Wage Freeze Danger !

It was certainly a big ask to request workers on the government payroll to accept a tweve months wage freeze to allow the state government to apply the saved money to job creation as we emerge from this virus lockdown.    The bean conters think a public serctor wage freeze would save the government about three billion dollars and this would be better spent on job creation.

That failed to get the numbers up in the parliament with Labor and the minor political parties opposed.  It will now be settled in the Industrial Relations Commission and that means endless hearings because the eight million people involved work under a wide variety of public sector awards.

The unknown factor is how the IRC will respond to the cases being put before it.  Public sentiment is strongly behind the nurses, doctors and paramedics who have courageously stood shoulder to shoulder at great personal risk to treat patients suffering from the coronavirus.  While the rest of the community sheltered in isolation our medical defence stayed on the job with deficient means of self protection.

There is the hope that the IRC will award pay increases where they are due and that our medical professionals will head that queque.   The IRC might also look favourably on fire fighters who week after week last summer  battled a forest inferno that almost wiped out many small towns and destroyed both homes and lives, but here the division of labour is greatly divided.

Most of the members of the Rural Fire Service are volunteers.  In a national emergency, their employers usually grant them leave to fight fires but the only ones on the governmenrt payroll are the members of city fire brigades.  They also fought these summer fires but to reward them with a pay increase and ignore the volunteers who turned out in their thousands would be a gross traversty of justice.

It is essential that the national wage structure delivers a living wage and in recent times that has been falling short.  Usually, it is a labour shortage that forces employers to pay more to fill vacancies but a" Gig " economy has emerged that has absorbed any excess labourforce and kept job demand unusually stable.  As a result, private sector wages have stubbornly failed to move upward despite increased living costs.

There is a danger than if public sector pay is frozen it will signal the private secvtor to resist wage increased and these are essentially overdue.  Commerce will face headwinds emerging from this recerssion but keeping business costs artificially low will only distort a healthy market place.  If a business has to underpay workers to survive it has no place in a healthy society.

There are many businesses that will not survive this recession and that is nature runnng its course. Using the law to artificially control wage levels is not the sort of society that has long prevailed in Australia.