The bosses are trying to convince workers that lower corporate taxes, fewer regulations and workers’ rights, and less union power would be good for real wages. What they really want is more profits at the expense of the working class.
For years, business lobby groups have decried what they call Australia’s “productivity crisis”. They don’t say workers are producing less than they used to; they say they aren’t increasing production as quickly as before and aren’t keeping pace with overseas productivity growth.
It’s true: growth in workers’ hourly output has slowed over the past decade, and Australian workers don’t produce as much value for the bosses as American workers. But the bosses argue that this means living standards are held back, and prices rise more than they otherwise would, contributing to the cost-of-living crisis.
They say that government regulations (rules about wages, hours of work, health and safety standards, construction standards, environmental protections and professional and occupational registration requirements) and trade unions are preventing business investment. Their solution is “deregulation”, “slashing red tape”, “more competition”. These are simply code words for attacking the working class.
Let’s break this down. First, what is productivity? The simplest definition is “output per hour”. For BlueScope Steel, it could be tonnes of steel produced per hour per worker. For a childcare centre operator, it could be the number of children in care per worker per day. Lift those and productivity rises.
But who benefits? Does the steel worker or childcare worker see their wage rise automatically if they get more done? Of course not. In the first instance, all the money made from extra production by every group of workers goes to the capitalists, not the workers. Workers’ standard of living depends on how much they fight for. And that applies across the whole economy.
The bosses say some of the additional money coming in from workers’ extra effort will come back through higher wages and maybe more jobs. They argue: “a rising tide lifts all boats”. Is that true, though?
First, productivity in Australia may have slowed in the past couple of decades, but it has still risen. Yet household living standards are no higher than they were in 2012. There is no indication that workers are seeing any of the higher value they produce in the form of higher real wages.
A starker example is the United States, which bosses always point to as the high-productivity benchmark, where output per worker is higher and rising faster. In that country, workers’ share of national income is now at its lowest since World War Two—the productivity gains have gone to the capitalists, who have grown ever wealthier at workers’ expense.
Take things down another level. Even if bosses shared a cut of the higher revenue from increased productivity with workers, or unions successfully struck to extract a higher wage, bosses would still be ripping off workers.
All wealth ultimately comes either from the world’s natural resources or from human labour. You only have to see what happens when workers go on strike to see the truth of this—nothing gets produced, not a wheel turns, the childcare centres lie empty. All the machinery, all the factories, all the railway lines can only be put to good use if workers labour on them. And these in turn are the product of previous generations of workers’ labour.
What the capitalists call productivity should really be called exploitation: the extraction of value from the worker over and above the cost of their reproduction, i.e. what is necessary to get them to come to work each day in the form of wages. They call it profit; in fact, it’s theft from the worker.
This theft lies at the heart of capitalism. It explains why the workers labour their whole lives and have not much more than their home to hand on to their kids, and often not even that. While their employer has significantly expanded their operations at the workers’ expense. Some of the bosses may blow the money on a more self-indulgent lifestyle, but personal greed doesn’t get to the heart of it.
Every boss is driven to extract more from their workers, i.e. to lift productivity, because if they don’t, their rivals will, and they will be undercut and go out of business. The winner is the boss who can exploit their workers the most. That’s why every boss in every country demands that governments make it easier for them to rip off their workers.
Far from helping lift real wages, Australian bosses’ demands for fewer regulations and workers’ rights—their demands on the government to help them lift productivity—are about making life harder for workers. In fact, many of the standards that they want to get rid of are things workers have fought decades to establish.
Sometimes the bosses don’t even bother to hide their appetite for more cash with demands to cut wages, penalty rates or shift allowances. Or increased access to vulnerable migrant workers on temporary visas. Or simply a cut in company taxes and a lift in the GST. That’s all part of the “deregulation” package they are championing as the solution to the “productivity crisis”.
This reveals the clear pro-capitalist agenda of those who raise a hue and cry about productivity. It’s a class offensive against workers.
In a socialist society, things would be organised differently. There would be no separate classes of capitalists and workers. The products of human labour would be shared among all. The labour-saving methods capitalists introduce to boost their profit margins, like improved technologies or production techniques, would be used to reduce hours of work for all. In such a world, workers would welcome the opportunity to produce more with less.
Additionally, whole swathes of jobs that are necessary under capitalism—everything from advertising and public relations to police and jail guards to financial planners—would be eliminated, freeing up this wasted labour to contribute to social improvement, not the security of a system that depends on the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.
