Australian regions face many challenges and at present regional policy development is not in a sufficiently coherent state to address these challenges.

In the labour market, we see evidence of skill shortages being coincident with pools of underutilised labour and diminishing job opportunities for workers.

In particular, there is now a dearth of employment opportunities for our youth.

There is a need to develop a new approach to regional development that is embedded in a viable macroeconomic framework that acknowledges that the fiscal and monetary policy settings should deliver macroeconomic stability – that is, full employment and price stability – but at the same time complement regional development strategies that are sustainable in social, economic and environmental terms.

The aim of regional policy is to ensure that communities throughout Australia have access to the economic and social infrastructure necessary to facilitate full participation and promote wellbeing.

Such a new regional employment framework should emphasise increased public sector infrastructure spending, the implementation of a National Skills Development framework and the acceptance that job creation and training initiatives go together.

This integrated policy framework would provide more effective ways to assist disadvantaged individuals into employment and advance sustainable solutions to persistent unemployment across regional Australia with constraining private entrepreneurial initiatives.

Professor Bill Mitchell holds the Research Chair in Economics and is the Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), an official research centre at the University of Newcastle. He also is a Visiting Professor at Maastricht University, The Netherlands and is on the management board of CofFEE-Europe, a sister centre located at that university.

He has published widely in refereed academic journals and books and regularly is invited to give Keynote conference presentations abroad. He has an established record in macroeconomics, labour market studies, econometric modelling, regional economics and economic development.

He is currently engaged in a large EIF project developing research infrastructure to facilitate regional and urban research capacity in Australia.

His latest book – Full Employment Abandoned – published by Edward Elgar (UK) focused on how current economic policies have undermined the principles of full employment and disadvantaged low pay workers.

Centre of Full Employment and Equity
Professor Bill Mitchell’s Blog – billy blog

The Howe Inquiry into insecure work in Australia has been swamped with more than 500 submissions, including around 450 from workers eager to tell their stories.

More than 100 of the submissions are now available online at
securejobs.org.au,
with more being added each day.

The submissions also include about 50 from community groups, unions, academics and other organisations.

ACTU President Ged Kearney said the response to the inquiry, chaired by former Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, had been overwhelming and showed the level of community interest in the issue.

“It is no understatement to say that the number and quality of submissions to this inquiry has exceeded our wildest expectations,” Ms Kearney said.

“The issue of insecure work has really struck a chord in the Australian community.

“Submissions range in length from a few sentences to hundreds of pages, but many of the most compelling are short stories from Australia workers about the impact insecure work has had on their lives. Many are heart-breaking.

“The sheer volume of submissions means that about 20% have been made publicly available online so far. More submissions are being published each day.

“We are now looking forward to the public hearings, set to start later this month,” Ms Kearney said.

She said dates and venues would be announced shortly for the hearings, which will occur in every state and territory this month and next.

“The Howe Inquiry is one of the most important investigations into the changing nature of Australian work in recent times, with the use of casual, fixed or short-term contracts, and labour hire almost doubling in the last two decades to make up about 40% of the workforce now,” Ms Kearney said.

“The submissions will provide valuable evidence for the inquiry panel to consider the impact insecure work has on people’s ability to plan for their future, to make ends meet and to spend time with family and friends.”

Attached is a summary of organisational submissions to assist media. Submissions can be downloaded at securejobs.org.au

Contact Rebecca Tucker Ph: 0408 031 269

The class struggle may be more advanced in Europe, but I sorely miss what we have created in the Socialist Alliance, as should become clear later in this talk.

My aim is to sketch the present phase of the class struggle in Europe, assess the gains of our side along with the challenges it faces, and hopefully help us all think about what this might mean for Socialist Alliance and the socialist movement in Australia. But the opinions expressed are my own, of course, not the Socialist Alliance’s: so feel free to disagree vigorously!

For me the critical questions are:

(1) How much has the economic crisis destabilised capitalist politics, capitalist hegemony if you like?

(2) How much, specifically, has it produced a political crisis for the social democracy (the Labor parties in Britain and Ireland)—big business’s back-up party of neo-liberal austerity?

