|
August 4, 2012
Big Business sure is going on and on about industrial relations, declining productivity and the Fair Work Act. It's the Gillard Government's fault. The ALP is refusing to change the regulations to increase company profits, reduce wages and decrease union power. It is the ALP that is responsible for the old culture of conflict and class division.
David Rowe
An editorial in the AFR spells it out:
Australia should have used the peak of the China boom to do the hard things required to set us up for the opportunities still on offer from our Asian century: if we can grab them. That would include forging the world’s best industrial relations arrangements that encourage a high-performance workplace culture. That is, we should seek to break from the adversarial and over-regulated workplace culture entrenched over the past century.
The AFR then says that the whitewash of Labor’s review of its Fair Work Act this past week showed we have done the opposite. The business-as-usual review by a panel of industrial relations insiders brushed aside concerns that Labor’s reregulation of the job market could have any role in our declining productivity growth.
The claim that Labor’s reregulation of the job market is a cause of the Australia's declining productivity growth is assumed not argued for. That the latter could also have something to do with an educated worked and research and development rather than lower wages ---is not acknowledged, despite a reference to the rise of the services sector as manufacturing declines and the wave of revolutionary technological change.
|
'The world's best industrial relations arrangements'? What on earth is that supposed to mean? How does the AFR suggest we judge - by evaluating the extent to which the system balances the rights of workers with the power of employers? I rather suspect not; for them, I think it's code for 'industrial relations arrangements based on the fiction that individual workers are free to bargain as equals with employers and therefore no third parties (like unions) should be allowed to interfere'.