End of the recession?
Last December's economic figures, just released, show a 0.3% growth in the economy, and some economists are now saying the recession bottomed out about six months ago and a slow recovery should follow. It's difficult to believe a recovery is under way while unemployment is still around 10% officially, and more like 12-15% in reality.
Moreover, it's worth asking what this recovery will look like. It's very likely it will leave unemployment permanently higher, as has happened following every recession since the early '70s. Unemployment of 2% was regarded as high in Australia up to about 1972. Through the '80s around 6% (official) was regarded as acceptable. Today, in European countries such as Belgium and France, permanent unemployment of around 10% is regarded as normal; in Britain, 12-14% is nothing unusual. This is the likely direction for Australia if we persist with the policies of the '80s.
Whatever the shape of the recovery, now would be a good time for the union movement to begin preparing for it. While the recession will undoubtedly leave a larger under-class in its wake, the recovery will lift most of the workforce out of its worst difficulties. When that happens, the union movement should place itself to fight against any repeat of the experience of the '80s.
In 1982-83 the Hawke government insisted that the fruits of recovery should not be "lost" on wage rises. Instead, they should go to business, which would then reinvest its profits and ensure prosperity for all. What really happened was that business grabbed its record windfall profits and squandered them in a speculative binge that eventually bankrupted a huge swathe of the biggest companies, built up an enormous international debt and tossed huge numbers of workers onto the dole.
If the profits of the last boom had been used to pay for shorter working hours, maintaining real wages and building safer workplaces, we would all be a lot better off today. Even business might have been better off as, denied part of its gambling fund, it would have been forced to adopt more realistic attitudes.
As the recovery proceeds (and there is as yet only the slenderest evidence that it is actually under way), unionists should remember these facts. There is no doubt some jobs will have disappeared permanently, due not just to the recession, but to new technology. If we are not to become one of the countries in which high unemployment is the norm, shorter working hours are a necessity.
Of course, most of the economic establishment is pushing in the opposite direction. It wants to persist with the '80s approach of giving business more and more of the national wealth. Many employers are pushing for longer working hours. As no tripartite committee will ever accept shorter hours, unions will have to fight for them against both government and employers. But if we are not to lose everything from the next recovery, as we did from the last one, unions will have to rediscover their capacity to fight. The '80s experiment of being an arm of government has not worked.