My Blog

Author: Future Admin

  • Austerity Threatens Women’s Access to Paid Work

    In this commentary, originally published in the New Daily, Senior Economist at the Centre for Future Work Alison Pennington outlines how government’s austerity agenda has intensified the unequal jobs fallout and threatens to “turn back the clock” for women’s economic security.

    How the government is turning back the clock for women

    The increase in women’s workforce participation is the most significant labour market trend of the past 40 years.

    However, in the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, the gender boundaries of paid work are being redrawn.

    Worse still, the government is the one holding the pen.

    Women have suffered the worst labour market impacts since the shutdowns.

    Total employment fell by 7.3 per cent for women compared with 5.7 per cent for men between February and May.

    About 450,000 women have lost their jobs and 350,000 left the labour market all together.

    Women saw a 12 per cent decline in hours worked, compared to 9 per cent for men.

    This gender inequity stems from three main channels:

    This combination has created a ‘perfect storm’ for women in the workplace.

    However, instead of stepping up to provide countervailing support, the federal government is only exacerbating the crisis.

    This started back when JobKeeper was announced and excluded short-term casuals by design, which affects more women than men.

    And then, most recently the government targeted early JobKeeper cuts to childcare workers in what is a cruel double blow.

    Not only do more women work in child care, but more women benefit from access to affordable child care.

    The cumulative impact of Australia’s effective gender pay gap of 32 per cent (in average weekly earnings for all workers) and inadequate parental leave supports for cash-strapped families makes their work-care decisions clear cut.

    Without affordable child care, mum’s got to stay home.

    There’s more bad news on the industrial relations front.

    Last week the Fair Work Commission decided to freeze minimum wages for up to seven months, in the sectors with the lowest wages and most precarious jobs – which are, surprise, mostly women’s jobs.

    While women have been bearing the brunt of the economic impacts of COVID19, state and federal governments have targeted stimulus spending on the most bloke-heavy industry in the economy – construction.

    For every $1 million invested in construction only 0.2 direct jobs are generated for women.

    Yet $1 million invested in education generates almost 11 jobs for women.

    In fact, education investment creates more jobs for just women than construction creates for anybody: Man or woman.

    Job-generating spending for women is best directed to the public sector.

    Women make up 61 per cent of all public sector workers, with the sector supporting fuller female participation – women hold 54 per cent of full-time roles but only 35 per cent of full-time roles in the private sector.

    Not only would public sector pay cuts risk driving this recession into a depression, they disproportionately hurt women’s incomes.

    Even temporary wage freezes (of one or two years) compound into tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages compounding over her working life.

    And austerity pain radiates far beyond income losses for affected workers, reducing consumer spending (right when the economy needs more), tax revenues and enhancing deflation risk.

    When the largest employer in the economy cuts wages, it has a powerful effect for other employers.

    It’s not just a hunch, this is exactly what happened after the GFC.

    The unnecessary 2011-12 federal public sector wages caps cut the legs out from everyone’s wages.

    But the pain induced from pay cuts doesn’t end there. Because lower-wage environments breed insecure work.

    People accept lower-quality jobs or juggle multiple jobs to earn the same income. Women are much more likely to work these precarious jobs.

    Prime Minister Scott Morrison has acknowledged that COVID-19’s fallout has been harshest on women.

    Yet his government is pushing an agenda that will ensure there will be less jobs for women, and they’ll be worse paid.

    Economic inclusion of women must be targeted in a long-term, sustained public investment plan that mops up the private sector carnage and lets us build back better.

    The post Austerity Threatens Women’s Access to Paid Work appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Repairing Universities & Skills Key to Meeting COVID-Era Challenges

    Our Senior Economist Alison Pennington was interviewed by UTS The Social Contract podcast on how COVID-19 is reshaping relations between universities, government and industry. 

