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: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday October 09 2017, @07:15PM (29 children)
The same information could be provided with a slightly more journalistic writing style, and convey the meaning, and the intent of the writer, without terms and formulations that would earn any of us a well-deserved Flamebait mod...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:43PM (20 children)
"Hey, I've built a factory and would like to pay people to do some work!"
"Great! I'll do that work for that pay."
Work gets done; people get paid.
"Well, I'm shutting down the factory because X, Y, and Z."
"FUCK YOU, MAAAATE! YOU OWE ME!!1!1!!1111"
What?!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 09 2017, @09:22PM (16 children)
I worked for a telco equipment company which lost 2/3rds of its people after the 2001 crash.
One guy was ranting really loud that the management was all bastards (somewhat true by that point), and the founder was an asshole who stole ten years from him because he was getting laid off.
As if he hadn't been well paid for ten years, with great benefits, nor enjoyed the stock options that paid for his nice house and man toys...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:42PM (14 children)
It didn't lose them; it knew exactly where they were.
It fired them.
...meanwhile, Mondragon (a worker-owned cooperative) doesn't lay off its worker-owners.
When things get tight, worker-owners are moved to a different product line, if that is a good choice; if necessary, every worker-owner's workweek is cut a bit.
Worst case: Everybody there still has a job at a living wage.
Now, when have you ever seen a Capitalist company start cutting at the pork side of the operation, shedding the highest-paid non-producing dead weight first?
(BTW, Mondragon's greatest pay differential is 9:1.) [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]
...and at Suma, the largest worker-owned co-op in UK, -every- worker-owner gets the -same- (very nice) compensation package. [google.com]
Socialism is clearly better.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:57PM (6 children)
Wow, talk about cherry-picking.
Mondragon is all too happy to pay its non-owner staff low wages, for part-time work, and can them when it suits them. They've effectively created a two-tier system.
They're also operating in a distinctly socialist-light environment, in which individual accumulation of capital is expressly supported.
... and as for socialism being somehow "better" there's no mention of individuals freelancing outside the coopera-corporate system. Fuck them, amirite?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:52AM (5 children)
Mondragon is all too happy to pay its non-owner staff
Everyone working at Mondragon is an equal owner of the company.
That's what "worker-owned cooperative" means.
Nitwit.
I've repeatedly explained this for three and a half fucking years.
Are you new here or were you in the "special" class at school?
low wages
A living wage.
In a worker-owned co-op, the worker-owners democratically decide how the profits will be used.
If you think they are going to screw themselves, you're just stupid.
for part-time work
Even on a reduced schedule, they still make more than enough to pay the bills.
N.B. In France, EVERYONE has a 35 hour workweek and they do just fine there as well.
a distinctly socialist-light environment
You are very poorly educated.
It's clear that you haven't bothered with the autodidact thing either.
You have, however, uncritically swallowed a whole bunch of Cold War bullshit.
in which individual accumulation of capital is expressly supported
Capitalism and Socialism are OWNERSHIP models.
In the first, there are lots of non-owners; in the latter, everybody is an EQUAL owner.
The first is an Autocracy; the latter is a Democracy.
Thanks for playing our game.
Collect your dunce cap on the way out.
You can now go back to your wage-slave job and continue to allow your Capitalists overlords to exploit you.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:32AM (4 children)
So, denial is cool.
And if you want to live in denial, never google as follows, and if you do, then DEFINITELY never read the linked content:
http://www.google.com/search?q=non-owner+workers+mondragon [google.com]
In your happy world of denial, you can continue to fantasise that I'm a poorly-educated wage-slave. I'm sure you'll feel very happy with that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:59AM (3 children)
Mondragon makes every attempt to promote from within.
It is an extremely rare occurrence when they have to bring someone new in to get stuff done.
My understanding is that when someone new is brought in, he has to pay the modest ante just like everybody else in the company and he then becomes a worker-owner.
