Unions will seek a $26 a week pay rise for Australia’s lowest paid workers in 2012, whose wages have fallen well behind average income earners over the past decade and are not keeping pace with the cost of living.

The ACTU will today lodge its submission to Fair Work Australia’s annual wage review to increase the award wage for the lowest paid workers to $615.30 per week.

This would mean a 68c/hour increase from $15.51 per hour to $16.19 per hour. For other award-reliant workers above the benchmark tradesperson’s rate, unions will seek a 3.8% pay increase.

ACTU Secretary Jeff Lawrence said it was time for an increase that stopped the gap between low-paid workers and other workers from growing further.

“The 1.4 million workers on award wages – one in six workers – can barely meet the cost of living let alone live comfortably in an economy that is the envy of the developed world,” Mr Lawrence said.

“It is grossly unfair that minimum wages have fallen further and further behind average wages. The purchasing power of minimum wages is now also below the level it was in 2005.

“The wage increases awarded in 2010 and 2011 have stopped minimum wage workers from falling further behind. It’s time to make up the ground that was lost under WorkChoices.”

Mr Lawrence said that while the National Minimum Wage had more or less kept pace with overall wages growth in the early 2000s, low-paid workers had lost ground under Work Choices.

Since mid-2005, overall wages have risen by 27.5%, while the NMW has gone up by 21.7%. The benchmark tradesperson’s award rate has risen by only 18.7% over the same period.

Mr Lawrence said that if the National Minimum Wage had kept pace with overall wages growth since 2005, it would now be $617.50 per week. Instead it’s just $589.30 per week.

Mr Lawrence said unions were seeking a $26 a week increase in the National Minimum Wage and in other award minimum wages up to the benchmark tradesperson’s rate, equal to a 4.4% increase. Unions are seeking a 3.8% increase for other award workers.

“Minimum wage workers are the backbone of the economy. They are the people who clean our schools and shopping centres, serve us in hotels, who take care of our elderly and our children. These are people we cannot live without, yet their value is not reflected in their pay packets. We must ensure they are not forgotten.

“An extra $26 a week is modest and affordable, but will make a difference to the lives of minimum wage workers and their families. Over the past year they have shouldered large price rises for fruit and vegetables, fuel, electricity, water, and education and childcare.

“This is money they will spend on food, clothes, fuel and other necessities in the main streets of every Australian suburb and town.”

Contact Details
Rebecca Tucker
Ph: 0408 031 269

ACTU CONGRESS Fringe Event Public meeting
AUSTRALIAN JOBS AND THE RIGHT TO STRIKE
Discussion and Drinks: Mark Lennon, Ged Kearney,
Brian Boyd, Dean Mighell, Len Cooper & more…
Time: 5.15pm – 6.15pm Date: Monday 14 May 2012
Where: Unions NSW Atrium, Trades Hall
Job Creation
Organising rights Fair tax system
Cap Exec pay
Sham contracting Phoenixing
sponsored by VTHC

See ACTU Congress website for other Fringe events.

Please in Sydney distribute this flyer.

Right Strike ACTU Fringe flyer

http://oz.labourstart.org/

Ged Kearney ACTU
Responding to the 2012 Federal Budget, ACTU President Ged Kearney said:

“The 2012-13 Federal Budget will help shape a fairer Australia, through a more progressive tax system, better assistance for low and middle income earners and protection for jobs in struggling businesses.

“The Government has had to perform a difficult balancing act in framing the 2012-13 Federal Budget. It has been driven by its objective of returning to surplus, but has also made several welcome commitments to create a fairer Australia.

“However, while we understand Treasurer Wayne Swan’s objective to deliver a surplus in the coming financial year, it is regrettable that this has resulted in cuts to public services, jobs, and social security for some of our most vulnerable community members.

“The Budget forecasts confirm that Australia’s economy continues to be well-managed, with unemployment much lower than that of the United States and much of Europe.

“However, the Government must remain conscious of the ongoing global economic instability and be prepared to reconsider its position if necessary.

“Specific initiatives we welcome from the Treasurer tonight include the Government’s commitment to the reduction of the inequitable tax concessions on superannuation contributions for high income earners, along with raising the tax free threshold to $18,000, which will mean about 630,000 low paid workers will not pay income tax.

http://www.actu.org.au/Media/Mediareleases/GovernmenttakesimportantstepstowardscreatingafairerAustraliawith2012Budget.aspx

Australia is among the top military spenders per capita.

This is not something to boast about! There are alternatives – for example, well resourced public schools with better facilities and smaller classes to educate the citizens of the future; more beds in our public hospitals with more nurses with better working conditions, a sustainable environment, and much more.

All this would be possible if Labor and Liberal Governments would listen to the people and cut military spending.

