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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:21AM (3 children)
No one is irreplaceable.
Just because the Capitalists who own your company have allowed you to keep your job till now, don't go thinking that that's a permanent entitlement.
The way of the Capitalist world is to always be reducing costs in order to increase profits for The Ownership Class.
At the top of their list is cheaper labor (with fewer worker protections).
This is know as The Race to the Bottom.
Keep looking over your shoulder; it's gain on you.
.
consider [...] the right to bear arms
They tried that. They got The Port Arthur massacre [wikipedia.org]
In 1 day, with 1 gunman[1]
The Aussies were smart enough to take the hint.
[1] Oddly, to an USAian, Aussie cops didn't shoot the perp dead when they had the chance.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:30AM (2 children)
Businesses do not enjoy employing people, yet society needs that. On the other hand, the non-capitalist world gives us Venezuela. Hmmm. It could be that a balance is needed, mostly free-market but blocking trouble. Trouble includes monopoly-like behavior (for sellers and buyers, of goods and labor and land) and externalities like pollution, as well as outsourcing (international and subsidiaries and local contractors) to evade restrictions.
There isn't a permanent entitlement, and we can't make it so, but we sure can act to keep jobs in a country. Careful tariffs can help. It also helps to wipe out regulations (such as zoning and "for your own good" safety stuff) that drive up the cost of living to the point where workers become too expensive for the market.
The Port Author massacre shows that people make bad decisions when they panic, and that politicians are all too willing to take advantage of that. Grow some balls. Will you ban trucks too if, as happened in Nice, a truck of peace drives through a crowd and kills 2 or 3 times as many as the Port Arthur massacre? How about aircraft? The Boeing 767-200ER and the Boeing 757-200 were used to kill 2996 people in a single day, at an average of 749 per plane. Maybe you should also ban all types of fuel, you know, just in case.
In a world without guns, the strong risk-takers can do as they please. Typically these would be lower-class young males with nothing to lose. The gun is well-known as an equalizer. The women and the elderly can protect themselves. Sometimes they do. More often, the mere possibility is a deterrent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:25AM (1 child)
You're serious??
Venezuela is VERY Capitalist.
Had the Bolivarian (anti-Imperialist) Revolution there done what was done in Russia or Cuba (ALL of the properties seized), we might have a reasonable starting point for a conversation on your pseudopoint.
The Reactionary Capitalists in Venezuela, however, are about to take over again (with a lot of covert and even overt actions from USA.gov).
The Venezuelan gov't already does most of its procurement via Venezuelan Capitalists--who then are just importers of USAian goods.
If GOV.vz was even -slightly- Socialist, they would be nurturing worker-owned cooperatives and getting crops grown and goods manufactured domestically by Non-Capitalists.
GOV.vz, however, is NOT Socialist; they have a Liberal Democracy welfare state set up, based on petroleum (with that market having crashed due to Saudi dumping).
The Port Author massacre shows
...that USA.gov is gutless and for sale to the highest bidder (NRA--which has only about 5M members out of 320M USAians).
In a world without guns
Guns aren't the problem.
It's the nutballs that are allowed to own them.
I have no problem with guns in National Guard armories (as indicated by the 2nd Amendment).
The way that Switzerland does it with military training and every man being in the militia, with a gun in the home and a tiny amount of ammo there, and most of the ammo in the armory also seems pretty sensible.
I'd also have no problem with somebody going to a shooting range, renting an automatic, spraying several hundred rounds to compensate for his tiny penis, turning in the gun, and going home.
The problem is having weapons of war in households with these pseudomen who think that those things make them more of a man.
On his Pacifica Radio program, Aussie Ian Masters has said repeatedly that USAian movies with guns in them are stupid.
He notes that in Oz, only cowards pull a weapon.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @04:47PM
Are you kidding? ... maybe.
Just in case you're not, let's check a few items. Just because Venezuela didn't nullify private ownership as a context doesn't make them capitalist. They're explicitly in opposition to many capitalist approaches to things, so ... socialist lite? Terminally confused? But sure as hell not very capitalist. The fact that they have catspaws doing their acquisitions for them doesn't make them capitalist, either.
As for the USA, if you don't like guns, work on repealing the second amendment. If you don't have a plan on that, you're either in opposition to the general opinion of the country at large, or ...
... or I guess you're all hat and no cattle. Pick one.