US Forces get the nod – for the time being

Ned K.

At the recent APEC summit in Port Moresby, the Australian Government had no hesitation in strengthening its military, political and economic ties with US imperialism with announcements of joint military and naval bases to the north of Australia.

On the final day of the Summit, the USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand also announced funding of a massive electricity and fibre optic project connecting 70% of Papua New Guinea.

The Australian Government also committed to a so-called "Western Alliance" with the USA and Japan in the Pacific region, clearly aimed at the rising influence of the new world power on the blocks, China.

The electricity and fibre optic investment announcement may reflect US imperialism's attempt to show that economically speaking it is still "top dog" in the Pacific region in the face of economic expansion by China in the region. The investment announcement follows the annual review of investment by the UN Conference on Trade and Development which showed that global direct foreign investment flows fell by 23% in 2017, equivalent to 2.3% of global GDP, compared with 5.3% of global GDP in 2007.

Despite the decline in foreign direct investment over the last 10 years, Australia while accounting for about 2.3% of global economic output, has attracted  3.2% of global investment.

Of that 3.2% global investment in Australia, US multinational corporations have $A230 billion, 70% more than US multinational investment in China and according to the UN report, far more than US multinational investment in Japan, Germany, France, Mexico and all of South America.

According to Dr Kirchner of the US Studies Centre, Australia's resources sector is a "unique attraction" for US multinationals. In the last five years the stock of foreign direct investment in Australia rose from a high of 42% of GDP over the previous two decades to 2013 to 53% over the last five years.

Most of this came from US multinationals according to Kirchner.

So, it is no surprise to see the Australian Government championing the US cause at the APEC Summit. Kirchner also points out that changes to US tax legislation may reshape the way US multinationals act in relation to the amount of profits they expect back from their operations in countries like Australia. This is probably where the big push is coming from to reduce company tax rates in Australia.

The expected Shorten ALP Government will have plenty of pressure put on it by US imperialism regarding keeping Australia a safe profit-making economy for US multinationals. Little wonder that Shorten did not embrace the Victorian ALP Government's embrace of China's One Belt One Road.

There are also "wheels within wheels" arising from the announced USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand funding of the Papua New Guinea electricity and fibre optic project. New Zealand also supports One Belt One Road, while China remains Australia's number one trading partner.

With neither major political party in Australia having an anti -imperialist, pro-Australian Independence outlook, the coming period is likely to see more divisions and disunity within parliamentary ranks reflecting alignments to either the still dominant imperialist power, the USA or to the fast rising imperialist power of China.

Hidden wage theft: Another reason why we have to change the rules

(Contributed)

 

Decades of economic rationalism have undermined our way of life for ordinary working people.

 

The fetish nature of de-regulation, privatisation and liberalisation has created the conditions where the worst instincts of the business-classes have been revealed. And they still cry poor!

 

Wage-theft is rampant, not only with non-payment of wages. The problem runs far deeper: into our terms and conditions of employment.

 

The problem of employers being found to not be paying workers the agreed amount with their wages is a far greater problem than many people think. There have been structural changes in the Australian workforce - the outcome of business practices emphasising economic rationalist thinking. The pursuit of de-regulation, privatisation and liberalisation which has accompanied the throwing of finance capital, by the business-classes, to the four corners of the globe has also included failure to honour legal obligations, both in Australia and elsewhere. 

 

A recent study conducted by the University of NSW together with the University of Technology Sydney, for example, has revealed, 'a silent under-class of vulnerable Australian workers', who are, 'owed an estimated one billion dollars', in unpaid wages. (1) The study, conducted from a survey of 4,322 temporary migrant workers from 107 countries found the problem widespread and not confined to small non-payments by employers; many of those concerned were only paid about half of what they were entitled, with payments of only $12 an hour. The study also excluded 457 visa workers - had they been included the final amounts of unpaid wages would have been even higher.

