Tricky trade-offs will show what Labor values most when we can’t have it all

Résumé détaillé

From AI job losses to productivity and tackling climate change, public debate is awash right now with choices between incompatible goals.

You've used all of your gift articles. 3 more will become available on the 1st of every month.

Two weeks ago, Australian technology juggernaut Canva announced it would sack, restructure or relocate more than 1200 of its employees. Afterwards, there was a rush of Canva employees seeking out their union. According to The Australian Financial Review, meetings suddenly grew five times more popular.

Tech, with all its talk of individual genius and creative destruction, doesn’t seem like an obvious growth area for unions – and yet that is exactly what we might see. While Canva did not attribute those job losses to AI, other companies announcing mass sackings, such as Atlassian, have. It is also true that tech may be the canary in the coalmine, with redundancies in other industries to follow. Which means, in turn, that we may be about to witness the single biggest contributor to union membership in decades.

If that occurs, its significance will go well beyond the usual political questions of industrial relations regulation. Unions have played a major role in shaping Australia’s sense of itself – for example, the fact we are governed by a party literally named Labor. But the influence extends further still.

Consider the Coalition government’s actions during the pandemic, which indisputably saved thousands of jobs.

Two years ago, the Productivity Commission made the point that one of the reasons productivity did not recover very well here afterwards was the fact those jobs had been saved. In America, jobs had been lost, businesses had died – meaning workers went to more productive parts of the economy. Here, relatively unproductive businesses survived. And the fact unemployment stayed low under the Albanese government also contributed to poor productivity, because more young, inexperienced workers are working.

This is only part of the productivity story. But it points to the far more potent questions hiding just behind an often sterile topic: what is the fundamental character of…

T…

Début de l'article, extrait de The Sydney Morning Herald. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.