Young people bearing the brunt of a weak economy

Without wanting to be branded a class traitor, I have to admit that we Baby Boomers have enjoyed a rails-run in the race of life.

Most of us had little trouble getting ourselves set up in the jobs market and then the housing market. I look at today’s bright and bushy-tailed youngsters, just starting out in both markets, and don’t envy them one bit (except, of course, their instinctive understanding of the right place to click on a webpage).

(Just to protect my back: those Baby Boomers who were conscripted, or ended up in Vietnam, didn’t have it easy. Nor should those who’ve come after us imagine all Baby Boomers are rolling in it, have never been unemployed, never paid uni fees nor suffered bad luck.)

In the decade since the global financial crisis and the recession we supposedly didn’t have, the supply of people wanting to work has been stronger than employers’ demand for work to be done.

That’s true even though the rate of unemployment never got very high and isn’t all that high today. But a study by Zoya Dhillon and Natasha Cassidy, of the Reserve Bank, confirms what I’ve long suspected: the reason the position overall hasn’t looked so bad is the brunt of the weakness in employers’ demand for labour has been borne by young people leaving school and university.

Whatever you’ve heard in the media, not a lot of workers have been laid off since the shock in September 2008. Employer behaviour has changed, the study confirms. Firms have been less inclined to get rid of people and more inclined to reduce the total amount of hours they’re paying for.

This has become easier for them to do because of their greater ability to employ people on a part-time or casual basis.

On balance, and from an economy-wide perspective, this change of behaviour is an improvement, a shift to a lesser evil. It’s a terrible blow to suddenly lose your job. Better to have some paid work than none.

But the price for this marginal improvement has been paid mainly by the young. Established workers have tended to keep their jobs, but employers haven’t recruited as many people at entry-level. And more of the jobs they’ve offered young people have been part-time.

A new twist on last in, first out.

The result is that education-leavers have had greater trouble – and suffered longer delays – in finding a full-time job suited to their education.

“Over the past decade,” the study says, “increases in the unemployment and underemployment rates for younger people have been twice as large as for the overall labour market. The share of 20 to 24 year-olds that have become disengaged from either study or work has also increased.”

“Younger people” means those aged 15 to 24, though remember that those aged 15 to 19 will mainly be still at school, while many of those aged 20 to 24 will be at university or TAFE.

Some younger people have part-time jobs while still at school, and most higher education students in full-time study also work part-time.

Nothing new or worrying about that. But “in recent years there has been a pronounced increase in the share of 20 to 24 year-olds working part-time who are not studying full-time”.

You’ve heard, no doubt, that while the official unemployment rate has been edging down, the rate of underemployment – people working part-time who want to work more hours – has been edging up (until lately, as we’ll see).

What’s less well known is that underemployment is dominated by younger workers, and it’s they who’ve done most to drive the rate up over recent years. A lot of this would be people finishing uni but having trouble finding a full-time job and taking a part-time job while they keep searching.

In the mid-1990s, about 80 per cent of all bachelor-degree graduates found a full-time job within four months of graduating. By last year, that had fallen to just over 70 per cent – about the same as it got down to during our last severe recession in the early 1990s.

Remember, it’s like a traffic jam. It takes a lot longer than it should, but you do get through eventually.

The most worrying thing is the “NEET rate” – the proportion of younger people who are “not in education, employment or training”. The NEET rate has fallen over the decades as we’ve done better at getting more of our young people into education and training.

But the rate for 20 to 24 year-olds has increased in recent years and is back to where it was in 2005.

The study says prolonged spells of disengagement from the labour market are known to have lasting ill-effects. “Poor labour market outcomes early on not only affect an individual’s future employability, but also have persistent negative effects on lifetime earnings.”

All this says the difficulties younger people are encountering in finding decent full-time jobs are better explained by the economy’s prolonged period of below-par growth since the financial crisis than by the sexier and more frightening explanation that it’s caused by the rise of the “gig economy”.