    Alison explains how the pandemic economic crisis presents significant challenges to Australia’s fragmented, underfunded and unplanned skills system wounded from decades of failed marketisation policies, and why sustained public investments in skills and jobs pathways will be essential to solving our economic and social challenges. 

    Listen to the episode on Whooshkaa. She is joined by Megan Lilly, head of Workforce Development at the Australian Industry Group.

    The post Repairing Universities & Skills Key to Meeting COVID-Era Challenges appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Unleashing a National Reconstruction Plan Fit for Our Era

    In this commentary originally published in the Newcastle Herald Centre for Future Work Senior Economist Alison Pennington explains why Australia needs a public spending program proportionate to the nature, speed and depth of this crisis, and outlines some priorities for a public-led post-COVID-19 reconstruction plan.

    Why governments must spend, spend, spend to save the Australian economy

    Our nation faces the most significant economic challenge in nearly a century. GDP will likely contract at least 20 per cent compared to pre-pandemic levels, with millions of jobs already on the scrapheap.

    Unbelievably, a top priority for governments has become freezing or cutting wages, public sector pay freezes and an industrial relations power play to kill the Awards system.

    Recent research on impacts of the NSW government’s proposed public sector wage freeze shows over 1100 jobs will be lost from workers’ lower consumption.

    Cutting wages and dooming working people to poverty is senseless. But governments refuse to learn from our own historical crisis responses in the GFC and the Great Depression.

    We recovered from the GFC better than other countries because government invested in keeping people in jobs (key word here is “invested”).

    Others countries that walked the austerity path were mired for years with lower growth and higher unemployment.

    But stimulus soon ran dry and critical failures of the business-led economy were painfully evident before the pandemic: declining business investment in new capital and innovation; the slowest sustained pace of wages growth since WWII; rising inequality; an explosion in insecure jobs and the labour underutilisation rate.

    It will be impossible for this emaciated economy to “snap back”. We need a powerful public policy response proportionate to the nature, speed and depth of this crisis. Discrete government stimulus programs will not cut it.

    But Scott Morrison continues to pretend his hands are tied: “if there’s no business, there’s no jobs, there’s no income, there’s nothing.” Market ideologues said this for 10 years during the Depression.

    They tried to convince people government was powerless to fix joblessness and protect living standards, heralding a private-sector recovery that never came.

    But there is something called public investment, Prime Minister. It’s what we did on a mass coordinated scale to ensure we didn’t return to the economic and social turmoil of the Depression.

    And it’s this fully-fledged comprehensive national government spending program we need now.

    Government must break the investment gridlock. There are many priorities for a public-led post-COVID-19 reconstruction plan including: repairing and expanding our public healthcare and education systems; a sustained public investment program, for transportation, energy, utilities, and social housing; and building our renewable energy systems and networks.

    We have the most educated generation in our history, and young workers have been disproportionately affected by the decline in hours worked and unemployment in this crisis.

    Let’s expand genuine career pathways before we lose a generation of skills, passion and potential.

    Universities have been decimated by the loss of foreign students and exclusion from the JobKeeper wage subsidy.

    Meanwhile, the disastrously privatised VET system cannot meet the needs of our economy for skilled workers. We need a complete reconstruction of the post-secondary skills system, with government funding injected into pillar institutions in both public universities and TAFE.

    Ensuring public money is targeted to people’s needs demands greater participation across all levels of society.

    We need to open avenues for collective representation – not shut them down. In the rebuild, we need new localised reconstruction and jobs plans, especially for regional communities rebuilding from bushfires, anti-union laws lifted and a new sectoral bargaining system to increase participation and coordination of workers across industries.

    The only actor with sufficient investment power and planning capacity to lead economic reconstruction is government.

    With the private sector wounded, it’s time we got comfortable with invoking direct tools of public investment, tools forced out of favour during a generation of market-worshipping neoliberal policy but which are essential to our recovery today.

    This is a historic crossroads moment.

