Massive real wage cuts will not improve growth prospects
There was a column in today’s Australian Financial Review “When the money-go-round slows, everyone suffers” which bemoaned the fact that all the investment bankers, lawyers and accountants that have been making heaps off the massive growth in the financial services sector are now doing it tough. We read that household budgets are being stretched when some woebegone executive suddenly discovers “multiple sets of $20,000 a year private school fees plus family holidays in Aspen” (from Australia). We feel sorry for them don’t we. The parasites of neo-liberalism who in between crafting handsome consulting contracts for themselves fill their days performing largely unproductive functions to our society. The AFR is, of-course, the neo-liberal propaganda machine that feeds the business sector with arguments about how badly they are doing because workers are overpaid and lazy. Yes, there was also an article in today’s edition about excessive wages and labour market regulation. Meanwhile, the latest evidence from Britain is that workers have taken the equivalent of a 15 per cent real wage cut over the period 2007 and 2012. The cuts have undermined nominal wages of workers in jobs rather than being the result of workers shifting to lower paid jobs. That is unprecedented and confirms the suspicions that the austerity agenda is being driven by a desire to win the class war for capital once and for all.