Work Choices

[xalciene]

Gavin Robinson and Jonathan Whybird (Oz Letters) note that economic theory has been neglected in the current debate over Work Choices, yet their attempts to rectify this are woefully misleading.

Robinson claims that Work Choices has been around long enough to show that our current prosperity is a result of it. This is confusing correlation and

Comments

[volacious_gus]

I think the big deciding factor will happen when the economy begins to experience a downturn. Let's face it, we've had a pretty sweet run for the past 14 or so years.

Adam Smith was the ultimate capitalist, let's not argue that. I think maybe Australia is not large enough to support completely competitive markets. In some markets employers do not need to compete for employees, and thus the employees lose their bargaining power.

Frankly, this "Work Choices" is nothing all that new... collective bargaining has been constantly eroded since 1992 and the first emergence of enterprise bargaining. Even Kevin Rudd states that we can never return to the unions "glory days" of the 80's (which I think is a damn good thing!).

I think it's best to let things unfold... despite the media cries, quality of life really isn't suffering so far from what I can tell. Time will tell.

[xalciene]

Well the "glory days" of the early 80s would certainly be a bad outcome, of course. I'm not arguing for increased unionism!

Adam Smith the "ultimate" capitalist? Well perhaps -- but he still believed in fairness. He's almost as famous for this Theory of Moral Sentiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments) as he is for Wealth of Nations.

As for competitive markets -- we've got an incredibly high degree of market concentration in a lot of industries, much more so than the rest of the developed world -- but this has more to do with strategic interaction than size itself. Smaller countries (New Zealand, Ireland, Estonia, etc) have much more competition in most industries.