...and your crap link brings up nothing to dispel my vision of how the company works.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:15AM (2 children)
The parent post is a glowing illustration of what we call "confirmation bias". Things that support the favoured view are obviously true. Contrary evidence is manifestly false, or not worth investigating, and certainly not worth believing or taking seriously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:35AM (1 child)
...and quote from that.
...or provide a better search link that actually supports your supposition.
...and which will get through the S/N comments engine without being molested (e.g. quote marks stripped).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @05:01PM
Not the OP, but what the hell, a guy (or gal) gives you a google link and you can't even follow it up? Wow, talk about your entitled little basement socialists.
Direct quote from a pretty friendly website: "Many cooperatives in the group not only abroad, but also outside of the Basque Country in the rest of Spain, make use of a significant number of non-member employees (Mondragon’s rule in the Basque Country is min 85% worker-member), especially in periods of high demand or season."
Sounds a lot like temporary workers being brought on and tossed out to me. There's more: "The Eroski Group grew rapidly and could not keep up with the speed of expansion, and, hence, a larger and larger percentage of the Eroski work force came to consist of non-member workers in conventionally-owned subsidiaries." So, yeah, there's that. Bought subsidiaries. Conventionally-employed people.
And then of course there's the lobster-pot thing of not being able to transfer your capital account. Why the hell not? It's yours, right? No, it's not yours, it's the cooperative's. And you get the privilege of being one of them, if that's your thing.
Hell, they even had to finally admit that certain kinds of professionals were kind of necessary, and that they would kind of demand higher wages, and then relax their rules for that. Go figure, the market for workers really does matter.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:31AM (6 children)
Capitalism does not conflict with how the people of Mondragon have decided to allocate their capital...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:51PM (5 children)
...only if you don't understand how decisions are made in the typical Capitalist operation.
...and if you concentrate on "capital" when trying to distinguish between Capitalism and Socialism, you're probably the type who would also become fixated on "liberal" when trying to analyze "Neoliberalism". [soylentnews.org]
...and Mondragon regularly outcompetes Capitalist operations in the market.
...in 40 countries, spanning 5 continents.
.
Let's play '"Name that system".
Example 1:
You go to work and someone else has decided what you will produce.
Someone else has decided how you will produce it.
Someone else has decided where it will be produced.
Someone else has decided what will be done with the profits.
Example 2:
You go to work and you and your coworkers democratically decide what you will produce.
You and your coworkers democratically decide how you will produce it.
You and your coworkers democratically decide where it will be produced.
You and your coworkers democratically decide what will be done with the profits.
N.B. Every worker's vote is equal to any other worker's vote.
...and the reason it works this way is because there are no non-worker owners|stockholders|board of directors.
In fact, it would be accurate to say that the workers (and only the workers) collectively own the means of production.
.
In the 1st example, TPTB could
- have you doing things in an unsafe way
(West, Texas fertilizer factory (exploded); Union Carbide's Bhopal plant (leaked poison gas and killed thousands and thousands))
- have you dump poisonous coal ash into the nearby river because The Ownership Class doesn't live in the community where the production is done, so they don't care about that community
- export your job because they found cheaper, more exploitable workers (The point of TFA)
- pay the workers as little as they think they get away with and cut benefits each year
(The Aussie workers repeatedly made concessions but got canned anyway.
Welcome to the post-Thatcher/post-Reagan era.)
In the 2nd example, workers who own their own company would tend not to
- do things in a worker-hostile/dangerous way
- poison the air, water, soil, and people of their own community
- export their jobs
- cheat themselves WRT compensation
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:49PM (4 children)
Sounds pretty capitalist to me. Owners of capital make a collaborative decision on what to do with their capital collectively, on a basis of voluntary cooperation. Now bearing in mind I haven't studied the legal systems of the whole world, but I'm not aware of any place that would be illegal, and I'm pretty sure not in Australia.
Why don't you go there and suggest that they start building cars themselves? I'm sure all those laid-off workers will be happy to chip in for a new factory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @01:51AM (3 children)
You haven't accounted for the non-owners within Capitalism.
