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Responding to the Economic Crisis

by Brian Boyd VTHC Secretary
March 2009

The Global Financial Crisis is impacting increasingly on Australia. Every day many ordinary working Australians are losing their jobs or told they are about to.

It’s not a pretty sight. One key area being affected, although not the only one by any means, is the country’s manufacturing base.

Over the recent two year period, this company alone received $17 million in government support initiatives, all the time planning an exit strategy to have their manufacturing done in China! This development raises some basic questions: where is the moral compass within such a corporation?; why has the government not attached to its assistance the necessary requirements that local jobs are to remain protected?

It is of some use when recently the Australian Industry Group Victoria tells us, with the occurrence of job losses AIG members are ‘hearing the message that everything possible must be done to keep people in work’ (The Age 28/2/09).

But AIG spokesperson Tim Piper also said manufacturers want governments ‘to do more’. For example government departments and agencies should, through their procurement requirements, ‘Buy Australian’. While a commendable idea, that has been supported by the union movement for a long time, it puts the onus elsewhere.

There is no sense of ownership of the issue itself being loyal to the country or Australian workers by the business sector for the long term future.

Many businesses see the right thing as simply to maximise their profits anytime under any global economic situation. It’s the ‘governments’ responsibility ‘to do more’, not them.

Yet this is the same group of employers that aggressively supported the push to globalisation over recent decades.

They lobbied successive governments to open up Australia’s economy to world markets and expose many of our workplaces to intense pressure. Wages and working conditions particularly felt the blow torch.

Jobs became more and more threatened. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

The developing impact of the financial crisis gives rise to big challenges for the union movement.

It is right for workers to be angry at obscene executive salaries; it is right to rebel against job losses and threatened job losses; it is crucial to defend and protect hard worked for entitlements, often swallowed up when companies get themselves into trouble.

It is important to therefore have a disciplined response to these matters. Both the business and corporate sector and the Federal and State governments need to receive the message loud and clear that Australian workers will not be tricked or treated badly in the current climate.