Max Bound
The current economic and ecological crises we are in underlines the need for new approaches and new priorities in economic policy making. As large company/corporation control over the economy has increased technological innovation has been harnessed to boost short term profitability at the expense of people and our physical environment. The gap between rich and poor has grown, jobs have disappeared and the rich are taking even more. There can be another way to utilise new technologies.
In an ideal world socially and ecologically appropriate new technologies would make it possible to shorten hours of work and increase leisure time, and to also include personal learning and personal development time for workers. Equity and ecological and social sustainability are vital issues in planning future uses of technological innovation and development.
A quick look at some Tasmanian history suggests that current economic problems are about more than the money market.
Industrial Development Takes Off— Then came new technologies and job losses
The Tasmanian Year Book of 1967 has a table on page 292 it reveals that Tasmania’s factory workforce changed little from 1911, when it was 10,298, to 1934-35 when it was 10,555 and that by 1939-40 it had increased to 14,670 and by 1964- 65 it had grown to 32,580 persons. The 1966 census registered the manufacturing work force in Tasmania as being 33,959. The 1981 census revealed this was down to 26,124 and falling. In the 2006 census the comparative figure was 21,729. These falls in employment were largely the result of the introduction of new technology in ‘good economic times’. (The 2006 figure does not reveal what is happening in the current late 2008-2009 economic climate.)
To illustrate further the long term trend, in an article on “Employment and Unemployment” published in the Labor Party Journal “Labor Forum” No 4 December 1983 I wrote. “APPM, a Victorian-based company with the larger part of its productive activities in Tasmania, increased its production by more than 40%, and reduced its workforce by 16.6 %in the 1970’s up to 1981. Since then, about as many workers again have been retrenched by APPM.” Now, nearly a decade into the 21st century there is serious speculation that the Burnie operation will close and the few hundred jobs left at Burnie and 50 or 60 K’s away at the Wesley Vale mill will all be lost.
In the same article I had quoted from the Tasmanian Parliamentary Select Committee on Employment in 1983 (the Petrusma report) it said “ New technology has had a net reduction effect on labour requirements in many industries, particularly in the lower skill levels of the labour force.” A specific example was given by the Edgell Company’s then manager. “In 1965-66 the company’s Devonport plant produced 400,000 kilograms of canned and frozen peas. In that season to harvest and vine a paddock required 54 workers, the same task today, using mobile viners, require 4 workers.”
A more graphic example is the company’s factory workforce: “In 1965-66 the factory employed about 800 persons to process 400,000kg of peas. In 1982-83, 300 people process 20 million kg of green peas.”Edgells then manager at Devonport, Mr. M. N. F. Gray in his evidence to the Petrusma Report discussing the experience of “labour being replaced by mechanisation” as in these examples commented “Any company which does not comply with this trend faces cost structures which would make it uncompetitive.” The Petrusma Report also indicated the dramatic effect computers had in reducing the workforce in printing processes.
The Tasmanian Pocket Year Book 1965 showed employment in textiles as being 3,426 people in 1963-64. The 1978 Pocket Year Book shows a figure of 2554 employed in textiles in 1975-76. Large textile mills were ‘down-sizing’ and closing in Launceston as manufacture moved off shore. The 2006 Census shows employment in Textiles as being down to 691. All figures above exlude employment in clothing and footwear.
Resource use per job/strong>
Another important aspect of capitalist development is how, in the era of technological change, the quantity of finite, even scarce, resources used up to provide one job accelerates. To come back to the Tasmanian experience. In my graduate diploma in Urban Planning thesis (1979) I examined this aspect among others. I found that in forest based industries the advent of export of woodchips plus technological changes had meant that 5 years into wood chip export the amount of timber resource used up to provide one job had doubled. The figures on logs used up to provide one job were 172.5 cubic metres in 1971 to 351.3 cubic metres in 1976. More recent observations indicate this trend is continuing as labour saving technologies continue to be harnessed to the end of more profit less jobs.