(Socialism doesn't have any of those.)
Thanks for playing our game.
Collect your dunce cap on the way out.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:21AM (2 children)
You still haven't explained why those australian auto workers aren't going to pool their resources and out-manufacture all the filthy vampire-owned ones like Toyota.
I mean, that's the logical conclusion of your position, right? Something about occupying the factories, the workers claiming the means of production, and then all riding off into the democratically managed sunset? Or doesn't that theory apply if they all have to chip in? Or are the vampires somehow preventing them from doing this? If so, how, and how can we make it better? After all, once released from their capitalist bonds they will produce more cars, faster and cheaper than their competition in Thailand. And better, of course.
C'mon, throw us all a bone here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:49PM (1 child)
My hypothesis is that they're even more stupid than you are.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:35AM
Impossible. We hear plenty about how talented, virtuous, and just plain gee-shucks nice guys these poor deprived workers are. They will outperform, outproduce, outdesign and simply outdo their wageslave competition on every level. They might just happen to be ignorant. So, are you advising them? Or one of your fellow travelers?
Are you going to make a shining example to show the whole world? Don't keep us in suspense, here.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:55PM
There's two sides... the telco job/lifestyle of the mid-late 1900s (up to about 1990) was presented as a life-career. You put in your hours, every year for 30 years, don't screw up too badly during that time and at the end there's a decent pension and we all live happily ever after. Contrast this with "consultant" careers that paid (in the 1980s) 3x and more in salary, but little or no benefits.
So, when the lifer-career jobs turn around and start dumping employees who've "done nothing wrong" in their personal/professional actions, always performed as requested, that's where the feelings of injustice erupt.
Presently, I'm employed by a bigish firm that's in the process of transitioning from a life-career institution to more of a "gig economy" hirer of consultants and temp workers. It's a tough act for them to put on because a big carrot they've used in the past to get their "associate-consultant-contractor-flunkies" to work for such low pay is that if they do a really outstanding job as a contractor, they'll get transitioned to the glorious full-time position. But with health insurance benefits sucking worse every year, pension benefits dwindling into the past, 401(k) matching getting watered down, etc. that carrot isn't what it used to be, and we've got lower level employees just walking away from the glorious-full-time spots as trailing spouses or for even less compelling personal reasons.
Personally, I'd like to work the old 3x pay consultant gigs about 50-75% of the time, and spend the time between jobs traveling and enjoying life. Unfortunately, since the 1990s, all that has been on offer are jobs that pay like lifer-career but lay you off like a consultant.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:43AM (1 child)
When that factory closes down, is it moved to a country with slave labor rates and then the cars just get sent back to the place that originally built them with no tariffs? Of course that's the case.
Everyone finds it easy to shit on blue collar workers but you know what, every fucking job is under threat either from offshoring (for blue collar work also coupled with unfair free trade deals -- for white collar, by the telepresence capabilities of the internet), or through importation of cheap labor to drive down living wages at home to 3d world levels.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:59PM
I think this is a somewhat temporary (40-80 year) phenomenon that will abate when the offshored jobs raise standard of living in the 3rd world / drag down standard of living in the 1st world until we reach economic parity.
Unless we have a pretty dramatic war, that could perpetuate the state of inequality for much longer.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:27AM
You also need to understand what's really going on here. Cars were never "manufactured" in Australia, they were clipped together from prebuilt parts that were just outside the margin of what would be considered a finished car, all designed to get around protectionist government regulations designed to shield Australia's "car industry" from foreign competition. Now that that's no longer necessary, the car vendors can drop the pretense and just bring them in pre-assembled.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Schafer2 on Monday October 09 2017, @09:04PM (4 children)
Well said. Such a biased writing style! Does it really have a place here? Could we please avoid posting obvious "alternative-fact" submissions (from any political perspective) without even commentary?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:42PM (1 child)
Who gets to decide what is even? Post it all. POST IT ALL.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:14AM
Yeah, not gonna happen. You want to post stuff that doesn't even make an attempt at journalism, use the journal or clone our github repo and start your own site.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday October 09 2017, @10:22PM (1 child)
The editors are still just the messengers. I think we should welcome submitters showing a little of their style and biases, even if they are obvious. Besides, at least OriginalOwner is submitting. Can't say that much for a lot of other users around here, including myself.