    Should government refuse to take up the investment mantle they will plunge millions into misery only to endow a smaller layer of business the power to restructure a harsher, more unequal economy.

    In 1942, years before the war ended, our national government formed a National Reconstruction Department to begin planning for post-war rebuilding.

    We can unleash another national reconstruction plan fit for our era. One with a commitment to full employment at its heart, that pulls us through COVID-19 with stronger public services, and paves our way to a sustainable future.

    The post Unleashing a National Reconstruction Plan Fit for Our Era appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Australia Needs Universal Paid Sick Leave To Get Through the Pandemic

    In this commentary, which originally appeared in 10 Daily, Centre for Future Work Senior Economist Alison Pennington discusses the consequences of low paid sick leave coverage for worker safety and public health efforts during the pandemic, and reviews the merits of a universal paid sick leave scheme to address both COVID-19 and precarious work.

    ‘No More Heroics Going To Work Sick’ Sounds Fine Unless You Have No Paid Leave

    Remember the Codral ‘soldier on’ television commercial? “With Codral you can soldier on”.

    In 2008 a concerned citizen on a WA hospital pandemic influenza committee complained to the Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB), worried the ‘soldier on’ message would ingrain community habits that could undermine emergency efforts during a national/international pandemic.

    The ASB dismissed the complaint, agreeing that Codral was designed to self-medicate for “sniffles”, not for more serious influenza symptoms.

    Now fast-forward to the present day. The world is facing a global pandemic. It’s clear the decision has not aged well.

    Outlining plans to get people back to work, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy announced last week “no more heroics”. Going to work with a sniffle is now “off the agenda for every Australian for the foreseeable future”.

    I welcome Murphy’s sentiment. Changing social attitudes and behaviours is key to infection control.

    But sentiment isn’t policy.

    Murphy’s public health directive is out of touch with the reality for working Australians who, Codral or not, continue to soldier on in a labour market marred by precarity, low wages, and jobs without basic sick leave protections.

    In fact, more than 3.3 million workers have no access to sick leave – almost one in three workers. This includes almost one-quarter of the workforce employed on a casual basis. One million more are independent contractors, including many so-called ‘gig workers’ — better described as misclassified employees like food delivery drivers.

    Casuals without sick leave are often the most vulnerable workers in the economy. As unemployment surges they will feel increasingly pressured to work every shift they can. There are real financial consequences of taking unpaid leave from the workplace. The bills don’t stop rolling in. Rent needs to be paid.

    Even before the pandemic, going to work sick is not some benign workplace habit. Taking sick leave is perceived by many bosses as a lack of commitment to the job. Workers are often punished for absences with diminished opportunities and disciplinary performance management akin to bullying. This fuels high levels of presenteeism — even for those with sick leave entitlements.

    The new COVID-19 work regime is exposing society-wide risks of unequal sick leave coverage. About 30 percent of the workforce have the potential to work from home — predominantly professionals, managers and administrative workers. Insulated from contagion, remote workers are paid almost 25 percent more than those working outside the home. They’re more likely to be permanent, full-time workers with sick leave.

    Meanwhile millions of essential workers across supermarkets, transport, cleaning and community and social services go to work each day exposed to both income precarity and higher viral loads, all without the ‘safety’ of sick leave and secure work.

    The common factor in the two major workplace COVID-19 outbreaks at Cedar Meats and Newmarch House aged-care facility is labour hire: on-call work with no guarantee of future shifts. And no sick leave.

    To put it bluntly: in a pandemic, insecure jobs with no sick leave will literally kill people.

    The Fair Work Commission introduced two weeks unpaid sick leave for half the private sector workforce in April. Unpaid sick leave is, however, useless in preventing workers coming to work unwell if the outcome of sickness is still financial punishment.

    This is why Australia needs universal paid sick leave: a system that allows for up to four weeks of leave to account for the full incubation, treatment and recovery lifecycle of COVID-19.

