Don’t Let Rich Business Owners Make Workers Pay for the Pandemic –
Force Them to Keep Paying Wages from the Profits
They’ve Leached From Workers Over the Years!
No Job Cuts! No Unpaid Stand Downs!
3 May 2020: Australian billionaire James Packer spent much of last year cruising around in a $200 million super yacht. He is now lazing about in his $20 million holiday mansion in a U.S. resort. Packer can afford all this. This main owner of hotel and casino operator Crown Resorts has made a fortune from leaching profits out of the hard work of Crown workers. In the last five years, Crown’s owners have extracted a total profit of $4.2 billion. Yet within hours of the March 22 announcement that clubs and casinos needed to close due to COVID-19, Packer and Co. stood down without pay thousands of workers. Around 95% of the 11,500 strong Crown workforce has been cut. This is outrageous! Consider this: assuming that the average annual wage of a Crown worker is $60,000, probably an overestimate given how badly hospitality workers are paid, then Packer and the other shareholders could pay all the stood down workers their full wages for six and a half years out of the profits that they have leached from these workers’ labour in just the last five years!
Packer is hardly alone in acting this way. Right across Australia, the owners of cafes, restaurants, gyms, airlines, tourism operations and factories are throwing onto the scrap heap the very same workers who made these capitalists their fortunes. We must not stand for this! Ultra-rich business owners should not be allowed to retrench workers or stand down workers without pay. We must force them to keep on paying us in full out of the profits that they have leached from our labour over the years.
It is Workers Who Are Bearing the Economic Pain of the COVID-19 Pandemic
For years, Australian governments – Liberal, ALP and ALP-Greens coalitions alike – have kept the dole at cruelly low levels. The right-wing media have “justified” this by insulting unemployed workers as lazy. However, with so many workers now thrown onto Centrelink queues it is hard to sell that lie. So, now the new line that the regime is selling us is that “everyone needs to share the economic pain” caused by the pandemic. Except it is workers who are being made to bear all that pain! Sure, there are also some small businesses that are not making a profit right now. But let’s not buy the line that those small business owners using hired labour are simply, innocent “battlers.” Many of these small business owners axing jobs now are the ones most notorious for illegally under-paying their staff and otherwise bullying their workers. And how many workers employed in small businesses see their supposed “battler” boss turn up each day in a flashy Mercedes or BMW!
Let’s remember that when any business using hired labour, big or small, winds up, the owners still have all their personal wealth that they have extracted from exploiting their workers as well as all the money that they will get from selling the equipment and other business assets that they had bought from the profits sweated out from workers’ labour over the years. Just look at how little the high-profile failure of Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel affected his wealth. After Palmer sacked 237 workers in early 2016, he then infamously refused to pay even the entitlements of the further 800 workers who lost their jobs when the company was liquidated shortly after. Today, despite his company’s collapse and all the pain borne by the axed Queensland Nickel workers, Palmer still manages to be Australia’s eighth richest person with nearly $10 billion in wealth!
Far from “sharing the pain”, many bosses are using the current crisis to, instead, inflict pain on their workers. Knowing that the massive job losses have left those still employed feeling insecure about their jobs and, thus, less willing to challenge bosses, business owners are ramming through attacks on working conditions. The conservative government is right behind them. Last week, industrial relations minister Christian Porter slashed the notice period that bosses have to give before making cuts to pay, penalty rates and leave entitlements to just 24 hours. Meanwhile, some corporate bigwigs are using the cover of the pandemic to push through job cuts. In March, ANZ bosses slashed 230 jobs as part of a long-plotted “cost cutting” drive.
Bosses Putting Workers’ Lives at Risk
Driven by this same pursuit of “cutting costs,” many business owners are putting those workers lucky enough to still have a job at risk of contracting the coronavirus. Qantas has such lax safety systems that even the limp government regulator, Safework NSW, issued the company a mandatory notice on March 2 because Qantas did not ensure that PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) was provided to Sydney ground crew performing the crucial role of cleaning aircraft of wet wipes, used tissues, used face masks and sometimes even vomit and blood. Then the Transport Workers Union exposed how after a Qantas baggage handler at Adelaide Airport was found be infected with COVID-19, Qantas bosses did little to put any protections in place. As a result within 17 days, another 17 baggage handlers, three other Qantas workers and 11 close contacts became infected.