Which brings me to a little good news. The trend rate of underemployment for all ages has fallen a little to 8.4 per cent over the past year. And the rate of unemployment for younger people has fallen from 12.4 per cent to 11.6 per cent in just the past four months.

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Why so much spending on infrastructure is misspent

It’s the great conundrum of government policy: we have a big shortage of infrastructure, but also waste billions on it.

This seeming contradiction is easily explained: particularly in recent years, and at both state and federal levels, much money is being spent on infrastructure projects.

Trouble is, a lot of the dough’s being spent on flashy or low-priority projects, at the expense of more important but less sexy projects, particularly in the overcrowded outer suburbs.

I suspect we spend more than we should building expressways and too little on public transport – and within the latter, some argue, too much on rail and not enough on busses.

Why? Well, I’m sure it wouldn’t be because the big heavy engineering companies are better at lobbying politicians than public transport providers.

There aren’t many aspects of government spending – many contributors to debt and deficit – more in need of reform than spending on public infrastructure, or with more scope for making a bigger contribution to national productivity and a smaller contribution to budget pressures.

But you’d never know that from the way our politicians, the business lobby and Treasury obsess about tax reform for decade after decade. We’ve had lots of tax reform over the years, but it’s never been enough to satisfy their appetite.

So why is infrastructure spending so rife with wastefulness? Mainly because it’s one of the few areas of policy left where the pollies themselves have much scope for playing Santa Claus in particular states and even particular electorates, at times of their own choosing. Byelections, for instance.

It’s often too tempting for pollies to pick projects according to the votes their announcement is intended to bring, rather than the extent to which the public benefits they bring exceed their costs.

Last week the boss of Infrastructure Australia, Philip Davies, who leaves the job next month, made his last contribution by unveiling a list of 11 principles governments should follow in making decisions about infrastructure, so as to lift the quality of those decisions.

“Businesses and households across the country rightly want to know that governments are investing limited public funds in infrastructure that will bring strong productivity benefits to the economy, support our quality of life, and help to deliver a collective vision of a strong, fair and prosperous Australia for many years to come,” the document states.

It nominates some respects in which governments’ decisions on infrastructure still leave “room for improvement” – to coin a bureaucratic euphemism.

One is that there should be more transparency – that is, information about the stages of the decision process and the public release of analysis – in making decisions about projects.

This includes reviews on the completion of projects, showing the lessons learnt and application to future investments. Everyone agrees they’re a good idea, but such reviews are rarely done and rarely made public.

Taxpayers pay a high price for the political and public service predilection for never admitting anything they’ve done was less than perfect, for fear of what the opposition and the media would say. Much better to always be up-front about failings, so critics stop getting overexcited but lessons are learnt.

Further room for improvement arises because “projects are often developed without fully considering all available options to solve an identified problem, including potential solutions that make better use of existing infrastructure through technology and data”.

Too true. This happens because pollies love announcing that they’re spending big bucks to build something new and wonderful – then come back five years later to cut the ribbon.

They don’t get as much media attention when they merely upgrade existing infrastructure – and none when they spend money every year ensuring existing assets are well maintained.

And they’d get adverse media attention if they did what the bureaucrats were hinting at with their reference to making better use of existing infrastructure “through technology and data” – charging motorists directly for their measured use of roads and the time of day they made that use.

Yet more “room for improvement” arises because “too often, we see projects being committed to before a business case has been prepared, a full set of options have been considered, and rigorous analysis of a potential project’s benefits and costs has been undertaken”.

Why such travesties of good management? Because spending on what we used to call “capital works” is so closely associated with politicians using the first announcement of projects to win votes at elections.

All this expediency and lack of courage is another reason we should be slow to believe politicians promising to fix budget deficits (or pay for tax cuts) by cutting government spending.