General Facts
• We spend $32 billion a year on the military that is $87 million a day.
• That makes us the 14th biggest spender on the military in the world.
• We are 6th largest per capita spender on the military in the world.
• Australian military expenditure equals and sometimes surpasses what we spend federally on education.
• Australian military expenditure is 9 to 10 per cent of Federal Government outlays.
• Australian military expenditure is guaranteed to rise by 4 to 5 per cent each year for 20 years.

Specific Facts
• Australia has spent $10 billion on the war in Afghanistan – $1 billion a year plus an additional $1.6 billion for extra armour.
• Australia is buying 3 Aegis air warfare warships at over $2 billion each.
• Australia has recently acquired a fleet of 24 Super Hornet warplanes for $6.6 billion.
• Australia is purchasing 100 F35 Joint Strike Fighters at a cost of over $16 billion. This aircraft involves controversial, highly complex technology and is still being developed. In late 2009, when the Government ordered its first instalment (14 jets totalling $3.2 billion), less than 3 per cent of flight testing had been undertaken.
• Australia cannot staff its existing 6 Collins Class submarines but the 2009 Defence White Paper pushed for 12 new submarines (estimated to cost $38 billion).
• Australia plans to be the first country in the South East Asian region to acquire cruise missiles (said to be more than $0.5 million each). Not only will this appear threatening to our neighbours but it will put us in breach of a nuclear non-proliferation measure to which we subscribe, the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime.

Australian Comparisons
Building the Educational Revolution; $16.1 billion ½ of 1 year’s military spending
The Government’s 2 year economic stimulus plan – $42 billion 1 year and 3 months military spending
Move Royal Adelaide Hospital to a new site – $1.7 billion 3 weeks military spending
Refurbish Royal Hobart Hospital – $1 billion 2 weeks military spending
Government funding of large, grid-connected solar projects (Solar Flagships Program) – $1.5 billion 3 weeks of military spending
Refurbish Royal North Shore Hospital (Sydney) – $1 billion 2 weeks military spending
Rebuild Wagga Wagga Base Hospital – $290 million 3 days military spending
$100 mill for Tamworth’s hospital Just over a day’s military spending Just over a day’s military spending
Acute care beds for Dubbo and Orange Base Hospital – $5 million 1 and half hours military spending
EcoTransit’s light rail plan for inner west Sydney – $414 million 4 days of military spending
Australian overseas aid — $4.3 billion 1½ months military spending
Queensland reconstruction after the cyclone and floods — $5 billion 2 months military spending

here it is

AO (68) autumn 2012

Weather is changing from the wet season to the dry. Time to be in Darwin this Easter weekend.

Darwin is an hourly horror for detained refugees.

Darwin is rapidly becoming Australia’s detention capital. Chronic levels of self-harm and protest have put the Northern Immigration Detention Centre (NIDC) in a state of perpetual crisis. And while numbers vary, since this convergence was announced, between 170 and 341 are languishing at NIDC, with scores more at the Darwin Airport Lodge “Alternative Place of Detention”.


As mental health nurse and former staff member at NIDC Ena Grigg told Lateline this week, “Being locked in a prison with not knowing how you are going to get out or when you are going to get out or why you are even there, and not getting any answers as to how they can get out is driving people mad.”


Within days, the government will open the first compound of the Wickham Point detention centre, located an hour outside Darwin in mosquito-infested swampland. 170-180 ‘clients’ are expected to be transported by Xmas to what is supposedly a facility for people on ‘positive pathways’, but which in reality is as bad as the worst that mandatory detention has created. It has two fences, the outer one with electricity, and the inner with a pressure sensitive alarm.
 When asked why the site was so far from town (100 km round trip from Darwin CBD and 60 km roundtrip from NIDC, no public transportation available), DIAC responded that the “government has had facilities in very remote locations before.”


The new multi-million dollar Wickham Detention centre is one focus of protest. Hopefully the police policy is not to provoke or assist a ‘riot’ for the TV, certainly not the NT Police, but federal Police or ‘intellegence’ or infiltrators provoking trouble, so as to get politically people against those of us protesting these inhumanities.

Australians want these Mandatory Detention Centres progressively closed. The saved finances can fund programmes in communities dealing with these refugees.

A convergence centred on Darwin, with simultaneous protests at as many other detention centres as our resilient movement can muster, can again focus attention on the reality behind the wire.


Darwin is set to become the military capital of Australia, with the massive new US military base announced during Barack Obama’s recent visit there.

