By Sean Malloy
Unemployment in Australia is currently around the 11% mark. October's unemployment rate was recorded at 11.3% nationally by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). This figure corresponds to 979,500 people out of work. Young people are worst off, experiencing an unemployment rate of 22.6% for 15-19 year-olds, on top of that the majority of 15-19 year-olds, who are working, work part-time. 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly spoke to Anne O'Callaghan and Jorge Jorquera, leading members of the radical youth organisation, Resistance, about unemployment and solutions to the problem.
"The first part of the problem", says Jorquera, "is getting a grip on the real size and effect of unemployment. At least an extra 164,000 people who are not officially in the workforce figures are also looking for work, according to the ABS. Over a million families are without any members holding jobs."
"The other side of the problem is ALP and Liberal Party insistence that wages, particularly of young people, need to be lowered to create jobs and that training unemployed people will create jobs. These proposals don't create new jobs they merely make it cheaper for industry to employ people."
O'Callaghan says that "Another aspect of unemployment is the illogical distribution of existing work."
The ABS registers that the average weekly hours worked by full-time workers is 40.2, for part-time workers it is 14.7 hours. ABS also recorded that 4,637,500 people are working over 35 hours per week, 1,323,700 of them working over 49 hours per week, while 515,000 part- time workers want more hours work.
"It is totally logical to have a shorter working week without loss of weekly pay rather than condemning a million people to poverty and driving workers who still have jobs into the ground for the sake of profit rates", states O'Callaghan.
Alan Wood, economics editor for the Australian put the "economic rationalist" case for solving unemployment in a December 1 article. "If we are to have any chance of maintaining relatively high wages and creating enough jobs for our growing workforce, then structural reform has to proceed more rapidly and more radically — not in the least in the labour market", Wood argued.
Wood noted that since the '70s "the economy has not grown fast enough to absorb all of the increase in the labour force." He added that "we have no prospect of sustaining such a high growth rate without faster micro- economic reforms".
O'Callaghan noted that micro-economic reforms had meant restructuring to improve industry profits rather than improve people's standard of living. "The Financial Review recently reported that company er quarter at $4.077 billion.
"Retail profits were recorded as rising from $171 million last year to $372 million in the last three months. The Coles Myer group has had a 20% rise in profits.
"I think Paul Keating's comment that we are out of recession are inaccurate. Big business may be out of recession but the majority of Australians are still reeling."
Wood Claimed that "reform directed to improving the flexibility of wages between occupations, and of work practices, will create jobs in the medium term. It will allow better signals to be sent about where particular skills are in greatest demand, and encourage workers to move to available jobs and to acquire skills that meet the emerging needs of industry."
By contrast, Jorquera argues that the whole principle of meeting the needs of industry is wrong.
"We should be meeting the needs of people, what is needed is a rational program of real job creation in socially useful areas such as public transport, housing, environmental repair, schools etc, in fact in most areas where the ALP and the Liberals are cutting back. The reality is that the ALP and the Liberal Party, despite their rhetoric about quality of life, are creating miserable conditions for the majority of Australians."
In his article, Wood commented that "all of this amounts to a strong case for the sort of reforms being introduced in Victoria and promised by the federal Opposition".
Disagreeing that the Liberals' industrial relations "reforms" will create jobs, O'Callaghan says "Kennett is cutting 7000 public sector jobs by next year and then plans to cut at least another 12,000. He is closing up to 200 schools and sacking 2000 teachers, this isn't a way of creating jobs."
"Ironically, Kennett is taking up where Kirner left off. Kirner eliminated 10,000 public sector jobs under her premiership.
"As for the Liberals overall policy, high unemployment seems to be the key to enforcing their industrial and economic policies, forcing massive wage cuts, loss of conditions and total control of peoples labour.
"They plan to cut at least 90,000 people off benefits with no explanation of what happens to those people. If unemployed people don't find a job within nine months they are forced to work for the dole or undergo 'on the job training', with no guarantee of a job.
"Both the ALP and the Liberals falsely base their programs on the premise that there are jobs for 979,500 people and all unemployed need to do to get jobs is train for years and accept low pay."
O'Callaghan and Jorquera are also critical of those who don't offer 9>wait for the economy".
"Delaying the problem by giving unemployed people training without guarantee of jobs and hoping for a miraculous economic recovery that might bring unemployment down a couple percent is not enough", said O'Callaghan.
"Kelty's jobs crusade is a perfect example of this, 25,000 training positions that are not new long-term jobs but token 'on the job training', for low wages won't solve unemployment."
"Even the left of the ALP attempts to justify the governments actions as the only course of action", said Jorquera. "[Labor MP] John Langmore, for example, thinks that "we share responsibility for reducing unemployment'. Unemployed people can't be blamed for something that is not in their power to change, neither can the majority of Australians be blamed for the economic situation, its big business that should be blamed. They caused the recession and are responsible for the country's debt."