pinkeye wrote:Call me a cynic. I wouldn't be holding my breath on that Lefty.
Full employment is a fundamental aim of the Commonwealth Government. The Government believes that the people of Australia will demand and are entitled to expect full employment, and that for this purpose it will be able to count on the cooperation of servicemen's associations, trade unions, employers' associations and other groups. Because the Referendum was not carried, the cooperation of State Governments and local authorities will be particularly necessary.
Despite the need for more houses, food, equipment and every other type of product, before the war not all those available for work were able to find employment or to feel a sense of security in their future. On the average during the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 more than one-tenth of the men and women desiring work were unemployed. In the worst period of the depression well over 25 per cent were left in unproductive idleness. By contrast, during the war no financial or other obstacles have been allowed to prevent the need for extra production being satisfied to the limit of our resources. It is true that war-time full employment has been accompanied by efforts and sacrifices and a curtailment of individual liberties which only the supreme emergency of war could justify; but it has shown up the wastes of unemployment in pre-war years, and it has taught us valuable lessons which we can apply to the problems of peace-time, when full employment must be achieved in ways consistent with a free society.
In peace-time the responsibility of Commonwealth and State Governments is to provide the general framework of a full employment economy, within which the operations of individuals and businesses can be carried on.
Philip Lowe says rising wages are essential to return inflation to normal levels and warns against assumptions about interest rates
The Reserve Bank of Australia governor says it would be a “welcome development” if wages growth began picking up in Australia because it would create a stronger sense of “shared prosperity” among workers.
In a not-so-subtle message to employers, and as workers endure their longest period of declining living standards in more than 25 years, Philip Lowe has said wages should ideally begin growing on the back of stronger productivity growth, but even if productivity growth were to be around the average of recent years, “a faster rate of wage increase should still be possible” now.
He also reminded employers and policymakers that rising wages would be necessary to return inflation to normal levels, and to lift the economy out of its ultra-low interest rate funk.
With households now worse off than they were six years ago, and with large businesses enjoying record profits, workers would benefit from a lift in real wages, he said.
“A lift in wage growth is likely to be necessary for inflation to average around the midpoint of the 2-3% medium-term inflation target,” he said.
“Stronger growth in real wages would also boost household incomes and create a stronger sense of shared prosperity.”
Lefty wrote:The Australian government is giving $430,000 to an American consultancy to tell it how to improve Centrelink’s call centre, a move unions describe as an “absolutely outrageous” waste.
The Centrelink call centre has come in for intense criticism over the wait times in recent years. In the last financial year, customers were met with 55m busy signals, up from 29m in the previous year, and the wait times are a cause of constant frustration to welfare recipients.
The pressure on the call centre, which the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) attributes to job cuts, led the government to announce this year that it would bring in multinational outsourcing group Serco to help operate the service.
Centrelink call wait times balloon to 16 minutes on average
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It also announced last month that it was bringing in a foreign consultant to advise it on how to resolve the call centre’s problems.
The contract was awarded on a limited tender to Brad Cleveland Company LLC, a US-based consultancy, for $430,000.
The CPSU national secretary, Nadine Flood, said the money was being wasted and the government would learn nothing it did not already know.
The call centre was the subject of an exhaustive audit by the Australian National Audit Office in 2015 and a commonwealth ombudsman inquiry in 2014, and has been scrutinised in Senate inquiries, including in budget estimates, on a frequent basis.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/03/paying-430000-for-advice-on-centrelink-call-centre-outrageous
Money to burn in order to keep the unemployed in that state rather than simply fixing the problem once and for all.
The amount of money and resources poured into "managing" the permanent pool of poverty and disadvantage created by neoliberalism makes the argument "we can't afford to create jobs for everyone" a sick joke and obviously a simple outright lie.
pinkeye wrote:Call me a cynic. I wouldn't be holding my breath on that Lefty.
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