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from the found-more-exploitable-workers-elsewhere dept.
The World Socialist Web Site reports
[October 3], Toyota wound up production at its plant in Altona, a working-class suburb in southwest Melbourne. The closure marks the end of the company's 54-year Australian manufacturing operation. The shutdown left 2,700 workers unemployed, and threatens tens of thousands more jobs in the car components industry.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), which covers car workers, previously oversaw the shutdown of Ford's production in Melbourne and Geelong in October last year, eliminating the 600 remaining jobs. Once Holden closes its operation in South Australia, in less than three weeks, a further 944 workers will be left unemployed, and car production will cease in Australia.
A University of Adelaide study in 2014 predicted this would result in the destruction of some 200,000 jobs across the country.
The string of shutdowns is an indictment of successive Labor governments, at the state and federal level, and the trade unions. Having imposed round after round of sackings, speed-ups and cuts to conditions, the unions, functioning as an industrial police force of the car corporations, have done everything they can to ensure "orderly closures".
[...] after extracting vast profits from their employees, Ford, Toyota, and Holden, have decided their Australian operations are not providing a sufficient return for their ultra-wealthy shareholders. They have thus ended manufacturing, wreaking social havoc on devastated working-class communities.
This is part of a global restructuring by the major car producers, aimed at taking advantage of poverty-level wages and economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs. Workers in every part of the world, from Asia and the US and Europe, are paying the price.
[...] The unions, taking their nationalist and pro-capitalist program to its logical conclusion, support this global race to the bottom, helping companies pit workers against each other along national lines. The AMWU, working with Toyota and the major companies, drove down wages and conditions over the past 20 years, seeking to ensure Australian car manufacturing was "internationally competitive".
[...] This is part of a broader corporate offensive against jobs, wages, and conditions, following the collapse of the mining boom, amid a deepening crisis of Australian capitalism. Massive job cuts have been imposed in the energy sector, telecommunications, and virtually every other industry.
A Roy Morgan survey in August found that more than 10 percent of the national workforce, more than 1.2 million people, were out of work.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:51PM (6 children)
Rent seekers constantly driving up prices while producing nothing.
Capitalism (people who make money while they sleep) sucks.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:01AM (5 children)
You seem to be confused about what rent seeking behaviour is. It has nothing to do with capitalism as such, as opposed to regulatory capture leading to official favouritism.
But people making money while they sleep? Screw those dang farmers, whose crops grow without them having to stretch them manually higher all the time. Capitalist scum, your time has come! We're going hunter-gatherer!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:13AM (4 children)
You seem to be confused
Not at all, but you clearly are.
rent seeking behaviour [...] has nothing to do with capitalism
Capitalism is about ownership and non-ownership.
So is rent seeking.
Too bad your Economics 101 course was so awful and didn't mention this stuff.
A remedial course for you in weekly installments. [kpfa.org]
farmers [...] making money while they sleep
You have a real talent for twisting yourself into a pretzel.
You should consider joining the circus.
...and if the farmer is an owner and has non-owner employees, he's a Capitalist even before we go to his sleeping habits.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:25AM (3 children)
You're entitled to your own opinion - but if you're going to start using terms of art in economics, it would behoove you to actually understand them, before you try to apply them. You see, when you misapply them, you get the wrong idea and confuse other people.
Brief explanation: rent-seeking behaviour is the behaviour of groups (usually professional organisations) where they persuade the powers that be to grant them particular privileges or prerogatives from which they can extract particular money. An example would be requiring a doctor to prescribe medications (hence driving people to doctors) or requiring an accountant to certify your accounts. The hell of it is, that there are often excellent reasons why one would want, for example, the construction of a block of flats to be overseen (or at least the wiring thereof) by a master electrician, but immediately it makes master electricians a lot more valuable in the market than they otherwise would have been.
This does not depend upon ownership of anything as such, nearly so much as regulatory control and regulatory capture by narrow interest groups.
Now, if you mean something utterly different by "rent-seeking", please feel free to explain in great detail so that we can all follow your insights, great guru...
Footnote: got a lot more than Econ 101. Even read plenty of Marx, and Castro, and so on ...
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:25PM (2 children)
Rent seeking is, well, literal rent seeking as your average person would understand it. You're right that it has something to do with government, but of course the benefits of owning property DO mostly come from services provided by government and society (and not what the property owner does to the property). Granted, the examples you give are also particularly inefficient examples of a practice that's not exactly economically productive to begin with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:25PM
"the benefits of owning property DO mostly come from services provided by government and society (and not what the property owner does to the property)"
yeah, right. fuck your society and your government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @04:38PM
Rent seeking is different from rent collection, in economics.
Rent collection is when you have a property owner who collects rents for the use of the property. This is what the average person understands.
Rent seeking behaviour is a different point, where groups attempt regulatory capture in their sectional interests.