"The Howard Government's aim is total victory in the class war that has been largely quiescent since industrial warfare was replaced by arbitration as part of the Australian settlement established by Australia's early prime minister and founding father, Alfred Deakin."
Yeah, well funny how the party that doesn't go on about class warfare is the one that delivers better wage growth to the workers.
"For Howard, victory is predicated on the belief that trade unions are no longer relevant to post-industrial society. But trade unions still play a role in ensuring that higher productivity is translated into higher wages so that firms compete on the basis of technical innovation, not on cutting wages."
This sounds stupid to me. What evidence is there that increased productivity does not translate into higher wages if a union is not involved.
"In the new era of flexibility, we are closer to Howard's free-market utopia of flexible wages, prices and organisational structures. This is leading to widening income differentials and insecurity, and will create social, and eventually economic, dystopia."
A definition:
dystopia n : state in which the condition of life is extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror
Yeah sure Ken.
"Paradoxically, Howard's reforms, if implemented, will simply compound insecurity as all employers face the prospect of having to compete by cutting wages and conditions or risk being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.
Knowingly or unknowingly, Howard is trying to unleash a "race to the bottom" that will worsen Australia's balance of payments by making us even more uncompetitive in international high-value-added industries."
This is almost as good reading as this post from a Webdiary reader - one Nancy Peters, who is quoting from another "economist" (sorry it is long, but it is worth it for its breath taking implausibility):
"The US citizen will, over time, be reduced to earn the same wages as his Chinese and Filipino counterparts. He hasn't realized it yet, but he is being progressively reduced to sweatshop labour by being reduced to accepting a job at MacDonald's or Wal-Mart on US$ 7 per hour. Now manufacturing has been largely outsourced or relocated to China or other Asian nations. However, the time will come, maybe by 2015 or 2020, when his wages will be reduced sufficiently to make relocating manufacturing in Ohio an attractive proposition. Welcome to globalization and the New World Order. This is all wonderful of course if you are one of the owners of the means of production and the capital base. You can play one nation off against another, arbitrage wage rates and maximize profits, and reduce your labour force to compliant and malleable serfs. All this comes with the added benefit of "the Sword of Damocles" hanging over each employee's head in the form of a debt mountain. What a brilliant scheme this all is!"
Didn't One Nation used to go on with crap like this. Now it gets a run on Margo's Webdiary...
And Margo's profound comment at the end ..."Hi Nancy!"
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