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Economy’s health requires reform of earlier wage reforms

Can you believe that many economists were disappointed by this week’s news from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that consumer prices rose by only 2.1 per cent over the year to June?

Why would anyone wish inflation was higher than it is? Well, not because there’s anything intrinsically terrific about fast-rising prices, but because of what a slow rate of increase tells us about the state of the economy.

It’s usually a symptom of weak growth in economic activity and, in particular, of weak growth in wages. Prices and wages have a chicken-and-egg relationship. By far the most important factor that pushes up prices is rising wages.

But, as measured by the bureau’s wage price index, wages rose by just 2.1 per cent over the year to March, roughly keeping up with prices, but not getting ahead of them.

We’re used to wages growing each year by 1 per cent-plus faster than prices, but such “real” growth hasn’t happened for the past four years or so (which probably explains why so many people are complaining about the high “cost of living” even when price rises are so small).

It’s important to understand that wages can grow faster than prices without that causing higher inflation, provided there is sufficient improvement in workers’ productivity – output per hour worked – to cover the real increase.

Of late we’ve had that productivity improvement, but all the benefit of it has stayed with business profits, rather than being shared between capital and labour by means of increases in real wages.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until it’s no longer relevant: the economy won’t be back to healthy growth until we’re back to healthy growth in real wages. That’s for two reasons.

First, in a capitalist economy like ours, the “social contract” between the capitalists and the rest of us says that the people without much capital get their reward mainly via higher real wages leading to higher living standards.

Second, consumer spending accounts for more than half the demand for goods and services in the economy; consumer spending is done from households’ income, and by far the greatest source of household income is wages.

So, as a general proposition, if wages aren’t growing in real terms, there won’t be much real growth in household income and, in that case, there won’t be much real growth in consumer spending. And the less enthusiastic we are about buying their stuff, the less keen businesses will be to invest in expansion.

Get it? Of all the drivers of economic growth, by far the most important is real wage growth. If your economy’s real wage growth’s on the blink, you’ve got a problem. You won’t get far.

Economists used to believe that real wage growth in line with trend improvement in the productivity of labour was built into the equilibrating mechanism of a capitalist economy. A chap called Alfred Marshall first came up with that idea.

But with each further quarter of weak price and wage increase it’s becoming clearer it was a product of industrial relations laws that boosted workers’ economic power by helping them form unions and bargain collectively with employers.

As has happened in most rich countries, our governments, Labor and Coalition, have been “reforming” our wage-fixing process since the early 1990s by reducing union rights and encouraging workers to bargain as individuals rather than groups.

Trouble is, governments have been weakening legislative support for workers and their unions at just the time that powerful natural economic forces – globalisation and greater trade between rich and poor countries, “skill-biased” technological change, the shift from manufacturing to services – have been weakening the bargaining power of labour.

Whoops. In hindsight, maybe not such a smart “reform”. My guess is it won’t be long before governments decide they need to promote real wage growth by restoring legislative support for unions and collective bargaining.

But how could they go about this? Well, Joe Isaac, a distinguished professor of labour economics at Monash and Melbourne universities and a former deputy president of the Industrial Relations Commission, outlines a plan in the latest issue of the Australian Economic Review.

Isaac proposes four main reforms of the reforms. First, the Fair Work Act should be less prescriptive, giving the Fair Work Commission greater discretion to intervene in industrial disputes, to conciliate and, if necessary, impose an arbitrated resolution on both sides.

Second, the present restrictions on unions’ right to enter workplaces should be eased to allow them to check the payments made to union and non-union employees, as well as to recruit members.

The widespread allegations of illegal underpayment of wages suggest “a serious lack of inspection of pay records” – formerly a task in which unions had a major role. “These breaches in award conditions cannot be discounted as a factor in the slow wages growth,” Isaac says.

Third, legislation against “sham contracting” – employers reducing their workers’ entitlements by pretending those employees are independent contractors – should be tightened.

Fourth, the present procedures and delays before workers are allowed to strike while negotiating new wage agreements should be reduced.

