If you're wondering why you haven't received a decent pay rise in a while, you're not alone: this is now the longest period of slow wage growth in Australia since the Great Depression.
https://theconversation.com/the-five-not-so-easy-steps-that-would-push-wage-growth-higher-107510
The Global Financial Crisis and Recession has come and gone, but Australia's crawling pay packets are part of a global trend of rising economic inequality known to sociologists as the 'Great U-Turn'. In the more primitive days of our society, inequality was marked. In the mid-twentieth century there was much shared prosperity in the developed world.
Shared prosperity then started going out of fashion again. Since the 1980s, the 1% or 0.1% (whichever way you want to look at it) wealthiest people are now increasingly vacuuming up most economic gains for their benefit, and their benefit alone. This is aided and abetted by governments the world over implementing trickle-down economic policies, under an ideological, almost quasi-religious belief that if you cut taxes for the wealthiest, the benefits will flow through to everyone.
How's that thirty-year experiment working? Many Australians are struggling to stay afloat, even so-called middle class Australians are now entering housing rental stress, and the share of earnings that are distributed to employees has shrunk to pre-1960s levels. In other words, businesses in Australia and around the world are doing quite well but keeping more and more of that benefit for themselves. They are withholding significant pay rises because they can.
The article linked above proposes some interesting reforms but implementing any of them would prove very challenging, even for any future Labor government.
https://theconversation.com/the-five-not-so-easy-steps-that-would-push-wage-growth-higher-107510
The Global Financial Crisis and Recession has come and gone, but Australia's crawling pay packets are part of a global trend of rising economic inequality known to sociologists as the 'Great U-Turn'. In the more primitive days of our society, inequality was marked. In the mid-twentieth century there was much shared prosperity in the developed world.
Shared prosperity then started going out of fashion again. Since the 1980s, the 1% or 0.1% (whichever way you want to look at it) wealthiest people are now increasingly vacuuming up most economic gains for their benefit, and their benefit alone. This is aided and abetted by governments the world over implementing trickle-down economic policies, under an ideological, almost quasi-religious belief that if you cut taxes for the wealthiest, the benefits will flow through to everyone.
How's that thirty-year experiment working? Many Australians are struggling to stay afloat, even so-called middle class Australians are now entering housing rental stress, and the share of earnings that are distributed to employees has shrunk to pre-1960s levels. In other words, businesses in Australia and around the world are doing quite well but keeping more and more of that benefit for themselves. They are withholding significant pay rises because they can.
The article linked above proposes some interesting reforms but implementing any of them would prove very challenging, even for any future Labor government.
