Due to the entrenched English class system, research has shown that the strong familial persistence of social status across generations has not changed in the UK across 400 years of accumulated data. With growing inequality and the emergence of ultra-wealthy and privileged classes in Australia – are we following the same path?
Source: 400 years and counting: Your social status is determined by class – Pearls and Irritations
The latest increases in the GDP deflator have been driven by both unit labour costs and unit profits. Unit profits increased by 9.4% in the fourth quarter of 2022, year-on-year, and contributed more than half the domestic price pressures in that quarter, while unit labour costs increased by 4.7% and contributed less than half.
Source: The cost of the Reserve Bank’s profit denialism will be lives
What the Reserve Bank in Australia ignores is a failure to recognize the facts
“Their goal is to put a chill on borrowing and spending,” it wrote of the bank, noting that the strategy “will throw people out of jobs and make workers insecure enough to stop asking for raises — even if it plunges the country into a recession.” It argued that the bank was focused on blaming workers. As indeed the bank was. So were pundits, bank economists, and right-wing politicians. According to the yarn they spun, because higher labor costs drive up prices, it is workers’ share of the economic pie that is the problem. And, of course, on this view, government spending was making things worse.
Part of the battle for a better world, then, is to shape the mainstream reality in such a way that recognizes basic facts that are inconvenient for the capitalist class. Those facts include, for instance, the empirically verifiable point that corporate profits and central bank interest rate hikes are sending housing costs up, crushing people and, you guessed it, driving inflation.
Source: Class War Is at the Heart of the Bank of Canada’s Incoherent Rate Hikes
The state also works to prevent the Working Class from organizing itself.
To sustain capitalism, otherwise competitive businesses have to do something unnatural: cooperate with each other. The state plays a crucial role in fostering this class discipline. We, on the other hand, have to build our own power.
Source: The State Organizes the Capitalist Class. The Working Class Will Have to Organize Itself.
As the Los Angeles Times reported late Friday, the accidental shooting death of Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of “Rust” took place six hours after several union crew members left the location and were replaced by non-union workers.
Source: Fatal Film Set Shooting Followed Outcry by Union Crew Members Over Safety Protocols
Forty years ago, on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and barred them from ever working again for the federal government. By October of that year, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, the union that had called the strike, had been decertified and lay in ruins. The careers of most of the individual strikers were similarly dead: While Bill Clinton lifted Reagan’s ban on strikers in 1993, fewer than 10 percent were ever rehired by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Source: The Murder of the Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week
The current blizzard of stories about a “worker shortage” across the U.S. may seem as though it’s about this peculiar moment, as the pandemic fades. Restaurants in Washington, D.C., contend that they’re suffering from a staffing “crisis.” The hospitality industry in Massachusetts says it’s experiencing the same disaster. The governor of Montana plans to cancel coronavirus-related additional unemployment benefits funded by the federal government, and the cries of business owners are being heard in the White House. In reality, though, this should be understood as the latest iteration of a question that’s plagued the owning class for centuries: How can they get everyone to do awful jobs for them for awful pay?
Source: You Must Work or Die: The Long History of “Worker Shortages”
This could and should be great news for the Left. Working-class voters don’t want candidates to use ultra-liberal rhetoric but neither do they want them to tear up the important gains of the 1960s Rights Revolution. They do want health care, a decent job and pro-worker policies that make it easier to unionize — it would be wise to pitch campaigns that meet those demands. A simple message built around destroying the obscenity of inequality and providing universal public goods would likely do well to unite workers across race, gender, region, and ideology; it just can’t be paired with an alienating “woke” aesthetic.
That means we should avoid the culture war and battles over online discourse and get back to the business of organizing within our unions and beyond to build an institutionally vibrant and working-class public sphere.
Conclusion: Debunking a Myth
It used to be said that people became more conservative in their political outlook as they aged. This was a sort of conventional wisdom, and like many forms of conventional wisdom, it is a load of crap. The reality is that age often correlates with the accumulation of wealth, which usually generates less uncertainty, and with it less need for change. I am doing just fine, thank you, nothing needs to change. This is, once again, an example of class over generation. Typically, each generation winds up better off financially than their parents were, and successive generations of this increase in wealth, and the associated tory turn that goes with it, generated this myth. Once more, it is not generation, it is class.
