Australian Labour in the Context of International Capital and Inflation - An Intervention.

This post is meant to be an easily readable dissection and timely intervention into the political conversation on this forum. Chiefly in regards to how the rights of workers provide an inescapable connection to democracy, social and economic justice. With the "Jobs and Skills Summit'' occurring come September 2022, and the Federal Government signaling workforce planning to recommence in earnest in this country, with a new legislated body, Jobs and Skills Australia - I believe the window is opening for the Australian worker story to finally have a be heard.

Apricot and Ardeet recently allowed me to speak a bit international and at longer length on the official /r/Australianpolitics podcast, Talking Auspol, about the right to strike and its condition in the world.

There is a whole political field of 'science' dedicated to comparing political-economies. This field helps us understand where the Australian polity comes from, how local ''agents'' or ''actors'' reshape what the Australian polity is, and how similar systems are travelling alongside us.

This field is particularly useful in a globalising world with instant communications and shorter travel times. A world where time and space almost converge.

Just this past week, the Federal Leader of the Opposition in the UK, Sir Keir Starmer, expelled long-standing member of the opposition cabinet, Sam Tarry, Shadow Labour Minister for Transport. The reasons cited are that he appeared in ''unapproved media spots'', but the real reason is that Tarry joined the picket line with striking union workers, RMT. Would a labor shadow minister here in the leadup to the previous federal campaign be sacked the same way? I'd wager that is not the case, yet.

RMT, that's rail and associated service provision workers for the railways in the UK, have been engaged in a long-drawn out dispute over conditions with Government and private monopolies, including: safety, security, economic wealth disparity, and pay. Though the media megaphones mostly make it about pay. In many interviews with Mick Lynch, the general secretary of RMT, you'll find on a dime, a question that pits the best paid in the rail profession against nurses or doctors. The conversation in the UK is again, the wage-price spiral concerns dominating cost-of-living crisis. In Canada and NZ, much the same talk of wage-price spirals exists - so too growing in Australia, but to a lesser degree.

There's a fundamental truth about cost-of-living, inflation, supply chains, and Australian labour, or workers, that doesn't often get said anywhere across the anglophonic world. That is, inflation is the aggregate report of price RISES. Deflation is the aggregate report of price FALLS. What data is aggregated and which isn't is also an important consideration, but what is forgotten is that inflation isn't some amorphous economy blob that we can say comes from nowhere. It is directly linked and is price rises.

It should be noted that many capitalist Anglophonic economies are ''end-heavy'', consumer-based and service-based societies, and have been for about 40 years. In fact, our very measure for inflation relays this to us, and our consumer-based society existed prior to our more recent services-heavy-orientation: Consumer Price Index. There have been in Australia's past, half a dozen or more Referendums put to the Australian people to do with corporate monopolies, nationalisation, rents and housing, public health, prices, and prices and incomes together. All as a means of understanding that a consumer capitalist economy needs to have some reckoning or mechanisms for accountability for prices, for it is us doing much of the importing to save our own skin, and you cannot have a consumer society without adequate consumers. So when we say global supply chains are failing - why not look to the empire makers, the corporate monopolist, profiteers, and wealth-of-nations kind of billionaire barons as creating much the issue for our degraded and degrading imperial economic arrangements - where we chuff off yakka - cash-cropping other societies for our ‘benefit’?

When the new Federal Government focuses on Jobs and Skills workforce planning, focuses on capital investment after a decade of capital dis-investment in Australia (despite tax cuts), and when it focuses on making new manufacturing and agricultural sectors at home, it is ensuring deflationary measures occur over time in a managerialist way.

The great folly of our time is to assume the only deflationary measure is jacking up interest rates.