Capitalism’s Inner Dynamic
Regardless of its various stages in its development capitalism consistently retains as its inner dynamic a necessity for growth, private profit and accumulation of capital by a few at the expense of the many and of the physical environment. Some see these inbuilt problems of capitalism as having positive aspects. For example in his “Beyond Right and Left” David McKnight argued “Although I am critical of extreme neo-liberalism, it serves no useful purpose to ignore the usefulness and dynamism of economic markets in many circumstances. (Mc Knight David 2005 Page 238
Even if we left aside the issues of equity and human decency, including the right that people should have to control their own lives in a cooperating society, there are very real problems. The dynamism, or greed, that drives capitalism and capital accumulation by a few works in direct contradiction to the ecological sustainability essential to the very possibility of a decent future for the human species. As J. K. Galbraith remarks “As earlier indicated, environmental concerns, both those which are contemporary and those affecting future generations, especially the latter, are inherently in conflict with the motivating force of the market economy…” (Galbraith J. K.”The Good Society” 1996 p84 )
A considerable number of people are currently recognising and seeking to change our present destructive course by opposing the current Rudd package which rewards private corporations for continuing to pollute our atmosphere.
At the international level China is now threatening to challenge the USA as the world’s major polluter. However should, for example, China even get close to Australia’s per capita rate of greenhouse Gas production the effects would be horrifying. Meantime if we are to cease to be one of the World’s worst per-capita polluters, we in Australia need to recognise the need to change our present economy from one based heavily on creating Green House Gas to an example of social and ecological responsibility based on minimal green house emissions. A big ask requiring intelligent forward looking thinking and decisive actions by governments, Industry and people.
Corporations do have political power
Rudd’s abject failure to act against greenhouse gas producers, as yet recognised by only a politically active minority, is not only due to doubts and ignorance about the seriousness of the impending consequences of climate change. There is very direct pressure from the coal lobby and their counterparts in the media and public bureaucracy and reported threats to use massive financial and other resources to campaign against the Labor Party in key electorates are real factors. This is an example of the sort of exercise of political power that most prominent and respected English speaking economist and social commentator of the 20th century, J.K. Galbraith, warned of over three decades ago.
Galbraith wrote“Were it part of our every day education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist. It is especially useful that the young be so instructed. By pretending that power is not present, we greatly reduce the need to worry about its exercise. But not completely, for we do not eliminate entirely the associated unease. We sense that our lives are shaped and that government is guided by the modern corporation. The myth disguises but it does not reassure.” (Galbraith J.K. “The Age of Uncertainty“1977 also see further p p 257-59)
In the above Galbraith’s expresses, even more clearly than in his Dec. 29th 1972 Presidential address to the American Economic Association, concerns about how damaging to society the teaching of economics as if the corporations were not a powerful political and social force is.
An aspect of the effect of this misconstruction of economic reality that is now, with but few exceptions, the common practice in the teaching of economics is to be seen in the Rudd essays. For example the ideal Rudd advocates in his February 2009 essay is –“… a system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate.” This sounds, to the uninitiated, almost reasonable and workable.
However most including all key markets are not free but are, along with our major political parties, either controlled or decisively influenced by powerful privately owned corporations. In reality, for the most part, control over economic development decisions, the mass media, much of social life and popular culture does not rest with elected Governments responding to people’s wishes –but is in the greedy hands of CEOs and directors of powerful corporations. Corporation grants to cultural and other events and projects whilst understandable welcomed by some artists are, in reality, a skilful exercise of political cultural power by corporation chiefs using money and buying influence they should never have in a truly democratic society.
Climate change has created a new political ball game
The recognition that climate change is being driven by human activities and that the choices we now have if our species is to survive have created a new political ball game. The March 9th 2009 “Four Corners” Program on Climate Change, despite its quite obvious weaknesses, provided plenty of evidence that in the greed dominated minds of the corporation spokespersons their power and bottom line is far more important than is the human future. That these self centred and intellectually limited corporation leaders and spokes persons still call the tune is tragically made evident in the Liberal Party’s strange antics and in Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CRPS) with its encouragement to corporations to continue their polluting activities.
The issue of what changes can be made can only be resolved to the degree there are plausible, and beneficial alternative approaches developed. Such alternative approaches need to be made real issues in public debate and actually implemented by governments and people. Analysis and exposure of the weaknesses of and problems with current practice of course remain part of the process but if the process stops there we are lost. The issue is how can we turn the tide now that the neo-liberal chickens of capitalist development have come home to roost and we are in a series of economic, social and ecological crises?
Instead of trying to prop up the power of the corporations with public money and resources the complex and difficult processes of dismantling that power needs to become a priority for governments. Using public money and resources to subsidise polluting activities as our own and many other governments are currently doing is a wrong direction. Radical alternatives are necessary to enable human survival. These alternatives need to include starting to build an economy capable of providing both decent and equitable social outcomes and ecological sustainability. It can be done but attitudes and expectations have to change and the power over governments currently exercised by large companies and corporations has to be eroded and eventually ended.