 

From a trade union perspective, it is important to note many immigrants into Australia also come from socio-economic backgrounds where trade union membership is not common. Those concerned find their way into blue-collar employment in Australia usually because their qualifications, while acceptable for immigration purposes, are not validated through Australian professional associations. The high cost of re-validating professional qualifications through universities remains exorbitant and often not even worth the initial financial outlay. Once in blue-collar occupations, many remain on shop-floors for many years, not because of choice, but basic financial reasons.

 

A further important consideration to remember is that many immigrants entering Australia come from countries where it is not usual for a worker to challenge an employer due to personal security considerations. In the Philippines, for example, over a thousand trade-union activists have been killed in recent years for organising workers. In other countries, including Colombia and India, it is extremely dangerous to be associated openly with trade-union activism. Australian employers have taken advantage of this problem to enrich themselves.

 

A recent finding that food delivery company Foodora had underpaid its casual workers by more than $8 million, despite amassing a revenue of $1.2 billion this year, has clearly shown dominant thinking of those within the business-classes. The fact Australian tax-payers are likely to have to foot the bill for the German-based company is a further factor to be taken into consideration; those from overseas exploiting Australian workers remain outside the jurisdiction of our legal channels. (2) There remains little wonder why Foodora shareholders must be laughing all the way to the bank.

 

Employers have cultivated a habit of crying poor, even though company profits continue to increase. Continued attempts, by the business classes, to undermine penalty rates and shift-loadings are but two examples. While most Australians honour the notion of a fair go for immigrants, the business classes continue to undermine our way of life.

 

Structural changes to the Australian employment now include temporary migrant workers accounting for 11 per cent of the total workforce. (3) A further twenty per cent remain on the national minimum wage of $719.20 for a 38-hour week. (4) Both groups include the working poor where wage-levels fail to meet normal household costs, together with limited credit worthiness for raising loans from banks. Buying their own home, even a small apartment, would be extremely difficult if not impossible for those concerned.

 

The remainder of the Australian workforce have been receiving almost stagnant wage-levels with minimal wage increases for years. A record low average annual wage increase of 1.9 per cent in 2016, in reality, has led most workers accepting a wage-cut; prices of basic household costs have risen far more. (5) While the latest findings have revealed that average wage levels have now risen to 2.3 per cent, most workers are worse off over the previous ten year period. (6) 

 

The problem has been compounded by a massive casualisation of the workforce which has been used by employers to weaken trade-unions and their bargaining power. The problem of precarious employment is widespread. A recent study found over half of Australian workers now have no normal leave entitlements which accompany full-time paid jobs. (7) Those receiving normal leave entitlements have fallen from 51.35 per cent of the workforce in 2012, to 49.97 per cent last year. (8)

 

And as if those figures are not appalling in themselves, there is also the theft of terms and conditions of employment and incorrect classification of duties to establish the correct wage levels.

 

All workers in Australia are covered by Award conditions, which clarify basic wage levels and terms and conditions. Only three-quarters of the workforce are covered by enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) which provide above award entitlements.

 

The 2010, Manufacturing and Associated Industries and Occupations Award, which covers large numbers of workers in production, manufacturing and assembly jobs, has fifteen pages of different allowances ranging from rest breaks and meal allowances to compensation for damage to clothing and spectacles. (9) It is a common problem for casual workers, particularly those who are young or immigrants, to not be informed of their entitlements.

 

A further nineteen pages of the Award deal with correct classification of duties performed at work; most workers in the industries concerned, however, only ever receive payment for C13 work duties while their employers expect them to do far more without further payments. (10) A C13 pay grade is only supposed to be used for a simple, repetitive job, with minimal responsibility. A re-classification, from a C13 to C12 or C11, provides a worker with a wage increase of $50-$100 per week together with a career pathway for further promotion.

 

A further part of the Award deals with the means of establishing whether a worker is entitled to an allowance: a sub-section concerned with Higher Duties, specifies that if a worker is expected to conduct extra duties for more than two hours of any shift, payment for the allowance is an entitlement for the whole shift. (11)

 

Experience has shown most of those actively involved within the trade-union movement, employers and those associated with labour hire agencies, rarely, if ever, consult an Award Book.

