Unionised workers, or those with very particular skills in high demand, can negotiate above award pay and conditions. But, for many workers in sectors such as hospitality, retail, cleaning, delivery driving and aged care, an increase in the award minimum is their only chance of a pay rise.
These are the so-called unskilled workers who, disproportionally, are women, migrants and young people and without whom society would not function.
While wage growth is trickling along at a feeble 1.4%, last year profits rose by a whopping 15.1%.
Even pro-capitalist economists have been raising the alarm, pointing out that a rise in real wages is needed to stimulate economic growth and that lower paid workers will spend their wage increases.
Unionised workers, or those with very particular skills in high demand, can negotiate above award pay and conditions. But, for many workers in sectors such as hospitality, retail, cleaning, delivery driving and aged care, an increase in the award minimum is their only chance of a pay rise.
These are the so-called unskilled workers who, disproportionally, are women, migrants and young people and without whom society would not function.
While wage growth is trickling along at a feeble 1.4%, last year profits rose by a whopping 15.1%.
Even pro-capitalist economists have been raising the alarm, pointing out that a rise in real wages is needed to stimulate economic growth and that lower paid workers will spend their wage increases.
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Australian Trotskyist Barry Jobson dies aged 78
Barry Jobson, 1942–2020 (Photo: WSWS Media)
From the time he joined the Socialist Labour League (SLL), predecessor of the SEP, in 1974 Comrade Barry was a tireless fighter for the program of Trotskyism in the working class, particularly in the Elcar railway workshops in the south-western Sydney suburb of Chullora where he worked for many years.
One of the most significant features of his work, which he carried out in collaboration with fellow leading party member, Terry Cook, was his struggle to defend the interests of railway workers against the betrayals of the Labor Party, the Communist Party Stalinists and the trade union bureaucracies, all the time seeking to educate them in the program and principles of the Trotskyist movement.