The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) hosted a forum on the jobs crisis in Sydney on July 20. The Jobs Summit: Pathways to Recovery brought academics, economists and trade unions together to discuss the effects of the global financial downturn on working people, and solutions to the resulting jobs crisis.
On the day, ACTU president Sharan Burrow said: "Working Australians are facing a growing catastrophe — thousands of workers losing their jobs every week … the average duration of unemployment has now increased to more than eight months.
"The measure of economic recovery is not record banking profits or the so-called 'green shoots' … on the stock exchange — jobs are the real indicator."
Burrow said the most pressing issues were to improve workers' access to redundancy payments and protect their entitlements when companies went bankrupt.
The ACTU said these measures should be part of a jobs-based stimulus package, and that company directors should be penalised when companies went bankrupt without making adequate provisions for their employees' entitlements.
The aims of the summit, and the solutions it proposed, are correct in recognising that the vital elements of economic recovery are workers' jobs and standard of living rather than the recovery of business's profits.
However, the solutions are only half measures: they do not address the real cause of the jobs crisis and the global financial downturn or provide solutions that will fundamentally address the needs of workers.
Workers need to do more than just protect themselves from further losses through redundancy pay and extension of entitlements — this by itself will not stop these crises from damaging the standards of living of working people in the future.
The ACTU's perspective is that workers and bosses should work together to solve the capitalist crisis — and stay within the framework of capitalism, which caused the problem in the first place. But economic crises, and the job losses that always accompany them, are fundamental to the capitalist system. They are problems that can be solved only outside the framework of that system.
The capitalists caused the crisis: they should be the only ones made to pay for it — no lay-offs are acceptable, and to talk about redundancy entitlements is to accept defeat.
Using the economic crisis as an excuse, bosses are telling their workers that to save the company they work for — and their jobs — they need to take pay cuts, reduced hours or leave without pay. Workers should instead demand that companies and capitalists take the hit for their mistakes.
Private profit should be cut — not workers' wages.
Rather than trying to meekly protect their ever-shrinking slice of the economic pie, workers, their unions — and the ACTU — should be making this argument loud and clear.
The capitalists will always try to make workers pay by socialising losses, while maintaining private profit. Workers must struggle for the socialisation of profit.
Companies that go broke should be nationalised and kept open under workers' and community control. That would be the first step in protecting workers' living standards by protecting their jobs, rather than simply improving access to redundancy pay and entitlements, and penalising company directors as the ACTU suggests.