 

Evidence of the extent to the problem can be seen in the case of one South Australian-based multi-national company with sales and profits nudging $100 million attempting to take a $50 a week allowance from a Material Handler without even reading the relevant section of the Award or taking the Competency Standards into account. Usual procedures for consultation were also not used by the company.

The $50, for the company concerned, was a paltry amount, the type of sum likely to be held in a petty cash tin. For the worker, however, the allowance was an acknowledgement of his expertise moving materials and stacking relevant parts into the correct storage spaces, gained throughout many years of service. The whole episode has revealed a callous type of behaviour when dealing with a loyal member of the Australian workforce, the logical outcome of a way of thinking where little respect was shown toward an ordinary worker. The problem was, however, quickly dealt with through trade union representation, making management look rather foolish. (12)

 

The example, however, is the mere tip of a huge iceberg; many workers are now also employed in businesses where there is little trade-union organisation, they are also unaware of their entitlements.

 

The theft of terms and conditions of employment together with correct classifications, is likely to affect a majority of Australian workers: it is hidden wage-theft.

 

The Universities’ study of under-payment of wages used the explanation that there was a culture of impunity for wage theft in Australia. It is not particularly difficult to establish why and how the problem has arisen. The problem of there being only two hundred inspectors being employed to enforce workplace laws for more than twelve million workers has also led to some employers being willing to take a chance to put employees' wages and other financial considerations into their own pockets. A study conducted by the Fair Work Ombudsman has also revealed almost forty per cent of businesses caught breaking workplace laws, including under payment of wages, continued to conduct their appalling business practices even after being re-audited. (13) Even after being caught once, those concerned continue to take the chance of not being caught a second time.

 

The universities study also drew attention to the 'fear factor', where workers feared losing their jobs if they complained about their employers. It is perhaps a brave worker who is willing to openly challenge the might of their employer or labour hire agency. The Universities study found, 'fewer than one in ten migrant workers have taken action to recover unpaid wages, even though they knew they were being underpaid. The remaining nine in ten suffered wage theft in silence'. (14) 

 

In conclusion, the problem has clearly shown the business-classes have too much power and no respect for ordinary working-people. The system in which this exists, is clearly broken and dysfunctional.

 

It’s time to Change the Rules to enforce the business-classes to honour their obligations, once and for all!

 

It’s also time to consider changing the system so that the private ownership of the means of production is abolished and with it, the incentive to cheat workers of their wages and conditions.

…………..
For further information about the Australian Council of Trade Unions Change the Rules Campaign,
to register an interest and to join the campaign, contact:

                                                 www.changetherules@actu.org.au

1.     Suffer in silence: unclaimed pay likely $1 billion,  The Age (Melbourne), 29 October 2018.

2.     Taxpayers face hefty bill for Foodora's $8m debt, Australian, 9 November 2018.

3.     Age, op.cit., 29 October 2018.

4.     Australian minimum wage,  ABC News, 1 June 2018.

5.     Private sector left behind as pay rates jump, Australian, 15 November 2018.

6.     Ibid.

7.     Most lack full-time jobs with benefits, Australian, 29 May 2018.

8.     Ibid.

9.     The Manufacturing and Associated Industries and Occupations Award, 2010, pp. 79-93.

10.   Ibid., pp. 132-159, and, page 136, Section B. 3. 4; see also, National Metal and Engineering Competency Standards, SA Manufacturing.

11.   Ibid., Award, page 65, Sub-section 24.3, Higher Duties.

12.   See MEM 11011B Undertake Manual Handling, together with, Section 11, Competency Standards, op.cit.

13.   Businesses rorting pay still at it on second audit, Australian, 9 November 2018.

14.   Age, op.cit., 29 October 2018.    

 

The tide is turning and Marcia Langton senses it

Lindy Nolan​

This is the first in a series of articles investigating ruptures in a carefully fostered pro-corporate united front among First Nations Peoples. The series focuses on the wider implications of recent statements by pro-mining Aboriginal activist Marcia Langton.

Yiman and Bidjara woman Marcia Langton is a writer and academic.  In her own words, she is “a strident supporter of action to end violence against Aboriginal women and children”.