I jumped the same gun as you did, though -- after a few glasses (okay, bottles) of wine I made a comment about Takyon in another discussion without really reading the full summary and that it was mostly the words of Aristarchus in the summary rather than Takyon's, even though it also had Takyon's name on it.
Besides, as far as Commies go, OriginalOwner is one of the better ones I've read.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Monday October 09 2017, @11:11PM
Although it makes me a little queasy, I agree wholeheartedly with Eth here. Don't like the published stories? Submit ones you want to read and discuss. Pissing and moaning about the quality of submissions doesn't make the site better, it just makes you look like an ungrateful asshole.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:12AM (2 children)
It's a gewg_ sub from World Socialist, what else would you expect?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:18AM (1 child)
...and I left out all of the -really- Lefty stuff.
Read the whole article and see if I'm stretching the truth.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:07AM
I read the rest of the article before I posted it... he's not lying.. he did leave out the leaning-so-far-to-the-left-it-is-almost-far-right-stuff
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 4, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 09 2017, @07:25PM (7 children)
What I don't see mentioned is where that missing production is going. Is Toyota eliminating that plant and importing 61,000 cars from existing Japanese plants? Or is this the usual off to China/3rd world scenario?
(Score: 5, Informative) by LVDOVICVS on Monday October 09 2017, @08:39PM (6 children)
Despite being from metro Detroit, and having a wife/engineer in the auto industry, I'd never heard that Thailand is known as the ‘Detroit of the AsiaPacific’. I did a little reading after seeing this post and found that it appears Australia is ending subsidies for automotive manufacturing, and ending tariff's for imports, in pursuit of agricultural exports. So Australia will only have imports from this October on with no domestic production.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/end-car-production-australia [autocar.co.uk]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:53PM (5 children)
So the Aussies want to destroy their own manufacturing to become exporters of raw materials and ag products to the rest of the world?
Is their goal to become a Third World economy?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:45PM (4 children)
They've discovered after years of (very expensive) subsidies, and years of tariffs (that unreasonably raise the cost of living - and hence the cost of many social benefits) that paying extra for all the things is not all it's cracked up to be.
Now they're letting things flow in a way that will let their dollar devalue to a more sensible level, and naturally do the readjustments for them, rather than swimming against the current with all their might, and losing ground anyway.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:33AM (3 children)
Those worked just fine for USA for over 4 decades.
They gave a whole bunch of folks (an expanded "Middle Class"[1]) a really nice stable life.
...then came Reaganomics (which GHW Bush properly called "Voodoo Economics") and that vast middle has been diminishing ever since.
...and Germany still has tariffs (though they disguise those, calling them "value-added taxes").
[1] I hate that term.
There are only 2 classes: The Proletariat and The Bourgeoisie; the first has to do labor to make money and the latter makes money from money.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:04AM (2 children)
Tariffs worked just fine for the USA? Which is why so many things were more expensive in the USA than elsewhere - such as, oh, say, medications. Because you can't just import them because you want them - that's terrible! You'd have sick people importing meds from other countries where they're sold cheaper, and then the pharmaceutical executives would cry!
Or lumber. Until NAFTA and canadian lumber came along, lumber was substantially more expensive. Now, I know that it feels as if that only affects leechmonster slumlord demons, but in reality poor people need somewhere to live, and lumber prices are as important to them as medicines.
Or cars. To this day we have classic examples: they make light, efficient, highly desirable trucks in India. Mahindra - you may have heard of them. They tried to import them into the USA and backroom deals killed it. Oh well, poor people don't breathe polluted air, so that doesn't matter, does it? And they don't buy trucks either, so tariffs are sticking it to the man!
