The Green's Employment Policy

Presented by:

Kerry Nettle
Green's Senator from NSW

Thank you for the invitation to come and speak to you today. To speak on a topic area not readily associated with Green politics but one which is none the less vital to the vision that The Greens bring to public policy both in Australia and overseas.

A vision of sustainability. This means more than just environmental sustainability. We also need to ensure social and economic sustainability. Only if a society provides sufficient meaningful and socially productive work will it be able to ensure social cohesion and the values of tolerance and inclusion that we aspire to. This is expressed through the Greens' commitment to FULL EMPLOYMENT.

Despite a decade of growth official unemployment remains over 6%. It was not long ago that 3% unemployment was unacceptable in this country. Now 5% unemployment is seen as ideal.

But the problem is worse than these statistics indicate because of rising underemployment and hidden unemployment.

This is compounded by increasing spatial inequality in the distribution of both employment and income. (Bob Gregory).

Need to recognise that these problems will not be solved by leaving it to the market, indeed it has been our increasing reliance on the market that has caused many of these problems. So we need to debunk some of the market myths.

The idea that the market is an appropriate mechanism for determining a minimum wage rate appears totally ludicrous to me. Decreasing minimum wages does not increase employment, it decreases demand which in turn only undermines employment. The market myth is based on an assumption of perfect information. In reality workers are often isolated and unable to properly assess their position in the market. When this is combined with the power asymmetries that exist between employers and employees, employees risk having their wages continually eroded. If the market was left to determine a minimum wage rate one would have to imagine it would be significantly below acceptable living standards.

More growth is not necessarily good. We are currently in the longest boom in this country since the 1960s. Yet unemployment remains well above the levels experienced between 1950 and 1980. Growth is being fuelled by increased productivity that in turn is driven by increasing competition and undermining the security of employment. Increased growth is now based on increased unpaid overtime (60% of all overtime is unpaid. Australia has the second highest average hours of work in the OECD and our average is increasing. 31% of full time workers in Australia work in conditions, which in Europe would be unlawful.) and also an increasing pool of casual and low paid workers (Of the 2.6 million jobs created between 1980 and 2000, almost 80% were paid less than $600 a week - (Borland, Gregory and Sheehan, 2001)). If growth is now predicated on undermining the security of workers it is unlikely to produce increased employment.

Labour is not perfectly flexible. There is no guarantee that workers made redundant in one industry or region will find or be able to accept work elsewhere.

We cannot leave the solutions to industry restructuring to the market in the belief that short term impacts will be solved in the long run. The reality is that short term unemployment can result in devastation social impacts and can easily become long term and entrenched unemployment. Our experience over the past two decades has demonstrated the failure of the market to provide full employment, particularly in regional Australia.

This is why the current solutions to unemployment are not working.

Increased deregulation and privatisation has been the cause of labour market failure. More deregulation and privatisation is not the answer.

Likewise, policies based on mutual obligation, like work for the dole, fail to take account of the structural reasons that generate unemployment, instead blaming the victim. People are unemployed because there are not enough jobs. Work for the dole does nothing to create any extra employment (as those at CofFEE are well aware).

But many would argue that the Greens are the last people to be talking about how to manage these problems. After all, they would say, environmentalism costs jobs. However, there is an increasing recognition that this is a myth - we can have environmental sustainability and full employment.

Recently the jobs vs environment myth raised its head in the Cunningham by-election. In the closing weeks of that campaign, as it became clear the Greens had a real chance of winning, the Labor Party claimed that our commitment to abiding by the Kyoto protocol would cost jobs in the Illawarra. Of course, this was somewhat ridiculous considering that the Labor Party has also committed itself to Kyoto and recognised the need for a 60 - 80% reduction in green house gas emissions in the next 50 years. But what stood out in the response to Labor's claims was that it was the union movement who ridiculed the suggestion. Increasingly unions are coming to understand that sustainability and employment can go hand in hand.

In fact in many industries it has been competition and increased productivity that has been costing jobs - not environmentalists. In Tasmania, for example, export woodchipping has doubled since the RFA was signed in 1997, yet instead of the promised 1000 extra jobs being created, 500-1000 jobs have been lost.

We need to recognise that industry restructuring is happening and may even be desirable. Unsustainable industries, by definition, cannot continue indefinitely. Australia is also well placed to capitalise on a competitive advantage in a number of new green industries, like solar and wind power, and more environmentally friendly production techniques.

But there is a need to carefully manage the process of restructuring to ensure that the disastrous results of the 1980s and 1990s are not repeated.

So I'd like to outline a broad Green policy framework for managing a sustainable economy - one that preserves the environment and one that ensures social and economic sustainability by providing full employment.

First we need to ensure that there are enough jobs for those that wish to work. This is too important a priority to be left to the market. The Greens believe this creates a role for direct government investment and employment. We believe in the government playing the role of employer of last resort and playing an active role in shaping Australian industry policy. Again we welcome the work of CofFEE in this area. It is vital that the state provide employment in sustainable, socially valuable and fulfilling employment.

