In the past few weeks, the Australian trade union movement has complained about the AUKUS agreement but said nothing about Albo’s new agreement with India to flood Australia with cheap, unskilled, as well as poorly trained labour.
What is wrong with the unions such that they grab for the geopolitical pearls but ignore a nuclear bomb for worker wages?
The weakness of unions is a topic of systemic concern. One that is a central input to the balance of liberal capitalism. It is strong unions that help divide national income fairly between labour and capital. They keep at bay the populists that would dismember the system. To wit:
Unions will push for a record 7 per cent increase in award wages for 2.6 million workers right up the pay scale, despite business warning that inflation-linked increases will add to prices growth and keep interest rates up.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions will urge the Fair Work Commission to apply the 7 per cent rise to the minimum hourly rate for lowest-paid workers, increasing it from $21.38 an hour to $22.88 from July 1. That would raise the full-time minimum wage by about $3000 to $45,337 a year.
But it will argue that the 7 per cent wage increase should also go to the many other workers on minimum award rates, ranging from $66,000 a year in hospitality to $82,000 for engineers and up to $200,000 for pilots.
We know that union membership is weak. And that certainly reduces their leverage with capital and policymakers.
But why are the unions so internally weak?
On the ground, we know that they are corrupt and greasy as the system itself. But that does not take away from the movement’s mission. The greater concern is in management.
A comment from Agriconomist yesterday nailed the answer to this question for me:
If that is the case then complaining about wage growth owing to the unions takes on an entirely different hue.
It is the weakness of the unions that is at the heart of weak Aussie wage growth but it is their armchair Labor progressive point-of-view that is the issue, as much as it is the falling membership.
In the circumstances of the next business cycle, of mass immigration and advancing AI, this weakness of the unions will move from inconvenient truth to life-threatening for workers.
And the free market system that they support.