Jim McDonald's timely article provides some food for thought and contradiction to John Howard's preposterous claim during his 10th anniversary celebrations that he is working for the benefit of ALL Australians.
There are more examples around the country of employers abuse of temporary employment visas for 'skilled' labour...nurses and boilermakers in the N.T.due to the lack of forward thinking of the Howard Government mismanagement of Tafe and apprenticeships.
There is a crying need in the Australian Workers movement to regroup and go on the offensive using the only weapon they have: Solidarity.
Let's not forget Reith and Howard's agenda to smash the Union Movement during the Patrick and Government attack on the Maritime Union and their continuing actions with their Industrial Relations legislation designed to further weaken Union strength and deprive young workers protection from exploitation.
For a start, the Australian Trade Union Movement has to review it's relationship with the Labor Party and the political left.
For too long the Labor Party has actively distanced itself from the Workers Movement despite assurances to the contrary. They have consistently failed to enunciate policy on major issues for fear of offending the swingers.
The result is a Howard Government continuing to implement anti-worker policies without restraint.

No-one wants to see ill-treatment of workers, but the industry I work in (IT) is absolutly driven by a cut-throat determination to reduce costs, and the shareholders and industry analysts expect cost reductions of x per cent per year.

In terms of labour the only way to realistically achieve this is to either import very cheap labour, or offshore your operations overseas. For example the equivalent package for a worker in Thailand doing the same job as a worker in Australia is 20%.

For an enterprise that means slashing your labour costs by 80%, which is a very easy answer for any business manager to look at.
Fact is we don't live in a socialist utopia. If Australia does maintain competitiveness with our trading partners, quite simply no-one will buy anything from us. Unemployment will grow, and jobs will simply disappear.

It sucks, but the only thing anyone can really do is accept that this is the case and try and structure their career around it.

To paraphrase Maracas,
Australian workers do not have a political party that represents them.

So many people consider themselves to be 'middle-class', whereas in reality there are merely working class with more 'effluence'.

As more and more 'workers' find their jobs in jeopardy, their 'real' wages declining and their conditions (holidays etc) eroded.

who yah gunna call? "strikebusters" ? the army ?

sorry, yer on yer own now !!

As an employer i still find it disturbing that we are bringing in overseas workers, who put little into our economy and funnel most of their wages overseas to the family.

Outsourcing is one thing, but when we have the people here all we need to do is find them, why do we need to bring in mostly lower skilled overeseas workers to make up numbers?

Why dont they go through rural and regional areas where there is high unemployment, and offer a pathway to employment and relocation.

This is the failing of the system for Australians which needs to be stopped. The people do not attempt to integrate to our culture and live in ghettos together, paying basic accomodation and food, therefore raping our country.

It is not their fault directly, but the government needs to put their foot on it. Dinmore Abbotoirs in QLD are hiring hundreds of chinese, yet skilled meatworkers in regional areas who are out of a job due to closures etc, miss the boat.

This does not do anything at all to stop the emergence of racism either.

The article merely restates what was self evident prior to the introduction of the new regime - in fact I think Mr Mc D has writtenprevious articles that have churned out similar information - but the message sadly is too little too late - even though the predictions and the analysis is correct:

The damage was done when people failed to see what Labor Market reform means to a very conservative government - the eupemisms of flexibiltiy, choice and the right to negotiate directly with the empoyer fooled most people - it sounded pretty cool, for some, until the detail was revealed - even before then most analysts predicted the downward pressure wages and conditions.

I also read with interest Peter Hendy comment on compassion and the unemployed - the argument is I guess a reduced wages bill will allow businesses to grow and employ more people - or a reduced wages bill will permit an employer to employ more people at the same cost -

The first asumption is essentially fallacious as most reports indicate gains made will simply returned to shareholders and certainly in the service industries there is nothing to suggest a reduced wagfes bill will do anything to expand the industry.

The second assumption is all well and good except that it is only a select group of employees whose wages and condiitons are being "pooled" to employ the unemployed - as implied by hendy's position if indeed that ever happens - it might be a different matter if Directors salaries and allowances together with CEO's salaries and stock option were under similar downward pressure to foster more employment or reduced to enable a company to offer more employment and increase production - but that aint the case.

This Bill was a Trojan Horse

Australian productivity is increasing. GDP continues to grow. So if, according to Jim McDonald's doomsday scenario workers are losing, someone else must be winning.

Who?

The research hasn't been done in Australia but it has in the US, documented by Dew-Becker and Gordon in "Where did the Productivity Growth Go?", http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/BPEA_Meetingdraft_Complete_051118.pdf

Paul Krugman in The New York Times last week summarised the message:

"[Most people believe] that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.

The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

"So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that...

"[Dew-Becker's and Gordon's] paper gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

"But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint."

The people who are eating our lunch are the corporate CEOs pulling in 5, 10, 15 million dollars a year. And for what?

For delivering ten or 20 times as much value to the economy as their predecessors 20 years ago?