Neoliberalism 'has run its course', says ACTU boss Sally McManus

Guardian AustraliaWednesday 29 March 2017 15.24

Paul Karp

Neoliberalism has run its course, causing higher prices through privatisation and rising income inequality, the new Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary, Sally McManus, has said.

In her first address to the National Press Club as ACTU secretary on Wednesday, McManus defended her comments that anti-strike laws were unjust and could be disobeyed, and set out the union peak body’s case for a $45-a-week increase in the minimum wage.

McManus said that neoliberalism and trickle-down economics had caused inequality to reach a 70-year high in Australia and that “working people and ordinary Australians have been the victims”.

“The Keating years created vast wealth for Australia, but has not been shared, and too much has ended up in offshore bank accounts or in CEO’s back pockets.

“Working people are now missing out and this is making them angry.”

Asked whether the Hawke and Keating governments and ACTU had made a mistake with economic reform in the 1980s and 90s, McManus said: “We think neoliberalism has run its course.

“We are not saying that the people who introduced some of the policies that you could name as being neoliberal were bad people.”

McManus cited privatisation as an “experiment” of neoliberalism, which promised to lower prices and improve products but had increased prices, cut workers’ conditions and caused job losses.

“And really, in the end, the consumer hasn’t benefitted too much either.”

Asked about technological disruption and automation, McManus said that many new jobs had been “created that essentially try to get around our laws”.

She said workers should be paid the minimum wage, no matter what job they were doing.

McManus argued that Australia’s Fair Work Act was out of step with international law. She cited Martin Luther King Junior and Thomas Aquinas in defence of civil disobedience and examples of illegal strikes including the Eureka Stockade, green bans and a strike against teachers’ job cuts she supported when she was 17.

Despite doubling down on them, McManus heavily qualified her comments on unjust laws by adding she had referred only to industrial laws and they could be broken only in “limited circumstances”, the decision “should never be undertaken lightly” and warning of consequences including personal fines.

The new ACTU secretary accused “the very people benefiting from the exploitation of ordinary Australians” of “a very public meltdown when I said we must resist exploitation, resist unjust laws and stand together”.

Asked about Shorten’s response that bad laws should be changed, not disobeyed, McManus said she was “glad that Bill said what he did” because it amounted to a commitment to change the laws.

“He is the leader of the opposition, I’m the leader of the trade union movement ... That’s his job and that’s what I hope he does.”

McManus criticised corporate avoidance of the Fair Work Act, including through sham contracting and underpayment becoming “part of the business model”. She cited exploited workers in convenience stores, farms, restaurants, cafes, hotels, airports, construction sites and charities.

The threat of fines was “absolutely no disincentive, especially when the exploited workforce is afraid to speak out”.

“How dare the federal government denounce me and do nothing to support Australians who are the victims of rampant law-breaking by some employers.”

The Turnbull government has proposed laws to crack down on deliberate underpayments, especially in franchise business models, although critics have argued they do not go far enough to increase corporate accountability.

McManus said the reintroduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and trade union royal commission aimed to weaken unions because they tried to “shift the balance back towards working people”.

She said new laws to ban “corrupting benefits” to unions did nothing to stop payments to politicians by corporations which are “designed to influence lawmakers”.

“The union movement will happily support laws with strong powers to investigate and punish corruption, so long as they apply to everyone.

“Such laws should apply equally to all members of the Liberal party, their backers in corporate Australia and the big banks.”

Last week when Malcolm Turnbull was asked why the government planned to criminalise employer payments to unions but corporate donations to political parties are presumed not to corrupt public policy, he mischaracterised the question as amounting to “defending employers paying bribes to unions”.

At the Press Club, McManus said the notion of a fair go “is under attack from the wealthy and the powerful”.

“We are now a country of stressed-out people, worried about our jobs and wondering why things have not turned out as we thought they should in Australia.”

She accused the Turnbull government of presiding over decisions that will harm families, in relation to penalty rate cuts, and called on him to meet affected workers.

McManus made an explicit pitch for workers to join the union movement, to fight back against penalty rate cuts and to prevent erosion of conditions through labour hire arrangements.