Real wages in Australia continue to fall and are now down 7 percent in two years. This is the biggest fall in real wages ever recorded. The overall proportion of national income going to wages is also the lowest on record, at just 45 percent. According to Jim Stanford, an economist at the Australia Institute, “This decline in labour’s share of GDP ... represents foregone earnings of close to $5,000 a year per employee, on average”.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has repeatedly promised to lead an “unashamedly pro-business, but also unashamedly pro-worker” Labor government. In his election night speech last May, he pledged: “Together, we can work in common interests with business and unions to drive productivity, lift wages and profits”.
Workers’ living standards are being pushed down as capitalists raise prices and hold down wages. While the wages share of national income is the lowest on record, corporate profits are at their highest. Big companies, especially the energy giants, are profiteering from a global supply shortage by jacking up their prices to take more money out of workers’ pockets and put it in their own.
UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the US, where he will face 18 espionage charges brought against him by the Department of Justice. The charges carry a combined penalty of up to 175 years in prison. It is another cut in the long, torturous crucifixion of the Wikileaks founder, who dared to embarrass and expose the war crimes of the US empire and its allies.
Electricity bills are set to soar across the east coast of Australia, driven largely by surging coal and gas prices. The price of thermal coal exported from Newcastle has leapt by almost 500 percent in the past year. Meanwhile, gas prices recently shot up to ten times what they were in March, before being (temporarily) capped by regulators at $40 per gigajoule.
In October 1917, revolutionary Russian workers, supported by millions of peasants and soldiers, succeeded in overthrowing capitalist rule and replacing it with their own democratic structures of power. Exploited masses have risen up in rebellion throughout history. But in Russia, for the first time, they actually took control of society, created a government based on democratic workers’ soviets (councils) and, at least temporarily, routed the capitalist state.