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  • Deteriorating Disability Worker Pay, Conditions Undermining NDIS

    Deteriorating Disability Worker Pay, Conditions Undermining NDIS

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    An urgent overhaul of poorly paid and casualised disability support work is needed to ensure the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s viability and protect participants from substandard care, a new report by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work says.

    Going backwards: How NDIS workforce arrangements are undermining decent work and gender equality warns deteriorating conditions for the quarter of a million workers supporting the scheme – which is increasingly reliant on digital platforms, third-party intermediaries and independent contractors – risk undermining its long-term survival.

    The Centre for Future Work’s report calls for comprehensive reforms to protect NDIS workers, 40% of which are casuals. Bolstering NDIS working standards would also make the scheme work more effectively for participants – and taxpayers – through reduced wastage and increased accountability.

    Key reforms:

    • Mandatory requirements within NDIS pricing arrangements to lift minimum pay for all NDIS-funded disability support workers under the Social and Community Services Award
    • Establishing a national mandatory worker registration and accreditation scheme for disability support workers
    • Requiring all NDIS providers to be registered, with registration requirements proportionate to the risks of service provision
    • Ensuring all NDIS support workers have access to adequate supervision and support, secure work and employment entitlements, and to collective representation and bargaining
    • Establishing portable leave and training for disability support workers
    • Reviewing funding and pricing so workers can collectively bargain for over-award wages

    “The NDIS is a major employer and a huge source of indirect jobs. But despite its size and importance to society and the economy, unfulfilled promises for workers – predominantly women – around fair pay, decent working conditions and career opportunities risk jeopardising the scheme’s sustainability,” said Dr Fiona Macdonald, Policy Director, Industrial and Social at the Centre for Future Work.

    “Limited regulatory oversight of the NDIS has eroded fair pay and working conditions. This has resulted in an overreliance on casuals, who make up a staggering 40% of workers supporting the scheme, and endure fragmented hours and poor pay relative to the demands and risks of the job.

    “Undercutting their pay and conditions does not just deter potential workers from joining the sector, it compromises the quality of support provided to vulnerable NDIS participants.”

    “Policy responses to date, including the National Care and Support Economy Strategy and the independent NDIS Review, are welcome. But the fixes proposed so far are fragmented and not enough to ensure the scheme is effective and sustainable, protecting jobs and people with disabilities.

    “The NDIS has great potential to do more for the people accessing and working for it, but only if we face up to the real problems that risk undermining its purpose.

    “Ensuring decent jobs within the NDIS is not just about economic sustainability; it’s about achieving societal equity and fulfilling the promises of quality employment and support made a decade ago.”


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    Going Backwards



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  • Going Backwards

    Health, Insecure & Precarious Work

    Going Backwards

    How NDIS workforce arrangements are undermining decent work and gender equality
    by Fiona Macdonald

    Author

    Fiona Macdonald

    Acting Director, Centre for Future Work

    Media release



    Deteriorating Disability Worker Pay, Conditions Undermining NDIS

    The disability support workforce is central to the effectiveness and sustainability of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

    Hundreds of thousands of NDIS participants rely on this workforce to provide personal support and care on a daily basis.

    The NDIS workforce is large and growing, currently employing about a quarter of a million workers, mostly women. Pay, working conditions and career opportunities in the disability support workforce are critical to the future of women’s economic equality in Australia.

    It is a decade since the NDIS was first piloted, yet the promise for workers, that the scheme would translate into ‘greater pay, … better working conditions … (and) enough resources to do the job properly’ has not been fulfilled.

    Rather, conditions of work in the NDIS are poor and deteriorating.

    The design of the NDIS, with its market basis and poor and uneven regulatory oversight, has undermined fair pay and working conditions for disability support workers and is threatening workforce stability.

    This briefing paper reviews this evidence and argues for significant reforms to address urgent problems arising from these design flaws and regulatory failures.



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  • Millionaire Tim Gurner’s Refreshing Honesty Reveals the Soul of Business

    Millionaire Tim Gurner’s Refreshing Honesty Reveals the Soul of Business

    by Jim Stanford in The New Daily

    Jim Stanford

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    Originally published in The New Daily on September 13, 2023

    Every now and then a window opens into the soul of the business community, and we catch a glimpse of the values and goals that shape the actions of the captains of industry.

