Above: A familiar sight in today’s Australia. Unemployed workers endure a huge queue outside a Centrelink office. Photo Credit: ABC News/RON EKKEL
FIGHT FOR SECURE JOBS FOR ALL WORKERS: FORCE COMPANIES TO INCREASE HIRING AT
THE EXPENSE OF THEIR BLOATED PROFITS!
30 October 2020: Bosses are using the pandemic to cut their workforce and force those still employed to toil even harder… all for the same pay. That is why even as corporations are frantically throwing workers out of jobs, their own profits are skyrocketing. They soared by 15% in just three months! Sure, some businesses are doing it hard. But overall, even small business total profits have risen. Yet the Morrison government keeps on doling out public money to the rich capitalist business owners. True, Jobkeeper did help some workers keep their jobs. That is why we demand that it be extended to cover casuals, guest workers and international students. However, the scheme has not saved the jobs of even many workers covered by the program. Moreover, the scheme has helped business owners far, far more than it has helped workers. In the long term, the huge flow of public funds into the hands of rich capitalists will lead to working class people having to pay for the resulting debt. We will be made to cop cuts to public services and welfare. And now, the Liberals’ latest budget is giving still more handouts to its capitalist mates!
However, winning jobs for workers requires not boosting bosses’ profits but the very opposite: forcing business owners to retain a bigger workforce than the level that makes them the greatest profits. We need mass struggle, including industrial action, to stop bosses cutting jobs! Let’s unite employed and unemployed workers to demand:
- A ban on job cuts by any firm making a profit, however small.
- A ban on job cuts by any company whose CEO has an annual package in excess of $1 million.
- A ban on job cuts by any business whose profit over the previous seven years exceeds any current losses.
- The forcing of any company making a profit to increase its number of full-time employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly (i.e. three monthly) profit.
- A ban on all cuts to wages and shift penalties from pre-pandemic levels.
- The granting of permanency to all currently casual workers.
- Any business that violates any of these measures to be confiscated and transferred into public ownership.
Instead of such a program, the ALP and Greens “opposition” parties and the pro-ALP leadership of most of our unions have accepted Morrison’s deceitful mantra that workers and their bosses “are all in this together.” They only differ with the government on the details. Additionally, Greens and ALP politicians and Laborite union leaders have long called for promoting jobs through protecting businesses from imports, backing local manufacturing companies and keeping out guest workers. But over the last several months, importing goods has become harder, local businesses have been subsidised and guest workers can’t come in. And still local bosses are throwing workers out of their jobs left, right and centre as they choose to make workers pay for the pandemic! Protectionism fails to save anyone’s job. It only divides local workers from their true allies: all the other workers of the world. Meanwhile, it very mistakenly makes workers believe that they have a common “national interest” with their own local bosses.
That is why we need a new agenda to lead our unions and the broader working class. An agenda based on the understanding that jobs for all workers can only be won through struggle against the capitalist exploiters. Such a program would be guided by the truth that to wage this struggle against the powerful capitalists, the workers movement must unite with all those hurt by the capitalist-dominated “order” – Aboriginal people suffering intense racist oppression, women workers disproportionately copping insecure jobs, guest workers and international students denied the rights of citizenship and Chinese, other Asian, Muslim and African people hit with redneck attacks. And when the capitalist exploiters scream that forcing them to hire more workers than they want will cause economic collapse, we must respond: if your system cannot tolerate the obvious measures needed to ensure secure jobs for all workers then your system has simply got to go! We working class people and our allies will take over the economy and run it based on socialist collective ownership for the benefit of us all.
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For those who want to print out this article to distribute to potentially interested work mates, fellow union members and friends, here is a PDF version of this article in leaflet form (one single-sided A4 page):