    It’s easy to do this. The New Zealand Ardern Government introduced a sick leave scheme for all NZ businesses, organisations and self-employed people under hardship due to COVID-19 from day dot. Australian policymakers have been slow to act on sick leave reform, but it can act now.

    A universal sick leave scheme can be publicly funded and transferred to employers at a future date when they’re in better shape. To signal the transfer of obligations, the entitlement should be entered into the National Employment Standards (NES) — the set of minimum employment conditions covering all employees — with an additional scheme for independent contractors not covered by the NES.

    The elephant in the room is that government intends to plough on with a ‘bosses knows best’ industrial relations agenda that would expand casual jobs (without sick leave), cut wages, and undermine workplace coordination needed to contain the disease.

    But it will be impossible to resume economic activity without universal paid sick leave — lest we risk dangerous and costly outbreaks.

    Trust, discipline and sacrifice has been demonstrated by Australians to flatten the curve and ensure community safety. It’s time government reflected this good will in people’s working lives.

    The virus doesn’t care about the employment status of its host. We must combine principles of public health with safe, secure jobs.

    Taking a codral won’t help us soldier on through this pandemic. Legislating universal paid sick leave will.

    The post Australia Needs Universal Paid Sick Leave To Get Through the Pandemic appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • 93 Economic Experts Back Govt Wages Subsidy in Open Letter

    Signatories to the open letter include Bernie Fraser, former Secretary to the Treasury and Governor of the Reserve Bank; Professor Roy Green, former Dean of Business at UTS; Professor Andrew Stewart, Professor of Law at the University of Adelaide; RMIT Distinguished Professor Sara Charlesworth; Professor John Howe, Director of the University of Melbourne School of Government; and Rae Cooper, Professor of Gender, Work and Employment Relations at the University of Sydney.

    The open letter states, in part:

    “The coming recession will be unprecedented in Australian history – in both its speed and its depth. Without immediate action, we expect that 1-2 million workers, or even more, could lose their jobs in coming weeks. That would drive unemployment to 15% or higher, overwhelm income support programs, and leave hundreds of thousands of businesses unable to function – even after the immediate health danger passes.

    “We recommend that the Commonwealth government immediately implement a large-scale wage subsidy scheme, similar to those already enacted in several other industrial countries.”

    “The breadth of support we received on this open letter confirms the proposal is supported by a broad cross-section of Australian stakeholders. The Government needs to move quickly now to implement this measure, and ease this pandemic’s devastating economic effects,” said Dr Jim Stanford, Director of the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute, and author of the open letter.

    The wage subsidy proposal has also been supported by many Australian unions, business peak bodies, and other stakeholders.

    Bernie Fraser, former Secretary to the Treasury and Reserve Bank Governor said, “Australia’s post-corona economic resurrection requires the on-going preservation both of the skills and self-esteem of our workforces, and of our business and entrepreneurial talents. If Australia is serious about ensuring the readiness of our work-forces to spring into action when the time comes, it should provide appropriate support direct to those workforces, as several other countries appear to be doing.”

    Professor John Howe, Director of the Melbourne School of Government, said, “Wage subsidies are a longstanding and legitimate form of government support for job creation and retention. In the context of the current crisis, an urgently implemented wage subsidy program will help workers retain income and stay in employment, unlike direct welfare payments. And they are more accountable than boosting cash flow to employers, which may or may not be used to save jobs.”

    Professor Roy Green, former Dean of Business at UTS, said, “The duty of the Australian Government in these extraordinary times is to ensure that a short term crisis does not become a long term disaster for the nation. In fact, the Prime Minister has referenced the need to build a ‘bridge’ to a better, stronger economy. For this to happen, the bridge must include substantial wage subsidies to retain workforces for the recovery and provide them with an income as they reskill and reposition our industries for the future.”

    The full open letter and list of signatories can be viewed here.

    A catalogue of international initiatives to support workers, compiled by the Centre for Future Work, is available here.