    A striking example occurred this week at a business outlook conference sponsored by the Australian Financial Review.

    In a panel discussion, Tim Gurner – founder and CEO of property developer Gurner Group, and personally worth almost $1 billion – discussed the state of the labour market.

    In his view, historically low unemployment in recent years has undermined the work ethic and discipline of the people who construct the buildings that made him rich.

    “Tradies … have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 per cent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy,” Gurner said.

    ‘Hurting the economy’

    “There has been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around … We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy … Governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment … We’re starting to see less arrogance in the employment market, and that has to continue.”

    Gurner didn’t mention ‘inflation’ in his statement. We are regularly told by central bankers that lifting unemployment is necessary to control inflation.

    But in Gurner’s telling, the goal is to control workers, not (at least directly) prices: To re-instil a suitable fear of joblessness and dislocation, so workers work harder and demand less.

    Gurner’s remarks were eerily reminiscent of a prediction made by the great Polish economist, Michal Kalecki.

    Kalecki was a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes. He simultaneously developed theories of aggregate demand management that could prevent depressions and achieve full employment.

    A desirable cushion of jobless

    In a famous 1943 article, Kalecki explained that even though full employment could now be readily achieved through active fiscal and monetary policy, powerful business interests would reject that goal.

    They prefer to maintain a desirable cushion of unemployment, to keep workers in line and private corporations humming along:

    “Lasting full employment is not at all to [business leaders’] liking. The workers would get ‘out of hand’ and the ‘captains of industry’ would be anxious to ‘teach them a lesson’ … A powerful bloc is likely to be formed between big business and the rentier interests, and they would probably find more than one economist to declare that the situation was manifestly unsound. The pressure of all of these forces, and in particular of big business, would most probably induce the government to return to the orthodox policy.”

    Kalecki predicted the historic shift in economic policy that would occur decades later, led by thinkers like Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps.

    They postulated the idea of a ‘natural rate’ of unemployment. In their view, unemployment is essentially voluntary: Some people choose not to work at the market-clearing wage, supported unwittingly by minimum wages and social welfare policies that subsidise unemployment and discourage job searches.

    Friedman and Phelps urged government to focus on controlling inflation, rather than fruitlessly trying to reduce unemployment below this ‘natural’ rate.

    In modern guise, the theory has a less pejorative moniker: The Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). But it postulates the same idea, namely that unemployment must be kept high enough to discipline labour and restrain labour costs.

    Central bankers rarely explicitly discuss the NAIRU anymore. This is partly to avoid offending the public with the idea that they are actively working to raise unemployment.

    It’s also because NAIRU models have been notoriously unable to pin down any precise number for this mythical benchmark, making it useless for policy purposes. In most industrial countries after the 1990s, unemployment crashed through estimated NAIRU benchmarks with no impact on inflation – casting great doubt on the very concept, let alone specific numerical estimates of it.

    Nevertheless, it is clear that NAIRU thinking still underpins the current obsession of central banks with alleged overheated labour markets as the purported source of post-COVID inflation. It also informs their single-minded focus on suppressing aggregate demand (and thus employment) to reduce that inflation.

    Even bankers say quiet bits out loud
    Occasionally, even central bankers say the quiet bits out loud.

    The Reserve Bank of Australia’s new governor Michele Bullock recently stated the unemployment rate had to rise to 4.5 per cent (from 3.5 per cent when she said it) to allow inflation to return to the bank’s 2.5 per cent target.

    If inflation is still above 2.5 per cent when the unemployment rate gets that high, this will be interpreted as evidence that the true NAIRU must be higher than thought.

    Let’s hope they don’t resuscitate previous estimates of the NAIRU, which formerly suggested unemployment had to be 7 per cent or even higher to keep workers suitably disciplined.

    We should be grateful to Gurner for his refreshing honesty, which helps illuminate the choices being made in current monetary policy.

    Workers who expect too much are a barrier to his efforts to accumulate more wealth. He wants adequate discipline restored, and engineering higher unemployment is exactly the way to do that. And apparently, central bankers agree.


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  • The weak economy shows the Reserve Bank is not threading the needle

    The weak economy shows the Reserve Bank is not threading the needle

    by Greg Jericho

    Greg Jericho

    Chief Economist

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    We have now had two consecutive quarters of GDP per capita falling – hardly the soft landing the RBA wants.

