James Clark: “Supermarkets have become an indispensable part of modern life. Most of us shop at them several times a week. Almost everyone buys their fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy there, as well as cleaning products, toiletries, basic medicine, and whatever household supplies we need. Supermarkets are the center of our food system. The products they decide to stock and promote impact the health and well-being of the entire population. But their real influence comes from their buying power. As the largest buyers, the decisions that supermarket chains make flow through our whole economy. From what farmers grow to how shipping companies schedule their fleets, supermarkets set the agenda for the food system. That system is broken. To fix it, we need to take the supermarkets out of private hands. … In fact, supermarkets already plan our food system. But they do it for the sake of profit maximization rather than the public good and long-term sustainability. Supermarkets use their influence over what we eat to promote high-margin, low-nutrition foods. Their buying power places arduous demands on their supply chains, leading to worker exploitation. Like all other essential services, the supermarket should be in the hands of the people.”

Good news/bad news: “A Melbourne magistrate said he was handcuffed by legal limitations from giving Coles the sentence he felt it deserved for underpaying staff. Coles Australia has been fined $50,000 for underpaying long service leave to more than 4000 Victorian employees in a landmark case. The supermarket giant, who pleaded guilty to seven charges on March 30, was sentenced in Melbourne Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday. The court heard an audit revealed Coles failed to correctly pay 4096 Victorian employees their long service leave, totalling $697,016. On Wednesday magistrate Justin Foster slammed new long service leave legislation that prevented him from slapping the company with a bigger fine. He said the $50,000 did not reflect how serious the offending was and set a dangerous precedent for future cases.” While the magistrate is right about the low maximum penalty, this case is still a big step forward — at last, employers face criminal prosecution for ripping off their employees. The federal government’s Fair Work Ombudsman does not treat wage theft as a crime, but the new Victorian Wage Inspectorate is taking a tougher approach.

Annina Claeson: “In Iceland, the Reykjavik City Council, the trade union confederation BSRB, and the national government ran a series of trials of a four-day working week between 2015 and 2019 — the world’s largest experiment thus far in shortening working hours without slashing wages. … The Icelandic trials were a direct response to campaigning pressures from trade unions and other grassroots organizations. Over 2,500 workers in the public sector (more than 1 percent of the country’s entire working population) moved from a forty-hour to thirty-five- or thirty-six-hour working weeks without any reductions in pay. The scale of the trial, combined with the variety of workplaces involved (including both nine-to-five workers and those on nonstandard shifts) means that the Icelandic experiment now provides some of the best data available on the prospect of shortening the working week. It should come as no surprise that this data paints a positive picture. Workers reported experiencing better health and less stress and burnout, and they had more time to spend with their families or on leisure activities. Productivity and service provision either remained at similar levels or improved in the majority of workplaces. With Iceland’s unions playing a key role every step of the way, they wasted no time in building on the trial’s success to negotiate shortened working hours on a permanent basis. Thanks to a series of successfully negotiated contracts in 2019–2021, 86 percent of Iceland’s working population has either already moved to shortened working hours or gained the right to negotiate such reductions in the future.”

Jason Wilson: “In Australia, scholars working in the related field of critical race and whiteness studies have for decades analysed Australia’s nature as a colonial state, founded on stolen land, which excluded Indigenous people and non-white immigrants from its commonwealth at its foundation, and where vast inequalities remain between Indigenous and white Australia. There are several possible responses that a white person can have to this. One possible response is visible in the moral panic around critical race theory. … Conservative media, which subsists on hate clicks, has eagerly jumped on this train. Australia’s dim-bulb rightwingers have followed. The real function of these arguments is to close white ears to demands for justice which are premised on simple facts about how their settler-colonial societies were built — including by means of theft, forced labor, and the consolidation of stolen property with state power. In this version of history, white America is itself the victim of the scheming of European marxist academics, with critical race theorists pulling the strings of protesters in the streets. … Another is available for those who see all of this as a compelling analysis of a vast historical injustice, which matches a systemic explanation with a systemic problem. The next step for them is to engage with and listen to the demands emerging from racial justice protests; to acknowledge how, why, and for whom our institutions were designed, and how they and other white people have benefited from it; and to find ways to assist with the enormous task of righting an almost incomprehensible wrong. If you’re white, this approach may be worth a try. Denying history uses up a lot of energy that could be spent on building a better, more inclusive future.”

Yet another attack on civil society by the Morrison Government: “The Australian government introduced new regulations last week that could have a major chilling effect across Australia’s diverse charities sector. The government’s aim was clear: the regulations are intended to target ‘activist organisations’, and specifically crack down on ‘unlawful behaviour’. Despite this rhetoric, there is no evidence unlawful behaviour by charities is a problem of any significance. By clamping down on charities in this way, the government is not only curtailing their ability to organise peaceful protests, it is imposing more unnecessary red tape on an already highly-regulated sector. The regulations would give the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) new powers to take action against a charity if it commits, or fails to adequately ensure its resources aren’t used to commit, certain types of ‘summary offences’. These are generally a less serious type of criminal offence, and can include acts such as trespassing, unlawful entry, malicious damage or vandalism. If the ACNC commissioner believes a charity is not complying with the regulations, they would be able to take enforcement action, which may include deregistering the charity. … In effect, the regulations mean that if a charity organised a protest in front of a government department and initially refused to leave, this could be considered trespassing. And this could then be grounds to have the charity deregistered. … [A] comprehensive review of the ACNC legislation commissioned by the government in 2018 did not identify any issues with unlawful behaviour by charities. In fact, the review recommended removing the ACNC’s existing power to take action against charities that commit serious breaches of the law. … Despite this, the new regulations would extend the reach of the ACNC and expand its existing powers even further.”