As well, bargaining and striking over multiple-employer or industry-wide agreements should be permitted. As economists long ago established, real wage rises should reflect the economy-wide rate of productivity improvement, not the experience of particular firms.

Industry-wide and multiple-employer agreements allow unions to support people working in small and medium businesses, not just those in big businesses and government departments.

Such bargains are known as “pattern bargaining” and are illegal at present. It’s true that pattern bargaining was pressed and extended to other industries unjustifiably in years past, but the commission should have the power to prevent pattern bargaining where it’s not justified.

Now, many employers may view Isaac’s proposed “reregulation” of wage fixing with alarm. What’s to stop the return of unreasonable union behaviour and excessive wage rises?

Ah, that’s just the point. What will prevent it is all those other developments that have weakened workers’ bargaining power.

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Decades of economic success have come at high social cost

I’m thinking of starting a new social movement. Still working on the details, but I’ve already decided we’ll have lapel buttons, bumper stickers and, of course, a hashtag, all that say #letscalmdown.

I know I’m supposed to be banging on about the urgent need for economic reform but, although as a nation we’re better off materially than ever before, I doubt we’re the happiest, most contented or most fulfilled we’ve ever been.

Even if it’s true we all want to be richer (which I doubt), why do we have to be in such a tearing hurry about it?

While I was calming down on holidays a few weeks back, I read social researcher Hugh Mackay’s latest book, Australia Reimagined, and it occurred to me that we seem to be paying quite a price for our economic success.

Mackay says that two seminal facts about Australia suggest we are in urgent need of some course correction.

First, thanks to our rate of relationship breakdown, our shrinking households, our busy lives, our increasing income inequality and our ever-increasing reliance on information technology (and, he could have added, our greater division between public and private schooling), we are a more fragmented society than we have ever been.

Social fragmentation is the opposite of social cohesion. Our fragmentation has been exacerbated by rampant individualism and competitive materialism, whereas social cohesion is grounded in compassion and mutual respect and is the key to true greatness for any society.

“In countries like Australia, we are at more risk of antisocial behaviour from people who are socially isolated and mentally ill than we are from ideologically based acts of terrorism," he says.

Second, we are in the grip of what he insists is “an epidemic of anxiety”. “Two million of us suffer an anxiety disorder in any one year and the closely related epidemics of depression and obesity swell that number even more."

Up to a third of us will experience mental health problems in our lifetime, 20 per cent of young Australians will have had at least one episode of clinical depression before the age of 25 and two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.

These two facts are so closely linked, Mackay says, we should think of them as two sides of the same coin. “Heads we’re more fragmented; tails we’re more anxious.”

The link is that, because we’re herd animals by nature, we become anxious when we’re cut off from the herd and our anxiety, in turn, induces the kind of self-absorption that further inhibits social interaction, creating a vicious circle.

Many of us have retreated into self-absorption – a heightened sense of personal entitlement and an exaggerated concern with personal comfort and personal appearance – as part of our disengagement from political and social issues and desire to escape into our own comfort zone, both physical and digital. The echo chamber effect of social media is part of this escape.

Mackay admits there’s nothing new about people feeling anxious, but argues there’s a lot more of it today because we’ve been neglecting the four strategies we've long used to minimise it: the magical power of faith, the secret power of community, the restorative power of nature and the therapeutic power of creative self-expression.

Let’s look at faith and community. Research by the leading American psychologist Martin Seligman led him to conclude that faith in something larger than the self is the one absolutely essential prerequisite for a sense of meaning in life. And the larger the entity, the more meaning people derive from it.

For most of human history – and for most people living on the planet today – the God of religion has supplied that something greater. But in our ungodly era, “the vacuum created by the absence of religion must be filled by something else”, Mackay says. He’s right. Our psychological makeup demands it.