But there’s a major contradiction. She’s also worked closely with corporations of the Business Council of Australia (BCA) and with Noel Pearson’s corporate-sponsored Cape York Institute.

In late August she launched a scathing attack in The Saturday Paper on Alice Springs’ Aboriginal woman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, raising eyebrows and setting off a flurry of social media comments because she’d previously campaigned alongside Price.

Langton addressed the National Press Club on violence in Indigenous communities with Jacinta Price in November 2016 (later published by the mining company-funded Centre for Independent Studies) and has appeared with her on other joint platforms on the same issue including a few years back at Sydney’s Yabun Festival on Invasion Day.

Her public criticism of the policies Price and her mother, Warlpiri woman Bess Nungarrayi Price, is important. It ruptures a damaging pro-corporate united front within Aboriginal communities that Langton has enthusiastically promoted.

Parliamentary bunfights

Competing corporate interests are more frequently breaking into open dispute, with Australian parliamentary bunfights just the tip of a worldwide phenomenon.

The BCA was set up to manage such corporate disunity. It was meant to create a ‘union’ for corporations to shore up corporate interests as a whole against the underlying anarchy of capitalism.

Recently Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has become a very uncooperative BCA member, driving the far right’s removal of PM Turnbull. Heads of peak corporate groups allied to the BCA bemoaned the instability and resulting exposure of a parliamentary puppet show that has been very useful to capitalism.

Of course, disunity is reflected among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, as corporations jockey for lucrative mining, real estate and tourism dollars from First Nations lands.

Langton is no friend of Turnbull, but her article attacking News Corp favourite, Jacinta Price, was published the day after Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrow. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that political and corporate machinations leading up to it influenced Langton. But both Marcia’s concerns and the machinations had been brewing for some time.

Shifting focus

Langton states in her article that it’s important to speak to all sectors of the community, but that Price speaks only to the far right.  Marcia Langton writes of community “revulsion for the influence of the alt-right or neo-Nazis in our body politic.”

Langton has experienced bullying and seen the violence caused by intergenerational traumatic stress in Aboriginal communities. She does so without excusing it and has often attacked what she calls ‘the left’ for failing to understand reality.

In attacking Price, Langton’s critical focus has shifted. She says Jacinta blames Aboriginal People’s traditional culture for violence. Yet Jacinta and her mother have long promoted this view. It’s nothing new and Marcia Langton is well aware of it.

But what Langton says is important: “Jacinta Price is useful to politicians. She legitimises racist views by speaking them against her own people. When she walks through Alice Springs and Tennant Creek with the prime minister, she waves a flag for the increasingly normal brand of race politics coming from Canberra.”

“The damage she causes to the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory is well known. The Tangentyere Council’s Women’s Family Safety Group, a service at the frontline against violence, is one of the victims of Price’s play for power. Price declined to invite them to the meeting in Alice Springs with the prime minister,” Langton continues.

“There’s nothing a small group can do”

Unlike Langton, the Tangentyere Council members she praises have been vocal critics of the NT Intervention since its imposition with bipartisan parliamentary support.  By 2008 Langton saw the Intervention as positive but flawed, because it lacked Aboriginal control. She agreed the original Intervention was racist and “not implemented properly”.

Back then she indicated that it ceased to be racist when the Labor administration extended its sanctions to non-Indigenous communities. Instead the sanctions attacked those in Australia’s most socio-economically disadvantaged areas, like Sydney’s Bankstown, and still played to racist sympathies because of Bankstown’s very high concentration of Muslims.

But it’s still clear she supported the Intervention. In 2008, Langton wrote of “The combined effect of the righteous media campaign for action and the Emergency Intervention” which “has been a metaphorical dagger, sunk deep into the heart of the powerful, wrong-headed Aboriginal male ideology that has prevailed in Indigenous affairs policies and practices for decades.”

She told anti-Intervention activist and Tangentyere Council member Barbara Shaw, from Mount Nancy Town Camp in Alice Springs, “It’s a situation of mass suicide now. There’s nothing that a small group like yourselves can do.”

