Property developer and CEO Tim Gurner: “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”

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14 points

No, that’s completely wrong.

He said it should go UP by 40-50% ie about 6% - which is still low by Australian standards.

Unemployment averaged 8% in the 1980s and 10% in the 1990s.

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42 points

Okay but increasing unemployment is meant to do exactly what this petty oligarch wants: discipline labor, preventing workers (that’s us) from eking out a little more from a very lopsided economic system.

Marx referred to the unemployed aa the reserve army of labor for capital. The bourgeois use it to say: “Want safer conditions? Enough money to pay rent and go to the doctor? Tough shit, there are hundreds of people I can call on to take your job.”

The unemployment rate is carefully curated by the capitalist class to prevent low rates and their worst nightmare, full employment.

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2 points

If unemployment rate is the key, why not create so many worker cooperatives that everybody can have a job?

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24 points
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A worker cooperative is just another business, albeit one where ownership is distributed among the workers. It still functions within the capitalist system and must follow its dictates. They start with capital, employ wage laborers, and must create profit to survive.

I mention this because really your question might as well be, “well why don’t people just start more businesses to make more people employed?” The answer applies to co-ops as well: because unemployment is controlled by making it more costly to do business, forcing a need to cut costs (usually starting with labor) and often simply failed businesses. Co-ops are not free from this, they need capital to survive just like a capitalist-owned business.

The only way to free ourselves from this system is to expropriate control of the businesses and put it into workers’ hands, which necessarily happens under the same conditions under which we could eliminate artificial unemployment (control of the state).

Put another way, we need to control the means of production, not be minor players still at the whims of capital.

Edit: I should probably mention that there’s more to it than this but it requires getting into the weeds of Marxist theory.

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7 points

You got the money for that? They tried it back in thr 70s. The banks froze them out and bought their assets on the cheap after the sabotaging

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6 points

I’d rather people not suffer personally.

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1 point

1/20 people who “want” to work not being able to work is insane. 1/10 is even worse.

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