corporate_whitey wrote on Jun 15
th, 2012 at 9:58am:
The word productivity should be taken out of the vernacular, it is only ever about making workers work harder, work longer, work for less money, work for less entitlements, work for less legal protections and work for less security so the wealth can be taken and redistributed to corporate welfare and the Mafia.
The whole idea with productivity is to:
(1) Reduce unemployment - which the LIBs did during the Howard years and the ALP inherited in 2007
(2) Increase the output of the current workforce.
It is the second point that I want start the discussion
Increasing output essentially means to increase the GDP - which the LIBs double during the Howard years
The workforce is where Labor loves to launch it's attack and use the old "Workchoices" war cry.
The scenario that CW has outlined would happen if unemployment was high. But unemployment is low and we have a mining sector that cries out for more labour supplies.
The miners are paying workers an obscene amount of money work. Train drivers are earning double in WA than they would in any other states. They can do this because each unit of production has a high productivity worth
So how do we equalise this?
Do we equalise this by paying everyone else who's not in the mining industry higher wages? Does that mean we will increase productivity? What will that do to costs and inflation?
Do we add another layer of costs to the miners and large companies (carbon tax and the Minerals resources tax) so they have less money to pay their workers? If they can't attract the workers then their productivity goes down. So how does that help the economy?