Response to 'Changes at Work and the impact of Globalisation' by the Australian Coalition for Economic Justice.

• Most of us know or have heard of someone who has been put on to casual or short time work against their will and it causes much uncertainty in their lives and they cannot plan ahead or take on a mortgage etc.
• Most people who are retrenched suffer some loss of income and many cannot again find work in their preferred industry.
• Support unions and collective bargaining to ensure job security and solidarity
• Shareholders are seeing the benefits of increased productivity

Changes to the workplace and workplace laws
• No direct experience in our group, but enterprise bargaining is clearly a system of divide and conquer and we should return to the arbitration system.
• No direct experience in our group of some of the changes taking place at work.
• There should be an increase in minimum wages.

• No one in our group is currently a member of a union, except a school teacher who believes the benefits are self evident.

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• MWorkplace changes in the teaching profession cause schools to compete with each other at the cost of marketing expenses and the loss of their former co-operation
• Unions can increase their appeal by discouraging workers from taking casual work voluntarily and showing them that the short term gain is not worth the long term loss of security and such benefits as holiday pay
• To offset losses in manufacturing a tariff or primage of 5-105 could be applied to assist local manufactures and encourage import replacement
• Workers shareholder schemes could distribute profits more widely.
• A strong industry development policy and strong workers rights will help, to some degree, with income inequalities

• Almost everybody is adversely affected in some way by corporate globalisation
• In the teaching profession, competition policy means that schools must try to retain pupils to keep their funding, but there are not enough suitable courses for older students
• To avoid racist responses regarding the impact of globalisation we need to inform the public that economic nationalism is not a racist policy any more than it is racist or selfish to own ones own home.
• To help promote basic workers rights in developing countries we need to publicise bad multinationals like Nike.

• We should ban the products of child labour where there is alternative employment or income for the affected people
• Vision for alternatives to economic rationalism include controls on foreign exchange and investment, a progressively increasing company tax based on turnover rather than profit (imposed internationally), public ownership of all industries which are natural monopolies such as water, electricity, rail and opposition to any further privatisation.