<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]--><!--[if !mso]> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <![endif]-->Workers’ rights...Ripping off working people
A majority of people in Australia — more than 11 million — are workers. Yet Australian governments constantly make decisions that negatively impact this majority.
The former John Howard Coalition government launched a full frontal assault on the majority of Australians via its WorkChoices laws. That legislation eroded basic employment standards, cut real pay and undermined job security. It attacked working conditions and weakened workers’ ability to defend their rights, criminalising many types of strike action. It subjected both trade unions and individual workers to massive financial penalities for simply refusing to work in protest.
In Australia today, when you divide the pie of national income between the share going to wages and that going to profits, workers’ share is shrinking. Payments to employees have fallen to 52.4% of national income, the lowest since the March quarter of 1965 (Australian Bureau of Statistics). This is the result of policy decisions made by successive governments, both Labor and Liberal. Legislation designed to stop workers and unions from fighting for better pay, conditions and safety at work all contribute to increasing company profits.
Despite the Kevin Rudd government’s rhetoric about “ripping up” WorkChoices, a large part of Howard’s laws remain in Labor’s “Fair Work Act”.
That legislation retains employers’ legal right to seek “inidividual flexibilities” among their workforce. It also retains the prohibition on unions seeking common working conditions across companies or industries. Restrictions on industrial action, on the rights of unions to enter worksites and on the content of industrial agreements all remain.
The Labor government, installed with the support of trade unions and tens of thousands of working people, has also retained the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The ABCC was created by Howard to criminalise a lot of union-related activity on construction sites. The ABCC is not investigating or prosecuting employers who are underpaying workers or breaching safety regulations, but it is targeting individual workers who are involved in union or collective activity.
The ABCC can seek fines against individual workers of up to $22,000 and gag interviewees, and anyone who refuses to cooperate fully with the ABCC faces a potential six-month jail term. Such restrictions on union activity leave workers much more at the mercy of employers, and since the establishment of the ABCC, the number of construction workers killed on the job has been increasing.
But capitalist governments not only create laws to restrict workers’ rights, they consistently fail to apply laws to deal with bosses whose criminal negligence causes the injury or death of workers. For example, the James Hardie company manufactured and knowingly exposed its workers and customers to asbestos. This is public knowledge and thousands of Australians have died from exposure to asbestos, yet not a single James Hardie executive has faced criminal charges, much less been jailed!
Young workers
Young workers make up about one-fifth of Australia’s workforce. They can work and pay taxes for years before they even have the right to vote.
The majority of young people work in casual and low-paid jobs. “Youth wages” mean bosses can pay them much less for doing the same work as others. In 2007, Youth Studies Australia found that, on average, full-time workers aged 15-19 earned about half of average weekly earnings and those aged 20-24 earned a little under 70% of the average.
Employers in sectors dominated by young workers are often not even paying the legal minimum. In July, the Workplace Obudsman audited 481 employers in the food service industry, of whom almost one-third were found to be underpaying staff. Many young workers’ rights are simply ignored by bosses who think they can take advantage of young people's inexperience or underconfidence to object.
Being concentrated in casual work to fit in their study and other commitments, young people have little income security. A 2004 Job Watch study of the fast-food industry found that 32% of young workers worked shifts of 11 hours or more. In a 2002 study of students working in retail in Queensland, almost one-third reported being sent home before their shift was due to finish (with correspondingly less pay). Bosses can effectively hire and fire them each day.
Pull-out: Young workers fighting back
The work of the Unite union in New Zealand shows the power of young workers when they get organised. Unite organises workers in a range of areas, including call centres and fast-food restaurants. In 2006, it led the Supersize My Pay campaign, which forced the government to raise the minimum wage to $12 per hour and abolish youth pay rates for most of the workforce.
In France in 2006, a movement led by young workers and students, and supported by the trade unions, defeated a law that would allowed bosses to fire workers in their first two years of employment without providing a reason.
In Australia, when the Howard government announced the WorkChoices legislation, Resistance helped to organise nationwide protests of students and young workers. On June 1, 2006, 1600 high-school students walked out of schools around the country to protest the laws. Today, the struggles to have WorkChoices and youth wages fully abolished continues.
Unemployment
Young workers suffer the highest levels of unemployment, usually about double the national rate. But why? There’s certainly plenty of socially useful work that needs doing: houses, schools and hospitals to build, food to grow, and power generation and agriculture transitioned to environmental sustainability.
Between the people who want to work and the tools they need to do the work stands a tiny group, the capitalists. Their main goal is to make money, so their decisions about where and when to invest and who to employ where and when are based on maximising their profits, not on what workers, the society as a whole or the environment actually need.
A constant pool of unemployed or under-employed and poor workers helps the capitalists to keep wages low: workers who fight for better wages and working conditions can readily be replaced with someone from the dole queue or who has only casual work.
The education system we know today arose with the development of capitalism. Initially, education was restricted to the sons of the capitalist class. However, for capitalism to continue growing, it needed a basically literate workforce, so formal education was extended to the working class. As the economy developed, it required a larger pool of skilled workers with a higher level of training; universities became training and research centres to fill those needs.
Today, capitalism must try to balance its need to maintain a highly educated (and therefore highly productive) workforce and the drive to make profits from education. The relative strength of Australian capitalism at present and the weakness of the student rights movement have meant the gradual introduction of the user-pays principle into education (student fees), the restructuring of universities curricula around capitalism's needs, and attacks on the student movement.
However, students occupy a unique position in society. They don't suffer the same restraints on their ability to be politically active as full-time workers, and can raise and organise around demands that aim to transform universities into institutions that serve the interests and needs of society as a whole, not the capitalist class. Throughout modern history, students have led and won campaigns for their rights, such as free education, and for social justice, such as against imperialist wars.
