Following the recent discussion here of critics of US foreign policy being labelled as anti-American, I saw a snippet in the Fin (subscription required) in which the Wall Street Journal (also subscription required) applied the same epithet to anyone critical of US labour market institutions and their outcomes, even extending this to former PM Bob Hawke, about as prominent a supporter of the US alliance as you could find, though, like many others, a critic of the Iraq war. The relevant quote
Even Labor leaders who have previously been strong supporters of the alliance have not hesitated to stir anti-US prejudices this time. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke warned that making it easier for workers to negotiate wages directly either their employers would be “a move down the path to” horror of horrors “an Americanisation of labour relations
Unfortunately, my efforts to find the full piece have been unsuccessful – I assume it’s behind the paywall somewhere. I’d appreciate it it anyone could supply the full text.
I’d be interested to know, for example, whether the WSJ has extended its net to catch that notorious anti-American, John Howard, who has warned against taking the “American path” in relation to gun laws and tort litigation.
In the meantime, let me offer the hypothesis that lots of American workers share the “anti-American prejudice” that they would rather have a union on their side than enjoy the benefits of direct “negotiation” with employers. For example, this Gallup Poll reports that 38 per cent of Americans would like to see unions have more influence, as against 30 per cent who would prefer less. And I’ll guess that the WSJ itself would be happy enough to endorse Howard’s anti-Americanism, at least as far as tort law is concerned.
Update Thanks to several readers, the full column is over the fold
Australia’s Labor Reforms
November 22, 2005
From the death of that most cherished of Australian traditions — the weekend barbeque — to couples divorcing and a rise in the homicide rate, no scare story is too far-fetched for die-hard opponents of labor reform down under.
Trade unions brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets of major Australian cities last week in the biggest protests the country has seen in seven years. And their Labor Party backers were quick to warn of all manner of dire consequences if Prime Minister John Howard succeeds in reforming Australia’s outdated labor laws.
Never far below the surface, the anti-Americanism of Sydney’s left — still furious at Mr. Howard’s resolute support over Iraq — is back with a vengeance in this latest battle. Even Labor leaders who had previously been strong supporters of the alliance have not hesitated to stir anti-U.S. prejudices this time. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke warned that making it easier for workers to negotiate wages directly with their employers would be a “move down the path to” — horror of horror — “an Americanization of labor relations.”
Such rhetoric belies the modest nature of the Howard government’s proposals. Even if its Work Choices Bill is enacted, all Australian workers will continue to enjoy generous labor protection — including an A$12.75 (US$9.30) minimum hourly wage, four weeks annual holiday, and a year’s unpaid leave for new parents.
What will change is a belated recognition that labor union protections, aside from infringing on human liberties, are obsolete in today’s Australia. Two decades of economic reform (much of it initiated under Mr. Hawke’s leadership) has produced a entrepreneurial economy where one in ten are self-employed and union membership has fallen to less than a quarter of the workforce.
You wouldn’t know that from Australia’s labor laws, which still ban employers from negotiating directly with their employees, unless they match the wages and conditions set by state-run arbitration bodies for workers in that industry across Australia as a whole. Remove that restriction, as the Howard government is finally proposing to do, and you remove one of the main reasons stopping union membership from plummeting even faster. Other reforms would further reduce union power by insisting that strike votes or other industrial action require secret ballots, and simplifying the maze of more than 100 laws currently governing industrial relations.
Hence the scare stories, and the ferocity of the counter-offensive by the union movement and its Labor allies. They represent an Australia of old battling for its political survival. Having already been dealt a blow by Mr. Howard’s reelection with an increased majority last year, and a swing in his favor among the blue-collar workers who were once Labor’s staunchest supporters, they know how much is at stake.
For all last week’s street protests, the chances are they will fail again. The Howard government’s parliamentary majority all but ensures the bill will be enacted. And modern Australia has shown through its voting habits, and changing employment patterns, an understanding of how true job security comes not through restrictive labor laws, but from a flexible labor market that helps fuel continued economic growth.