In addition, converging on Darwin provides the refugee movement with an opportunity to deepen our links with Aboriginal communities, who for more than four years have been resisting the hugely negative impacts of the NT Intervention.
Together with other national initiatives—from the events held around the 20th anniversary of mandatory detention on 6 May, to mass demonstrations on World Refugee Day around 20 June—the Easter convergence can ensure that the national grassroots refugee rights movement remains on the front foot against a government that is increasingly defensive about its punitive refugee and asylum seeker policies.

Meanwhile, work with the Indonesians on the smuggling question.

And the government should not support repressive regimes and wars and the containment of China by the US (supported by the ALP govt!) and…

For those in Darwin here are the activities.

http://refugee-rights.net/darwin-2012/

http://www.truth-out.org/republic-windows-workers-consider-employee-owned-co-op/1330711182

More than 400 people crowded into a lecture theatre at the University of Technology Sydney on February 17 a public forum, “Don’t shoot the messenger: WikiLeaks, Assange and Democracy”. The forum was organised by the Support Assange and WikiLeaks Coalition.

http://stopwarcoalition.org/support-assange-and-wikileaks-coalition/

Speakers at the forum included socialist historian Humphrey McQueen, Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, London-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson and Christine Assange, the mother of Julian Assange. Veteran journalist and broadcaster Mary Kostakidis chaired the forum.