    The latest June quarter National Accounts released yesterday showed that without the increase in population, Australia’s economy would have shrunk for two consecutive quarters. This, as Policy Director, Greg Jericho writes in his Guardian Australia column, reveals just how weak our economy is, and how massively households have been hit by the 400 basis points rise in the cash rate.

    The Reserve Bank has talked about trying to thread the needle of lowering inflation and delivering a soft landing. But with GDP per capita falling and real household disposable income per capita now 5% below where it was a year ago, it is becoming harder to suggest the RBA has achieved its aim.

    Even when including population growth GDP only rose at all because of government spending and investment. The private sector is struggling as companies run down their inventories rather than build up supplies in the hopes of increased sales in the months to come.

    The household savings ratio is now as low as it has been since the GFC as households do what they can to pay the costs of essential items and reduce their purchase of discretionary goods and services.

    The Reserve Bank sought to dampen demand from a misguided view that demand was driving inflation. Instead, we know that inflation has largely been driven by international prices and costs and from companies taking advantage of the situation to increase their profits.

    Rather than focus purely on inflation the RBA and the government now need to be most wary of rises in unemployment. We are not in a recession yet, but should the economy continue to fail to grow aside from population unemployment will inevitably rise, and the cost of the RBA’s strategy will be felt even more so by households across the country.


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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

  • Report Reveals True Potential of Fully Funded Public Schools

    Report Reveals True Potential of Fully Funded Public Schools

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    A new report from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work is calling for increased investment in public school funding to lift flagging school completion rates and spark economic growth.

    “The Case for Investing in Public Schools: The Economic and Social Benefits of Public Schooling in Australia” has found that the current inadequate funding for public schools is preventing students from reaching their full potential and is depriving the nation of the significant benefits of high levels of school completion.

    The report simulates the short-run and long-run economic benefits arising from the 15% increase in public school funding that would be required to meet the minimum resource benchmarks established through the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS).

    Key findings:

    • Inadequate funding is linked to falling school completion rates and declining relative performance in international achievement. Students from relatively disadvantaged socio-economic, regional, and Indigenous backgrounds are most likely to be affected.
    • Additional funding of $6.6 billion per year is needed for public schools to meet the SRS commitments adopted by federal and state governments a decade ago, a 15% increase in total public school funding.
    • With additional resources, the decline in high school completion rates that has occurred since 2017 could be repaired under a modest estimate, and further gains in completion (in line with historical trends) attained under an optimistic estimate.
    • The enhanced funding and resulting improvements in school completion could lead to employment, economic activity, productivity gains and social savings equal to $17.8 billion and $24.7 billion annually (in 2022 terms) after two decades.
    • These economic benefits are two to four times greater than the additional yearly cost required to fully meet the SRS for public schools.
    • Fiscal improvements resulting from these economic gains, such as increased tax revenues and reduced social expenditures, would eventually offset the incremental resources needed for full SRS funding.

    “Australia’s economic success relies heavily on the potential of our young minds,” said Dr Jim Stanford, Director of the Centre for Future Work, and co-author of the report (with Eliza Littleton and Fiona Macdonald).

    “Public schools play a critical role in ensuring that students have access to an education that provides them with choice and opportunity throughout their lives – regardless of their postcode or economic and family circumstances.

    “With stronger school completion and academic achievement, our communities thrive and our nation benefits from increased economic activity, productivity and earnings.

    “The total economic benefits arising from adequate public-school resourcing would be two to four times larger than the cost of meeting SRS funding standards. The fiscal gains associated with those economic benefits would ultimately offset the cost to government of improved public school funding.

    “Every dollar invested in public education translates into a stronger, more cohesive, and prosperous society. Let’s not rob our students, and our nation, of this opportunity,” Dr Stanford concluded.


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    The Case for Investing in Public Schools



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  • The Case for Investing in Public Schools

    Education & Training, Tax, Spending & the Budget

    The Case for Investing in Public Schools

    The Economic and Social Benefits of Public Schooling in Australia
    by Eliza Littleton, Fiona Macdonald and Jim Stanford

    Authors

    Eliza Littleton

    Senior Economist

    Fiona Macdonald

    Acting Director, Centre for Future Work

    Jim Stanford

    Media release



    Report Reveals True Potential of Fully Funded Public Schools

    Education has long been recognised as a vital determinant of both personal life chances and broader economic and social performance.