Devastating though it may prove to union membership, the bill is only a first step in this direction. As Mr. Howard said recently, “In a year’s time, people will look back and say why on earth did people try and exaggerate and scare us.”
John Quiggin 
Those Gallup poll results are interesting. The 38% John quotes is up by 8 percentage points in 2005, having been fairly stable between 27% and 30% from 1999-2004. Also, the people who changed their minds were ones who previously thought that the degree of union influence is about right. My interpretation is that few people in the stable ‘too-much influence’ camp are employees, so their attitudes won’t be influenced by threats to job security.
Only 19 percent of the sample actually had family members in unions, so it would be hard to argue that the pro-union camp were victims of brainwashing by their own unions. Evidently many people who aren’t members can still perceive the benefits.
The belief that unions are holding the country to ransom or are centres of featherbedding is an ideological fashion that seems to have hung over from the seventies. But some people cling to it, like flares or beer home brewing kits.
It is completely obsolete, as evinced by the largely worker-led improvements in labour productivity and the huge decline in industrial action. This is observed right accross the OECD board.
Over the past 20 years it has been the bosses, not the workers, that have been the industrial militants. They have gotten away with murder both on pay and privileges. There is also the little matter of financial shenanigans.
The industrial relations legislation will be to the New Right what liberal sentencing laws were for the New Left: classic over-reach.
It took a couple of decades (1970s-90s) of the New Left going berserk in common rooms before there was a Decline of the Cultural Wets in politics.
Likewise the past couple of decades (1980s-2000s), which saw the New Right gone berserk in boardrooms, will lead to a Decline of the Economic Dries in politics.
Liberal sentencing laws? Come on, Jack, admit it: you wrote multiculturalism, didn’t you, but then, overcome by a sense of weariness, you deleted the word, scratched around, and came up with liberal sentencing.
No, I was trying to think of an example of “cultural wet” overreach that pushed the public’s “hot button” in a way comparable to “economic dry” over reach on IR does.
The first conservative reaction to become mainstream was the “backlash” against revolving prison door sentencing in the late seventies-early eighties. Cultural conservatives will never lose votes running on tough on crime/law and order platforms. It still has plenty of mileage, even in an age of declining crime.
Public opposition to multiculturalism will never be as hot as opposition to liberal sentencing. This is because of the deceitful way the multi-cult was foisted on an unsuspecting public. The Wets have fraudulently identified multiculturalism (bad) with multiracialism (good).
Most decent people are anti-racists and support multi-racialism. But these same people have trouble rising to the notion that importing Sharia law would be a form of diversity heralding cultural progress.
Neo liberalism is always depserate to employ a kultur kampf against its foes. Now its ‘anti-americanism’ as they try and depict opposition to their plans for the planet as mere vulgar ethnic/racial discrimination. They employ the same tropes aganist their critics at home, as they try to depict anybody who critcises the massive transfer of wealth upwards and foreign policy adventurism as being ‘anti american’ . However they are running out of cultural ‘gas’. Their amazing success with populist revolts against eglaitarian social and economic policies has at last run up against a reality check, as people start to stop and count the costs to them personally.
There is nothing like a little bit of social unrest to concentrate the minds of the powerful and insouciant, and we will increasingly see these pathetic slanders against their own populace being deployed, as the great ‘scheme’ starts to meet resistance, even in the home of the great scam itself.
What is the big deal with anyone admitting to anti-Americanism? Is it somehow illegal in Australia to be anti-American? Or anti-anything? How is being pro-union the same thing as being anti-American? Anyone who knows anything at all about the US knows that unions have been part of our economic make-up for decades.
Well I guess the point is that if you think Australia’s labour laws are better than America’s then you are obviously not thinking rationally and anti-Americanism is likely the culprit.
Avaroo,
What is the big deal with accusing people of anti-americanism at every opportunity?
Australia has been America’s ally in ever war since World War I, we may be the only country to have sent troops to every major conflict in which the US has been involved in that period.
The majority of Australians, across the political spectrum, support the American alliance – which is why we get sick of these cosntant accusations.