... yeah...
OK, now returning to the real world: if you are a friend of the proletariat, you should despise tariffs with a passion because they're one way that global businesses have extracted more money, by segregating markets and artificially keeping competition out. Sure, have a job here, a job there - it's For The Workers (and maybe those rubes will even believe that). Every time you cheer for tariffs, you're cheering for the few at the expense of the many.
Oh, and value-added taxes aren't tariffs. They're applied to things produced domestically just as they are to things imported. And there isn't a bright line between The Virtuous Labouring Heroes of Proletarian Magnificence and the Effete Bloodsucking Exploiters of the Bourgeois Conspiracy. There are lots of people who are investing one way or another while still needing to work to feed their families. Aside from the usual retirement nest eggs there are those who actually do so as an additional strategy, like house flippers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:29AM (1 child)
...and USAians had jobs and good wages and could afford those prices then.
Apparently, you live in a gated community and never see the huge numbers of folks who are trying to get by on poverty wages--or don't have jobs at all.
This would be a good point to mention that if minimum wage had kept up with worker productivity--or even inflation--that would now be over $22.
medications
Wow, are you ever out of the loop.
You clearly aren't aware of the number of USAians who currently get their meds from Canada because the prices here are so outrageous in USA.
NAFTA
Slick Willie's GOP-friendly job exporting bill?
Surely you jest.
you should despise tariffs with a passion
I hate Capitalism a lot more.
...but, as long as that's around, tariffs are a Good Thing(tm).
value-added taxes aren't tariffs
When they're waived for domestic consumption of domestically-produced goods, that's de facto what they are.
It's nice that you're doing so well such that you eagerly defend the status quo.
What are you going to do after they export -your- job? [wikipedia.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:48AM
Nope. Don't live in a gated community. Have spent a lot of time broke, though, living the sub-prole life. Worked my ass off, no longer there.
The number of people getting meds from Canada actually supports the point that market sequestration is a problem, because people can do things as individuals that are not available to corporations. Personal meds? You can cross the border with those. Importing on a commercial scale? Pay up, dude.
A propos NAFTA: not jesting. The canadian lumber thing is a major issue. Check the history. And yes, part of the problem from the point of view of US companies is canadian lumber companies undercutting them. I guess exploiting consumers is OK when they're protected by tariffs or something ... and this is far, far from the only example of tariffs. Look at the effect it had on motorcycles. Or sugar.
The germans waive taxes on particular goods, same as anyone does, in the interests of making them more progressive. For example, things like baby food are regularly tax exempt. That doesn't make a tariff from the tax. Now it's true that pretty much all countries play procedural shenanigans, which is part of what crapulent agreements like TPP were supposed to fix - but that doesn't make procedural shenanigans tariffs either. Keep them straight; they're differently done, differently handled, differently analysed.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:28PM (4 children)
I believe most Australians source their cars from such Asian poverty hellholes as Japan.
So what really caused the Australian auto industry to collapse within 10 years? With like 20 different governments during that time, it's probably not one party's fault.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @07:40PM (2 children)
Japan is hardly a poverty hellhole.
Thailand fits that description a bit better though, and I'm guessing a lot of Aussie cars still come from there. A few years ago I recall Mazda and Ford shared facilities there for the Aussie market.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:45PM
S/t
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday October 09 2017, @08:46PM
Also Malaysia, Indonesia; anywhere labour is cheap...
http://www.drive.com.au/motor-news/where-was-my-car-built-20160905-gr9hzn.html [drive.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:23AM
Some industries in Australia are heavily unionized, and have kept worker pay and conditions very generous for the 'new normal' of the modern economy. This makes Australian cars much more expensive than imports, even with the subsidies that the government has been paying for decades.
There is an industry here that is even worse - construction. If it were possible to import houses and office buildings from overseas, most of Australia would be doing it in a heartbeat.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:36PM (7 children)
Look at the absurdly high wage level in Aussieland, along the with the absurdly high cost of living. Despite the size of territory, it's a market of mere 20m population.