    Public schools play a critical role in ensuring access to educational opportunity for Australians from all economic and geographical communities.

    Public schools are accessible to everyone. They provide a vital ‘public good’ service in ensuring universal access to the education that is essential for a healthy economy and society.

    However, inadequate funding for public schools – measured by persistent failure to meet minimum resource standards established through the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) – is preventing students in public schools from fulfilling their potential. Growing evidence (including the latest NAPLAN testing results) attests to declining student completion and achievement in Australia, with major and lasting consequences for students, their families and communities, and the economy.

    In this new report, Centre for Future Work researchers Eliza Littleton, Fiona Macdonald, and Jim Stanford document the large economic and social benefits of stronger funding for public schools. The report measures three broad channels of benefits:

    1. The immediate economic footprint of public schools, including direct and indirect jobs in schools, the education supply chain, and downstream consumer industries.
    2. The labour market and productivity gains resulting from a more educated workforce.
    3. Social and fiscal benefits arising from the fact that school graduates tend to be healthier, require less support from public income programs, and are less likely to be engaged with the criminal justice system.

    Citing international and Australian evidence regarding the scale of these three channels of benefit, the report estimates that funding public schools consistent with the SRS would ultimately generate ongoing economic and fiscal benefits two to four times larger than the incremental cost of additional funding. For governments, the fiscal payback from those benefits (via both enhanced revenues and fiscal savings on health, welfare, and criminal justice expenses) would exceed the upfront investments required in meeting the SRS.

    Please see the full report, The Case for Investing in Public Schools: The Economic and Social Benefits of Public Schooling in Australia, by Eliza Littleton, Fiona Macdonald, and Jim Stanford.



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    Report Reveals True Potential of Fully Funded Public Schools

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  • For most workers, wages are still failing to keep up with inflation

    For most workers, wages are still failing to keep up with inflation

    by Greg Jericho in The Guardian

    Greg Jericho

    Chief Economist

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    Originally published in The Guardian on August 17, 2023

    While overall wages grew in line with inflation in the June quarter for workers in most industries real wages are still going backwards.

    The best news from the June quarter wage price index is that average wages rose 0.8% – the same as inflation. This means that after 11 consecutive quarters, real wages have finally stopped falling.

    That is the good news, but as Policy Director, Greg Jericho noted in his Guardian Australia column, for most workers real-wages kept falling. Only good wage growth in construction, mining, transport and warehousing, and the utility industries enabled the overall growth to be equal with inflation. For workers in all other industries, real wages kept falling.

    And for all workers, real wages in the past year have fallen sharply and are around 5.4% below where they were before the pandemic.

    These latest figures only serve to reinforce that wages are not driving inflation and there is no sign at all of a wages breakout. Indeed, annual wage growth fell in the June quarter to 3.6% from 3.7%.

    It highlights that we do not need unemployment to rise to 4.5% in order for inflation to get under the RBA’s 3% target ceiling. The current rate is more than consistent with long-term inflation of between 2% and 3%. Any further efforts to raise unemployment by increased interest rates would only hurt workers and households for no benefit.


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  • We need more than a definition change to fix Australia’s culture of permanent ‘casual’ work

    We need more than a definition change to fix Australia’s culture of permanent ‘casual’ work

    by David Peetz in The Conversation

    David Peetz

    Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow

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    Originally published in The Conversation on July 31, 2023

    The surprising thing about the Albanese government’s announced reforms to “casual” employment is not that they’re happening.

    It’s that employer advocates are getting so excited about them, despite the small number of people they will affect and the small impact they will have.

    That’s not to say the changes aren’t needed. Rather, true reform of the “casual” employment system, of which this is just a first but important step, has a lot further to go to resolve the “casual problem”.

    What is the ‘casual problem’?

    This problem is that most “casual” workers aren’t really casual at all — as shown by analysis that I and colleague Robyn May did, using unpublished data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

    The premise for hiring them is that the work is intermittent, short-term and unpredictable. But, as you can see from the chart, the last time the ABS collected these data, a majority of “casuals” worked regular hours.

    Almost 60% of “casuals” had been in the job for more than a year. About 80% expected to still be there in a year’s time.

