Thoughts on the IR changes

I've been trying to come to grips with Howard's IR changes, amidst the clamour of those on the left who think that after July 1st, it was only a matter of time before he unleashed his fascist tendencies and those on the right who think the changes are well overdue. According to the liberal educated view, both the industrial landscape and our civil liberties will be irrevocably changed for the worse. There's some truth to that view, but it's been overstated. The main problem I can see with the IR changes is Howard's reluctance to protect the minimum wage. Who'd want to move to an American style system, where the working poor are increasing, those poor sods who work full or more than full time and are still trapped in poverty? To have a system like that requires a very American dream of escape through hard work, through placing the responsibility for success or failure solely on the shoulders of the individual. Australia is a more modest country. Our dreams are smaller. Howard himself spoke of a relaxed and comfortable Australia as his aim. This is not how to get there. Without a Big Dream to offset the damage freezing the minimum wage relative to inflation will do, he's shooting himself in the foot by hurting his aspirationals/battlers (however they like to be named: victor or victim).

But the rest of the IR changes are a slightly different story. To me, they seem to be an attempt to rebalance the scales in favour of businesses. No great surprise, considering the increase in political donations from industry (another American trend), the roots of the Liberal Party and the dry economic rationalist philosophy Howard channels. His move towards a new, more flexible system promoting individual enterprise bargaining really drives the knife into the union movement, caught between its own entropy (see Latham's savage critique of the machine men who were formed in the heat and ire of the union institutions), declining interest from youth paralleling recent wage rises, and the rise of the professionals and aspirationals (were they once called tradies?). As an aside, white-collar professionals generally don't have unions. They have associations - the Australian Medical Association, the Media Entertainment and Arts Association and so on. With exceptions - teachers, media workers and social workers, for a start - these associations often seem to be more conservative than blue collar unions, which in turn appear to be generally shifting rightward in tune with society. Associations work within the system more than the oppositional politics of blue-collar worker unions, many of which have suffered from the flight of manufacturing overseas.

I'd argue that these changes may potentially be exactly the kick up the arse that Labour needs. Beazley has been listening to his many critics (even Latham) who decry his small target policy, and has attempted to install a backbone. But Howard's changes may ironically end up serving Labour's political long term interests more than his own. Short-term, he's solidified the ALP and resident unions behind their leader, and long-term, the attack on the union movement may mean that what Crean started to do - disentangle the ALP from the constant factional warfare of the unions - may be hastened. When Latham lashed out at the "machine men" culture inside the party, he was really attacking the influence of union factions, the bland men specialising in institutionalised in-fighting. Latham somehow got through the pack of groupthinkers and factional heavies, but he was an anomaly. Howard thinks he's undercutting the union movement that gives Labour life. In fact, he may be strangling the vine that is holding Labour back from fresh thought and fresh approaches to today's world. Third Way politics didn't come out of unions, it came out of universities. The Democrats and British Labour party don't draw on unions to produce their crop of politicians in the same way we do. This may be the unwanted change that will rejuvenate Labour. Then again, it may not.

On a wider scale, these IR changes can be seen as an adaptation to global trends. Australia used to have a manufacturing industry until employers figured out that the poor next door are keener, more eager and require less pay than comfortable Australian workers. Don't fuss, said economists and industry observers, never mind, we've still got our high-tech IT sector. Those cheeky developing world people have no chance of competing with our universities and our brains. (A nice strain of implicit racism runs through that argument). But then India sat up and realised that it had a population who spoke English and were very eager to get ahead. After quietly pumping out graduates, India can now compete for IT business and ask for peanuts in return. All Australia really has, in terms of comparative advantage, is its agriculture and resource sectors. Biotechnology, perhaps. Tourism, of course. The creative industries? In our highly concentrated media sector? Please. Frankly, in global terms, our wages are too high for the work we're doing. Other people can do the same work for less. Perhaps this is the start of a great levelling. We're going mad with consumption and debt. Consumption drives our economy along in a mad, self-sustaining rush, a bubble of sorts. But we're consuming with blithe ignorance of what people in the rest of the world have to do for a living. What they would much rather be doing is our jobs.