In many cases, bosses are not only putting their workers at risk but placing those they supposedly serve in danger too. At many hospitals and private aged care facilities, bosses have failed to provide workers with adequate PPE; and at best only after the virus has already spread. At a Western Sydney Anglicare nursing home, 14 residents have tragically died from COVID-19 after a worker was infected.
The higher paid strata of administrators of government-run facilities are often little better than their private sector counterparts. In Tasmania, the virus jumped from two infected North West Regional Hospital patients onto medical workers. The lack of adequate PPE, which medical workers have angrily exposed, enabled COVID-19 to then spread like wildfire amongst staff and patients at the hospital and a neighbouring private hospital. Three days ago, the twelfth person died from this particular outbreak that has infected at least 73 health workers.
Since we can’t rely on the bosses to ensure a safe workplace, the workers movement must fight for the following:
- Union/worker safety committees at each workplace. These will struggle to ensure that each workplace is safe and has proper pandemic deterrence procedures. If any site is found to be dangerous, workers should walk off the job until the site is made safe. Workers to be fully paid during any such walk-offs.
- Temperature testing of all workers and others entering work sites.
- All workers at hospitals treating potential COVID-19 patients and at all aged care homes to be supplied with full head-to-toe PPE. The provision of such space-suit style PPE to nurses, janitors and doctors in China is part of why that country was so successful in responding to the COVID-19 threat.
- All workers to be granted unlimited paid pandemic leave for COVID-19 treatment or quarantining or for caring for ill people. Instead of bosses blaming workers for outbreaks, they should pay sick leave so that workers don’t get hit with the choice between poverty and risking spreading the disease.
- Similarly, all casual workers must be immediately granted permanency. These workers must have all the rights of permanent workers – including sick leave and guaranteed minimum work hours.
Not Bailouts of Capitalists but Jobs For All Workers At Full Pay
All of official society, business owners, media commentators, the ALP “Opposition” and even, to a significant degree, the current leaders of our trade unions – have been cheering the government’s JobKeeper scheme that pays the owners of certain businesses $1,500 per fortnight for each worker that they keep on their payrolls. However, JobKeeper does not apply to most casual workers. Yet it is precisely such workers who have suffered the biggest job cuts since they often work in the hardest hit sectors like hospitality and retail. Also, often working in these areas are international students and visa workers. Yet the scheme will not apply to them either. These people now face destitution as they are not even eligible for the dole. Despicably, Morrison’s response to their plight is to tell these people to “make your way home”! For many this is not even possible as they not only have no money to pay for airfares but often cannot do so due to travel restrictions. The workers movement must actively demand that, to the extent that JobKeeper actually helps workers keep their jobs, it should apply to all workers. Let’s stop our wages being undercut by the forcing of destitute people into illegally-low-paid jobs in the cash economy! Let’s demand:
- Immediate permanency, with all the rights of permanent workers, for all casual employees!
- Full citizenship rights for everyone here including international students, refugees and visa workers!
Other than those explicitly excluded from JobKeeper, there are many others that the scheme will not save the jobs of. Since it only applies to large companies that have lost more than 50% of their revenue and smaller businesses that have lost at least 30%, workers being axed by firms experiencing lesser downturns will not be helped. Moreover, since the subsidy is barely above minimum wage, many bosses are choosing not to utilise the scheme because they simply don’t want to top up any wages out of their own pockets. Other capitalists are refusing to re-hire cut workers because they wanted to “prune” staff anyway.
There is another huge problem. JobKeeper is financed not from wealthy company owners but from the public budget. And you can bet that it is working class people who are going to be made to cover most of the resulting public debt. We face cuts to public service jobs, the further sell-off of public housing, the return of the dole back to near starvation levels, more health and education services being made user pays and further privatisation. What makes this more terrible is that some of the capitalists receiving JobKeeper subsidies did not actually have plans to cut their workforce because they needed to keep exploiting their workers to protect profits or market share. Thus, many billionaire and multi-millionaire capitalists are now going to receive huge donations from the public budget that amount to a combined multi billion dollars amount. That’s why in counter-position to JobKeeper, we need to fight for jobs for all workers through forcing the bosses to retain more workers than they want to at the expense of their own profits. That requires militant, mass struggle.