Little evidence

In 2013 Nicole Watson quietly challenged Langton’s conclusion about how to tackle an emergency 25 years in the making in. The Intervention’s “measures were at odds with the tenor of The Little Children Are Sacred, the report on which the Intervention was supposedly based.  The report, Watson said, “placed an emphasis on empowering Aboriginal communities to own the solutions.” 

“There is little evidence to suggest that Aboriginal women are any safer as a result of those measures,” wrote Watson.  In contrast, she stacked up the evidence that the Intervention and Labor’s Stronger Futures supported by Langton were a disaster for Aboriginal communities.

She also took Langton to task for dividing Aboriginal opinion into ‘two camps’, those who according to Langton live in “remote Australia” and “those with cosmopolitan urban experience who have allowed libertarian leanings, and deep political disappointment, to confuse their logic.”  (Langton quoted by Nicole Watson,’ From the Northern Territory Emergency Response to Stronger Futures’ in The Intervention, an anthology)

Langton’s words were more academic, but differ little in content to the tune Bess and Jacinta Price still sing condemning ‘eastern staters’. Such divisive language by Langton echoed back to the 1970s and 80s, when prominent pro-corporate activists like racist Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke Petersen constantly attacked vocal advocatess, like Langton herself, for not being ‘real full blood Aborigines’.

At Fitzroy Crossing

At its inception the authors of the Little Children are Sacred, Rex Wild QC and Patricia Anderson, both condemned the NT Intervention. Their report spells out the reason: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples need to control their own affairs.

In 2012, revisiting Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberleys after a 20-year absence, the once out of control town was transformed. There was no ban on alcohol, but there were no takeaways, closing time was 8pm and for much of the afternoon only low alcohol beer was available. A small group of people had welfare payments quarantined to ensure their children were adequately fed and clothed. The senior women had led the fight and the land council now owned the pub.

There was discontent, especially about what a veteran of the Noonkanbah dispute, recently celebrating its 40th anniversary, called the “apartheid place across the bridge” (the expensive hotel with no limits on drinking apart from the take away ban).

Marcia Langton has long supported such controls on alcohol put in place by Aboriginal communities and says support programs should arise from community consultation.

But an emerging First Nations’ leader urges people not to forget the “punitive desire” that Langton has until recently expressed “in relation to alcohol abuse in Aboriginal families and communities, and her emphasis on the dehumanising of Aboriginal men”.

 

Langton’s support for Tangentyere Council’s Women’s Safety Group indicates some change in her views on this last point, as its spokesperson, Barbara Shaw, spoke very publicly about supporting “our men who are also going through hardship and hard times”.

The emerging leader also says Marcia Langton saw “re-colonisation as a solution for her people.”

 

Too often, she continues, Langton supported the “whitening and the institutionalising of black minds as a successful pathway for young emerging thinkers navigating within western colonial systems.  Conformity is dangerous.  Black assimilationists are the final nail in the coffin for black Australia.”

 

It remains to be seen how deep the changes in Marcia Langton’s thinking are.

Editorial - Anniversary: 100 years since the end of the ‘war to end all wars’

On 11 November 1918 an armistice was signed, bringing to an end a conflict that had claimed the lives of millions of people. The Great War, as it came to be known, was set in motion by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. Princip shot the Archduke on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, a city in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. The assassination precipitated a crisis that simmered throughout July 1914. An ultimatum from the Austro-Hungarian Empire was delivered to Serbia and the Serbian response was deemed to be unsatisfactory, putting the Serbs and the Austro-Hungarian states on a war footing.
 
