Decline in bargaining power affects the workers’ share of the Australian economic pie
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has pointed to a reduction in the bargaining power of workers to explain a change in labour’s share of Australia’s national income. The Organisation’s Employment Outlook for 2012 shows that between 1990 and 2007 the share of wages, salaries and benefits declined by 3.8 percentage points and by 5.1 percentage points if the mining and real estate industries were excluded.
Many factors have contributed to the decline, says the OECD, including increased domestic and international competition, higher productivity and capital-deepening.
“However, a reduction in the bargaining power of workers has played a role. Australia experienced one of the strongest declines in trade union membership in the OECD over that period, as well as a significant drop in the share of workers whose wages were set by collective agreements or awards. Such trends are likely to have reduced the bargaining power of workers, especially the low-skilled. The decline in the labour share in Australia has also been associated with an increase in wage and income inequality over recent decades.”
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Of course this is why multi-billion mult-national corporations want to negotiate ’1 on 1′ with individual workers. A large or even a medium-sized corporation is already a collective, backed up by legal and human resources staff, detailed and extensive market knowledge, deep funds and so on. Who is going to look after the workers’ interests? Not the shareholders, not CEO’s and not executive management. The workers have to look after themselves and to do this they need to combine their strength. The situation will only get worse when Abbott comes to power and revives ‘Work Choices’ under another name and further nobbles the unions. We just have to look to the USA where real wages have declined in the past 30 years and the minimum wage is way below the poverty line. And even there, this isn’t enough for many Republicans, who want to go further and abolish the minimum wage.
Under BOTH Liberal and Labor the gap between rich and poor (and rich and average) is growing. Also taxation and superannuation changes which are spun as putting money into the pockets of workers all give much greater benefits to the rich.
The main reason we are going this way is not due to the Liberals (after all, in a democracy should not those who think that this change is good be able to vote for this?).
The main reasons is that Labor also support the rich getting richer, lower taxation, etc.
The big-con from the two main parties, which is supported by most of the media, is that Labor is left or centre-left, so that those who want a fairer and more balanced society can vote Labor.
Yes, the rich getting richer will accelerate if Abbott gets in. One of the reasons that the Greens are being demonised is to ensure that discussion is limited to how fast the rich get richer (Abbott vs Gillard), and any suggestion of moving in the other direction can be called looney or extreme and ignored.
It still pisses inane ideologue leftists like Mickey double-barrel off that Reagan and Thatcher were right.
Even unionists and traditional Labor men like Hawke, Keating and Bill Kelty accepted it and saw to it that organised Labor did as well or better than the productivity increases of the businesses that employed them.
Capitalism, property rights and free markets have saved more people from poverty than any other political philosophical theory in history.
Mickey boy would like to see the proletariat equal in state dependent near-destitution.
But “not as equal” as he and his fellow inner-city sandal wearing nomenklatura.
You can bet $millions safely that the GDP grew a helluva lot more than ~5% between 1998 and 2007.
Richard Farmer ‘F’ for Fail.
Even for a lefty you should be ashamed of a post of disingenuous drivel like this.
But at least you’re not a dangerous idiot like Mickey.
You just feed them
I guess that’s why the UK and America have such higher qualities of life, lower levels of poverty and sounder economies than socialist hellholes like Norway and Germany.
“So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”
― Milton Friedman
“With the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of capitalism, an extraordinary transformation took place in men and women’s thinking about the possibilities of life on earth, a revolution so radical that it is still far from fully understood.
With the collapse of the absolute state and the development of the free-market society, people saw the sudden release of productive energy that had previously had no outlet. They saw life made possible for countless millions who could have had no chance at survival in precapitalist economies. They saw mortality rates fall and population growth rates explode upward. They saw machines (the machines that many of them had cursed, opposed, and tried to destroy) cut their workday in half while multiplying incalculably the value and reward of their effort. They saw themselves lifted to a standard of living no feudal baron could have conceived. With the rapid development of science, technology, and industry, they saw, for the first time in history, the individual’s liberated mind taking control of material existence.”
― Nathaniel Branden
JamesKant has Association Deprivation Issues…… LonelyKant, VillifyingKant, SadKant. Marx (Groucho) had no such problem.
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