So the question we have to ask ourselves, is who is setting the prices? We live in a mostly services, consumer-based national economy with far too many private monopolies or duopolies - and therefore much of our GDP and economy is based upon whether the people in the country have the ability to pay for goods, services, and housing (or land). Our 'mixed', "advanced'' capitalist economy is actually between 70th to 90th placed in diversity of internal markets and sectors, around the world. (https://www.defenceconnect.com.au/key-enablers/5076-australia-s-abysmal-economic-diversity-has-flow-on-effects-for-national-security and https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/australias-lack-of-economic-complexity-is-a-problem/)

What happened with the last decade, but rather, the last 20 years of real wage stagnation and decline is believing that reducing the spending and accumulative power of the consumers in a consumer CENTRED economy is a really smart idea. Hint is, it isn’t.

Over the last 120 years the Government sceptre has moved, from being used as an arbitrator between labour and capital, to a conciliator, to according (Whitlams era ''treaty-making with Prices and Income’s Accord''), to accords in limited capacity (Hawkes era of capping incomes for Medicare), to WorkChoices (no arbitration, no conciliation, no accord, you go where you are told), to Fair Work (a sort of Income Accord era reversion, with added limitations for new union organising), to the present day.

Therefore, if you spot a journalist saying to the Government: “What can you really do to influence the Fair Work Commission?”, understand that the FWC was designed by Labor under Rudd. That the industrial relationships can be abolished and reconstructed at any time.

Union density of workers in Anglohphonic countries such as the US and UK, and public opinion of Unions is finally on the increase after decades of fall. In Australia, density remains rather stagnant, at 15 percent.

It should be noted that Unions are workers-groups, or workers-networks. Australia is in a unique place among the Anglophonic countries. Our unions are very in-house looking, and very concentrated, and we sit as a junior empire at the apex between two Anglophonic empires, the British and the United States. The "Asian Century’’ Labor report in 2011, and certain people’s foresight, like Keating and Whitlam’s gave us to trade with a third empire, China. In the 70’s, days ''lost’’ (that Private Capital lost), to strike were escalating dramatically to the millions.

(https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Industrial_Disputes_Briefing_Note_FINAL.pdf)

The placation of the Hawke Government dulled strike activity, and so did the ACTUs diluted down final accord. Strike activity in the country has not recovered - though is showing signs. And with the new Federal Government wanting to expand the right of organisation, we can only agitate for FWC reconstruction and workers rights to bargain more effectively. The Labour Party in the UK at the moment is at pains to even say that workers bargaining should be strengthened.

We shouldn’t be defeatist. Medicare (originally promised by Whitlam, so too compulsory superannuation), as great public goods providing better health outcomes for the populus - were won because of community, union strike action and people-to-people organising!

People creating democracy through solidarity of labou - solidarity of their human energy.

After facing a terrible coup in 1972 backed by the US and Australian intelligence agencies, Chile on September 4, 2022, will decide if it supports a new constitution for its democracy. It holds that all public utilities should be made public. Even water, in which Chile is notorious world-wide for having some of the worst water distribution due to monopolist ownership. It also gives Indigenous people’s a great voice in its democratic chambers. It changes local government provisions. This has been a long-time coming for Chile, but this pressure to re-write the constitution from the ground-up came from the people, organising in communities, organising in their First Nations, organising in Trade Unions, to wage strikes, protests and demonstrations over the last 5 years to bring the Establishment to heel.

Bolivia did much the same recently. After the recent US-backed coup in 2017 ousted the democratically elected Morales government, the Trade Unions, Indigenous First Nations, the people, held the country to heel on three separate occasions, in three separate general strikes. This to force the country to hold another election.These attempts included organising efforts from sectors of community through different vehicles, but the third general strike included the threat of guerilla warfare should another election not be held. An election was held in 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and so too returned was a democratic socialist government.

The International Trade Union Council in its 2021 Report said on the right to organise worldwide that the United Kingdom on par with the Russia, the former ‘’workers paradise,’’ of the United States of Socialist Republics. That is to say, that the UK, that free ‘’liberal western democracy’’ gives its workers almost the same space to democratically organise as a despotic Russia. Perhaps the United Kingdom is too a capitalist oligarchy.

Nation within a Nation

This is the power of the union when used - giving people economic democracy in their nation-state constructs - at a time where individuals seem to be directing the capital flows of the world capitalist wealth with greater individualistic greed and concentrated power not yet seen in our human history, the power of collectivist unions is paramount to humanity and environment.