Of course, most of those wars didn’t connect the USA and Australia directly but through common interests. As Terry Pratchett has one of his characters say in a novel,”we’re not on the same side, we’re on two different sides which happen to be side by side”.
I don’t know Ian, what is the big deal with accusing people of anti-Americanism and why do you do it? What do you CARE if anyone is anti-American? Is it illegal to be anti-American in Australia?
Yobbo, what do America’s labor laws have to do with Australia?
Avaroo
Stories about US IR laws gives Australian workers chills and Australian business leaders thrills..
The right-wing of Australian politics is determined to bring in every bad idea that the US has ever had (privatised medical system, school vouchers, ludicrously low minimum wages) while refusing to take any of the good ones (bill of rights, legislated freedom of speech). The politicians here will recycle the same rhetoric and the same wedge politics as used in the US (eg abortion rights and privatised medicine for which there is and never has been a mass public constituency in Australia)
That’s why.
Andrew, although I appreciate your post, I still have no idea why anyone in Australia would care what the US does when discussing Australia’s labor situation. Shouldn’t Australian politicians and businesspeople be discussing Australia, rather than the US? It wouldn’t occur to Americans to consider what Australians do about labor laws.
Since you brought them up, the US has both public and private healthcare, school vouchers are rare and only in places where they have been voted in by the public (which I assume you think is an acceptable way of deciding these things) and minimum wage jobs in the US unlike other places, are not designed for lifetime employment, nor are they usually held for life. The minimum wage issue perfectly illustrates my point that Australian pols and public shouldn’t look at the US when deciding what to do in Australia.
The belief that unions are holding the country to ransom or are centres of featherbedding is an ideological fashion that seems to have hung over from the seventies. But some people cling to it, like flares or beer home brewing kits.
It is completely obsolete, as evinced by the largely worker-led improvements in labour productivity and the huge decline in industrial action. This is observed right accross the OECD board.
Bravo Jack, I’m glad someone pointed that out.
As for criticism of American labour laws et cetera being “anti-American”, well, I suppose all the lefty American bloggers are anti-American, then? Actually, a lot of traditional conservatives come into that mould, too.
Avaroo, US minimum wage jobs weren’t “designed” for anything. And a sizeable proportion of the US workforce will not be able to lift themselves out of them in their lifetime, because the lowest wages don’t cover basic accommodation, food and health care, let alone education and interview clothes to climb the ladder of opportunity.
US minimum wage jobs weren’t “designedâ€? for anything. Well, correction, it’s designed to ensure the highest profits.
>I don’t know Ian, what is the big deal with accusing people of anti-Americanism and why do you do it?
I don’t.
> What do you CARE if anyone is anti-American? Is it illegal to be anti-American in Australia?
Like most australians, I’m pro-American. I don’t like being misrepresented.
Helen, of course minimum wage jobs are designed for specific purposes. Most people who hold them are not in them forever, they are entry level jobs. Let’s see your evidence that a “sizeable portion of the US workforce will not be able to life themselves out of them in their lifetimes”.
Ian, who is it you think it would matter to if you were anti-American?
Being anti-American isn’t illegal, anywhere that I know of, including in the US. Do you care if anyone is anti-Australian? Stop worrying about what other people think about you and do what’s best for you.
Helen,
If you look at really profitable US businesses they don’t on the face of it appear to be employing a high proportion of people on minimum wage. I’m thinking of companies like Microsoft etc.
Do you have some data that correlates high levels of profitability with low levels of wages?
Regards,
Terje.
>Stop worrying about what other people think about you and do what’s best for you.
So, hypothetically, if I claimed that your support for the Iraq war was motivated by your virulent anti-arab racism that wouldn’t bother you?
Of course it wouldn’t bother me. Anymore than if you claimed I was a three eyed, stuttering, Mongolian princess.
Why would you give anyone the power to bother you by making any and all claims they want to make? People can say anything they want to about anyone (at least in Australia and the US). But what does what they say have to do with you?
” If you look at really profitable US businesses they don’t on the face of it appear to be employing a high proportion of people on minimum wage. I’m thinking of companies like Microsoft etc.