    The post 93 Economic Experts Back Govt Wages Subsidy in Open Letter appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Public Sector Pay Freezes Could Push Economy From Recession to Depression

    Governments are devoting unprecedented resources to protecting Australians against the health and economic effects of the pandemic, but a contradictory push to adopt fiscal austerity measures is also becoming apparent. Leaders of governments at all levels — federal, state and local council – have already announced plans to freeze wages and cancel previously agreed pay raises for public servants.

    Key findings:

    • At least 35% of the purported ‘savings’ from freezing public service pay is offset by the loss of direct tax revenues that would have been collected as a result of higher income and spending by public servants. And considering other tax revenue losses from the resulting slowdown in broader wage growth, even more of those ‘savings’ are never realised.
    • Pay freezes in the public sector spill over into weaker economy-wide wage growth through three key channels: a composition effect, a demonstration effect, and a macroeconomic effect.
    • Freezing pay for even short periods reduces the lifetime income and superannuation savings of public sector workers by tens of thousands of dollars, because it permanently reduces their lifetime wage trajectory.
      • A 6-month pay freeze for a typical federal APS worker will reduce career earnings by an estimated $23,500, and superannuation accumulations by another $4000 or more. The longer 2-year freeze contemplated for Brisbane local council workers would reduce career earnings by over $100,000, and superannuation accumulations by $17,500.
    • Misguided public sector wage restraint in the aftermath of the GFC short-circuited an initial recovery in private-sector wage trends in 2010-11, and helped lock in a lasting deceleration of national wages after 2013. Since then Australia has experienced the slowest sustained wage growth in the entire post-war era.

    “Pay freezes are being imposed at the very moment when public sector workers such as healthcare workers, first responders, teachers and social service providers are performing vital tasks, at personal risk to themselves, to support Australians through the pandemic. Freezing pay for these essential workers is not just morally questionable — it’s also a major economic mistake,” said Dr. Jim Stanford, Director of the Centre for Future Work.

    “The motivation for public sector wage austerity seems more ideological than fiscal or economic: pay freezes are justified with appeals to ‘shared sacrifice,’ and a symbolic desire to ‘tighten the purse strings’ at a moment when governments are about to incur their largest deficits in history.

    “However, our research shows these arbitrary pay freezes are both unfair and economically counterproductive. Government policy should be driven by economic reality, not political optics.

    “Public sector wage austerity imposed after the Global Financial Crisis helped ‘lock in’ historically slow wage growth in the private sector in the years that followed. Since then, wages in Australia have grown at their slowest sustained rate in the post-war era.

    “Australia cannot tolerate a further deceleration of wage and price inflation. Inflation was already close to zero, chronically falling below the RBA’s inflation target, even before the economy was hit by the double shock of bushfires and COVID-19.

    “Economy-wide deflation is associated with long-term depression. Australia cannot risk letting any COVID-19 recession turn into a depression. At this pivotal moment, governments’ priority should be anchoring price expectations, supporting nominal incomes, and contributing to aggregate demand. Normal wage gains should be implemented in the public sector and encouraged in the private sector.”

    The post Public Sector Pay Freezes Could Push Economy From Recession to Depression appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • 81% of Australians support JobKeeper for all Casual Workers

    More than eight in ten Australians support extending JobKeeper to all casual workers.

  • Financialisation and the Productivity Slowdown

    Financialisation and the Productivity Conundrum

    by Anis Chowdhury

    There has been much angst at the slower or stagnant productivity growth experienced recently in Australia. Ross Gittins, the Sydney Morning Herald’s much respected Economics Editor, summarised some of the discussions reflecting on the causes and remedies of the productivity problem in his recent piece, ‘Productivity problem? Start at the bottom, not the top’ (SMH, 2 March 2020).

    The phenomenon of slow productivity growth is neither unique to Australia nor recent. It has been observed globally over the past few decades, especially in the developed world, as highlighted in recent reports on global economic health (e.g. United Nations, World Economic Situation and Prospects 2020, and the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects 2020). The trend accelerated since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-2009, as emphasised by Maurice Obstfeld, IMF’s former Chief Economist, at the joint BIS-IMF-OECD conference on weak productivity (10 January 2018).

    The UN report notes that “as firms around the globe have become more reluctant to invest, productivity growth has continued to decelerate.” It attributes much of the slowdown to significantly lower contributions from capital deepening (investment in machinery, technology, etc.). Subdued productivity growth is also proposed as one of the reasons for slow growth of real wages and falling share of labour income in GDP, contributing to rising inequality – although even more rapid productivity growth is no guarantee, of course, of rising wages or greater equality.

    The World Bank report observes that to rekindle productivity growth, a comprehensive approach is necessary for “facilitating investment in physical, intangible, and human capital; encouraging reallocation of resources towards more productive sectors; fostering firm capabilities to reinvigorate technology adoption and innovation; and promoting a growth-friendly macroeconomic and institutional environment.”

    While similar observations can also be found in the OECD and IMF reports, none offer explanations as to why this is happening, that reach beyond orthodox excuses – like uncertainty due to Brexit and US-China trade tensions. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS), OECD and IMF also included such factors as unconventional monetary policy (very low or negative real interest rates) and financial frictions (e.g. firm-level financial fragilities and tightening credit conditions) as possible causes of weak investment and the productivity slowdown since the GFC.

    Financialisation

    However, one can trace the deeper cause of the long-term declining trend in productivity growth since the 1970s to financialisation: that is, the dominance of finance over the real economy. This is visible globally in the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies.

    Beginning with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in August 1971, when President Nixon unilaterally withdrew US commitment to gold convertibility of currencies, the process of financialisation gathered pace in the 1980s. This coincided with the neoliberal counter revolution against Keynesian economics, and the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. All this ushered in an era of multinational corporation-led globalisation. In turn, this led to rapid growth of international trade, foreign direct investment and capital flows – all mutually reinforcing – and the consolidation of finance’s domination over the real economy.

    Several features of this era of financialisation have direct implications for productivity. They include:

    • Rapid expansion of financial markets, and the proliferation of financial institutions, instruments and services with the de-regulation and liberalisation of the financial system, blurring the distinction between speculative and patient investors;
    • The banking sector becoming more concentrated, less regionalised and more internationalised with the decline of mutual, co-operative and State ownership of banks and financial institutions;
    • Financial intermediation shifting from banks and other institutions to financial markets, thus the axiomatic ‘invisible hand’ of supposedly anonymous, self-regulating financial markets replacing the ‘visible hand’ of relationship banking;
    • Nonfinancial corporations increasingly deriving profitability from their financial as opposed to their productive activities;
    • Financial institutions increasingly becoming owners of equity, and real decision-making power shifting from corporate boardrooms to global financial markets pursuing shareholder value;
    • Managerial remuneration packages increasingly becoming linked to short-term profitability and share price performance rather than to longer-term growth prospects.

    These features, by and large, have adversely affected levels of real capital investment and innovation, due to the inexorable pressure of financial interests for the pursuit of short-term profits and dividends. Shareholders (most of whom are financial institutions) demand from corporations a bigger, faster distribution of profits. The lower retention of profits ratio, and share buybacks to boost share price together imply reduced internal finance for real investment, R&D, and technology upgrading.

    Corporate managers act in the interests of the financial sector as they too profit personally from increasing stock market valuations – often linked to reduction of employment. This has meant chronic job insecurity and underinvestment in on-the-job training. Increased insecurity also discourages workers to invest in their own skill upgrading.

    Thus, the overall effect of financialisation on investment, technology adoption, skill upgrading has been negative, with adverse consequences for productivity and decent jobs.

