Innovation, skills and income security will be the key items manufacturing workers are looking for in this years’ budget, according to the AMWU.
In a submission to the budget, the AMWU stated that manufacturing workers were hit 8 times harder than non-manufacturing workers during the economic downturn, and have suffered disproportionately.
“Too many workers in this downturn lost both their job and substantial income as a result of job loss or their company going bust and employees not having their entitlements or their income protected,” the submission stated.
The AMWU has called on the Federal Government to use the budget to create a stabilisation policy that invests in the following protections for workers:
A) Increase GEERS so that employees don’t lose any of their entitlements in the case of their firm becoming insolvent; and
B) Develop an income security program to help protect employees against loss of income, protect their entitlements and ensure appropriate retraining in the context of job loss.
The AMWU argued the government must deliver long-term policy to deal with the coming decades, in particular, fluctuations caused by the industrialisation and urbanisation of China.
“The conclusions the AMWU draws from Australia’s closer integration with China’s business cycle is that there will be upward pressure on Australia’s exchange rate and the potential for another boom bust cycle in our terms of trade that spills over to the real economy. This is more a question of when rather then whether.”
While praising the Government’s “timely, temporary and targeted” economic stimulus program, the AMWU believes only long-term infrastructure plans will boost consumer and business confidence when there are future global downturns.
“We are going to go down this path again and we all know it,” the submission stated.
“There will be another boom bust cycle and the next one is more likely than not to be more severe than what we have just experienced. We need to do even better in the next downturn by having a programmed infrastructure response in the pipeline. It is the responsibility of Treasury to upgrade macro stabilisation policy.”
The AMWU also called for the obsession with government debt to end in order to fund the innovative industries needed to prioritise long-term growth and expand the nation’s productive capacities.
“The bottom line is that Australia has about the lowest net public debt in the OECD and there is ample room for additional expenditure on infrastructure, skills, innovation and initiatives that promote fairness in the budgets that are brought down over the next decade,” the submission stated.