(In case you think the regulator would surely be reasonable in using its new power, remember its chairman is a greedy, pro-coal, racist eugenicist who has long been committed to removing charitable status from organisations that advocate on policy.)

Research by Anna Stansbury at the Peterson Institute for International Economics: “To what extent do US firms have an incentive to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)? Stansbury examines this question through a simple comparison of the expected costs of noncompliance (in terms of legal sanctions) to the profits firms can earn through noncompliance. In the case of the FLSA minimum wage and overtime provisions, typical willful violators are required to pay back wages owed and in some cases additional penalties, if detected by the Department of Labor (DOL). Based on available data on the penalties levied, a typical firm would need to expect a chance of at least 78-88 percent that its violation would be detected in order to have an incentive to comply with the FLSA. In practice, the probability of detection many firms can expect to face is likely much lower than this. In the case of the NLRA, a firm that fires a worker illegally is required to reinstate the worker with back pay if the violation is detected. Based on empirical estimates of the effect of unionization on firm profits, a typical firm may have an incentive to fire a worker illegally for union activities if this illegal firing would reduce the likelihood of unionization at the firm by as little as 0.15-2 percent. These analyses illustrate that neither the FLSA nor the NLRA penalty and enforcement regimes create sufficient incentive to comply for many firms. In this context, the substantial evidence of minimum wage and overtime violations, and of illegal employer behavior toward unions, is not surprising.” It would be fascinating to see a similar analysis of the Fair Work Ombudsman’s time and wages enforcement, and of the Fair Work Commission’s adverse action decisions. I can’t imagine our toothless tigers would fare much better.

Morrison’s vaccine and quarantine failures mean we are going to keep having lockdowns, so we need to make the burden fair: “Lockdowns socialise the burden of public health responses. It means that the worker who may be bullied into putting themselves at risk by their employer can more easily say no, or is in fact mandated to say no. Paying people to stay at home is also part of socialising the burden. All places where the virus can readily spread, including all indoor non-essential venues such as retail outlets, gyms, hairdressers, restaurants and bars, must be closed. All workers who can, should be told to work from home and their workplaces closed. JobSeeker and JobKeeper payments should be restored to their previous levels, and paid pandemic leave made available to anyone who needs it while awaiting test results, quarantining, or unable to work because they have the virus. This is the opposite of the approach of the NSW government, which has emphasised individual responsibility and offered no support to those who lack the means of individually keeps themselves safe. These new measures privatise COVID responsibility to individuals with the least cost to business and the government. It’s the same logic and politics as criminalising the limo driver for the failures in the government’s public health measures. Individual responsibility in a pandemic just means the rich avoid the disease and the loss of profits while workers bear the burden of disease and suffering and economic loss.”

Former SA Premier Jay Weatherill: “I firmly believe that the Australian Labor Party would be elected at the next federal election on a commitment to make Australia the best place in the world to be a parent, and the best place in the world to grow up. … [Such a platform could] remove the false dichotomy between social and economic policy, build a bridge across Labor’s disparate constituencies and unite and powerfully activate women. … For over a quarter of a century, the Left has been looking for a coherent economic narrative equal to its vision for an equal, empathetic, vibrant, diverse society… in the face of rising insecurity and anxiety we have not done enough to challenge the economic orthodoxy of our generation. The more we used the language of economics to argue for human-centred public policy, the more our electoral proposition appeared limited to a better version of the same product… this limited our capacity to deliver the critique of neoliberalism it deserved, nor did we develop an accessible and attractive alternate vision. The neoliberal agenda, which was once legitimised for its promise of a stronger economy, has produced low growth cycles, unevenly distributed, with rising levels of social dislocation — this is not a healthy picture of a modern society. But during the current pandemic, attitudes to the role of government have changed — people’s vision of government as the source of security has been renewed. People now want, and expect, governments to step up, be active and intervene in their interests.”

He proposes early childhood policy reform to drive this agenda — decommodifying childcare and transforming it from child-minding into an early learning system. Wouldn’t be a bad start.

Prof Tracey Warren and Prof Clare Lyonette confirm that we are not all in the pandemic together: “[H]ome-working was a strongly classed phenomenon. Around a half of workers in managerial and professional jobs reported that they were working from home all of the time in April 2020 (with an additional 24% saying they sometimes or often did so). The figures for working-class employees, however, tell a very different story. Only 10% of working-class women in semi-routine jobs (such as care-workers, retail assistants, hospital porters) or routine jobs (cleaners, waiting staff, bus drivers, bar staff, sewing machinists…) were always working from home (only 10% more reported doing it sometimes or often). While many of those who had to work fully from home already had a suitable home office set-up, far more had to make do with working at cramped tables or from sofas and beds. There were also deep class disparities in who had adequate computing facilities with reliable and fast broadband and printing and office supplies. As the summer months came to an end, inequalities in home-working conditions were intensified by stark variations in the workers’ abilities to afford to heat home work spaces over an extended period. … Class inequalities persisted in workers’ wages and household earnings, with working-class women faring the most poorly, taking home the lowest weekly wages in our employed sample. … Without widespread recognition and urgent government support, the traditional working-class backbone of the workforce will be stretched to the limit, with longer-term implications for the rest of society.”