Do you have some data that correlates high levels of profitability with low levels of wages?”
Terje, you are introducing a red herring with your statement and your question, quoted above.
I understood Helen’s point to mean that if the minimum wage would be raised then in the first instance (ie the immediate effect) would be that profitability, as measured by the accountants, would be lower than that reported, keeping everything else constant.
One ‘thing’ which is being kept constant would be the income of the CEOs and other managers. Of course, profitability, as recorded by the accountants could remain unchanged (depending on the relationship of parameter values) if the CEOs and other managers ‘wages’ (claims?) would be reduced as the minimum wage is increased.
As for general relationships, may I refer you to the extensive literature on multinational corporations – one of the factors (not the only one) which motivates MNCS to locate production facilities in countries other than the country in which they originally were incorporated, is that there are significant wage differentials. This is so well known that I believe the onus is on you to get the data, if you want to have it.
Avaro, your statement that minimum wages in the US are designed as entry level wages and most people lift themselves out of this state (of ?). is interesting. Do you have evidence that this actually happens and if so, at what speed? Thanks in advance.
Ernestine,
I am aware that minimum wage laws might displace jobs to other countries. That’s a hardly a significant point.
Regards,
Terje.
Terje,
True. However, from the perspective of an individual, it probably doesn’t matter whether survival is not ensured because the minimum wage incomes
Ernestine, nowhere did I say anything about “most people lift themselves out of this state”. I did quote someone else who used this language.
Most Americans have at one time or another had a minimum wage job, usually as a student. But few Americans hold any job for a lifetime, at any wage level. We tend to move around quite a bit.
Please replace comment addressed to Terje with:
Terje,
True. However, from the perspective of an individual, it probably doesn’t matter whether survival is not ensured because the minimum wage income
Avaroo,
Thanks for the reply.
The information I have is:
Helen, of course minimum wage jobs are designed for specific purposes. Most people who hold them are not in them forever, they are entry level jobs. Let’s see your evidence that a “sizeable portion of the US workforce will not be able to life themselves out of them in their lifetimes�.
I’ll pass it back to you and Helen and wait to see what happens.
Regards
Ernestine
Terje,
I have no idea why the erroneous message got posted twice. This is my last attempt.
True. But from the perspective of an individual it probably doesn’t matter whether survival is not ensured because the minimum wage is less than the survival amount or whether jobs arn’t available.
I am using the survival costraint to simplify the argument. The notion of ‘a decent wage’ is preferred but it is difficult to argue the point in a few lines.
Regards
E.G.
Ernestine, your information is correct. As I said, I was quoting another poster. That’s why the prase was in quotation marks.
Ernestine,
I agree. A choice between starving due to insufficient wages and starving due to no wages is pretty stark.
Regards,
Terje.
Ernestine, from the perspective of an individual, let’s say a muslim individual living in the French banlieu, would you say a minimum wage job was preferable or no job? I don’t recall anyone rioting in France recently because jobs didn’t pay enough.
Avaroo,
1. My information now is that both, you and Helen, either do not have data to substantiate the hypotheses or both, you or Helen, do not wish to reveal the data.
2. In the absence of definitions of terms such as ‘minimum wage job’ and ‘no job’, my answer is: There are plenty of minimum wage jobs in France.
3. Do you recall any period in France’s history where riots took place because of income distribution issues?
Regards
Ernestine
Ernestine,
1) I haven’t a clue where you’re getting your information/
2) If there are plenty of minimum wage jobs in France why were people rioting and claiming there weren’t any? Were they lying?
3) uh, does the French revolution ring any bells?
In Paris, the Reveillon riots of 1789 broke out when a rumour spread that Revillon, a manufacturer of wallpaper, was intending to cut his workers’ wages.
In fact, Reveillon paid his workers over the going rate and intended to do nothingof the sort. But he was a well-known physiocrat (neo-liberal) smarty-pants who shot his mouth off about the desirability of deregulating the price of bread.
