydney Green Bans in the 1970s and, more recently, the Polish women’s strike against abortion bans.

“If patriarchy is the system that uses fear and threats to create a kind of global economic political and social order, what is the opposite of patriarchy?” Lappin asked.

“For us, it is solidarity.”

Staffing for fairness

Solidarity: the antidote to inequality