A stopped clock is right twice a day. So it was that Joe Hockey, the Shadow Treasurer, summed up the Labor Government’s intergenerational report succinctly today:
Quite clearly Australians, according to this Government, will have to work harder for longer with less reward in more crowded cities.
The Liberals in power would do the same. It’s what Workchoices was about. But that doesn’t detract from the truth of Hockey’s criticism of Labor’s ‘Australia to 2050: Future Challenges’ report.
Labor increased the retirement age to 67. Labor is talking about increased productivity but without the massive infrastructure investment necessary to avoid speed ups, even longer unpaid hours and more slave driver workplaces.
Both Labor and the Liberals have put in place industrial and other laws which have transferred more and more of the value our increased productivity has created over the last 30 years to the bosses, not us.
While real wages have increased the share of national product going to labour has fallen to its lowest level ever.
Australia has the longest working week of any OECD country.
Workers’ personal debt levels are among the highest in the world, fuelling a level of consumption that is perhaps unsustainable in the long term.
Now we have an education revolution whose real aim is to turn our schools into little factories and our kids into learning automatons.
The forced savings model of the 9 percent superannuation guarantee is built on a wage cut.
Yet despite this workers when they eventually retire will not have enough in their superannuation funds to live reasonably well.
Superannuation, when the market is in crisis, is not safe at all. It destroys futures, not protects them.
Fifty years of working for the man and all you get is a goodbye card and a poverty pension.
Why can’t we work shorter hours and retire earlier?
The drive for profit and its reinvestment in more and more expensive capital vis a vis labour creates a tendency for the rate of profit to decline.
Increased productivity, reduced labour rewards and living standards, cuts in social spending and a longer working day (plus the devalorisation of capital in crises) can address that tendency for some time.
The logic of the system is to pour more and more petrol onto the fire until it engulfs us all.
The more value we create the more it goes to capital and the more voracious the system forces it to become to produce even more to counteract declining profit rates
Capital sucks more and more life out of us for its own survival.
It’s time to kill the vampire and reclaim life.
That of course is for the future. Here and now?
A 30 hour week and retirement for all on the average wage at sixty is affordable.
Make the bosses pay for their system, not us.