Lisa Macdonald
Since the 9/11 attacks, the US rulers have escalated their military drive for control of every corner of the world economy, and the Australian capitalist ruling class has been there every step of the way, vying for a share of the spoils.
On November 7, Canberra announced a multi-billion-dollar spending spree on military hardware. This will not just give the Australian Defence Force the ability to unilaterally launch military aggression anywhere in the South Pacific area, but will enable the integration of the ADF into future US military invasions in far-flung parts of the world — what they call "network warfare".
Domestically, too, the Australian ruling class is vigorously pursuing its neoliberal program of privatisation, deregulation, labour-force restructuring and industrial "reform". The capitalists' gains are summed up in the fact that last year profit share of national income was close to an all-time high, while wage share was close to a record low.
An economy growing at around 4% a year has made life relatively easy for the Howard government. But what treasurer Peter Costello does not dwell on in his media gloating sessions is that much of the basis of the healthy state of the Australian economy has been Australian capitalists' success in increasing the rate of exploitation of labour. This has been achieved through forcing or convincing workers to submit to wage restraint, labour force "flexibility" (that is, casualisation, part-time jobs, 12-hour shifts, etc.) and production speed-ups.
Growing social inequalities
Behind the "miracle economy" are growing social inequalities.
While Costello boasts about job creation, according to the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) the real unemployment rate is at least 12% of the labour force. There are now 380,000 long-term unemployed on benefits, 30,000 more than when Howard came to office.
In 1971, 89% of workers had full-time jobs. Now it's 69%. Last year, women held 70.5% of part-time jobs — that's 45% of all employed women — and 22% of these wanted more hours. Meanwhile, 30% of male workers are working more than 50 hours a week and more than half of these wish they could work less.
More than 1 million Australian workers feel they have to do unpaid overtime.
The number of workers in casual jobs increased from 13% of the labour force in 1982 to 27.3% in 2000.
In her new book, The End of Equality, Anne Summers points out that by last May, women's average weekly earnings were 66% of men's, which is less than it was than 10 years ago, and the gap is widening. Half a million women wanted paid work but were unable to get it, one-third of them because of lack of affordable child care.
While CEO salaries skyrocket, 2.1 million people are living in poverty and, according to ACOSS, one in six children are at risk of poverty. In 2002, 1.2 million people sought help from the Salvation Army, an increase of 10% on previous year.
One in six employed workers are now on the minimum wage, which is now just over 50% of average earnings — a drop of around 15% since 1983. There are now 365,000 people living in "working poor" households; the working poor now make up 15% of all people living in poverty.
There are now almost 100,000 homeless people, almost half of them are under 25 years old. There are 200,000 people on public housing waiting lists; yet government spending on public housing has dropped by 54% since 1998.
Students from poor families are now half as likely to attend university as 10 years ago. Austudy for students over 25 is now around 37% below the poverty line.
A Roy Morgan poll in August found that 25% of people don't have confidence that they would receive adequate hospital treatment if they had an accident. While people die unnecessarily in public hospitals (as the recent Campbelltown hospital scandal revealed), private health insurance companies receive $3.7 billion a year in federal government subsidies.
A section of the working class is still doing well, relative to both previous decades and to other workers. What has happened under the government's labour force restructuring drive is that the division between the higher and lower paid 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the working class has widened. During the 1990s, the wealthiest 20% scored an extra $111 a week in pay, eight times the $13 per week increase for the poorest 20%.
But the relatively better quality of life of those workers who are still doing well is precarious, and they know it. Job security continues to be one of chief concerns for workers, with a recent poll showing that 60% of workers say they are a lot less secure than 10 years ago.
Combine this with the fact that over the last 10 years the debt of households has increased from 56% to 125% of their income and it's no wonder that while the better-off strata of the working class may be comfortable for the moment, they are far from relaxed.
Distrust and anger
The distrust and anger at the bastions of the system — politicians, the banks, the corporations — that is constantly revealed in the opinion polls occasionally bursts out into mobilised dissent.
In the last six years we've seen indications of this in the spontaneous mass mobilisations to force the Australian government to stop the massacre in East Timor, to demand that the federal government apologise to Indigenous Australians (the reconciliation marches), to stop Peter Reith's thuggery on the waterfronts, to blockade the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000, and to condemn Philip Ruddock's inhumanity towards refugees.
This year we saw it more clearly than before in the massive February 14-16 anti-war marches. The Australian government's decision to support the US invasion of Iraq acted like a lightening rod for all the anger at politicians' dishonesty and trampling of democracy, and at corporate greed, that had been simmering beneath the surface.
These biggest ever protest rallies occurred despite a concerted pro-war propaganda offensive by the corporate media following the 9/11 attacks. They revealed chinks in the Australian ruling class's ideological armour. The government's usual appeals to racism and xenophobia failed to stop a million people from marching against the impending war.
The discourse of fear and loathing still dominate Australian official politics, as we are seeing in the government's focus on "national security" and "border protection" for the next federal election and Labor's scramble to outdo Howard by proposing a "Ministry of Homeland Security". The short-lived nature of the mass mobilisations against the Iraq war meant that wedge politics wasn't able to be fully challenged.
Nevertheless, the government's support for the war has cemented, even deepened the polarisation in Australian politics, and the ALP's failure to differentiate itself sufficiently on the issue has exacerbated the broad disillusionment with the big business parties.
John Howard's Coalition government, and the Hawke and Keating Labor governments before it, have taken back many of the advances in workers' wages and conditions that were won in earlier decades of union struggle.
While the attacks have not abated and the union movement is still characterised by generalised retreat, the long-term assault on workers' rights and the refusal of almost all trade union leaderships to fight the attacks, has generated huge disgruntlement in the unions' ranks. This is reflected in the historically low level of union membership, which has fallen by 18% since 1988 to just 23% of the work force.
Militant unionism
It is also starting to be reflected in stronger votes for militant pro-struggle tickets in union elections and a clear preparedness by workers to take concerted industrial action if allowed to do so by their union leaders.
While Howard set out, from the moment he took government, to severely weaken the strongest unions using the Workplace Relations Act, the outcomes of the 1998 waterfront dispute and the development of the Workers First leadership in the Victorian branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) in particular have spurred the coalescing of a broader embryonic class-struggle leadership bloc, centred in Victoria, which is gradually rebuilding rank-and-file unionists' confidence in struggle.
The rebuilding of militant unionism took a heavy blow with the removal of Craig Johnston as state secretary of the Victorian branch of the AMWU. But despite that defeat, we have seen this year the victory of the Western Australian MUA Rank and File group, led by Socialist Alliance member Chris Cain; the election of militant Danny Doherty in the Queensland AMWU; Socialist Alliance member Tim Gooden's election as assistant secretary of Geelong Trades Hall; and Joan Doyle's victory in the Victorian postal division of the communications and postal workers' union (CEPU) after years of contesting against the ALP union leadership.
These gains for militant left-wing unionism are not only blows against the government's union-busting agenda, they are also blows against Labor's union-controlling agenda.
[Lisa Macdonald is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective and the Socialist Alliance.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, January 21, 2004.
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