Even at this time of pandemic restrictions, strike action is still possible. Last month, MUA-organised Hutchison workers walked off the job for ten days over the company’s callous indifference to the threat of a pandemic spread at its Port Botany terminal. Moreover, social distancing measures will inevitably ease, giving us more freedom to launch the mass actions so urgently needed. We should then fight to stop wealthy business owners planning to permanently shut down operations by holding mass protest occupations of their facilities (while maintaining safe social distancing) to prevent them from selling their assets. However, given that many workers being axed are at smaller sites with less industrial power, the workers movement must also unite behind common demands for laws to ensure jobs for all workers. Let us demand:
- A ban on all job cuts or unpaid stand downs by any firm whose total profit over the previous, say seven, years exceeds any current losses.
- A ban on all cuts to wages and conditions from pre-pandemic levels.
- The forcing of any company still making a profit to increase its number of full-time paid employees by at least five workers for every hundred thousand dollars of monthly profit.
- Any business that violates these measures to be confiscated and transferred into public ownership.
Workers are NOT “All in This Together” with the Greedy, Rich Bosses
To wage the desperately needed fightback, the workers movement must change the program that currently leads our unions. Right now, pro-ALP union leaders have completely bought into the “we are all in this together” mantra. They have been cheered on in this by the corporate bigwigs, the right-wing government and media commentators. The ACTU leadership has been so compliant that industrial relations minister Christian Porter called ACTU leader Sally McManus his new BFF! Even the more militant Victorian CFMEU head, John Setka, has cheered the “unprecedented co-operation” with bosses associations saying “For once, we are all in the same boat.”
But far from being “all in the same boat”, the greedy bosses are actually throwing workers off the very boats that these workers built as soon as these boats run into rough waters. It is this same “we are all in the same boat” nonsense that saw the 1980s Accord between unions, bosses and the then ALP government. The Accord was essentially a no-strike pledge by union leaders in exchange for promises of social programs. In reality, The Accord saw the then Hawke and Keating Labor governments preside over the biggest increase in inequality in Australian history. Since then a less overt, but still underlying, “all in the same boat” ideology has seen union leaders, for the most part, shy away from organising militant industrial action – a strategy that has weakened our unions and led to the undermining of working conditions and rampant casualisation of the workforce.
Central to the “we are all in this together” ideology is the myth that workers and bosses share a common “national interest” in promoting the profits of local companies. Thus, the union leadership’s long-term “strategy” to stop job cuts has been to call to protect Australian businesses from imported goods. However, the last couple of months have exposed how utterly bankrupt this protectionist strategy is. For all the recent huge job losses have absolutely nothing to do with overseas competition hurting local businesses. The job cuts have actually been concentrated in sectors – like restaurants, shops, personal care, tourism and gyms – that simply cannot by their very nature be replaced by imports or by overseas contracting. Meanwhile, not only are travel disruptions reducing imports to Australia, those cuts to imports are causing job losses here as Australian businesses are deprived of needed supplies.
So we desperately need to exorcise our union movement of the we are all in this together or common national interest myth that currently haunts it. Our unions need to be re-oriented on a program based on a clear understanding that the interests of the capitalist business owners and those of the working class are at all times counter-posed. At times of crisis, like today, this conflict of interests actually becomes even sharper. Central to such a class struggle understanding is the truth that job losses are not ultimately caused by foreign threats to local business profits but by the greed of capitalists and the irrationality of their system. Thus the fight for jobs for all requires not helping local bosses to make more profit but actually, in a sense, the very opposite: mass struggle to force these bosses to hire more workers at the expense of their profits.
