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Category: International & Security Affairs

Research branch

  • Interest Rates and the Federal Election

    Interest Rates and the Federal Election

    by Greg Jericho in The Guardian

    Greg Jericho

    Chief Economist

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    Originally published in The Guardian on February 17, 2022

    For the first time in a decade the coming election will be at a time of increasing inflation and talk of rising interest rate. And while it is clear interest rates are always a political hot potato, Greg Jericho writes in his latest Guardian Australia column that we should not lose sight of the need for government support.

    Inflation is occurring off the back of the largest government intervention and the lowest interest rates in post-WWII history. But while the economy is performing better than might have been expected when the pandemic first occurred it would be a mistake now to quickly reduce economic support from the public sector.

    After the global financial crisis, worries about debt and deficit took precedence over the strength of the economy. At a time when government borrowing rates still remain historically low, the need to improve productivity through infrastructure and support in areas such as education and health, as well as equality improvements through high a higher Jobseeker rate, should take precedence in the upcoming federal budget.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • Power, Not Just Supply and Demand, Vital to Future Wage Growth

    Power, Not Just Supply and Demand, Vital to Future Wage Growth

    by Jim Stanford in The Conversation

    Jim Stanford

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    Originally published in The Conversation on February 9, 2022

    Australia’s unemployment rate declined to 4.2% in December, and it could fall further (below 4%) in the coming year, barring further waves of COVID or other global shocks. This has some forecasters predicting a quick acceleration in wage growth — which has been stuck for almost a decade now at the slowest pace in Australia’s postwar history.

    Will a low unemployment rate be sufficient to solve the crisis in Australian wages? In this article published in The Conversation, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford argues that the historic restructuring of Australia’s labour market institutions over the last half-century (since the last time unemployment was below 4%) will continue to undermine wages, despite apparently tight labour markets.

    This table compares regulatory and institutional parameters today, compared to fifty years ago. Across multiple dimensions (including the minimum wage, the Awards system, unions and collective bargaining, and job security), workers have lost the bargaining power they need to win higher wages. Hence labour costs remain suppressed, and business profits hit records, even as unemployment declines.

    Labour Institutions Then and NowPlease see Jim’s full article, “Why there’s no magic jobless rate to increase Australians’ wages,” at The Conversation.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Labour Market Implications of Australia’s Failed COVID Strategy

    Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Labour Market Implications of Australia’s Failed COVID Strategy

    by Jim Stanford

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    As COVID and recession gripped the world, through 2020 and most of 2021 Australia recorded one of the best outcomes: lower infection, fewer deaths, and a faster, stronger economic recovery. That seeming victory has been squandered, however by the appalling and infuriating events of recent weeks. Purportedly in the name of ‘protecting the economy’, key political leaders (led by the Commonwealth and NSW governments) threw the doors open to the virus at exactly the wrong time: just as the super-infectious Omicron variant was taking hold.

    The resulting surge in infections has been among the worst in the industrialised world (worse than the U.S. now, as shown in the following graph from Our World in Data). The implications of this massive outbreak for work, workers, production, and the economy have been as predictable as they are devastating. One-third or more of workers in the most-affected regions cannot attend work: because they contracted COVID, were exposed to it, or must care for others (like children barred from child care and soon, possibly, schools).

    Our Centre for Future Work team has been active in highlighting the risks of ‘letting it rip’, analysing the failures of isolation and income support programs, and reminding everyone that keeping workers healthy must be the first priority in keeping the economy healthy. Here is a selection of our recent interventions:

    New COVID Cases per Million (7-day rolling)

    • Our Director Jim Stanford reminded policy-makers in this commentary in The Conversation that human labour is the critical input to production at all stages of value-added and supply chains, and if policy-makers acknowledged the centrality of work to the economy they would not have made such destructive choices. The article was reposted by the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald, and other platforms, and viewed over a half-million times.
    • Senior Economist Alison Pennington has exposed the flaws in government isolation and testing systems. For example, she highlighted the perverse incentives created by the NSW government’s punitive $1000 fine for failing to register a positive RAT test — never mind the governments’ failures to make tests available, and support workers (with necessary income benefits) to isolate. Her analysis was shared thousands of times, and featured in multiple news coverage (including News.com, The New Daily, and Yahoo Finance) of the flawed NSW policy.
    • Alison further detailed the flaws in changes to the Commonwealth government’s isolating support payments, in this commentary in The New Daily. By punitively excluding hundreds of thousands from isolation benefits, the policy will accelerate contagion and make supply chain problems even worse down the road.
    • Our experts have been featured in numerous other reports on the supply chain problems arising from the Omicron surge, including these reports on Channel 10, Today, The Age, ABC Online, and The Guardian.
    • Our Economist Dan Nahum linked the surge in Omicron contagion to the spread of insecure work arrangements in Australian workplaces. And the Centre’s previous work on how COVID has accentuated the dominance of casual and insecure work in Australia’s labour market shows that without urgent action to improve job quality, the labour market will be even more vulnerable to the inevitable future disruptions from this continuing crisis.