Due to the alliances that the various European nations had signed among themselves, it was not just the Austro-Hungarian Empire at war with Serbia. Two rival groups of European nations also found themselves on the brink of hostilities. One group was the Triple Entente made up of Great Britain, France and Russia. The other group of nations comprised Germany, the Austro-Hungarians and Italy. They were known as the Triple Alliance. Italy decided to hold back from joining the other two members of the Triple Alliance when war got under way in August 1914. Because of their colonial possessions, both of these groups of nations involved masses of people from across the globe. People from the various colonies, former colonies and dominions in Africa, Asia, the Indian sub-continent, the Americas and Australasia (not forgetting the various European peoples) fought for one or other group of great powers. It was not a war for liberty, democracy or the rights of small nations. It was a war between two groups of imperialist powers, a war to decide which powers were to be the pre-eminent imperialists. Such an understanding of what the Great War was – an imperialist war for global dominance – informs Lenin’s writing in works such as Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It is just this understanding of the imperialist nature of the so-called Great War that is consistently omitted in any of the commemorations held for the centenary of the armistice. Instead, the bourgeois commentary about the conflict has tended to moralise about the tragedy and futility of the conflict while skirting any attempt to analyse why the war happened.
 
The First World War was not just the result of an unfortunate set of circumstances, brinkmanship gone wrong or a failure of diplomacy. It was the culmination of tensions that had their genesis in the changes to capitalism that started in the last decades of the nineteenth century. These changes were identified by thinkers such as John Hobson, the British liberal and staunch opponent of imperialism; Rudolf Hilferding the Austrian born Marxist who wrote about the pivotal role of what he called finance capital in late nineteenth and early twentieth century capitalism. Others, too, added their insights and analyses. Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg and numbers of other Marxists including the leader of the German Social Democratic Party Karl Kautsky, contributed to the discussions about the developments in capitalism and its intimate relationship with militarism, colonialism and great power rivalry, in short, with imperialism. These analyses of capitalism in its monopoly phase and imperialism were summarised, criticised and developed further by Lenin in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In this major work, written while the Russian army was fighting with German and Austro-Hungarian (and Turkish) forces on the Eastern Front, the direct connections between monopoly capitalism, imperialism and war were starkly outlined. For Lenin, inter-imperialist rivalry and war were the unavoidable products of the developments in global capitalism that had occurred in the decades since Marx died. The political lesson Lenin drew from his research into imperialism was that the only way to break the drive to imperialist war was socialist revolution. The ‘war to end all wars’ was an imperialist war; it happened because rival groups of imperialist nations resorted to armed conflict in order to secure the dominant position in the pecking order of nation states.
 
Here in Australia the Great War still casts a long shadow. Australian and New Zealand troops were sent to fight for the British Empire soon after hostilities broke out. Official Australian rhetoric at the time played up issues such as the violation of Belgian neutrality by the German army, supporting the Mother country and so on. After the war, the whole ANZAC/ Gallipoli nation building myth has been used to inculcate generations of Australians into believing that the killing and maiming of many thousands of their soldiers for British imperialism was somehow a noble sacrifice. Two failed conscription referenda showed that a lot of ordinary Australians at the time were sceptical of claims made by governments about the war. The majority of the Australian population were not convinced that more sacrifices for the war effort were necessary.

The 1980s marked the start of a concerted campaign to revivify the ANZAC myth. During the 1960s and ‘70s ANZAC Day and commemoration of war had become less popular due to mass opposition to Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. In an effort to counter this distaste for militarism, both Labor and Coalition Federal governments have seen fit to promote ANZAC day as a nation-forming and unifying event. The centenaries of battles that ANZAC troops fought in during the war have received copious amounts of attention and public funding. Every opportunity is taken at public memorial services to have representatives from the various branches of the armed forces present. What is being done with the promotion of ANZAC Day and the various commemorative services associated with the Great War is the normalisation of militarism.
 
The lessons of the Great War are not drawn out by bourgeois commentary. The imperialist nature of the ‘war to end all wars’ is not mentioned. The fact that in 1919, the victorious imperialist powers imposed punitive and financially crippling peace treaties on the losing powers leading to misery for the working classes of those countries is passed over. These punitive peace treaties sowed the seeds of another war; fascism started to raise its brutal head.
 
Out of the carnage and bloodshed of the First World War there appeared one beacon of hope for the working people of the world. That beacon of hope was (and remains) the Great October Socialist revolution. The working people and their allies in Russia fought through two revolutions in 1917, with the second one in October delivering into the hands of the working class state power. It is their attempt to build a better world based on socialism that is inspirational and worth emulating. Far better that than bourgeois mythologising and moralising about the ‘war to end all wars’.