The fight for full employment

Some former Labor ministers, now retired from parliament, speak unhappily of a change in the recruitment of politicians that has coincided with the shift from questions of policy to questions of leadership and management. Most Labor candidates used to be people who had earned their living in other trades. They may also have done time as officers of trade unions, professional associations or charities. Together they knew a lot about life and work outside politics, including the citizens’ hopes and fears and expectations of government. That was then.

Now, in a Weekly Guardian review of the Labor Party, “its candidates are incestuously drawn from the party bureaucracy”. The party has been their working life. Winning seats and gaining office for its candidates has rightly been their mission. Policy was the business of the politicians. Of course the politicians wanted office, often greedily - but public purposes were at least among their working purposes.

Some of those old warriors insist that the change of purpose is profound. The conviction that they’re in politics to improve the justice and equity of Australian life has given way to the conviction that because winning office is a condition of any other achievement, nothing must get in the way of it.

About 60 or 70 per cent of the voters are doing all right, and most of them are assumed to be self-interested and easily frightened by talk of higher tax, interest rates or inflation. But this understanding of “middle Australia” is contradicted by almost all polls that have asked people if they would pay more tax for better public health or education, or other necessities for people poorer than themselves. Meanwhile the Labor Party attack has shifted decisively to questions of management, or - increasingly - of personal character. Never mind the government’s policies, just attack its leaders as being incompetent and as liars.

Critics of the strategy get some space on the opinion pages and occasionally the feature pages of the national press, but rarely in its editorials. Professional journals of political economy, Left-leaning magazines, academic authors of critical books from the university presses, and critical talk on the ABC, aren’t even dangerous any more. As many Labor as Liberal voices deride them as dismal “latte intellectuals”, “chardonnay socialists”, the dying Left talking to itself.

So what hope is there for our million and a half unemployed and as many again of their suffering dependants? For lone mums devoting their time and minimal welfare income to bringing up young children? All now identified as pampered idlers, the cause of their own poverty and needing only a welfare cut to drive them back to work?

The best hope - though a frail and perhaps a frightening one - may be that a triumphant Right with command of both government houses will be tempted to go too far. Keep in mind the four new directions to which the government is already committed. Imagine how initial success might encourage some further development of each of them:

• exclude union officers from all places of employment. (Next, perhaps, get rid of unions?);
• ban any other collective bargaining by employees (and perhaps by contract workers?);
• repeal unfair dismissal rules for employers of less than 20 people. (In due course extend the blessing to bigger firms?); and
• from The Australian, five days before Christmas 2004:
   
  The complex array of welfare payments could be streamlined with a single working-age benefit, under a renewed push by the Howard Government to encourage the jobless, disabled pensioners and single parents to go back to work. Outlining a new “work first, welfare second” reform push to tackle tax and welfare disincentives and boost workplace participation, Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Anderson has also hinted at further child care assistance to middle-income mothers returning to work.
   
  The plan could include stripping general child-care entitlements from the unemployed and low-income single mothers, who can currently secure up to four days of taxpayer-funded child care at a nominal rate, and re-directing support to mothers in the paid workforce. “There are 2.7 million working age Australians currently on welfare payments,” Mr. Andrews told “The Australian”. “The current system is confusing, and there are disincentives in the system which mean that even if people want to work, they are not provided with the incentive ... If we want to maintain our economic prosperity, we must boost productivity. And there’s an ethical element to this, which is to assist people who want to work”.

Ethics? Most of the unemployed get less welfare income if they return to work. But single mums are to get less welfare while they’re unemployed and more if they’re out earning.

But credit opponents with good intentions. The neo-liberal program has so far failed to achieve its own aim of limiting real unemployment to its “natural” rate. So it has not achieved the full rate of economic growth or the flexible capacity to respond to continuing technical and global change that our technical and global conditions would actually allow. Neo-liberal believers can expect the new four-point program to perfect the economy by freeing it to do its potential best for all parties. Greedy non-believers may welcome it for discreditable reasons, but they’re not the leaders, or the voters, whom argument or experience might persuade to change their minds. Argument hasn’t so far moved enough of either the believers or the profiteers. Might some historical experience help?

A little history

King George III inherited an agricultural England whose peasant households also spun and wove most of its imported cotton and home-grown wool. An Elizabethan statute, and some later law, required local magistrates to regulate pay and hours. Parishes cared for their poor. But the industries were presently transformed, re-located and their labour economised by Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule and Watt’s steam engine. Napoleon’s wars blocked some imported food. Merchants raised prices. Some parishes urged their unemployed people to seek work or welfare in other parishes. Some unemployed people asked their magistrates for protection to which they were entitled by statute and common law. Machine workers joined in bargaining for better pay, hours and safety in the new “satanic mills”.

There was sympathy, including in parliament, for the sufferers. But it didn’t prevail. Workers’ unions had been banned in the textile and metalworking industries in 1749. By the end of the century informal associations were petitioning Parliament to restore their old rights. Parliament responded with Combination Acts. They restrained both masters and men, but were rarely applied to the masters. Organised resistance - mass meetings, strikes, petitions, some machine-wrecking - intensified in 1811-12.

Parliament responded with tougher Combination Acts. In 1813 it repealed the Elizabethan right of magistrates to fix wages and regulate apprenticeships. In historian Halevy’s words, “it was a triumph by no means making for social peace. The workmen, deprived first of their right of association and then of their legal right of state protection, were driven to the formation of secret societies, to conspiracy, and to riot. It is true that the Luddite disturbances had subsided, and that employers and men alike took part in the rising of 1815; but two years were not to elapse before a renewal of Luddite outrages. Never before had the existence of workmen’s associations in England been so precarious; never had their character been so revolutionary.”

Ten years later the repressive legislation was repealed. Seven more, and a Liberal prime minister forced the King of England to force the House of Lords to pass the radical reform of Parliament that began Britain’s progress to democracy. To match that response to our coming repression we will need different politicians than represent most of us now. Candidates could begin by memorising the Reserve Bank’s estimate of the true number unemployed people, and by reading Mark Peel’s The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty.