The Globalization not only enter third world countries to the main capitalist production of "goods" (in addition to raw commodities) but also narrow the gap between the level of life of working class members of the old metropolins and that of the ex-colonies.
More intimate international solidarity between working class
people of all kinds of countries is "forced" on the working
class of old metropolins. The shrinking of so called privileges
is more influential than "leftists' preaching".
Ilan
>>>
For those unfamiliar with Australian industrial relations history,
"the awards" referred to at the end of the article are industry-
wide standards of pay and working conditions (I gather
something similar once held in New Zealand also).
Traditionally these awards were ratified (and often arbitrated)
by State-level or Federal-level industrial courts after
negotiations between employer and union bodies - more and
more, they are being pared back to very minimum criteria, with
the emphasis being shifted to workplace and/or individual
contracts . . .
Steve
<<<
Subject: Sydney Morning Herald: AMERICA All work, low pay From: Paul Canning <paul-canning@rocketmail.com> Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 23:22:20 +1100 (EST)
AMERICA
Saturday, December 27, 1997
All work, low pay
The deregulated, no-union, zero-employment economy of the United States is seen by some Australian employers and politicians as a model for this country. But as ADELE HORIN travelled America, she found the downside - an army of worn-out, exploited working poor.
"GETTING a job is easy," says Rose Scott. "It's getting the pay you want that's hard - $7 an hour is the most I've ever made." A small, blonde, shy woman in her 30s, Scott is talking in the office of the Adecco Employment Agency in Greenville, South Carolina, where she has come to get a job.
In Greenville, population 65,000, a Bible-thumping, anti-union town, the jobless rate is 3.8per cent, even less than the US national rate of 4.9per cent.
As Scott says, getting a job is easy. In the booming US economy, where unemployment is at a 25-year low, crack addicts have jobs, alcoholics have jobs, and single mothers of newborn babies have jobs. For an Australian, accustomed to more than a decade's bad news on the jobs front, the atmosphere is electric.
South Carolina, which only four years ago recorded Australian-style unemployment rates, has achieved what economists loosely define as full employment - and other States such as Nebraska, South Dakota and Wisconsin boast even lower jobless figures.
But having a job in the US does not mean having a living wage.
When Scott's husband left her with three children under eight to support, she found a job in a convenience store, working the midnight to 8am shift.
"It paid $6 an hour and I could barely support myself let alone my children," she says as we wait in Adecco's over-bright, no-frills office.
Unable to find overnight child care or feed her children, Scott was forced to send them to live with her mother in a town 50 kilometres away.
But relinquishing her children was not the only trauma for Scott. An armed robber held up the convenience store when she was on duty. Terrified, she resigned the next day, which is what has brought her, still shell-shocked, into the Adecco employment office.
It isn't long before Adecco's placement officer calls Scott to the desk, having scanned the computer and found her another job - just like that. This time, she will be making boxes for a packaging company at $US7 (about $10.50) an hour, starting at 7am.
"I should be able to have my children back in a few months," Scott says happily as she leaves, clutching complicated directions to her new workplace.
But who, I wonder, will mind her children when she leaves for work at 6.30am, and how will she afford child care?
AS I travelled around the US, wondering whether Australia should emulate or beware the US economic model, Rose Scott's pale face stayed with me. She came to embody the contradictions of this "economic miracle". America has put its underclass to work. Virtually everyone not incarcerated - and there are 1.7million of those - can get a job. But the workers are exhausted. They are suffering from too much work - 12-hour shifts, seven-day weeks, 60-hour weeks. Compulsory overtime is common. Mothers drag infants on a succession of early-morning buses for the sake of a minimum-wage job. Rose Scott works through the night for a pittance. American families have suffered falling or stagnant incomes - and declining hourly wages - for more than 20 years. That's the underside of the US economic miracle - an army of worn-out, exploited working poor and an embattled middle class puzzled at the gap between their living standards and the enviable unemployment rate.
Compared with Australia's, other US indicators look less impressive. The US has much greater inequality, twice the proportion of working poor, seven times as many men in jail and a much higher divorce rate. And US workers are much more likely than Australians to be retrenched, while feelings of job insecurity, as measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, are much more widespread.
Shelters for the homeless are filled with people who have jobs. "Sixty to 70per cent of the people we serve are working," Anne Burke tells me later when I visit Urban Ministries, a charity for Carolina's homeless and medically uninsured.
"The work is there," she says, "but work is not the solution to the problem of poverty."
On average, Americans work about a month longer per year than they used to 20 years ago. But the typical family is still worse off than its counterpart in 1979. As well, fewer workers in the 1990s are covered by health insurance and aged pension plans.
And while jobs are easy enough to get, millions are on the road to downward mobility if they get retrenched. Few are as lucky as Rose Scott: on average a new job will pay 15per cent less than the previous one.
Recently, families have begun to reverse the long decline in median household income. But since hourly wages have continued to fall, the only way people have caught up has been through working longer hours or at multiple jobs or through putting more family members to work.
When President Bill Clinton boasted at a rally that he had created 11million jobs, a worker called out, "Yes, and I've got three of them."
When he boasted that most of the new jobs were relatively well paid, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, showed that 30per cent of America's full-time workers earn poverty-level wages.
When the minimum wage shot up to $US5.15 an hour, or $US10,700 a year, on September1, it meant minimum-wage workers were still $US2,000 a year worse off in real terms than their counterparts 30 years ago.
High-tech jobs are increasing. But the five occupations with the best prospects over the next 10 years, according to the US Department of Labor, are cashier, janitor, shop assistant and waiter. Also, America can't get enough prison guards. And it seems any American can get work at Wal-Mart, the downmarket retail colossus that provides one in every 200 civilian jobs. "About 75per cent of American families are caught in an Alice-in-Wonderland world, working enormous hours but not getting anywhere," says Professor Barry Bluestone, of the University of Massachusetts, when I meet him in Boston.
In the mid-1980s Bluestone alerted the nation to its "disappearing" middle class as the rich grew hugely rich, and the poor grew poorer and more numerous. In the '90s, he is warning about its overworked and underpaid. At a time when labour should have the upper hand, the willingness of incumbent workers to work harder and longer has kept a brake on wage increases. It has also contributed to the highest rates of after-tax corporate profits in 36 years.
IN A sprawling car parts factory outside Raleigh, North Carolina, I meet some of the conscripts to the 70-hour week - the tiredest workers I have ever encountered. Many are required to work bizarre shifts - 3am to 3pm, for example. Here they are not clamouring for overtime - they are too frightened to refuse. When I meet Ron, Lillian, Beth, Stella and the union president, Iris (this is a union plant, a rare entity in the Carolinas), at the end of their 12-hour shift, they flop into chairs in the meeting room as if they will never move again.
Ron has worked 60- to 70-hour weeks for almost three years and clears $US450. He had worked for the past three weeks without a single day off - 12 hours on weekdays, 10 hours on Saturday, and eight on Sunday. On Sunday morning he preaches in church.
"There's no choice," says Ron, a grandfather, hitting 60. "I do it because the company says we have to. If the supplier goes, we go."
It occurs to me that 130 years ago Ron's forebears were slaves, and under slavery everyone had a job, too.
But these workers have known worse conditions, and worse employers. Two of the women previously worked in textile and apparel factories that have shut down and migrated to Mexico. They have seen 250,000 textile jobs in North Carolina alone disappear in a decade.
MANY workers live in fear of getting sick. They have jobs but increasingly no health insurance, sick pay or other benefits. US corporations have found ways to evade their traditional obligations. They get someone else to hire the workers for them.
Employment agencies, like Adecco, where I met Rose Scott, or the giant Manpower, have become huge hirers of labour on behalf of the corporations - but with none of the usual obligations. For some workers their "temporary" status lasts for months or years.
"The perception among workers is that you can't get a job without starting as a temp through the agencies," says Charles Taylor, of the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment.
In the small city of Greenville, alone, he says, the number of employment agencies specialising in "temporary" workers has increased from 12 to 60 in less than a decade.
Taylor tells me about a worker called Patricia who used to have a permanent job as a weaver in a textile mill. When that job ended, she worked as a "temporary" for two years at the Fluor-Daniel construction company in Greenville.
Finally Fluor-Daniel put her on permanent staff, gave her a pay increase, a pension program and health insurance. That arrangement lasted 18 months before she was laid off.
"Then they hired her back as a temp," Taylor says. "Same desk, same phone but less hourly pay, no health insurance, no benefits..."
The Tupperware company in Hemingway, South Carolina, laid off most of its workers and hired them back as temporaries, minus benefits, through an agency.
Harry Payne, the Labor Commissioner who oversees North Carolina's employment regulations, had said to me: "If America is so prosperous, why are its workers so anxious?"
I'm beginning to see why.
Corporations, however, are showered with benefits. In a bidding war that has been likened to the arms race, States have extended extraordinary subsidies and tax breaks to some of the world's biggest companies.
Alabama even renamed a freeway the Mercedes-Benz Autobahn in honour of the German car maker, which had deigned to build a plant. The Government put up more than $US300million in tax breaks and subsidies for a plant that would employ only 1,500 people - that is, $US200,000 per job. The deal almost bankrupted the State. Here in the South Carolina woods, you can find dozens of foreign companies. Near Spartanburg, the German car maker BMW has established what is believed to be its first non-union plant in the world. It employs 2,000 workers - under a deal that cost the State Government at least $US79,000 a job.
A Greenville Chamber of Commerce document highlights the State's attractions to business: South Carolina has the "second lowest union representation in the nation", and boasts some of "the nation's leading [anti] labour law firms".
About 25per cent of the area's workers earned the minimum wage, and would gratefully "respond to more rewarding job opportunities".
There are a host of tax credits and subsidies for job-creating companies. As well, the State will bear the total cost of training company workers, "even when it involve[s] training in a foreign country".
WHAT can Australia learn from the American experience in creating a low-unemployment economy? The lessons are not obvious nor easily transferable. Low wages play a part in the low unemployment rate. But if low wages were the main reason, Britain, which lacks any minimum wage, should have even more impressive figures. The UK's unemployment rate, however, is much higher than the US's, at about 7per cent (using comparable figures).
Nor does faster economic growth provide the explanation for low unemployment. Until recently the Australian economy has grown faster than that of the US - at 3.5per cent compared with the sluggish US performance of 2.5per cent.
Elaine Bernard knows Australia and the US well. She is executive director of Harvard University's Trade Union Program. "Australians say, "If only we could have America's job machine plus Australia's safety net'. I always caution people to be careful about what they wish for - they could end up with the failings of the US and Australia."
If Australia cut wages, it would have to cut its social security payments, and put time limits on them, too. It might get "good" unemployment rates. But "bad" poverty. And then again, it might just get the poverty.
IT'S ALREADY HAPPENING HERE
AUSTRALIANS, too, are working longer and harder as competitive pressures, a hard-nosed management style, and Government policy push us towards the US model.
Employers and Canberra have run aggressive campaigns against the ACTU's claim for a "living wage" and against all but minimal safety-net adjustments to awards for low-waged workers. As well, awards are being stripped back to cover only 20 basic conditions of work.
Despite the introduction of the 38-hour week, full-time employees in Australia work more hours than they did a decade ago - on average 41 hours. And compared with 20 years ago, a lot more Australians work very long hours. In 1996 just under half of male full-time workers clocked up 45 hours a week or more, compared with 37per cent in 1980.
As well, Australians endure more stress, work faster and more intensively, and put more effort into their jobs than they used to, according to a Government survey released this year. A quarter of the workforce feels the balance between work and family has deteriorated.
The American trend towards replacing staff labour with contract workers has also accelerated here in the first half of the 1990s. And like Americans, Australians are turning their backs on unions, with coverage falling from 50per cent of employees in the 1980s to 31per cent now. In the US, however, coverage has fallen to 13per cent.
Also, there has been a fundamental shift in attitude to sacking people. In 1990, 39per cent of big Australian workplaces had sacked workers; in 1995 the figure was 60per cent.
Real wages have fallen for some Australian workers over the past 20 years - the poorest 30per cent of male workers have gone backwards. But most other Australian workers, unlike the Americans, have enjoyed wage increases.
The fundamental difference between Australia and the US has been our award system. It has meant even the poorest Australian workers are better off than their American counterparts - getting the equivalent of $US7.50 to $US8 an hour. Until the recent rise to $US5.15 an hour, America's low-wage workers received $US4.25.
[end of article]
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