Women with imposter syndrome, take note: young, rich males are inclined to bluff and get away with it, a UCL study shows
BCA, IPA, remain silent as does Sky and 2GB the media that claims to inform and be Fair and balanced. Underpayment and non payment of Super are crimes against Labor. Thank Australia for the ABC vote Labor (ODT)
Aaron Farrugia no longer works at the popular vegan restaurant Smith and Daughters in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, after a recent roster change left his name off it.
It’s left a bad taste in his mouth.
In May, he had approached the owners on behalf of other staff members, asking why they were being underpaid.
The first approach was a text message to the co-owner, Mo Wyse.
“I didn’t really get a response from that,” he said. “And I think that angered a lot of staff.”
“So we sent an email to the bosses just requesting that they assess everybody’s pay and rectify it immediately.”
The email asked the owners to respond in 14 days.
But two weeks later, he said nothing had changed.
“So then we collectively got together and sent them the next email and still nothing changed. And that really outraged some of the staff.”
Mr Farrugia and his co-workers had checked their rates of pay after watching the hospitality industry’s open secret blow up in public around them.
Celebrity chefs and corner cafes were caught up in a deluge of underpayment claims from workers — from kitchen staff working 100 hour weeks but being paid for 38, to waiters who lost their share of tips to pay for breakages.
The average purchasing power of the average worker’s wages in the United States has not increased for 40 years. We are on the second generation in which Americans did not on average get better off. But someone got better off. Since 2000, people at the top have seen their real income climb five times as much as lower-paid salaried workers.
via On Labor Day, American Workers are Poor because they Aren’t Socialists
“How does it happen that there are major corporations in America where CEOs receive extravagant compensation packages, who pay their workers wages so low that many of them are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing—subsidized by taxpayers—to survive?”
Conservatives and the likes of the IPA claim these are exceptional infractions and far from systemic. However when the system is shaken there’s an overabundant number good corporate people found to be screwing thousands of better Australian workers for an improved bottom line, their shareholders and their own personal pockets. Dominos Pizza sees a gap 400 times larger than the average wage and it’s franchisees are struggling to make that average wage. That’s not just a widening gap that’s an abyss as well paid for by franchisees conned into the idea they are business owners and not just workers. (ODT)
Cosmetics giant Lush has underpaid more than 5000 retail and manufacturing workers across Australia, internal investigations have found, prompting the company to launch a national back-pay scheme valued at $2 million.
The large-scale underpayments, publicly revealed on Tuesday, was due to “serious payroll system errors” stretching back eight years, Lush Australia director Peta Granger said.
Would or could ordinary people ever unite for change? (ODT)
The world’s largest economies have grown at a steady pace and unemployment has consistently fallen in the years following the greed-driven global financial crisis of 2008, but income gains during the so-called recovery have been enjoyed almost exclusively by the top one percent while most workers experience “unprecedented wage stagnation.”
via As Global 1% Seize Economy’s Gains, ‘Unprecedented Wage Stagnation’ for Everyone Else
We’re not all middle class. That would make a mockery of the word “middle,” which implies that there are lower and upper classes. Some of us are working class, some are middle class, some are upper middle class, and some are rich. Policies that help the rich by cutting their taxes do not help the working and middle classes. They actively harm the latter by making less money available for government services and by devaluing the dollar.
The Republican Party mainly represents the rich. It also reaches out to rural people and claims to help them, but it is all lies. It mainly represents the rich.
via Yes, America, there is a Class War, and you Just Lost It | Informed Comment
As Trump deliberately crashes Obamacare and deprives millions of health insurance
Source: Why do the Super-Rich hate the Poor & Workers so Much?
It gives an opportunity to harvest revenue from the McMansion classes that can well afford it.
Source: ACT government’s speeding fines should be adjusted by income
Cuts to penalty rates will hasten to the “mass casualisation” of Australia’s workforce, leading to lead to a decrease in job security, less paid leave and more workplace stress.
Source: Penalty rate cuts to hasten “mass casualisation” of Australian workforce: report
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