“maintain the adult rates of pay in Australian Pay and Classification Scales (Pay Scales) at their current levels.”
The reasoning given not to increase minimum incomes by the tiniest little bit is straight from the employers text book, the standard excuse quoted when a justification is needed for denying the lowest paid workers a pay rise, spiked with a little guilt trip for anyone disagreeing.
With economic times being as dire as they are, increasing the minimum wages would push the payroll expenses in some businesses to the point that they'd have to reduce their workforce, driving up the unemployment rate. So how dare you good for nothing commie support measures which would increase the unemployment rate?
Good question. Let me look to the former Goldman Sachs banker and now opposition leader for some guidance on this:
QUESTION: Is a freeze on minimum wage the correct decision?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, I respect the decision of the Fair Pay Commission. They obviously have some…have got to weigh up the arguments, the arguments for an increase against of course the impact on employment and they’ve taken that decision. I think it’s a reasonable one and I certainly support it.
QUESTION: So are lower paid workers better off earning less and keeping their jobs then?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Look, I think everybody is better off keeping their jobs.
This from the leader of the Australian Liberals (in comparative terms the Republicans, although in reality closer to US Democrats), the party with a history of giving preference to the big end of town over workers. The same old vanilla flavored junk phrases, learned of by heart during the many hours standing around lavish buffets with fellow champagne drinkers discussing the state of their hedge fund portfolios.
And so we hear that when times are lean we can’t increase wages coz it’ll drive up unemployment, in fat times we can’t because it’ll overheat the economy and put pressure on the
Reserve Bank to raise interest rates. No matter which way the cookie crumbles, minimum wages have their name for a reason, they must be kept to a minimum.In a fictional case of lets say a restaurant with 10 employees, 6 on minimum wages, increasing the payroll expenses by 3% would amount to approx $100 per week. Should a business with 10 employees really be in danger of going broke coz it doesn’t have the $100 pw, then quite frankly there is a good chance the firm would go down the gurgler of failed businesses anyway. That’s like the fuel price going up by 10c a litre. If you can’t sustain such a minimal cost increase without having to cut the number of employees, your biz had it coming. Lame excuse, to hold the workers with the least income responsible for bad management. Why not cut the owner’s and manager’s drawings and salary by $50 ea, and e voila, you got the cash to pay your 6 workers $15 a week more. How does that feel? All neo, all liberal? Now that’s what I call neo-liberalism.
3 comments:
juan
since i come from that fatal shore & have not returned (except totake part in a documentary on my work) in16 years - i feel when i read about it which i do on the internet - i feel nothing short of horror - i feel i was lucky to have lived & also betrayed that country from 1968 to 1975 - from little more than a boy to a man who knew he would leave it - because when i read about it now i feel horror, shame & not a little terror at what people do against their proper self interest
i know that that culture tho it appears to deïfy courage in fact only encourages cowardice - cowardice in the face of a power so corrupt & venal - it astounds me that much australian literature skirts around the question
corruption is as australian as peach melba & has been so from the beginning - from colonisation - governors & 'forces of law' who have demonstrated over 200 years a corruption worthy of the african countries they seem so frightened of - the recent 'events' of gangster massacring one another in melbourne with complete complicity with corrupt cop institutionally corrupt cops do not come as a surprise because in each region there is a long & sad history of such corruption
& that corruption is tied to a corrupt political class & never moreso than the last 30 years & never moreso in its treatment of the underclass - an underclass created by a polity that let generation after generation without possibility of education, of work, of a future & from my reading that situation gets worse
i work with the homeless here in france & often they dream of this country as a paradise & i have to tell them the ugly truth - to be a stranger there is to become a pariah, to be poor even worse, completely discarded
never has a culture been ss penetrated by a contempt for its own self interest - it has served its colonial master whether england or america & had generations of her sons slaughtered in the process
it is impossible to travel through flanders without feeling how a nation was destroyed by the mad dreams of gentlemen & contrary to the myth that destruction has continued
the only poems possible in australia are elegies - michael dransfield & bruce beaver have written many of them
poor fellow my country
remembereringgiap
Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: "we live" but "we survive",
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
A.D. Hope
rgiap, I hear you man, Australia is, just as it always was since 1788, a country based on class and race.
Thank you for putting into words what I had swirling around my head for years,
i know that that culture tho it appears to deïfy courage in fact only encourages cowardice - cowardice in the face of a power so corrupt & venal
Your description of Aussie culture, as harsh as it is, are well chosen and precise. Australians, happy to embrace their convict history, Ned Kelly as national treasure, are the same people who voted John Howard into office four times in a row, and then chose as successor the blond version of Tony Blair, who leads a labor party not worth its name. These prime ministers are presiding over an in parts racist nation, willing to partake in any war for which the US requests human ammunition, a nation which culturally is also more and more swinging from the traditional pommie nipple to the bigger US breast.
As you noted on MoA, the case of an aboriginal countryman being cooked to death in the back of a prisoner transport van on its way through the desert, is about es exemplary as it gets. The two transport officers, a woman and a man, with him having reportedly been involved in previous racist episodes, simply didn't give a fuck about that man, the same fuck many many other Ossies wouldn't have given. The maximum extent to which your average suburban thought process includes Aboriginals is that everybody is concerned about their mortgage and having black fellas hanging around is bad for real estate values.
Having said that, I found Europe to be not all that much different, and from what I can make out, neither is the rest of our "civilised" world. Auslaender in Germany aren't much better of, or an African living under plastic bags in the shrub on the French coastline.
I fear the world as a whole has made two steps backwards and needs to regain lost ground in all matters humanitarian and social. Way too materialistic, egoistic, plagued with tunnel vision.
Juan, I believe it was one of your posts on MoA that suggested that the US govt hand out $50,000 debit cards to every adult citizen. Your reasoning was near impecable and you offered an example (and a link, I believe) of something similar that had occured in Australia. I would be interested in looking at that link if you remember it. I intended to look at it at the time I read your post and simply got distracted by another post and didn't get back to it. Thanks if you can help me here. ds
aka, davidsheegog@yahoo.com
Re: r'giap's post reminds me that pretty much all govts from the beginning of time have been ongoing criminal enterprises, and yes, some are worse than others, and among democracies Australia and US may be the leading crime syndicates.
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