(3) And, most importantly, how much has the left been able to capitalise on that crisis and grow and consolidate its influence to the left of the social democracy, so as to be able to drive the struggle forward?

Who’s winning and who’s losing?

Sarkozy, Merkel and the European Central Bank’s Mario Draghi, these mediaeval doctors who react to the sickness of the patient they have bled white by repeating the same treatment?

Or the rising social resistance that their policies—and those of their national counterparts across Europe—have stirred, from UK to Greece, from Spain to Romania?

What are the challenges for the left in this new wave of struggle? How well is it meeting them?

But some points of caution and clarification before starting:

First, by “left” I mean all forces that reject in practice the neoliberal consensus and the policies enforced by the European Union and European Central Bank—backed up by the International Monetary Fund (the “troika”).

That definition excludes the commonly accepted designation of the French, Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese Socialist Parties, or Scandinavian Social Democratic parties as “left”.

It also includes parties who oppose austerity, but don’t have consistently left policies on other issues (like the Dutch Socialist Party on NATO, for example).

Second, within this left I don’t make a distinction between the “revolutionary” and “reformist” left. No doubt some currents within the left as I’ve defined it will fail decisive tests of struggle, but which these turn out to be won’t be completely determined by how they or their political rivals presently describe them. I don’t want in the least to underestimate the importance of peoples’ and parties’ present self-description, but all political actors evolve under the blows of the struggle and future destinations are not always determined by today’s labels.Read the report here

http://links.org.au/node/2727

Unions and community groups resolve to have the Fair Work Australia Act become ILO compliant to protect the right to strike.

First is a broad based education campaign to highlight the necessity of Australians to have the right to strike.

PM Gillard retained the restrictions and penalties on industrial action in WorkChoices and these sanctions must be removed.

The push is on Minister Bill Shorten to remove all of the penalties against withdrawing your labour power.

We want a right to strike – full stop.

We want a right to strike firewalled so the employers’ corporate lawyers cannot get an injuction to stop the industrial action.

Please prepare your own arguments.

Here are some sugestions; eg letter

Dear Friend,
The National Right to Strike Campaign (NRSC) is writing to ask you to support the campaign’s aim to have all Australian law
comply with International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions.
Contained in this correspondence are a 10 Point Proposal and model resolution. We ask that your organisation adopt the resolution.
Currently a number of unions, union branches, peak union bodies, as well as community organisations from neighbourhoods,
faith-based, environmental and social movements are considering similar resolutions.

If your organisation agrees to support this most fundamental of human rights, as defined by the ILO, you will be formally added
to the national list of supporting organisations, in an effort to
build the confidence and unity necessary if Australians are to achieve these rights:

MODEL RESOLUTION FOR ALL TYPES OF UNION MEETING
“That this meeting of (Name and status of union meeting) supports the National Right to Strike Campaign and declares that all
Australian law must comply with ILO Conventions 87 & 98. In particular with the guaranteed right to organise and strike at the
time chosen, and for the purposes decided upon, by union members.
Further, our organisation demands that the ILO Conventions pertaining to workers in unions being free to take solidarity action with other workers by striking, be complied with.”

Please see articles on the right to strike on this blog.

Here are TEN POINTS CONCERNING THE RIGHT TO STRIKE
AUTHORISED: NATIONAL RIGHT TO STRIKE CAMPAIGN VICTORIAN TRADES HALL:

1. All Australian law must comply with the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions.
2. The ILO Conventions state that the right to withdraw labour under-pins our democratic rights.
3. The ILO Conventions state that the right to strike is one of the es-sential means available to ‘seeking solutions to economic and social policy questions and to labour problems of any kind which are of direct concern to workers,’ and en-sures that working people and their unions can show solidarity with each other and with their communi-ties.
4. Australian law must uphold the ILO Convention to guarantee the rights of unions to negotiate about anything that is deemed to be in their interests. This is the same right that employers already have when they determine the price and conditions of sale for the goods they sell.
5. The ILO Conventions guarantee the right of entry for unions to enter in workplaces. This must be respected by Governments and employers, so that workers can exercise their freedom of association.
6. If unionists had the right to strike in solidarity with one another, we could have stopped pri-vatisations, casualisation and the offshoring of Australian jobs.
7. Australian workers should be equal before the law with employers. When employers use an alternative workforce (scabs), they are using second parties to achieve an industrial outcome. The law is unequal where workers cannot support each other with solidarity actions.
8. The ILO states that the right to strike protects all other human rights. Only unions with the freedom to act, in the same way as employers are free to act, can redress the imbalance of power.
9. Workplace flexibility has gone too far. This has led to casualisation, insecure employment and sham contracting. An unfettered market, not contained by the workers right to strike, re-duces conditions and the take home pay of working people.
10. Only through the right to strike will restrictions on their ability to trade freely be lifted on workers, allowing them to operate as freely as employers in the pursuit of their interests within the economy. In this way unions will be able to live out their purpose in the protection and advancement of all working people and their communities.

NRSC

NRSC letter to all types of of union meeting

http://securejobs.org.au/

I recommend two changes for more secure work.

1. Amend the Fair Work Act to have an effective right to strike.

2. Amend the Fair Work Act to restrict casual and other forms of precarious work to a limited period and apply more secure contracts of employment. Fair Work Australia is to have the discretion to conciliate and arbitrate the transition to the more secure employment contracts.

1. The right to strike

I submit the lawful strike is essential for beginning to enable employees and their unions to respond to dire precarious work of existing capitalist labour relations.

The international capitalist crisis daily worsens putting more pressure on business to further move to precarious and exploitative work.

In response, there is a driving imperative for employees to have the FWA balance the more powerful corporate and government forces by amendments that protect the right to strike.

I have written on this blog for a right to strike, firewalling industrial action for protection for employees and their unions.

I argue the right to strike is vital for employees in all the forms of non-standard work.

Arguments are strong for amendments to the Fair Work Act to protect the right to strike. I urge as necessary the repeal of the Australian Building and Construction Act, and the ABCC functions and powers.

All of the existing provisions from the earlier Workplace Relations Act and Work Choices still in the current repressive regime against strikes are to be deleted.

Instead, a broad legal protection for all forms of industrial action is inserted.

At a minimum, commonly accepted ILO principles protecting the right to strike are to be adopted. The history of such ILO principles and their non-application by Australia is well known in the industrial relations and labour law community.

Similarly, labour law critical analysis by Shae McCrystal ‘The Right to Strike in Australia’. I recommend Keith Ewing’s research on the right to strike and Tania Novitz (see this blog).

There is much criticism of the failure of the current FWA to have an effective right to strike in writings by industrial relations specialists, labour lawyers, the ACTU and unions.

Firewalling the right to strike I submit is essential to assist strategies for secure jobs.

2. Job security in the Fair Work Act

The overall merit evidence from employees’ adverse experiences in precarious work and the unjust impact socially at many levels in the Australian community requires Fair Work Act amendments for job security. Here are some recommendations.

2.1 One amendment is to clearly restrict casual employment to only short periods, such as 4 hours daily and no more than fortnightly.

Then a provision that compels employers and allows employees the transition from existing casualisation to more permanent on-going employment contracts.

Such a provision has bargaining rights for precarious workers to change to secure employment with the terms to be negotiated and agreed. The clear right exists when not being able to reach an agreement for the employee(s) to access conciliation and arbitration from FWA to gain process steps for more permanent work.

The same applies to ending many short-term contracts. After two short term contracts, then the employer is required to move to more permanent, on-going contracts.

Special attention is to support any employee with service e.g. more than seven years who is to be on a permanent contract, as is an existing employee with 10 years before retirement. Other non-standard employment sectors could be protected such as in the disability sector.

2.2 The next new section is to ensure that labour-hire contract provisions are not attractive to employers for lowering costs. The aim is have protections against precarious work in the labour-hire industry.