The Greens recently outlined one example of how this may be done in the lead up to the Cunningham by-election. We have committed ourselves to funding $1 billion worth of direct investment annually in sustainable manufacturing industries in Australia's post-industrial cities - Wollongong, Newcastle, Geelong Whyalla, and Port Augusta. This money is targetted at research and development, direct investment in plant and equipment and upgrading transport infrastructure. Industries would be selected according to meeting stringent zero waste criteria, meaning that waste is reused in future production cycles. This industry would be government owned and at the cutting edge of environmental technology. As consumers increasingly demand sustainable goods, and governments, particularly in Europe, but around the world, demand higher environmental standards, these technologies offer Australian industry a vital competitive advantage. Our proposals could be paid for from a number of sources, including legislation to end tax minimisation abuses, responsible borrowing, or corporate tax changes.

The Greens also believe that we need to reprioritise our economic goals. We do not believe in a world of ever-increasing growth. Instead we need to recognise the economic and social value of non-paid work time. Giving people more time away from work allows us to participate in civil society, to give our families and friends the time they both need and deserve, in other words to pay attention to what is really important in life. The Greens believe in a shorter working week, banning unpaid overtime and moving to a four-day week by the end of the decade. This would involve taking future productivity gains in the form of shorter working hours, rather than higher weekly pay - a return to the long running campaign to lower the working week.

Decreasing the working week offers us the opportunity to better share the work we already have. If managed correctly, with appropriate training provided for potential employees, we may be able to significantly reduce unemployment and underemployment at the same time as reducing the stress on those currently working too much.

However, increasing leisure time is difficult in a world that commodities leisure so intensely. People find themselves working longer hours just to earn enough money to spend relaxing with friends and family. This is why the Greens believe in keeping public land - like the ADI site in Western Sydney, Callan Park in Rozelle and the beaches of Lake Maquarie and the Central Coast - in public hands. We need to provide our communities with public spaces where we can enjoy ourselves without paying for it. This is part of the holistic vision the Greens offer.

We also need to confront the challenge of ensuring that the jobs that are on offer are appropriate for those that want to work. The first challenge is to ensure that jobs are spatially distributed were people live.

This means two things need to be done. We need develop sustainable employment strategies for Australia's regions. That means guaranteeing key services, like postal, banking and telecommunications services, in regional communities. This is why we oppose the privatisation of Telstra and why we believe in maintaining and enhancing community service obligations in these key sectors. It means an active industry policy that creates sustainable jobs, like those outlined in our policy for post industrial cities. But it also means ensuring that regions have a diversified economic base that is more resilient to economic change. This means encouraging small businesses and self-sufficiency in Australia's regions.

We also need to retrain workers made redundant by structural change in the economy. This does not just mean generic training schemes; we need to ensure that the workers that lose jobs in old industries are the workers that gain jobs in new industries. That means a specific obligation to those workers. It means increasing funding to Australia's technical training sector such as the TAFE system in NSW. But we need to recognise that training is much easier when workers already have basic skills and that means ensuring that our public schools have the funding they need to ensure that every Australian child has access to quality education. That is why here in NSW the Greens are committed to cutting class sizes from more than 30 to less than 20 in all years from Kindergarden to year 3. Again, we must view employment policy in the context of a holistic policy agenda.

Addressing the spatial distribution of work also means addressing the distribution of income. We live in an economy where an increasing number of service industry jobs are spatially specific, ie they need to be provided in the same place they are consumed, like cleaning and take away food. Many of these jobs are generated by the demand of high-income workers. As income inequality increases, so the spatial inequality in the distribution of these types of jobs increases. We need to act to provide greater equality in income. We believe the backbone of ensuring income equality is ensuring wage equality. That is why the Greens supports restoring the powers of Australian Industrial Relations Commissions and encouraging the role of unions - the real safeguarder of pay for low wage workers. The Greens are also currently looking at ways to limit the current excesses of executive salaries.

Finally, we need to address total income inequality, including the question of ensuring a real safety net. The Greens believe that all people are entitled to an adequate income. This is not conditional on meeting mutual obligations, on applying for a certain number of jobs a week. It is a basic right. That is why we believe in instituting a Guaranteed Adequate Income, based on the model proposed in the Henderson Commission Inquiry into Poverty. With an increasing number of working Australians suffering from poverty this reform is even more desperately needed now then when it was first proposed. This is real welfare reform, not simply a way of blaming the poor for their poverty.

Conclusion

The failure of the market to provide jobs for all who want them should be obvious. The responsibility of government to address this failure is equally obvious. Sadly, the political leadership needed to step away from the simplistic dogma of the neo-classical economics, that has blighted much of the OECD for the past 30 years, is absent from both major parties. We continue to suffer from ALP and Liberal party's success in convincing the electorate that national economies are like household budgets and that assets must be sold, debt eliminated, and borrowing shunned in the interests of good housekeeping.

The results of this fiction are regional decline, continuing unemployment at one end, and over-work at the other. The Greens reject this damaging dogma, and offer a vision for a fairer, healthier society that is economically, environmentally and socially sustainable now and into the future.

(Photo left to right: Senator Nettle and CofFEE Director Bill Mitchell).

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