Of course the manufacturing is all moving out to India and SE Asia along with the logistical advantage serving ME and African market.
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:44PM (21 children)
10% out of work is horrible.
You wanted to be all global, and you got it. You even welcomed unemployable people who will never accept western civilization. This is the result.
In the history of mankind, modern civilized western society is not the norm. You have to fight for it. It's easy to lose. Probably you're doomed.
I don't think you have the will to recover. I don't think you have it in you. You probably take offense at the measures you'd have to take, which become more extreme the longer you ignore your problems.
I do wish you luck. I suggest you consider having freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. You need to put your own people first. You need to rip out whatever regulations are burdening the small and medium businesses. You need to deport some people, stripping citizenship as required, before voters get desperate enough to demand a final solution. You need to fix the birth rate of the people who accept western civilization, and you especially need to fix it for the smarter and more industrious people. Some huge tax adjustments are probably required, paying the large traditional families and punishing all others.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:54PM (5 children)
Reduce the size of government (aim for zero), and promote the idea of voluntary interaction, and then you'll not only get your western civilization, but you'll get a society that is a whole lot more civilized.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:58AM (1 child)
you'll get a society that is a whole lot
...like Somalia.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:34AM
... what are you smoking?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by number11 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:32AM
If you're gonna try that, start with the totally unproductive part first, the standing army. And don't forget, corporations are a creation of government, so we need to get rid of them as well.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:10AM (1 child)
Who promotes voluntary interaction? You just wiped out the government...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:40AM
You're implying that a government is necessary to promote voluntary interaction, but that's not at all obvious; it's particularly non-obvious given the fact that government is by definition based on involuntary interaction.
(Score: 2) by LVDOVICVS on Monday October 09 2017, @08:42PM (10 children)
Sieg Heil!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:07PM (9 children)
... and still became yet again the political and economic power of one of the top civilizations in human history.
Poke fun all you like, but maybe it's time to realize that while society is a matter of culture, not every kind of human seems to be able to install the necessary culture in his brain.
At your own peril, replace one brand of human with another.
(Score: 2) by LVDOVICVS on Monday October 09 2017, @09:36PM (4 children)
Oh, those Untermenschen!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:53PM (3 children)
The vast majority of Jews used to be Sephardi, but where are they now?
Despite being a minority just 300 years ago, and despite a huge set back during WWII, the Ashkenazi Jews are now the dominant kind of Jew, making up something like 75% of the world's Jews. Any time you think of a prominent Jew, you are very likely thinking of an Ashkenazi Jew.
Who are these Jews? Well, they are German Jews.
Not only do Ashkenazi Jews have a not-insignificant amount of German DNA, but they also adopted a largely German culture, including Yiddish (which is dialect of high German), a strong work ethic, a predilection for deep and often technical studies, personal responsibility, and a bit healthy miserliness. The whole Zionist philosophy originated among German Jews.
In order to run a certain set of software, you often need a certain set of hardware, and your denial of this fact means shit; it's still a fact.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:26PM (2 children)
I don't know where you get your history of jewry, but it's completely out to lunch.
For starters, there's a lot more than just sephardim and ashkenazim running around, and the ashkenazim are from a much, much wider area than just the old german-dominated regions.
As for Yiddish, while it's a dialect of German, there's a strong admixture of slavic terms, morphemes and grammatical structures - especially (unsurprisingly) among the eastern european ashkenazim who didn't speak a lick of German, but plenty of (for example) Russian.
I know, I've seen you around, you have your own little narrative, this is more for the sake of anyone who's ignorant or deluded enough to think that you have it right.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @07:20AM (1 child)
RWNJ infestation. Garbage humans, and they congregate here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:53PM
Point well taken.
On the other hand, this story is very much LWNJ, and there's something very similar to be said about that end of stupidity as well.
I suppose that reflects editorial balance, where there's room for both?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:54AM (3 children)
...largely because they had universal healthcare, gratis education, workplace safety, proper wages, as well as strong labor unions and a non-antagonistic approach to labor-management relations.