“[S]ince bread was the foundation of our national economy” its distribution sould be deregulated, allowing lower prices, resulting in lower wage costs, lower manufacturing, and all the benefits that the Rodent is promising, as we speak, for Australia.
“Death to the rich! Death to the aristocrats!” The mob sought to hang and burn Reveillon in the town square.
Eventually, the regular army and the militia turned out and shot hundreds of the rioters.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed describes the world of the US underclass- cleaners, waiters/waitresses, WalMart employees and the like – who are mostly in no way middle class students on their way to a better paying job. On the contrary, as I mentioned above, their wages can’t even buy what we would define as basic living conditions, and would definitely not pay for the fees, books, travel, etc. to go to school and improve their lot.
There is a lot written about the conditions of WalMart workers which American bloggers point to. WalMart has even used government social security payments as a stop-gap to pay lower wages and boost profits.
And this is even before you get onto the topic of outsourcing overseas.
Ernestine, please don’t say that because someone hasn’t re-posted then they are unwilling or unable to back up what they are saying. Not everyone has 24/7 access to this blog or indeed the internet.
Avaroo,
1. A form of Bayesian updating of the information I receive for storage in my head (I don’t know a better method of dealing with huge quantities of words)
2. My answer to your original question is conditional on the information you had provided me in the original question. I have not received new information regarding the original question hence my answer to the original question remains unchanged.
2′. You are giving me a new question. I can’t answer this one at all because it contains information which you seem to have but I don’t.
3. Yes, it rings a bell with me too. So, we can take the muslim factor out of the original question. Can we?
Regards
Ernestine
Helen, if waiters and waitresses in the US cannot provide basic living conditions for themselves, why don’t we see more of them living on the streets? Or starving on the streets?
To my knowledge, no one is forced to work at WalMart and again, where are the homeless WalMart employees? Plenty of Americans finish high school and go to college. Some of them without paying a thing for it.
Ernestine,
1) Well, it’s not working very well for you.
2) I’ll take that as surrender as you no doubt know very well why the French youths were rioting…..no jobs. They were pretty clear about it.
3) If it rings a bell, why are you asking the question? The recent French unrest is not the first time income inequality brought France to violence.
>If you look at really profitable US businesses they don’t on the face of it appear to be employing a high proportion of people on minimum wage. I’m thinking of companies like Microsoft etc.
Walmart is a famous example of a very successful company which pays the low wages and provides the minimum benefits it legally can.
Whether it is representative of any larger trend is another matter.
Not too long ago, one of the unions was paying people to picket WalMart over the salaries it pays. The picketers were paid LESS than WalMart employees.
Here’s a link to the story. Too funny.
http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/2005/09/08/awsi1.html
With an average rate of pay of $10.17 per hour for Nevada WalMart employees, I wonder how many French “youths” would have accepted such a job rather than burning their neighbors car.
“I’ll take that as surrender as you no doubt know very well why the French youths were rioting…..no jobs. They were pretty clear about it.”
They told you that did they?
Helen, Avaroo,
My first response was: “I’ll pass it back to you and Helen and wait to see what happens.”
My question now is: Do you have data on the time profiles of people on minumum wages in the US?
Regards
Ernestine
They told EVERYONE that, Ian.
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5138990&fsrc=RSS
If even de Villepin can admit, why can’ you?
Ernestine, pass what back?
Why even the BBC admited it, Ian….
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4416454.stm
Ironic that Walmart is lobbying Congress for an increase in the minimum wage.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/25/news/fortune500/walmart_wage/
EXTRACTS:-
Wal-Mart maintains that it pays above the current $5.15 an hour minimum wage to its employees.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott said he’s urging Congress to consider raising the minimum wage so that Wal-Mart customers don’t have to struggle paycheck to paycheck.
Why is that ironic?
Avaroo,
1) Your opinion, which you are entitled to.
2) Are you sure people in France were rioting recently because they could not get a job at zero price (wage) or was it because they could not get a job at a ‘decent wage’?
3) Do you agree that the muslim factor can be taken out of your original question?
Regards
E.G.