Restoring Real Wages and Full Employment - ACTU submission on the Employment White Paper

The Curtin Labor Government’s Full Employment White Paper was the culmination of a century of struggle by unions to establish the right to jobs, “arguably the Australian union movement’s greatest strategic achievement of the 20th century” alongside the establishment of the minimum wage with the 1907 Harvester decision, following successful campaigns for the right to collectively bargain and the ei. [...] 3 Putting the "Full" Back into the Full Employment White Paper The White Paper must make true full employment an explicit macroeconomic goal in the form of zero involuntary unemployment, rather than the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), as the ACTU has argued in our submission to the independent review of the Reserve Bank and the first paper in our series on the September Jo. [...] The Committee, comprised of the Treasurer, the Minister for Finance and their departmental secretaries, the RBA Governor and Deputy Governor, and the Chair of APRA, could meet monthly to discuss and coordinate fiscal, monetary and macroprudential policy towards the shared goals of full employment, low inflation and financial stability. [...] Firstly, there is the historic undervaluation of work done in female-dominated industries and occupations due to gendered and discriminatory assumptions about the skill level and value of work, and the persistently high levels of occupational and industry segregation along gender lines. [...] Reforms considered in the Paper should include: • An increase to for JobSeeker and other supports to at least $70 a day, the introduction of a minimum floor for payments and the indexation of payments to the greater index of prices or wages.