Bill Mitchell — We need trade unions to grow again

It is clear that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) management is at odds with the elected Federal Government over the current state of the economy and what needs to be done to get through the COVID-19 pandemic. The Federal government is about to significantly wind back its fiscal stimulus, which although was insufficient at the outset, did help reduce the damage that the health responses to the pandemic caused (lockdowns, etc). The Government has the view that the private sector will now rebound quickly especially as the vaccination process has begun. The RBA though is clearly not convinced and its senior officials are wont to point out (regularly) that growth will struggle for years unless the stimulus is maintained and the government promotes an environment where wages can grow more quickly. The RBA clearly blames the Government for the record low growth in wages given the penchant of the latter to impose wage freezes and wage caps on public sector workers, which spill over into poor private sector outcomes. And that is quite apart from the damage that Government industrial relations legislation has done to the capacity of unions to gain wages growth for workers. The chances that we will break out of this malaise are close to zero. The Government is anti-union and anti-wages growth. It thinks that suppressing wages growth to historically record lows and further attacking the unions, will drive the wage share down even further (as the profit share rises). And, of course, the funding of the conservative political forces largely comes from the beneficiaries of these trends. For the vast majority of Australians the situation gets worse. Our real incomes stagnate and to maintain consumption levels we have to borrow more, even though household debt is at record levels in relation to disposable income. It is not a sustainable future but the damage will get worse until there is a pushback from the population. And one of the things holding that back is the deplorable state of the Australian Labor Party in electoral terms. We can generalise all this to most nations. The neoliberal score card: Biggest F you can find.

I would say in addition that we need to increase labor power and environmental power in order to generate sustainable growth. We need a lot of other things, too. Without taking a whole systems view of this in terms not only of national systems but also the world system, we are cooked as a species.

The systems approach can be applied in economics, but that will be insufficient to make macro useful as a policy science. The whole system has to be taken into account in terms of individuals and society. 

Many ethical and political questions are involved and there are also ontological, epistemological, and ethical assumptions that need to be addressed since many world views contend on the world stage. Clearly, many issues are political and decisions involve the political process. Compromise is required instead of rigidly "standing on principle."

Trying to impose one world view, liberalism, on a world that is still mostly traditional is a recipe for disaster, for example, and many paradoxes arise in liberalism itself. In addition, attempting to maintain Western hegemony when decolonization is an inevitable result of globalization is also disastrous.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
We need trade unions to grow again
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia