the Banner Bright

A new Oxfam report on the garment industry has blamed Australian companies for using Bangladeshi and Vietnamese sweatshops in their supply chains. A factory supplying Kmart pays as little as 55c an hour, and a factory supplying Big W pays just 51c an hour — with disastrous effects on workers and their families. There is absolutely no reason for this. Wages could be dramatically lifted without significant impact on the price of clothes: “Deloitte Access Economics estimates that on average just 4% of the price of a piece of clothing sold in Australia goes towards the wages of the workers who made it. Oxfam said if brands absorbed the cost of paying a living wage, it would amount to less than 1% of the garment price.” Instead, Oxfam found in chapter 4 of its report that Australian brands engaged in aggressive tactics to drive down prices (and therefore wages). On the other hand, Oxfam’s scrutiny seems to have had some effect, with a number of brands claiming they will do better. Time will tell.

This time last year, John Button wrote persuasively in The Monthly that Peter Dutton and Mike Pezzullo had gutted the department of immigration’s nation-building expertise and were rewarded with a paramilitary empire in the new Home Affairs mega-portfolio. Now, Paddy Gourley shows that a year on, Home Affairs has turned out exactly as expected, and needs to be urgently dismantled.

There are currently two Kickstarter campaigns under way for tabletop roleplaying games about community organising. The first, Beat the Boss, focusses on union organising in an American context, and aims to “create a place for activists to learn how to organize on the job and in the community. With a handful of six-sided dice, a pencil, a character sheet, and a group of friends, you can learn how to move people to action and take back their power.” The second, Comrades, is more dramatic. Set in a fictional “revolutionary underground”, “it pits players against a corrupt government, forcing them to fight from the shadows to free the people from their chains.” Both games use the PbtA system.

Nathan J Roberts spoke to some of America’s richest high school students, and made an eloquent pitch for socialism: “I’m beginning here, with a basic example of an unjustified inequality, because … for me, that is where the socialistic instinct begins, not with economic theory but with a sense of solidarity, feeling a deep understanding, love of, and sympathy with your fellow human beings in very different circumstances, and wanting nothing for yourself that you do not also want for them. … A socialist is, first and foremost, not just perturbed by injustice, but horrified by it, really truly sickened by it in a way that means they can’t stop thinking about it. It gives you the feeling that ‘we can’t do anything about that’ or ‘that’s just the way of the world’ is not acceptable.” He goes on to explain that the key issues for socialists are inequalities of wealth and power, and that liberalism fails to address deep structural imbalances. Worth a read.

Recently released ABS data showed tiny real wage growth in the past year — but as Greg Jericho points out, “there is a long way to go before we experience anything like what was considered solid or even merely average wages growth.” He notes, “It is now four and half years since real wages grew by 0.5% and six years since they grew by more than 1%.” This trend is baffling market ideologues like the chief economist at CommSec, who says “economists have been left scratching their heads as to why solid jobs growth isn’t translating into stronger wages growth for employees”. It’s no big secret — wages will rise when workers have power, and not before. Jericho concludes: “given there are already noises of concern about wages rising faster under a Labor government, it is worth remembering that wages growth does not happen by accident, and that companies will be happy for the new normal to remain in place — and will campaign strongly against any changes to industrial relations.”

After posting yesterday’s link about how labour law can make workers vulnerable, I saw this report on Deliveroo’s campaign to have the law changed to suit its particular model of exploitation. UNSW’s Shae McCrystal says Deliveroo is driven by impending judgments that may find it has engaged in sham contracting, and wants to shift the goalposts: “Every time you talk about a third category of worker, a ‘third way’, what you are really talking about is creating a category of worker that is denied the protections of labour law … [with] more grey areas where they get fewer protections and less pay.” The University of Sydney’s Joellen Riley says instead of carving people out of legal definitions of employment, we should be expanding the class of workers who are protected: “I think too much time and legal costs have been wasted in arguing about whether these workers are in fact employees. If we think they should enjoy decent working conditions (and I do) I think it is time we legislated to provide those working conditions directly — not by deeming them to be employees, but by working out an appropriate regulatory regime that would address the exploitative practices in these arrangements.”

In a chapter of Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law, Virginia Mantouvalou argues that the term “exploitation” needs a broader legal meaning than just slavery and servitude, and should also include taking advantage of workers’ vulnerability. She also calls for governments to be held accountable for “legislation that excludes or treats differently certain groups of workers, making them in this way especially vulnerable to exploitation. That the state has such a role in creating structural conditions of vulnerability to exploitation through law is deeply troubling, given that the employment relation is already a relationship of inequality and subordination.” In Australia, some of the legal structures that increase vulnerability in this way include visa work rules, junior wages, work for the dole and CDP, internships, au pair arrangements, labour hire, and ‘independent’ contracting. Some State governments have begun reviewing small aspects (such as labour hire licensing) but Mantouvalou’s call for a systematic review has merit.

The story of Greens candidate Tim Hollo’s 14-month quest to prove his eligibility to run for election demonstrates the need to scrap the absurd citizenship restrictions in section 44 of the Constitution. It is ridiculous to suggest that Hollo might be a Hungarian or Chinese sleeper agent because his Jewish parents were repeatedly forced to migrate, but that is what our Constitution says. We should adopt the New Zealand rule, which only bans MPs who take up a new citizenship after they are elected.

In a secret report to investors, Credit Suisse assesses Labor’s industrial relations policies and predicts “a potentially transformative shift in the bargaining power of labour, leading to a rise in the labour share of GDP over and above cyclical dynamics”. Noting that “productivity has grown almost four times faster than wages” in recent years, the investment bank is forced to admit that a shift in workers’ favour would merely be a “structural unwind” in response to the “windfall” profits companies have taken from the current system. In public, bosses claim the current system is fair and balanced, but in private they acknowledge it is rigged in their favour.

Ryan Goss of the ANU Law School has written the first comprehensive summary of the voting franchise at local government elections throughout Australia. Disturbingly, in most places, non-resident property owners and companies can also vote — and in Sydney and Melbourne, companies get more than one vote. Goss argues that the Queensland model, which gives one vote to each human resident who is on the State electoral roll, should be rolled out nationwide: “Local governments operate as an important form of government in contemporary Australia, and Australians should have an equal say in electing those governments and an equal opportunity to hold those governments accountable at the ballot box. … Allowing plural voting by those who own properties or those appointed by corporations is inconsistent with … notions of political equality as assigning to ‘each citizen an equal vote’.” This is an important issue. We should not countenance any amendment to include local government in the Australian Constitution — and certainly not with powers of taxation, as the Liberal Party has suggested — without a guarantee of fair council elections.