Re: Aussies the world's hardest workers?

[Grant Lee <grantlee@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Happy May Day!

Jim said:
> throw a shrimp on the Barbie!

The famous tourism ads featuring Paul Hogan used the word "shrimp" for US
audiences; "shrimp" here are small fish, rather than crustaceans ("prawns").

Anyway, here's the original article referred to by CNN, based on the new
book: _How Australia Compares_, Rodney Tiffen & Ross Gittins, Cambridge
University Press, A$49.95

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/30/1083224585827.html

My instant hypothesis about this is that, prior to the 1980s, Australia had
one of the developed world's most highly-regulated labour markets. This was
a testament of sorts to the historically long-stnading strength and
organisation of the labour movement. As Marx, among others, alluded, a
distinctive thing about the later settler colonial societies was that they
imported not only the workers from Europe, but also fully-devloped
capitalist relations of production ("unhappy Mr Peel"). This included
unionisation and early, pre-Marxian forms of socialism.

By the 1890s, the political power of the "aristocracy of labour" in
Australia was reflected in the world's first election wins for a
union-created "labor" party (beginning with the self-governing Colony of
Queensland in 1892) and a "class truce" in the form of a powerful
"arbitration system" (industrial courts), to filter and modulate disputes.
This resulted, inter alia, in (relatively) generous wages and short, rigid
working days.

For various social and political reasons, by the late 1970s the rate of
union membership had plateaued. Nevertheless, no conservative government
was, as yet, politically capable of unravelling arbitration. Capital had to
co-opt the Australian Labor Party into chipping away at arbitration, and
that's what a federal labor govt did between 1983 and 1996, e.g. allowing
individual workplaces to opt out of arbitrartion, allowing 12-hour shifts in
the mining industry, etc.

It seems workers got the "message" and union membership declined further,
from 55-60% in 1985 to 25-30% by the late 1990s (
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/downloads/FAQ/UNIONSTATS2002.pdf )

regards,

Grant.