One positive development that lasted for a short period is that after years of focusing on demands to keep out guest workers, our union leaders, albeit not very energetically, did rightly call for JobKeeper to be extended to visa workers and international students. However, this emphasis did not last long at all. Today, Sally McManus and some other union leaders gave legitimacy to a newspaper opinion piece by one of their ALP parliamentary mates calling to cut migration and for local workers to get a “first go at jobs.” The divisive, nationalist article was written by senior federal shadow minister, Kristina Keneally, who sounded a good deal like a Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson or Donald Trump. Such pitting of Australian workers against international and guest workers, far from saving the jobs of local workers, only divides workers from our true allies – the workers of the world – and, thus, makes the workers movement less able to mobilise effective action to stop job slashing attacks by capitalists. It is high time that our unions strongly reject all divisive, protectionist demands that call for putting local workers ahead of our international worker comrades whether they be calls to slash immigration, demands for more “local content”, demands for “Aussie crews on Aussie ships” or calls to keep out visa workers. Instead, our unions must demand that all those working here (including on ships servicing here), no matter what their nationality, get the highest local wages and conditions, must fight to win full citizenship rights for all visa workers and international students and must make persistent efforts to unite local and international workers against job slashing bosses everywhere in the fight for jobs for all. As the threat of job losses at British magnate Richard Branson’s Virgin shows and the fact that the most powerful Australian capitalists – like James Packer, the Murdochs and Anthony Pratt – have major operations abroad highlights, we need unity and solidarity with our worker sisters and brothers around the world today more than ever.
In waging a fight for jobs for all, the working class must unite in common struggle with all downtrodden layers especially hard hit in recent weeks. Standing by those sleeping the streets, couch-surfing or struggling to pay rent, the workers movement must demand a six-month freeze to all residential rent payments, an immediate end to all public housing sell-offs and the requisitioning of all unoccupied properties of people owning more than three homes and their immediate conversion into low-rent public housing or rent-free housing for the homeless. The workers movement must also stand by Australia’s brutally oppressed Aboriginal people who face extreme racist discrimination at the best of times but who are now, with police having greater powers arising from pandemic restrictions, copping even more racist repression. That means we must strongly stand by homeless Aboriginal people being especially bullied by police. And we must join in the recent, powerful call by the families and friends of Aboriginal victims of deaths in custody to release all of our Aboriginal sisters and brothers who are languishing – now more than ever given the dangerous and repressive covid-19 conditions – in Australia’s many brutal prisons and cruel detention centres.
Don’t Let the Capitalist Rulers Blame Others
for the Suffering and Job Cuts since the Pandemic Hit
Any fightback that the workers movement tries to wage will be undermined if the ruling class succeeds in shifting the blame for the pandemic and job losses onto others. Hard right media shock jocks and coded messages from the government have despicably sought to blame Chinese people. This has led to an explosion in the already alarming number of racist attacks against people of colour in Australia. People of Chinese appearance, including medical workers, have especially been abused and violently attacked. The working class must stamp out such attacks. Workers of Asian background make up an important component of the Australian workers movement and we need to resolutely fight against racism if we are to preserve our own unity and focus the masses on who our enemy actually is. So, while workers rights activists should respect genuine social distancing regulations, when a racist attack is threatened, we should make an exception and take mass action to defend those targeted and to painfully rebuff the perpetrators.
The main way that the capitalist rulers are trying to shift blame for the deaths and economic pain caused by the pandemic is to make ridiculous smears against the People Republic of China (PRC). The fact is that China gave Australia and the world much warning about the COVID-19 threat. Indeed, Australia did not even have a single confirmed case of COVID-19 when China took the unprecedented step of shutting down a whole city of 11 million people to contain the virus. That the virus still spread so widely here is because the Liberal government, with ALP support, in order to underhandedly promote anti-China fears within the Australian population, maintained for a long period restrictions only on travellers from China (and later from South Korea too) while not taking measures then to screen and test the large number of people returning with the virus from Europe, from cruise ships and from the U.S. Furthermore, the capitalist system, in which those who control production only have things made if they can find a way to extract a profit out of it, meant that Australian manufacturers have only in a very limited way switched over to producing pandemic response items like protective suits, medical masks, infra-red thermometers and testing kits. The resulting scarcity of these items has greatly weakened Australia’ response. In the end, these shortages have only been eased after China came to the rescue in recent days with large shipments. So the attempts by Australia’s capitalist regime to blame the PRC are total rubbish. Indeed, the Liberal government’s China-bashing call for a supposed “independent inquiry” into the earliest phase of the pandemic are much like its 2014-2015 Royal Commission into the Trade Unions, a witch-hunt aimed at smearing their target and justifying attacks against it. If we allow the capitalist ruling class to deceive the population into blaming China for their current hardships then the masses will likely stay away from any attempt to resist the capitalist class’ attacks on workers’ jobs and conditions.