    Our team of experts will continue monitoring the dangerous labour market developments arising from Omicron, and flawed government responses to it. Please watch our site and follow our Twitter feed for regular updates.


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    Centre For Future Work to evolve into standalone entity

    The Centre for Future Work was established by the Australia Institute in 2016 to conduct and publish progressive economic research on work, employment, and labour markets. Supported by the Australian Union movement, the centre produced cutting edge research and led the national conversation on economic issues facing working people: including the future of jobs, wages

  • The Broken Bargain: Australia’s Growing Wages Crisis with Sally McManus

    The Broken Bargain: Australia’s Growing Wages Crisis with Sally McManus

    by Dan Nahum

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    In this episode from The Australia Institute’s webinar series, ACTU Secretary Sally McManus outlines the political and legal reasons why wage growth is so low in Australia.

    Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, wage growth in Australia was anemic.

    Historically, a working class with power to organise and bargain, and a broad commitment to the social wage ensured Australia’s wealth was shared. But the last 30 years have seen a dramatic shift of the share of Australia’s prosperity going to profit and away from working people.The shift in the distribution of GDP from the mid-1970s to today has transferred 10% of GDP directly from workers to corporate profits. That’s more than $200 billion – or almost $20,000 per waged worker – per year.

    Australians are facing a wages crisis, and Government actions and inactions are making this problem worse.

    In conversation with Australia Institute Deputy Director Ebony Bennett, and Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford, Sally McManus outlines the reasons why wage growth is so poor, and the way back for working people to once again be at the heart of a strong economy.

    Recorded live on 14 July 2021, as part of the Australia Institute’s 2021 webinar series. A transcript of Sally McManus’s speech is available below.


    Related documents



    Transcript

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  • If You Thought Employers Were Exploiting Workers With Too Many Insecure Jobs Before The Pandemic, Wait Till You See The Figures Now

    If You Thought Employers Were Exploiting Workers With Too Many Insecure Jobs Before The Pandemic, Wait Till You See The Figures Now

    by Dan Nahum

    Dan Nahum

    Economist

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    Australia paid a big price for the over reliance on insecure jobs prior to the pandemic. But as our economy recovers, insecure jobs account for about two out of every three new positions. In this commentary, originally published on New Matilda, Economist Dan Nahum explains why that’s a very bad thing – especially in front-line, human services roles. In the context of COVID-19, the effects of insecure work in these sectors, in particular, reverberate across the whole community with dangerous and tragic consequences.

    COVID-19 has been reintroduced into multiple aged care homes in Victoria, in part via staff who worked in multiple locations. We have been here before, but this time, the Commonwealth government should have prevented this channel of contagion.

    The poorly-managed vaccine rollout, including inexplicable delays in vaccinating aged care residents and staff, has played a key role in the current outbreak. But there is another policy factor at play as well: multi-site, insecure, and precarious work in Australia’s aged care sector.

    There has been a dramatic expansion of insecure work in this sector: including more than doubling the share of part-time jobs in the last generation, a huge shift toward lower-qualified, frequently precarious personal care positions (rather than qualified and registered health workers), and the widespread use of labour hire and agencies to provide short-term labour (rather than creating permanent, stable jobs).

    The recent report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety identified these precarious staffing practices as a major risk to the quality and safety of care. The Commissioners criticised the over-use of temporary or agency work, and emphasised the inextricable linkage between ‘the quality of care and the quality of jobs.’ They recommended that permanent, more stable jobs are most compatible with ‘developing a skilled, career-based, stable and engaged workforce providing high quality aged care’.

    It’s not just in aged care facilities that insecure work has accelerated the spread, and magnified the consequences, of COVID-19. In fact, insecure work has generally weakened Australia’s resistance to the virus, and undermined both our health and economic responses. In aged care and beyond, precarious work enhances risks that the virus is transmitted.

    Precarious jobs do not provide the training and stability to ensure that rigorous infection control measures are implemented and followed. Workers in those jobs have low and unstable incomes, and generally lack paid sick leave: the resulting economic desperation compels many of them to work, when they should be isolating. Another tragic example of the overlap between insecure work and COVID-19 contagion was the tragic failures in hotel quarantine – where a perfect storm of poor training, low wages, and insecure work clearly contributed to the virus’s escape into the community.

    Precarious work is more than just casual work – it includes part-time (especially with unpredictable hours), casual, labour hire, sham contracting, and gig work. Around half of all Australian jobs embody one or more of those dimensions of insecurity.

    Sick pay is unavailable in most of these roles: casual and self-employed workers have none, while even permanent part-timers accumulate only partial credits. When the pandemic hit, 37% of all employed Australians (including self-employed) had no paid sick leave entitlement. Unwell workers thus faced the economic compulsion to work when they should have stayed home.

    Workers in insecure jobs experienced the lion’s share of initial job loss in the early days of the pandemic, cruelly concentrating the costs of the downturn on those who could least afford it. Casual workers lost employment eight times faster than those in permanent jobs. Part-time workers lost work three times faster than full-time workers, and insecure self-employed workers (those without incorporation or without any employees) lost work four times faster than those in more stable small businesses.

    Now, however, the rebound of employment since the initial lockdowns is being dominated by a surge in insecure jobs. Casual jobs account for almost 60% of all waged jobs created since the trough of the recession. Part-time work accounts for almost two-thirds of all new jobs. And very insecure positions (including own-account contractors and ‘gigs’) account for most of the rebound in self-employment.

    So without measures to improve job stability, the post-COVID labour market will clearly be dominated by insecure work – setting us up for future economic, social, and public health risks in the future.

    Multiple job-holding provides further evidence that the labour market, for many people, provides only fractured, incomplete, precarious opportunity. In the December quarter of 2020, there were over a million ‘secondary jobs’ in Australia (where a person is working that job in addition to another role) – the highest in history. Secondary jobs surged by 27% from June through December 2020 (alongside other types of insecure work).

    These jobs now account for 7.2% of all employment in Australia – also the highest in history. As we have tragically been reminded, multiple job holding poses enormous risks: not just on workers forced to juggle multiple positions to make ends meet, but for quality of care and public health.

    Finally, the broader social and familial stresses unleashed by the pandemic have also been exacerbated by insecure work. This problem has a particularly gendered slant: women do most of the unpaid work in our society, and carrying this burden of unpaid work is made even more difficult when paid work is precarious and unreliable. Family demands do not suddenly disappear when there is an opportunity to pick up a casual shift. And for the worker, the consequences of turning down that shift can be damaging and long-term – likely leading to fewer hours subsequently offered by that employer.

    Avoidable outbreaks of COVID-19 provide further proof that Australia needs to roll back precarious work, and ensure all workers have basic security, stability and entitlements.

    Australia has among the highest reliance on insecure work arrangements of any industrial country. That precarity is not natural or inevitable, it is the result of deliberate policy choices. And in the wake of COVID-19, Australia should be making different ones.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • Why is Job Quality Worsening?

    Why is Job Quality Worsening?

    by Alison Pennington

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    Over time, insecure work has become more prevalent in the Australian economy. Key drivers of worsening job quality include: decades of economic policies which constructed unemployment “buffers”; insufficient paid work available for all who need it; reductions in the level of unemployment benefits to below-poverty levels, collapse in collective bargaining coverage, and failure to regulate insecure work.

    In this update on job insecurity in Australia, Alison Pennington reviews the ongoing erosion of full-time, traditional “good” jobs, growth in COVID-era “gig” work, and outlines how business trends and labour market policies have facilitated both lower worker bargaining power and a dramatic rise in insecure work.

    For more on reducing the incidence and consequences of insecure work, see our recent submission to the Select Committee on Job Insecurity, by Dan Nahum.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • Video: Myth & Reality About Technology, Skills & Jobs

    Video: Myth & Reality About Technology, Skills & Jobs

    by Jim Stanford

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    We are constantly told that the world of work is being turned upside down by ‘technology’: some faceless, anonymous, uncontrollable force that is somehow beyond human control. There’s no point resisting this exogenous, omnipresent force. The best thing to do is get with the program… and learn how to program! Acquiring the right skills (usually assumed to be STEM or computer skills) is the best way to protect yourself in this brave new high-tech future.