Such provisions are to ensure the same wages and conditions in the user firm in similar work employees from must be hired permanently for not less than two years. There is a formal written contract with the same rate and benefits. The worker may join the user firm’s union. Labour-hire is to be implemented ‘generally for short-term, supplementary and substitute positions’.
Provisions for transition and
compliance need to be put in place.

2.3 Strengthening enforcement provisions by employees and unions to ensure that employers pay legal wages and comply with all employment conditions of the contracts of employment, with speedy measures for exploited workers to recover wages. Increased penalties and damages against non-complying employers.

2.4 A provision that deems for compliance that legal minimums exist in contracts of employment so that those entitlements can be enforced even if there is no evidence of a written contract of employment.

2.5 Amend the unfair dismissal section so that the right applies to all employees, irrespective of the employee’s status or contract of employment or the size of the employer’s workforce.

The big lie that employers may not employ was made up by Peter Reith’s press secretary and is repeated ad nauseum in the media, but is to be rejected.

Even precarious workers ‘dismissed’ ought to have an opportunity to state their case about why they were unreasonably dismissed before a user friendly FWA conciliator then arbitrator for reinstatement or not.

2.6 For strengthened redundancy provisions in a new minimum entitlement that has a provision for one month’s pay for each year of service for redundant employees. This new minimum deters employers from making employees redundant and assists redundant employees in this recessionary period.

2.7 A specific process provision for precarious workers with non-standard work arrangements to have the legal right to union representation and to be able to organise in unions.

I support the ACTU campaign for Secure Jobs.

As the many issues of insecure work in Australia has overseas the same issues this Inquiry will investigate other countries attempts to deal for greater protection for their employees. I recommend China’s attempt (see this blog).

I urge support for the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work in Australia

Doug Nesbitt

A wage cut of fifty per cent. An elimination of pensions. Cuts to benefits. These demands have inevitably led to a major showdown
at a locomotive factory in London, Ontario between the 700 unionized workers of Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) and Caterpillar,
a massive U.S.-based corporation.

The workers, members of Canadian Auto Workers Local 27, responded to the employer’s
demands with a positive strike vote of 97 per cent. The employer, Progress Rail, a subsidiary of Caterpillar, locked out the workers on New Year’s Day.

In addition to facing down a notorious anti-union employer who
hammered the American United Auto Workers in the 1990s, there are plenty of rumours about Caterpillar closing the London plant and
moving operations to Muncie, Indiana. EMD workers in London make $36/hour while their counterparts in Muncie are paid only
$12.50-14.50 (Cdn). Indiana is also on the cusp of becoming the first rust-belt state to introduce a “Right to Work” law, a
notorious form of anti-union legislation made possible by the even more infamous Taft-Hartley law of 1947, the long-standing
crown jewel of American anti-union legislation.

Click here to continue reading:
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/586.php#continue

They will appear in court on Tuesday 10 January 2012 to face charges that could see them jailed for up to five years.

They were protesting against part of the Greek austerity measures – the cutting off of power to people unable or unwilling to pay a new, swingeing property tax, levied regardless of income or wealth. Greek trade union confederation GSEE, is calling for the charges to be dropped.

Send your protest

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1231

Read more here
http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-20449-f0.cfm

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/photo-gallery/gallery-e6frf94x-1226222780166?page=1″

The hundreds who attended his memorial service heard of a tireless campaigner for justice and social change on which to build a better world.

Far from being anachronistic, his convictions are being echoed by many people around the world in protests against obscene greed and growing inequality by the “occupy movement”.

Due to our current fortunate position in the global economy, Australians often don’t see the world in the same way as those in countries where the financial crisis of capitalism is now spawning social and political crisis.

In countries where democracy is the norm, like Greece and Italy, normal governmental processes have been suspended and technocrats installed because the people simply cannot be trusted. The proposal to consult the Greek people through a referendum was quickly dispensed with and the Prime Minister with it.

