Today's Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook has confirmed that real wages will go backwards this financial year, after years of stagnant wage growth under the Morrison Government. As inflation outpaces wage growth, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is delivering Australians a pay cut for Christmas.
Following recent research from the McKell Institute and Parliamentary reports showing the prevalence of wage theft and insecure work in South Australia, today's labour force data and the MYEFO confirm that the Morrison and Marshall Governments are presiding over the most significant degradation in working South Australian’s living standards in generations.
Quotes attributable to SA Unions Secretary Dale Beasley:
“The Morrison and Marshall Governments have no plan to address the epidemic of insecure work, casualisation and sham contracting impacting a third of South Australians and preventing them from planning their futures and living the lives they aspire to. The Morrison and Marshall Governments have done nothing to address wage theft. They’re denying workers public holiday penalty rates on Christmas day, and we now know that workers are also getting a cut to their real wages this Christmas.
“The Morrison and Marshall Government’s resistance to action on these issues, which a senior Federal Government Minister has insultingly called a ‘made up problem’ is galling.
“Ask any casual worker struggling to buy a home or pay their rent whether their problems are ‘made up’ and you’ll quickly find out the real cost of this degradation in working peoples living standards. The Morrison and Marshall Government’s callousness, lack of leadership and action is shameful.
“Their only real plan for wages is to continue ramping up temporary migration, robbing locals of opportunities, suppressing wage growth, and exacerbating the abuse and exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers.
“In an economy like South Australia’s, heavily reliant on small and medium enterprises, our economic fortunes depend on workers having money in their pockets and the confidence to spend. This degradation in working peoples’ living standards is nothing short of economic vandalism on the part of the state and federal governments.”
All Media Enquiries: Dale Beasley – 8279 2222