http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf ... enDocument
Greg Jericho in the GuardianL
Right now, wage growth is perhaps the sharpest indicator of the state of the economy. While employment has shown signs of better than expected growth, the story of the economy in the past few years has been one of low demand.Australia's wages growth slips to 2.2%, the slowest in 18 years, figures show.
Demand is all about people and businesses wanting things: wanting products or services to buy, and wanting people to work for them in order to make or sell those products and services.
When demand is low, everything slackens – job growth, economic growth, inflation and, crucially, wages.
And at the moment it is very low, and so too is wages growth.
There is a word for that: recession.
In the December quarter, wages in the private sector grew by just 0.49% – the second lowest amount ever – bested only in the deep dark days of the global financial crisis in September 2009:
Maybe we need some government spending, running out a real NBN at top speed say. All this crap about a surplus has to stop.
In 2015, the underlying inflation growth rate (which takes out the bumps and falls in some prices to get a more steady figure) was also staggeringly low – reflecting the lack of demand in the economy. The Reserve Bank’s trimmed mean measure of underlying inflation for 2015 was 2.13% – just 0.03% points below the trend wages growth for both public sector and private sector workers in 2015 of 2.16%.
Thus in 2015, on average, Australian workers’ purchasing power (or real wages) grew by just 0.03% – basically nothing:
Agile, Innovative—how unreal and irrelevant all this Lib crap is. We need the NBN and that is that.
Also a concern, as noted by senior Westpac economist Justin Smirk, is that the growth in hours worked and wages growth is now very disjointed. Normally, when the number of hours worked is growing strongly – as it was in 2015 – wages growth is also strong. That’s not happening at the moment:
It means workers are increasing their work, and employers seem to have an increased demand for that work, but it is not flowing through to workers in higher wages.
Why that is the case is unclear – perhaps due to both unions and employers having very low expectations for inflation, perhaps the hours worked data is a bit iffy. But it is pretty strong evidence that the industrial relations system is not loaded in favour of workers, despite what business leaders might suggest.
The lower than expected wages growth and the utter lack of real wage growth also suggests the pressing need for government is not bracket creep. Rather it should be looking at how to raise demand such that wages may actually grow in a way that sees bracket creep once again something to worry about.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/gro ... cket-creep
Everything the idiotic Libs have done is wrong: wrong assumptions, wrong ideology, wrong IR policies, wrong decisions when they do make a decision.
Casualisation of the workforce, 457 visas handed out by the bucketful could be behind this, how widescale is the 7/11 style exploitation and cheating by employers exactly?
And then you hear Snot Morriscum crapping on about bracket creep and you it is just wrong, wrong wrong!
I think the handing out of 457 visas like confetti, the disastrous FTAs rushed into under abbott and howard, the driving off of the car makers is Lib ideology run mad: destroy the unions even if you destroy the economy.