    Misallocation

    An overgrown financial system also costs the economy on a daily basis by attracting too many talented workers to ultimately unproductive careers in the financial sector. Talented students are disproportionately attracted to finance courses in preference to liberal arts or social sciences; moreover, bright engineering and science graduates are increasingly engaged in the financial sector, where they can earn many times more. Research at BIS shows that when skilled labour works in finance, the financial sector grows more quickly at the expense of the real economy – disproportionately harming R&D intensive industries.

    In his Fred Hirsch Memorial Lecture (15 May 1984), Nobel Laureate James Tobin doubted the value of “throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to the social productivity.”

    Rent seeking

    Luigi Zingales titled his 2015 presidential address to the American Finance Association, ‘Does finance benefit society?’. While acknowledging the need for a sophisticated financial sector, he doubted whether the growth of the financial sector in the last forty years has

    been beneficial to society. He argued on the basis of both theory and empirical evidence that a large component of that growth has been pure rent seeking.

    According to Gerry Epstein and Juan Antonio Montecino, the US financial sector captured rents “through a variety of mechanisms including anticompetitive practices, the marketing of excessively complex and risky products, government subsidies such as financial bailouts, and even fraudulent activities… By overcharging for products and services, financial firms grab a bigger slice of the economic pie at the expense of their customers and taxpayers.”

    Robert Jenkins listed more ‘misdeeds’ of UK banks. These range from mis-selling (e.g. of payment protection insurance, interest rate swaps), manipulation of markets (e.g. precious metals markets, US Treasury Market auction/client sales, energy markets), aiding and abetting tax evasion and money laundering for violent drug cartels, collusion with Greek authorities to mislead EU policy makers on meeting Euro criteria, and more.

    All this sounds too familiar to us in Australia after the Hayne Royal Commission into misconduct in the financial services industry.

    A drag on the real sector

    The power of finance has become a drag on the development of the real sector in a number of ways.

    First, the manner in which the financial sector has grown has not been conducive for

    real investment and savings. Finance has failed to act as an intermediary between savers and investors, and to allocate and monitor funds for real investment.

    Second, the growth of financial markets and speculation have diverted resources into

    what are essentially zero-sum games.

    Third, the rush to financial liberalisation and the failures of the regulatory systems produced more frequent financial crises, with increasing depth and width. An over-abundance of (cash) finance is used primarily to fund a proliferation of short-term, high-risk investments in newly developed financial instruments, such as derivatives — Warren Buffett’s ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ that blew up the global financial system in 2007–08.

    Thus, real capital formation which increases overall economic output has slowed down, as profit owners, looking for the highest returns in the shortest possible time, reallocate their investments to more profitable financial markets.

    With financial speculators now panicking in the face of the spread of the COVID-19 virus, in the context of inflated and debt-heavy financial valuations, we could be poised for another chapter in this repeating saga.

    Way out

    No amount of corporate tax cuts or suppression of labour rights in the name of structural reform will solve the productivity conundrum. What is really required is the taming of finance.

    Finance can positively contribute to economic progress, but only when the ‘ephor’ is ‘governed’ and ‘directed’ by State regulation to structure accumulation and distribution into socially useful directions.

    The earlier era of financialisation during the late 19th century and early 20th century ended with the Great Depression. John Maynard Keynes wrote in ‘The Grand Slump of 1930’, “there cannot be a real recovery . . . until the ideas of lenders and the ideas of productive borrowers are brought together again . . . .”. He thought, “seldom in modern history has the gap between the two been so wide and so difficult to bridge.”

    Fortunately, the policymakers listened to Keynes and regulated finance to serve the real economy. This produced nearly three decades of the ‘golden age’ of capitalism, ending in the 1970s.

    But the gap between finance and the real economy is now even wider and more difficult to bridge. It will require a lot of political will and courage to confront the very powerful finance capital which has changed the rules of the game to facilitate rent-seeking practices of a self-serving global elite.

    Dr. Anis Chowdhury is an Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University (School of Social Sciences) and the University of New South Wales (School of Business, ADFA), and an Associate of the Centre for Future Work.

    The post Financialisation and the Productivity Slowdown appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Go Home on Time Day 2019: Australian Employers Pocketing $81 Billion Worth of Unpaid Overtime

    The Centre’s 11th annual ‘Go Home on Time Day’ report also reveals the growing polarisation of working hours, between Australians who have too much work and others who can’t get enough. While 21 percent of Australians in full-time employment are working more than they want to, 48 percent of part-time workers and 64 percent of casual workers want to work more hours.

    “There is an epidemic of time theft in Australia right now and it is costing workers tens of billions of dollars, each and every year,” said Bill Browne, researcher at The Australia Institute and author of the report.

    Each November, the Centre urges Australians to appreciate the value of their legitimate time off by leaving their jobs at the end of their paid workday.

    “Today is the day we ask all Australian workers to go home on time. We need to put limits on our work – and push back against the increasingly common expectation among employers that we should stay late for free.

    “Our research has shown that employees are regularly staying late, coming in early, working through their lunch or other breaks, taking work home on evenings and weekends or being contacted to perform work out of hours.

    “Most Australians wouldn’t dream of working for 6 weeks without pay, but that is happening every single year in the average Australian job.

    The Centre’s 2019 ‘Go Home on Time Day’ survey indicated that even part-time and casual workers, most of whom want more paid hours of work each week, are still being asked to work unpaid overtime.

    “At the same time as many Australian workers report they would prefer more hours of paid work, unpaid overtime is an all too frequent occurrence,” Browne said.

    “In an era of wage stagnation, underemployment, insecure work and significant cost of living pressures, Australian workers cannot afford to give their time away to employers for free.

    “To end the epidemic of time theft, regulators must enforce existing rules regarding maximum hours of work on a more consistent basis, and provide workers with more choice to refuse overtime and work shorter hours. Workers, either individually or through their unions, must also demand that employers respect their right to leisure time – for their own benefit, and for the good of Australian society.”

    The post ‘Go Home on Time Day’ 2019: Australian Employers Pocketing $81 Billion Worth of Unpaid Overtime, Report Reveals appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.

  • Chronic Unemployment a Consequence of Deliberate Economic Policies

    New research from the Centre for Future Work shows that there is no statistical evidence for the long-held assumption that if unemployment falls below its so-called “natural” or non-accelerating inflation rate (the NAIRU)—currently thought to be around 5% unemployment—that inflation and wages will grow uncontrollably. The report concludes that Australia’s controversial NAIRU concept and it’s use in economic policy should be abandoned.

    Key Findings:

    • Australian macroeconomic policy maintains elevated unemployment in order to restrain wage growth and inflation, this is known as the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU).
    • There are around 3 million Australians who would like to work, or more work, but can’t: that’s more than four times higher than the official unemployment estimate.
    • The economic benefits of reducing unemployment are enormous. Every one-percentage point reduction in unemployment results in 134,000 new jobs, $10 billion in additional output, and billions of dollars in revenue for governments.
    • Monetary and fiscal policy should aim to steadily reduce unemployment to as low as possible, rather than targeting a certain minimum unemployment rate.

    “In Australia, we blame the unemployed for their supposed lack of skills and motivation but at the same time, use macroeconomic policy to stop unemployment getting ‘too low’ – it’s an enormous contradiction,” says David Richardson, senior research fellow at The Australia Institute.

    “Record-low wages growth, and Australia’s generally sluggish economic performance, make the need for a change in policy direction all the more urgent.

    “It is time for a fundamental rethink of Australian macroeconomic policy, which should instead be focused on restoring genuine full employment as the top priority.

    “Since chronic unemployment is the outcome of deliberate policy, the least society can do is fairly compensate those who have been hurt by this policy – raising Newstart would be a start.”

    The post Chronic Unemployment a Consequence of Deliberate Economic Policies appeared first on The Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work.