“I don’t have to tell you why we are here. Instead, having been introduced as a historian, I shall spend most of my time relating what is happening now to past struggles, and why they relate to the ways in which information is regulated.
This evening is the second time I’ve been on a panel with Christine Assange. We spoke together outside parliament house during the Obama visit. She apologised for not being a public speaker. I have to say that you should look forward to hearing her. Hers was a speech that would put any public figure in Australia to shame. Nothing that the leader of the opposition or the prime minister could say could carry not only the conviction but also the content. What made the difference with Christine’s speech that morning was she had something to say.
We also heard from a group of Congolese who spoke passionately about the nine million Congolese who had lost their lives in the fifty years since their fake independence. They were there to protest against the US mining corporations in their country that are responsible for that slaughter. Many of you would have seen the documentary by Raoul Peck on the life and murder of the Congo’s first President, Patrice Lumumba. A further question occurs: had there been a WikiLeaks then, we might have had the answer to what happened to the secretary-general of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold whose plane crashed in Africa in 1961.
Japan could also do with a WikiLeaks to get some sense of what is going on around the nuclear reactors. Had WikiLeaks been operating, many of the disasters that have happened over the decades, like the radiation leaks, would have been investigated in public and there may have been more action to prevent the continuing melt-downs.
We can do with a WikiLeaks here to tell us the extent to which the banks are lying to us about the cost of borrowing money. One thing we all need a WikiLeaks for is to expose this abominable phrase “commercial-in-confidence”, which we know means “corruption-in-the-cabinet office”.
As I said, I’m not going to take up the legal issues about Wikileaks. I want to go back and look at how the relations between information and power have changed in the last couple of hundred years. Throughout all of human history, the one percent have struggled to make sure that the 99 percent couldn’t read or write at all, let alone read what WikiLeaks has revealed. Within living memory, French was the language of international diplomacy.
Slaves in America were flogged if they tried to learn to read. They nonetheless resisted, using what was available to them — which was the Old Testament — to compose hymns of protest, such as ‘Let My People Go’.
The Church used Latin to befuddle the masses. John Wyclif tired to translate the Bible into English just before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. He managed to die before the bishops got to him, but they dug his bones up and burnt them anyway. The authorities were convinced that he was in hell, but they thought they should do the little bit extra that they could.
It wasn’t only the Holy Inquisition that tried to stop people knowing what was going on in their world. No less than a president of the Royal Society from the late 1820s, a Mr Giddy, announced:
Giving education to the labouring classes of the poor will be prejudicial to their morals and happiness. It would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society has destined them. Instead of teaching them subordination, it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets and render them insolent to their superiors.
This is not the skeptical voice of science speaking, but the claim of a social class determined to protect its property.
When Marx was writing Capital, he used the evidence that had been collected by the factory inspectors who interrogated teenage boys working in Satanic Mills six days a week, twelve and more hours a day. They asked Jeremiah Hayes, aged twelve, what a king was. He wasn’t a complete ignoramus. He said: ‘A king is him that has all the money and gold.’ Yet he was a bit confused beyond that because he said, ‘a princess is a man’. William Turner was asked where he lived: “I don’t think I live in England. Perhaps it’s a country, but I didn’t know it before.’ Another factory-hand, aged seventeen, had been in church where he learnt that: ‘The Devil is a good person but I don’t know where he lives.’
Marx had some idea of where the Devil lived because over the page, commenting on the state of miseducation and the abominable conditions in which these English young people were living, he wrote: “Late at night perhaps, Mr Glass Capital, primed with port wine, reels out of his club homeward bound, droning idiotically, ‘Britons never never shall be slaves’.”
By then, the Britons have decided that for themselves. Like the slaves in America, the wage-slaves set about to teach themselves how to read. There is a wonderful document called the ‘Bad Alphabet for the use of the Children of Female Reformers’. When I went to school I was taught ‘A’ is an apple and with the bite taken out, ‘A’ says ‘a’. These children were taught to say: “B is for Bible, Bishops and Bigotry …K is for King, Knaves and Kidnappery.” The power of capital was now up against the self-education of workers and the autodidacts who taught themselves to become champion a working-class movement and socialist groups.
Around the mid-nineteenth century, capitalists needed a more literate workforce. So they had to start educating more of their workers, which is a very dangerous thing to do, as the president of the Royal Society had warned.
After prime minister Benjamin Disraeli introduced the second Reform Act of 1867 to give one million working men the vote, a conservative member of parliament remarked “we must educate our masters”. He had no intention, and neither did Disraeli, of allowing these workers to become the masters. Compulsory education became a form of factory discipline, as Charles Dickens spells out in Hard Times. The cultural illiteracy that had horrified Marx continued and took new guises.
The political requirements of capital coincided with its commercial needs. Advertisers dealt with the surface of commodities, deflecting attention from the intrinsic properties. Glamour bathed every product from limos to packaged suet. Mass marketing installed a “culture of distraction”. If people were going to read, they had to be distracted from the causes of oppression in their working lives: sensationalism and crime in the police gazettes and, more recently, the promotion of people who don’t have personalities, like Paris Hilton. The media pictured Julian Assange in terms of his socks and backpack apart from the sex charges, and Bradley Manning in regards to his sexuality rather than on his motivation and the substance of the documents.
My favourite science-fiction writer George Turner in his 1987 novel The Sea and Summer refers to television as “the Triv”. To appreciate why that term is apt, we need to place television in the circumstances in which people live. The head of Channel 9 in 1970 was clear: “If people come home from work wrecked from a hard day what they want is to relax in front of the tele, and that’s quite right.” Well, it’s ‘quite right’ once we understand the exhaustion that modern work puts on people’s lives. But it’s not ‘quite right’ in terms of people’s understanding of why we are in that situation of time-poverty.
A further device for trivialisation from early in the 20th century was to reduce information to “the news”. Even if every item on “the news” were 100 percent accurate it would still be a lie because it would misrepresent the world as a blizzard of isolated items. If I’m interviewed and rub two footnoted facts together I’m accused of promoting a conspiracy theory. If you know two bits of information and you try to make sense of the world, this is a conspiracy theory.
So we have to ask ourselves, what is ‘the news’ telling us? If we listened to every news bulletin, every quarter of an hour, since we can have news around the clock, if we absorbed to every little bit, what would we understand about the causes of the current global economic catastrophe? If we stress ‘understand’, the answer is – Nothing! Our heads would be filled up with scraps which really couldn’t matter less. What we need are ways of understanding what is in the media, of contextualising what WikiLeaks reveals to us instead of boiling their substance down to fractured factoids.
Unless we understand the dynamics of capitalism, why it has got us into this mess, and why it could not do anything else, then all these bits of information are not going to be of much use to us in determining what we are going to do to fight back.
In conclusion, I want to take up a phrase that all of you, I’m sure, have heard, to wit, the difference between interpreting the world and changing it. Sometimes people put this pair up as if we could have one or the other. We can’t. In every aspect of life, whether in science or in politics, the two activities have to go together. The way we interpret the world is by changing it. We work on it, we do something to it, and through that experience we get a better sense of where we are going. And the obverse is true: to change the world, we need to be able to interpret it. Our task is to perform both, not one or the other.
A second and related point in conclusion is in regard to the Pentagon Papers and the comparisons with WikiLeaks. There can be no doubt that the release of the Pentagon Papers helped the peoples of Indochina to defeat the US invaders. Nothing can take away from the work that Daniel Ellsberg did.
But we need to remember that Ellsberg did what he did because the US was losing the war on the battlefield. That is what he had learned by going there as a true believer. He knew that the reality of defeat was documented in these official reports and felt he had to get this information out. The reality had changed, and so had his understanding of the war. The crucial factor in ending the war was not the publication of the Pentagon Papers, as useful as many of us found them, but the refusal of the Vietnamese to surrender.
That’s what ended the war, at the cost of two million Indochinese, and 60,000 Americans and other allied troops. It was that armed struggle that changed the world in Indochina, and indeed, in many ways, changed the entire world, because the Indo-Chinese showed that even the US, the greatest power on earth, could be broken and driven into the sea.
The combination of interpretation and change that the Vietnamese and their allies demonstrated is the vision that we can take from WikiLeaks and away from this meeting.

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