It is said in Australia now, in our music, and even from the state newsreporter mouths, that there is a nation (or multiple nation-states) within the Nation of Australia. The Prime Minister instead of referring to the Indigenous peoples as having the ‘’longest continuous cultures’’, now remarks, they hold ‘’the longest continuous civilisations’’ on Earth. Nation-states are still king despite what some might say - and in order for Indigenous concepts of sovereignty and kinship to have had much significance, they must be brought into a language the Continents immigrants can understand - that they are the First Nations, continuing to be so.

When we look to Bougainville isles in the nation of Papua New Guinea, we are also intimated with this ‘’nation within a nation’’ sentiment. The Autonomous Provisional Government of Bougainville has just received a 98 percent endorsement by its peoples to leave Paupa New Guinea. The UK similarly to the EU, Scotland similarly within the UK itself, is increasingly of the opinion it should leave, so too Northern Ireland to it’s reunification with Ireland.

ON touching the Autonomous Government of Bougainville, it should be noted that Papua New Guinea was one of the first regions Australia as an Empire received dominion over - with attempts by the Federal Council of Australiasia to annex south Papua from geo-strategic compeetiton of the other European colonial monoliths, like Germany, and France in the 1880s. We did establish before having formal control, shipping routes and commercial banks through the state bank of NSW in the 1870s through to the 1890s, in order to expropriate the wealth of the place for a few monopolist capitalists and send a few paltry dollars back into the Australian economy. My current local member, was just this last week on a trip to the Provisional Government. This as part of Australia’s delegation to ‘’assist’’ them with the process of Nationhood. Australia fully and internationally as a nation-state, claimed its title to PNG in 1906, and didn’t permit independence until 1975, in Whitlams Government.

Bougainville - where many indigenous peoples are concentrated, and also, as an isle away from the main-land of PNG, was for the most part of the 20th century, extorted out of its resources by mining giants like Rio Tinto in connexion with the Bank of NSW. In fact, there were many uprisings from the people of Bougainville in resistance to corporate monopoly, with strikes, and paramilitaries brought in to kill them. A ‘’civil’’ war broke out in the late 80s to the 90s after PNG’s independence from Australia, here was another ‘’nation within a nation’’, seeking Statehood as a means for its peoples to combine in large enough force to be accepted as legitimate and redistribute some of its wealth finally to the people it represented. This was a bloody war, where the PNG government hired armed goons from private security companies, in order to protect imperial economic arrangements arraigning from Rio Tinto’s operations, its cosyness with the PNG and Australian Governments.

Unions, solidarity, First Nations, community groups, activists, protests, demonstrations, blockades, wars, have been fought to create living democracies are still are so to this day.

The right to strike, to withdraw one community’s labour, is a serious tool in economic, social and community democracy, development and justice. When you join a workers organisation, you give yourself a greater lever to set the price of your labour - away from the dictatorial decisions of a board of a top-down, capitalist enterprise.

When a ''wage-price spiral’’ occurs, as it did in the 70’s across many Anglophonic countries, you have a critical-mass movement of people attempting to set the price of the labour more broadly, and business leaders responding in kind by attempting to raise prices in order to stave off wealth redistribution. Threats of prices rises were used in Bolivia and Chile in an attempt to assuage woker's democracy, In the 70’s, the ''wage-price spiral’’ in inflation, which was really to do with profiteering fossil fuel monopolies, became an effective bludgeon to dissuade people from workers' groups and unions, through media channels.

The same as it ever was.

For more information see:

https://files.mutualcdn.com/ituc/files/2022-ITUC-Rights-Index-Exec-Summ-EN_2022-07-06-063804.pdf

(Australia slips below the UK in right to bargain in 2022).

Australian Capitalism, by Playford and Kirsner

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2022/06/11/why-the-rbas-interest-rates-rise-wont-work#hrd

https://www.aec.gov.au/elections/referendums/referendum_dates_and_results.htm

The British Empire in Australia, by Fitzpatrick.

Media and Unions overview in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwTD4fH31-I