When Europe and Japan rebuilt after WWII, those places adopted that kind of plan.
USA ("the victor") went the other direction, dismantling the gains that Organized Labor had fought for in the 1920s and 1930s.
Shortly after FDR died, a Republican-majority Congress was elected and passed Taft-Hartley which gutted labor law.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @04:37AM (1 child)
Nice try, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:08AM
Citation needed
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @04:34PM
And amazingly, the USA carried on to the kind of massive growth that trade union apologists love to point out.
At best, this points out that there are multiple ways to run a country, and as long as the populace is agreeable, it can be made to 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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Monday October 09 2017, @07:53PM (4 children)
When a socialist rag cited by Gewg_ starts condemning the Unions (made up of workers, with leaders elected by workers, who's purpose is to keep workers employed) for being the main instigator of the shutdowns you have to wonder WTF is going on.
TFA seems to condemn the unions for an "orderly closures" of plants - implying they should have been burned to the ground instead.
Was it the Union demands that made these plants uneconomic?
Would riots and strikes have kept the plants open longer?
Or would these closures have happened years ago had the Unions not caved in at prior contract negotiations?
Australians buy about 100,000 new vehicles every MONTH. [abs.gov.au]
Toyota made 209,000 vehicles a YEAR in Australia.
Holden made 146,680 vehicles a Year.
The country could probably support 4 manufacturers just on internal sales alone. The "Labor" governments chose not to require internal manufacture.
Isn't spreading the work/wages to lower income countries exactly in line with socialist ideals?
Socialists admitting Unions were a flawed and failed concept!! WTF?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MostCynical on Monday October 09 2017, @09:21PM (1 child)
Governments by polititians...
Like many western nations, Australia has right-of-centre, further-right-of-centre, and right extremists.
Centrists are called "socialist", and left-leaning groups (like the Greens) are called "socialist" or even "communist".
The floating of the Australian dollar, the reduction in import duties, the eventual destruction of the internal car industry (in fact, mpst manufacturing) has been something the two major parties (Conservative and Labour) have been causing for decades..
For example, the Button Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_car_plan [wikipedia.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:18PM
The australian dollar floats because ... what could be the reason? Could it possibly be that the whole system of fixed exchange rates collapsed under its own impracticalities?
Naaah, must be something else. Capitalist leech vampire squid plots involving the Freemasons, most likely.
Sarcasm aside, fixed exchange rates - in fact, even occasionally re-pegged exchange rates turned out to be so flawed that they were only ever temporarily feasible, and in the long run bid fair to actually bankrupt countries that were flatly unable to prop up their currencies for a lack of foreign currency.
Think about it: if your family likes to do deals in cowrie shells, and the family next door likes polished slate beads, and you keep buying from them, then you'll be pretty soon running out of slate beads, and any attempt to buy in cowrie shells is going to be ruinously expensive (in terms of shells), resulting in a city-wide oversupply of cowries that nobody except your family cares about. If you're supposed to keep cowries as valuable as slate beads, and everything every other family uses then you'll be effectively unable to trade with anyone, as opposed to actually dealing with the fact that nobody wants anything you have unless they can pay you cheaply by devaluing your shells.
But sure, let's all pretend that markets are utterly static, caught in amber for all time. That always works!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:28PM
Maybe back in the days of commodity boom - when China was buying up shit left, right and center. Not anymore. Aussies need to figure some shit out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:46AM
a socialist rag cited by Gewg_ starts condemning the Unions
Socialists admitting Unions were a flawed and failed concept!! WTF?
We should note here that in the case of a (Socialist) worker-owned cooperative, there's no need for a labor union.
It's already a democracy.
It's only if you cling to the obsolete economic model called Capitalism where labor unions are needed.
...and the number of times that WSWS uses the term pseudo-Left in a week's time is noteworthy in this context.
Unions (made up of workers, with leaders elected by workers
So, it's every bit as broken as the "democracy" we have as a government in USA, where the elected folks don't do what a majority of the voters want.