The “occupy movement” (OM) quickly became big news in most developed countries, reinforcing the adage that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Rude awakenings about the assumed democratic right to protest were meted out to the occupiers of public spaces in hundreds of cities around the world; Melbourne saw the return of the choke hold when the Mayor summoned the cavalry, California the pepper spray to seated passive protesters and New York’s finest were sent in with billy clubs to defend the citadel of Wall Street. Trade unions joined the protests in many cities, notably in the US where redundancies and short time working are imposing savage cuts on incomes.

OM has raised all the big questions about why the powerful economic interests do not serve social needs. It has stressed the view that wealth and those who have it are growing more venal, while those that don’t have it are suffering for it.

Despite the control that the Murdochs and Berlusconis have over the mass media and the world view they propagate, OM’s protests have resonated with majority public opinion in many countries, simply because the message is true.

The policies which the governments in the capitalist economies are following will intensify the inequality and the social crisis it engenders.

The global financial crisis shows no sign of a solution, threatening millions of redundancies and increasing poverty, as the ILO has reported. Two years ago the G20 predicted that slashing interest rates, pumping public money into weak banks, cutting taxes, increasing spending and printing money would address the problems.

But further crisis looms as the depth of indebtedness remains intractable and the burden of debt has shifted from the private to the public spheres. The long credit boom has gone into reverse. Now vital public services are in the sites for cutbacks – as the sacrificial lambs of a crisis not of our making.

Of course OM came to us warts and all. It may appear naive, without any long term strategy, and bedevilled by the erstwhile vanguards of the political left.

The occupations also attracted many of the desperate and those harmed by poverty and ill-health. But a visit to the “Occupy NY” website reveals a long exchange about socialism…its failures and mistakes but also a true engagement on what was an alternative social system to the failures of capitalism written in the street.

Readers of AO know that this is precisely what motivated Elliott Johnston throughout his long life and in founding this magazine.

While the Gillard Government has been selective in its mini-budget cuts, it must resist a competition with the Opposition for the title of best defender of the interests of corporate Australia by cutting public spending in the face of declining tax income. Even many in the corporate world are nervous about the commitment to create a budget surplus, recognising the dangers of recession. The strategy, as in the 1930s, is to cut expenditures as they carry out the global financial plan to restore capitalism’s fortunes at the expense of the 99% of people so famously championed from the streets by the OM.

As Paul Keating has recently commented, the current economic crisis promises to be the worst since then, and the left is forewarned about the need to unite the left under those circumstances.

We need positive proposals. How about an Australian referendum on how to spend the budget and address the crisis? Some expenditure is kept from public view and hidden in quadrennial funding such as needless grants to private schools. The billions being wasted on unwanted wars, corporate subsidies and middle class welfare would be good places to start in restoring fairness. Introducing social controls to match the guarantees and bailouts made to banks, as well as public ownership, equity and regulation which treats them as public utilities with limits to prevent high risks, frauds and scams would be supported by public opinion in these times.

Unlike previous crises, the current one is overlaid by environmental crisis, putting at a premium the need for public investment and jobs in renewable energy industries which could involve beneficial treatment of workers’ savings in superannuation rather than leaving them to the vagaries and rip-offs of the financial services industry.

Workers should be able to choose certainty with modest returns for retirement rather than risk and losses of their savings in the sharemarket with added losses to fees and charges.

The OM has opened up all these issues anew, buried as they were in the era of corporate greed and privatisation which swept the globe in the latter part of the 20th century.

Such demands open up thinking and analysis about the social system which Elliott Johnston called “socialism, however named”, combining participatory democracy, fair shares of wealth and power, and sustainability. This is a project which AO is keen to support.”

Australian Options magazine $5 no 67 now out subscribe contact donjarrett@internode.on.net.

Articles on ‘Occupy’; Williams, Bridge and Pocock on “Living and working in Australia”; Stillwell on “What prospects for tax reform?”; Sutherland on “WorkChoices Unfinished Business”; White on Timor-Leste; Ann Pettifor on financial crisis; Kaye on the price on carbon; Bill Dunn on ‘The political crisis of government debt”; Dow on the banking crisis; Ranald on ‘New trade agreement threatens public health”; Roos on “The future of manufacturing” plus music and book reviews.