    Only 6% of “casuals” (1.5% of employees) worked varying hours (or were on standby), had been with their employer for a short time, and expected to be there for a short time.

    Even now, some “casuals” have been doing the same “casual” work for over 20 years.

    Permanent ‘casuals’

    All this has led to a class of “permanent casuals” – a nonsense term. They should more accurately be called “permanently insecure”.

    The one thing “casuals” have in common is they’re not entitled to sick leave or annual leave, and they are in a precarious employment situation. Their contract of employment only lasts till the end of their work day.

    That means they have much less power than other workers. So little power, in fact, that barely half of them even get the casual loading they are meant to be paid in compensation for not receiving other entitlements.

    On average, low-paid “casuals” get less pay than equivalent permanent workers, despite the loading.

    Changing legal definitions

    Not many “casuals” have been brave enough to challenge this exploitative relationship. But when they did a few years ago, Australia’s courts agreed permanent casual work was nonsensical.

    To be a “casual worker”, there had to be no promise of ongoing employment. A court would judge this not just by what was in the formal contract of employment but also by what the employer actually did. If they kept hiring you, week after week, on a predictable roster, you weren’t casual.

    In 2018, mine worker Paul Skene challenged his classification as a casual worker, arguing he had done pretty much the same work, with a few changes along the way, for five years.

    The Federal Court agreed he wasn’t a casual employee and should be back-paid annual leave. Another mine worker, Robert Rossato, had a similar victory in 2020.

    Employer organisations were “outraged” by the “billions” in back pay they could be forced to pay for having misclassified ongoing workers as casuals. They lobbied the Morrison government to amend the law, and challenged the rulings in the High Court.

    The Morrison government changed the law in early 2021, to give primacy to the written contract, ignore employer behaviour, and protect employers from back-pay claims.

    Later that year the High Court overturned the Federal Court decisions, ruling it was the written employment contract that mattered. If that was worded a certain way, you couldn’t test whether a worker was “casual” by whether the employer treated them that way afterwards.

    Labor promised to overturn these interpretations, and that’s what this proposal does.

    What will the legislation change?

    The details of the government’s plan is still not clear, but it is likely it will seek to amend the Fair Work Act to revert to something close to the pre-2020 definition of casual work, with a procedural twist.

    It will again be possible to judge whether an employee is “casual” based on employer behaviour. And an employee who repeatedly works a similar roster can, after six months, demand “permanency” – meaning rights to sick leave, annual leave, and better protection against arbitrary sacking.

    The twist: until they demanded “permanency” they won’t be entitled to any leave. So employers will be protected against claims for back pay.

    Theoretically this could affect hundreds of thousands of “casual” workers. In reality, it will likely help far fewer.

    Suppose you’re a “casual” labour hire worker in mining. You can tell what time you’ll start work on the first Friday next June. You go to your employer — the labour hire company — and say: “Make me permanent.” The labour hire company says: “We can’t. You might not have a job tomorrow.”

    And indeed, now that you’ve asked, maybe you won’t have a job. So would you really ask?

    It will depend critically on the protections offered to workers who ask to convert, and how credible they are to workers.

    Most people only expect a few people to make the demand. Workplace relations minister Tony Burke says he believes only a “very small proportion” of “casuals” working regular shifts will do so.

    Part of that reluctance will be fear of the consequences, and part of it will be that many casuals rely on their casual loading. About half of “casuals” are on the award minimum rate, compared with 15% of “permanent” full-time workers. Most cannot afford to “choose” to trade the money for holidays and other entitlements.

    If you’re not getting the casual loading, you’ve got nothing to lose — except your job. If the power imbalance means you don’t get the loading, you won’t fancy your chances.

    So, it will just work for a small number or workers – though it’s likely to be very important to them.

    More needs to be done

    In short, this is a good step but more needs to be done.

    In most other wealthy countries all workers – including temporary workers – are entitled to annual leave. That’s not the case in Australia, because of the “casual” ruse. These laws will not change that.

    There should be universal leave entitlements. Sure, there needs to be a loading where work is unpredictable, and hence so short-term that leave entitlements would not be practical.

    But everyone else should get annual and sick leave, and minimum award wages should be high enough that low-wage workers don’t have to rely on the casual loading to get by.

    The challenge should be about how we transition to that situation.