Sounds like the founding document needs a re-write.
Maybe a more effective feedback loop with no-confidence|recall elections easily attained.
"orderly closures"
...where that is in the eye of The Ownership Class.
...with the union officials licking their boots.
plants [...] should have been burned to the ground instead ?
I would suggest occupying the plants.
It was effective in 1936. [google.com]
More recently, at a door and window factory (which is now a worker-owned co-op).
...and at a tire plant in Mexico (which is now a worker-owned co-op).
Was it the Union demands that made these plants uneconomic?
They weren't "uneconomic".
The Capitalists were just doing what Capitalists do:
attempting to reduce costs to maximize profits for The Ownership Class, namely: cheaper, more exploitable labor.
(Really, the Socialist rag was bitching about the more-exploitable thing.)
Germany has been mentioned in the (meta)thread.
If someone has an example of this shit going on there, I'd like a link.
So, in conclusion, we've go limp-wristed union officials and an anti-labor gov't (which ironically calls itself The Liberal Party--with the "Labor" Party being no better).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Monday October 09 2017, @07:57PM (7 children)
Tesla, who's looking to open 3 or 4 new gigafactories in the next two years. Not having to build one from the ground up might help out.
(Score: 4, Funny) by frojack on Monday October 09 2017, @08:33PM (5 children)
That would never work, because Tesla relies on solar powered factories, and we know how little sunshine is available in Australia.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 09 2017, @09:00PM (1 child)
Well, it does depend on whether today's giant brush fire covers the sun, and deposits ash on your panels, which you don't have water to wash.
Better go with coal, I'd say. Bonus: It also keeps the drop bears away.
Also: has anyone ever studied the effects of the various Australian poisons and venom on battery efficiency, and worker productivity?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:07PM
I think they did. If I remember well, they couldn't find any difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:04PM (1 child)
Yeah, naaah... We still have plenty of hydropower, OzLand centre is full of it.
We don't have is uranium reserves, though.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:34AM
(Score: 2) by n1 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:56PM
First they should probably finish building the original gigafactory, that isn't even 50% complete yet...
then they still need to save Puerto Rico and work out how to make more than 3 'mass market' cars per day..
the current gigafactory does not rely on solar either, they get cheap energy from the Nevada grid with plans to go solar some day...
and then they also need to find the next few billions to pay for it all on top of the 20bn in liabilities they have today, before they really start work on the semi, 2nd m3 production line, actually delivering their solar roof to non insiders...
still waiting on that billions of revenue from powerwalls that was promised 2 years ago, with off the hook demand... they probably won't even make 50m this year, but still found hundreds of units for PR despite all that demand and barely any installed
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:12PM
How much subsidy does Aussie government have in mind?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fierce on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:59AM (1 child)
This is what you get with free-trade-agreements.
I'm shocked there still are factories in ANY "western" countries. I suppose the cost of transporting the materials (to "3rd-world" countries) outweighs the cost of labor?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:12AM
There's a variety of factors why factories still exist in western-style countries. The most frequently cited (but one of the most misleading) is the very high productivity of western type workers. What that actually reflects is mostly a high degree of sophistication in things like automation, allowing a smaller working team to produce more, faster than their predecessors or foreign competition could.
What complicates this is that the reason for massive capital investments in automation is precisely that otherwise the local labour would be priced right out of the market. So it has less to do with third world labour costs than first world automation infrastructure. Observe that the more unstable your workers, environment and infrastructure are, the less likely an investment in automation is to pay off. Conversely, where your infrastructure is solid but the workers are very high priced, it makes sense to automate the crap out of everything - as witness for example recent moves on the part of fast food franchises.
Technically, we're very close to the stage where a burger joint is a fast food factory with a manager there whose job is basically to call a repair team if anything breaks, and the police if hoodlums show up. On paper, that manager looks like a ferociously efficient burger-flipper. Hence the myth of super-efficient first-world workers.