You have hit the nail on the head. The number one reason why Australia is so unproductive is that labour costs are too high and our workers are far too unproductive. Instead of concentrating on the work at hand, they concentrate on when the next sickie should be and when the next tea break is. Instead of being grateful for having a job, the Australian worker possesses a sense of entitlement for massive wages and benefits.
First of all workers aren't unproductive because labour costs are too high. Your point seems to be that Australia is unproductive because our workers are lazy. High labour costs would equal hard to be competitive, not unproductive.
And did you just write 'instead of being grateful for having a job'? You sound like the Glencore bloke who said Australia should be grateful for allowing his company to come and dig out minerals and make billions in profit. He said Australia should be like the Congo and welcome him and basically not have any restrictions. It's really quite arrogant.
But your 'workers are lazy' opens a whole Pandora's Box of arguments to which I have an example from the other direction, just to temper the debate. I work for a large multinational company and the MD has told me on a number of occasions that the cost of labour in Australia is just too high. (They 'only' make $90m profit within Australia.)
I agree that wages are high here, compared to China, SE Asia, US and many other places, but thats the rub - apart from Australia having a high cost of living in line with our wages, globalisation has opened up cheap labour markets so that companies can maximise their profits by taking things offshore. But when they have to produce things onshore, there are complaints - seems like many companies have a sense of entitlement (for dirt cheap labour and no benefits) just like you suggest Aussie workers do in the opposite.
This is one of the structural shifts happening in our economy right now - how to find a balance between labour costs and being competitive on the world stage.
Back to my workplace though. It isnt unionised. They used to be unionised, militantly so, and this led to workers effectively taking the **** like 'China' mentions above. After they were all sacked and paid out for unfair dismissal the company has bullied and harassed the new workers for about a decade. In contract negotiations they gave workers 6 weeks to nut out a deal and then rang each worker individually and threatened to sack them if they did not sign. The majority of workers are married with kids and have big mortgages so they did. One employee didn't sign and tried to organise Union involvement in negotiations and he was sacked and paid out. I've only been their 2 years and over 10 employees have been sacked in that time - each one that has taken them on for unfair dismissal has won. We've been told that the company budgets for it.
On top of that physical and verbal harrassment was rife. Threats to dock wages, abusing workers, threats to fire them etc. Are the workers unproductive now? Not at all, most are scared shitless for their job. We only have a skeleton staffing in an extremely dangerous industry and we can work up to 70 hour weeks. There are no overtime rates (infact my rate when I work more than 38 hours drops by 15%), no penalty rates, workers are forced to take annual leave on public holidays and talking about joining a union will get you fired. Sure, the flat rate is tremendous but overall has nothing when compared to other companies in the industry. It took a year and 2 major accidents for the company to hire some new casual labour, and even then they hired a few but sacked a few more.
I believe there is a place for unionism in all industries if only to protect the rights of the worker. Unions get demonised in the News Ltd press but have an in depth look at places like QANTAS and realise that given the opportunity companies will take the **** in as much as an extreme way as poor unionism does at the other end of the scale.
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