    But what if technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? And what if you invest in learning the current hot coding language, only to see it replaced by something totally different as soon as you graduate?

    In this 30-minute video, Centre for Future Work Economist and Director Dr. Jim Stanford takes on several myths related to technology and jobs.

    He argues that technology is neither exogenous nor neutral: innovation reflects the priorities (and the power) of those who have the resources to pay for it. By some indicators, jobs are becoming less technology-intensive — and this is undermining job security and living standards. Finally, we need a more holistic and democratic approach to skills and training: one that respects the all-round interests of workers as human beings (not just ‘producers’), and accepts that skills alone are no guarantee of decent, fair jobs in the future.

    The video is an excellent, free resource for adult education workshops, career development courses, and union meetings.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • Expansion of Employer Power to Use Casual Work Hurts Women Most

    Expansion of Employer Power to Use Casual Work Hurts Women Most

    by Alison Pennington in Michael West Media

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    Originally published in Michael West Media on March 24, 2021

    As women lead mobilisations against workplace gendered violence, the federal government passed legislation expanding employer power to use insecure, casual labour in its IR bill – laws that will disproportionately impact the pay and security of women’s jobs.

    In this commentary, Senior Economist Alison Pennington explains how new casuals measures and the government’s wider economic policies – including in industrial relations, childcare, welfare, and fiscal spending – significantly undermine the economic security of women, entrench pay inequality, and ultimately, increase their vulnerability to gendered violence.

    This commentary was originally published in Michael West Media.

    Crocodile tears no mask for Coalition’s economic war on women

    Well may Scott Morrison tear up as he relates how his daughters, wife and widowed mother drive his every decision. The facts are that every move of the Coalition government ensures women are poorer, more insecure at work and more vulnerable to violence on the job. The Industrial Relations bill pushed through last week is a final nail in the coffin for women. Alison Pennington reports.

    After a month of anger from women around the country about sexual harassment and the treatment of women in the workplace, federal parliament passed legislation last week that will strike a massive, lasting blow to women’s job quality and pay, entrenching pay inequality and exacerbating women’s economic insecurity.

    The mainstream media has mainly focused on the fact that most of the Industrial Relations bill didn’t pass. But the cornerstone of the legislation – and the primary reason for its inception, pre-pandemic, by business lobbyists – did.

    A new legal definition of casual work will allow employers to call any job a casual one. Jobs can now look and smell like permanent jobs, except that employers can legally engage you as a casual, stripping away your legal entitlements at will.

    So-called “permanency conversion” rights in the legislation are so weak that employers will easily craft employment arrangements to lock in casual jobs long-term.

    Employers will simply vary rosters

    Employers will vary rosters sufficiently to ensure that employees will never reach the benchmarks of six and 12 months of regular schedules that should lead to permanency. In any case, employers will be allowed to refuse offers on “reasonable grounds”. And small businesses, which employ a huge 44% of all private sector employees, are exempted entirely.

    The federal government’s new casual laws will expand the incidence of casual work. Women will disproportionately suffer in a labour market with diminishing opportunities to obtain secure, decent jobs because women are more likely to be in casual roles (filling 54% of all casual positions). And women’s vulnerability to casualisation is growing. Women accounted for 62% of all new casual jobs created in the period from May to November 2020.

    Casual workers are not compensated

    Despite claims from employers that casual workers are compensated for the loss of entitlements and lack of predictability in rosters and tenure, nothing could be further from the truth.

    Casual workers are, on average, paid far less than employees in permanent roles. Median weekly earnings of full-time casuals were 23% lower ($1080 per week) than those in permanent roles ($1400 per week), and 45% lower for casual part-time workers ($390 per week) compared with permanent part-time workers on $720 per week.

    The expansion of the power of employers to use casual work in a jobs market awash with many hungry mouths desperate for paid work means more women in lower-paying, insecure jobs.

    The government’s decision to subject the unemployed to a below-poverty JobSeeker rate means more women reliant on employers to survive. At every move the Liberal National party government is making Australian women poorer, more insecure and more vulnerable to violence on the job.

    Women return to lower quality jobs

    Treasurer Josh Frydenberg celebrates the recent fall in the unemployment rate to 5.8 per cent, claiming the recovery is well under way. But the detailed job quality data tell a very different story for women.

    Women workers are “snapping back” to a world of paid work on inferior terms compared with men – fewer hours, less pay and less security.

    Casual jobs accounted for 64.3% of the total growth in women’s employment from May to November last year.

    Alarmingly, more than half of all the growth in women’s employment over the six-month period was in both low-hours and insecure work, with 52.4% of total growth in employees in part-time casual jobs.

    Traditional full-time permanent jobs with normal entitlements (such as paid sick leave, holidays and superannuation) represented a dismal 10.4% of female employment growth from May through November.

    It’s a crude fact that as women’s casual jobs were booming, business lobbyists were pushing for passage of the IR Bill on the basis that employers “lacked confidence” to hire casuals due to legal “uncertainty”. Australia was simultaneously experiencing the largest and fastest increase in casual employment in its history.

    More fuel for gender pay gap fire

    The consequences of an employment recovery overwhelmingly concentrated in part-time and casual jobs for women is more fuel for the gender pay gap fire.

    The gender pay gap is most often measured by comparing the earnings of men and women in full-time jobs. But women face persistent barriers to workforce participation – including unaffordable childcare, lack of family-friendly work arrangements, and workplace discrimination. Consequently, almost half (45.1%) of all employed women are in part-time work.

    Measuring the gender pay gap using total average earnings data (including both full-time and part-time workers, and bonuses and overtime as well as ordinary time wages) indicates that the gender pay gap is 31% across all jobs – a more dire, but more accurate, measure of the pay gap.

    Ironically, the gender pay gap narrowed in the early stages of pandemic and recession. From late-2019 to May 2020, the gap between male and female total wage incomes declined from 31.4% to 29.6% – down by 1.8 percentage points.

    But this did not represent “progress” in pay equality. The gap only closed because more than 300,000 women in low-paid casual roles lost their jobs, which increased the average earnings of those women who were able to stay connected to the workforce.

    How good’s “snap back”?

    As the economy recovered from May last year, an influx of women’s lower-paying jobs widened the gender pay gap again, just as quickly. How good’s “snap back”?

    Instead of improving the quantity and quality of jobs for women, governments have actively pursued policies that will exacerbate pay inequality this year and into the future.

    In addition to casual work changes pushed through in the IR bill, two other policies create higher barriers to women’s participation in paid work, and suppress their pay once they get on the job.

    The federal government and all states and territories (bar Tasmania and Victoria) have imposed punitive and counterproductive public sector wage freezes and caps on their workforces. This suppression of public sector pay hurts women most because they account for 61.7% of all public sector jobs.

    The failure of government to provide affordable, quality childcare presents another major barrier to women’s paid work opportunities. After dangling free childcare in front of families early in the pandemic, the federal government cut supports and reintroduced fees after just three months.

    The return of full-fee, high-cost childcare prices women out of paid work. More than half of women with young children outside the workforce list childcare costs as a key factor in their decision not to work. A childcare system that lets a small number of profit-driven providers determine access denies families and their children access to critical developmental education and much-needed community bonds as people emerge from pandemic-era isolation.

    Rebuilding women’s economic security requires a very different approach from the bankrupt austerity agenda of government. Women need more and better quality jobs, free childcare, a superannuation system that provides genuine income security and an employment relations system that works to lift the quality, pay and safety of their jobs, not undermine it.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

    Australia’s Gas Use On The Slide

    by Ketan Joshi

    The Federal Government has released a new report that includes projections of how much gas Australia is set to use over the coming decades. There is no ambiguity in its message: Australia reached peak gas years ago, and it’s all downhill from here:

  • Yes, lockdowns mean lost jobs. But data shows that not locking down causes much more economic damage

    Yes, lockdowns mean lost jobs. But data shows that not locking down causes much more economic damage

    by Jim Stanford in Toronto Star

    Jim Stanford

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    Originally published in Toronto Star on January 16, 2021

    With new stay-at-home orders covering many parts of the province, Ontarians are settling in for a month (at least) of daunting isolation. Restrictions are also being tightened in other provinces to slow the spread of COVID-19, until vaccines can turn the tide of the pandemic.