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    “Permanent Casuals,” and Other Oxymorons

    by Jim Stanford

    Recent legal decisions are starting to challenge the right of employers to deploy workers in “casual” positions on an essentially permanent basis. For example, the Federal Court recently ruled that a labour-hire mine driver who worked regular shifts for years was still entitled to annual leave, even though he was supposedly hired as a “casual.” This decision has alarmed business lobbyists who reject any limit on their ability to deploy casual labour, while avoiding traditional entitlements (like sick pay, annual leave, severance rights, and more). For them, a “casual worker” is anyone who they deem to be casual; but that open door obviously violates the intent of Australia’s rules regarding casual loading.

  • Inflation is falling so let’s make sure we don’t let unemployment rise

    Inflation is falling so let’s make sure we don’t let unemployment rise

    by Greg Jericho in The Guardian

    Greg Jericho

    Chief Economist

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    Originally published in The Guardian on July 27, 2023

    Inflation is coming down fast so we should now shift our attention to making sure unemployment does not rise

    The latest quarterly CPI figures showed that inflation is falling dramatically and in line with that of other major economies such as the USA and Canada. This, Chief Economist, Greg Jericho writes means we have a prime opportunity to lock in the current level of low unemployment.

    Through the past year of the Reserve Bank raising interest rates, the main justification has been that the economy needs to be slowed in order to bring down demand pressures on inflation.

    What the latest figures reinforce however is that the major pressures have come from the supply side. Australia’s inflation is essentially following the same path as other nations. This is because inflation is slowing largely due to reduced world prices of commodities rather than any response to increasing interest rates.

    Indeed the largest driver of inflation in the June quarter was rental prices, which will have been in part due to investors raising their prices to deal with higher mortgage payments.

    In the past year, unemployment has remained at 3.5% while inflation has gone from 6.7% up to 8.4% and now down to 5.4% (using the monthly measures). The belief that we needed to raise unemployment to 4.5% in order to stop inflation from accelerating is a cruel approach that treats inflation in the wrong way.

    Fortunately, in spite of the RBA’s best efforts, unemployment has not yet risen. This presents Australia with a genuine chance to lock in historically low unemployment as the norm.

    Rather than pursuing higher unemployment in order to reduce inflation the RBA and the government should be pursuing policies that keep unemployment low while also reducing inflationary pressure. This can mean a price cap on essential items such as rents and energy, introducing windfall-profits taxes, and increased public housing investment to reduce housing price surges.

    Interest rates are not the only way to tackle inflation and in an environment where profits are been driven by supply-side issues and profits they are one of the worst ways.

    Full employment needs to be the target, not a mythical “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” that largely justifies higher unemployment and more ho0usyheold living in poverty.


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    Profit-Price Spiral: The Truth Behind Australia’s Inflation



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  • Hollywood actors showing that unity is strength

    Hollywood actors showing that unity is strength

    by Greg Jericho in The Guardian

    Greg Jericho

    Chief Economist

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    Originally published in The Guardian on July 20, 2023

    When workers are united, and able to collectively bargain, they can win good outcomes

    The Screen Actor’s Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strike launched last week against Hollywood studios has brought large attention because of the celebrities involved. But as Chief Economist, Greg Jericho, notes in his Guardian Australia column, there are lessons for Australian workers as well.

    For the past 40 years there have been consistent efforts in Australia and other English speaking countries to reduce to power and role of unions in industrial relations. And while we are often told that there are reasons such as a need for greater flexibility to ensure increased productivity, the reality is there has been no evidence that any of the changes to IR laws have produced anything like the productivity that was promised.

    The past decade has seen as much “flexibility” and reduced power for unions as any business group could (and did) desire, and yet productivity levels have plummeted.

    The problem, as the SAG-AFTRA strike makes clear, the reason governments and business groups have agitated against unions and the ability to conduct industrial action is not because of concerns about productivity, but because unions garner better wages for their members and faster wage growth.

    The past decade shows that as the number of days lost to industrial action have fallen, so too has wage growth.

    The Hollywood strike might notionally be about payment for film and productions on streaming services and concerns about AI, but as SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher made clear, it is truly about workers demanding respect, and to be honoured for their contribution.

    Australian workers should learn from the strike and see that unity and union membership delivers benefits – and we know this is true, because employers will do anything they can to prevents it happening.


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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