There is another reason why the Australian regime and their big brother allies in Washington are so hysterically attacking China over the pandemic. The PRC’s stunning success in responding to the COVID-19 threat, versus on the other hand the seriously flawed response in Australia and the catastrophically botched one in the U.S., has shown the superiority of the PRC’s socialistic system based on public ownership and working class rule. The capitalist rulers around the world are terrified that their own masses will see this and, thus, conclude that socialism is what is needed in their own countries too. Indeed, that is precisely the conclusion that we must draw! For although working class rule in China is bureaucratically deformed and threatened by the presence of a still significant capitalist class, recent events have proven that such a socialist system, even in a flawed form, is far better able to protect the interests of the masses than the chaotic capitalist system. Thus, because the key sectors of the Chinese economy are dominated by public ownership – including banking, construction, ports, airlines, heavy industry, communication and mining – China was able to switch over its economy to building brand new emergency hospitals and pandemic response items in a flash. Moreover, the fact that the Chinese working class, in as imperfect a way as it is, have control of the PRC economy through their state means that the rise in unemployment in China since the pandemic has been relatively miniscule compared to the massive wave of joblessness that we are seeing in the U.S., Europe and Australia. So, yes, we definitely do need to fight here for a system based on public ownership and working class rule. And when business owners respond to our demands for them to retain more employees than is most profitable for them by saying that “this is not practical” then the workers movement must respond: if you capitalists cannot run the economy in a way that provides jobs for all then the economy should not be in your hands, we working class people will take it off you and put it into our own, strong and able, collective hands.
The Western capitalist rulers are right, from their point of view, to fear that the existence of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country is an existential threat, if only by example, to capitalist rule in their own countries. That is precisely why it is in the interests of working class people and all the oppressed here to stand by socialistic rule in China. For the existence of Red China strengthens our own struggle against capitalist exploitation. So let us oppose the Australian regime’s participation in the provocative U.S.-led naval forays through distant Chinese waters and let us oppose its fulsome political support to counterrevolutionary forces within China – like the yuppy, rich people’s opposition in Hong Kong.
The Capitalists Have Waged Class War on Workers for Decades –
It’s Time to Wage Class War on Them!
For the last several years, most workers have barely received a pay rise even while rents have been rising significantly, electricity costs are climbing steeply and out of pocket medical costs are increasing. In the meantime, company profits have skyrocketed. As a result, the wealth of Australia’s richest 200 people went from $197 billion in 2016 to $342 billion in 2019 – a staggering 74% increase in just three years! But now that some of them have run into choppy waters they are dumping overboard the very workers who produced their spectacular wealth. And then they tell us that “we are all in the same boat together.” How dare they! Workers who have just been axed by their bosses must feel nauseous when they encounter such rubbish as they queue up for hours before opening time outside Centrelink offices while wealthy business owners drive past in their flashy prestige cars.
So let’s completely reject the lie that we are being sold by the big end of town, with the complicity of the current ALP leaders of the workers movement, that “we are all in this together.” Let’s never lose sight of the fact that while it is the pandemic that necessitates social distancing restrictions it is a choice of business owners to lay off or stand down workers without pay rather than pay their workers out of the profits that they have sweated out of these self same workers over many years. Let’s build mass working class struggle against the bosses to force them to re-hire retrenched or stood down without pay workers as well as all longer-term unemployed workers. And if James Packer complains that he can’t afford this, we should demand that he sell the new super yacht that he bought eleven months ago. That alone would give him enough money to fully pay all his stood-down Crown workers for nearly four months. Let’s win jobs for all through waging class war on the very exploiting class that has been waging a one-sided class war on us for the last three and a half decades!