    Despite accelerating infection and overflowing hospitals, many oppose the new restrictions on grounds that their economic costs are just too high. Business lobbyists grumble that health rules on retailers, airlines, cinemas, ski resorts, gyms, and more are onerous and unfair. Each sector invokes comparisons to others which supposedly get off easier. The common thread in their resistance is an assumption that strong health restrictions are deeply damaging the economy.

    As the pandemic rolls on, however, it is increasingly clear that the best way to protect the economy is to stop COVID. Yes: lockdowns reduce economic activity and employment. But not locking down, letting the virus run rampant, causes more economic damage — on top of the toll in lives and suffering. Anyone concerned about the economy should be pleading for fast, powerful lockdowns, not demanding a return to business-as-usual.

    The correlation between controlling contagion and economic recovery is clear across Canadian provinces: those with fewer COVID cases have achieved the strongest employment results since the pandemic hit. It’s not often that New Brunswick leads the nation in employment growth — but it did last year. Its near-elimination of the virus was the obvious reason.

    In this context, the protestations of premiers Doug Ford and Jason Kenney that fighting COVID must be “balanced” against the interests of business were always self-defeating. Even if they were motivated solely by desire to protect business, their top priority should have been stopping COVID. The faster and harder that battle was waged, the better business fared.

    The correlation between COVID suppression and economic performance is also obvious in international data. Several countries moved fast with severe but temporary restrictions on mobility and business; and they are now harvesting the fruits of their foresight. COVID-slaying nations like Australia, China, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan are already enjoying powerful and sustained economic recoveries. Their economies (forecast to grow by five to eight per cent this year) are racing far ahead of those still lurching from one wave of infection to the next.

    No one escaped the economic fallout of the pandemic. But after powerful action to suppress contagion, these countries are now recovering strongly and predictably. Elsewhere, the economic outlook is far less certain. In Canada, for example, our hopeful summertime recovery is already disintegrating: employment is now falling again. America, Britain, and other places where COVID suppression failed miserably are faring even worse.

    A particularly powerful illustration of the link between public health and economic recovery is provided by the experience of Victoria, the second largest state in Australia. After initial success limiting COVID-19’s spread, a second wave took hold in Melbourne (Victoria’s capital), infecting 600 people per day by early August. The state government ordered a strict lockdown, more severe than anything yet experienced in Canada: overnight curfew, closure of most workplaces, and strict bans on social gatherings and travel.

    The government was pilloried for its response — facing sustained attacks from its federal counterpart, business groups, and conservative commentators, all lamenting Victoria’s descent into “dictatorship.” Yet after 111 long days, Victoria achieved something almost unheard of: mass community spread was stopped, and new cases fell to zero by late October. Now the state economy is blossoming: employment rebounded 2.2 per cent in November alone, retail sales grew 22 per cent the same month, and Victorians are flocking back to restaurants, pubs, and malls. All those CEOs whining about Canada’s late and half-hearted restrictions must be drooling with envy.

    Leaders like Kenney and Ford were unduly influenced by short-sighted concern with business profits. Their reticence has created needless harm, for both public health and the economy. If we’d moved faster and more powerfully to limit contagion, business would already be better off.

    The economy is made up of human beings who work, produce, and consume. There’s no tradeoff between the economy and the health of those same human beings. The sooner we recognize they are one and the same, the sooner we can finally get serious about winning this battle.

    Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Vancouver, is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @jimbostanford


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    Commonwealth Budget 2025-2026: Our analysis

    by Fiona Macdonald

    The Centre for Future Work’s research team has analysed the Commonwealth Government’s budget, focusing on key areas for workers, working lives, and labour markets. As expected with a Federal election looming, the budget is not a horror one of austerity. However, the 2025-2026 budget is characterised by the absence of any significant initiatives. There is

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

  • The Pandemic is Our Clarion Call to Rebuild Good Jobs

    The Pandemic is Our Clarion Call to Rebuild Good Jobs

    by Alison Pennington in The Age

    Alison Pennington

    Senior Economist

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    Originally published in The Age on November 5, 2020

    Victorians emerging from lockdowns now confront Australia’s harsh COVID-era work reality marked by more insecure jobs, mass unemployment, and long-term work at the kitchen table.

    In this commentary, which originally appeared in The Age, Centre for Future Work Senior Economist Alison Pennington discusses what the pandemic reveals about Australia’s high levels of insecure work, new work-from-home risks, and how rebuilding more secure labour markets will be critical to creating more good jobs in our post-COVID recovery.


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    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

    by Charlie Joyce

    Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have