Most of the research showing the health benefits of religious faith and practice is actually identifying two influential factors: not just the faith, but also the “fellowship”. Church or mosque goers are members of a community of like-minded people who, at their best, are characterised by mutual support, kindness and respect.

The less obvious benefit of social engagement is that “belonging to a community keeps us in touch with people who might need us, and nothing relieves anxiety like a focus on someone else’s needs”. It is “the exercise of compassion – not merely the experience of belonging – that is the great antidote to anxiety”.

Don’t have enough time to do all that, you say? Don’t want to turn your life upside down? Mackay says we’re not going to turn the clock back, not going to junk the technology, not going to stop enjoying the fleeting pleasures of consumerism and not going to give up pursuit of material prosperity for a life of poverty in a monastic cell.

“But is easing back a possibility? Rethinking our priorities, slowing down, disconnecting from technology sometimes (such as when we’re eating a meal in the company of family or friends, or heading for bed), noticing what is happening to our children as a result of the toxic blend of their excessive screen time and our excessive busyness ... in other words, being a little more observant, a little more moderate, a little more restrained, a little better prepared for the future”, Mackay suggests.

Sounds good to me.

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Budget office fills vacuum left by politicised Treasury

I see the federal Auditor-General has been less than complimentary about the Turnbull government’s cashless welfare card. The cheek! I say the man should be removed and replaced by a Liberal Party staffer forthwith.

Always provided the staffer has done at least a year or two of accounting at uni, of course. Wouldn’t do for voters to gain the impression his chief qualifications were his years of loyal service as a ministerial flunky.

If this ironic scenario seems over the top, it’s not way over. If the present Auditor-General actually had incurred the government’s serious displeasure, it would be more likely to wait until his statutory term had expired before replacing him with someone less likely to provide it – and us – with critical advice.

You don’t have to be very long in the workforce to realise that one of the hallmarks of a bad manager is his (or occasionally her) penchant for surrounding themselves with yes-men. See that happening and you know you’re in the presence of a disaster waiting to happen.

But installing a tame auditor-general wouldn’t be a big step beyond the flouting of convention and good governance we’ve seen the government engaged in over the past two weeks.

Following Tony Abbott’s unprecedented dismissal of the secretary to the Treasury in 2013, and his replacement with hand-picked candidate John Fraser, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison have now completed the politicisation of Treasury.

What an accomplishment for Malcolm to include when he boasts in his memoirs about the glorious achievements of his reign.

With the sudden resignation of Fraser, he was replaced by Philip Gaetjens, whose service as chief-of-staff to Peter Costello and then Morrison himself was interspersed with his time as secretary of the NSW Treasury, appointed by the O’Farrell government after it sacked the apolitical secretary it inherited from the Keneally government, Michael Schur.

The timing of Fraser’s departure was portrayed as all his own inconvenient idea, which may well be true. But, with the federal election so close, it reminds me of a trick practised by the self-perpetuating boards of the mutual insurance companies of old.

Any director not wishing to serve another term would resign just a few months before his term expired. This would allow the board to select his successor, and that successor’s name to go onto the ballot paper with an asterisk beside it, certifying to the voting punters that he was a tried-and-true incumbent.

Morrison then topped off this innovation in Jobs for the Boys by installing Simon Atkinson, a former chief-of-staff to Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, as a deputy secretary in Treasury.

Worse, Atkinson got the job to replace Michael Brennan, who’s been moved up to be the new chairman of the Productivity Commission, which has had a long and proud tradition of independence, giving fearless advice to governments of both colours.

We’ll see how long that lasts. Morrison tacitly admitted Brennan’s appointment was questionable by using his press release to make Brennan sound like a career public servant, conspicuously failing to mention he’d been a staffer for two Howard government ministers and a Liberal Victorian treasurer, not to mention a candidate for Liberal state preselection.

My greatest fear is that the next Labor federal government will use this bad precedent to behave the same way, thus making the politicisation of government departments and supposedly independent agencies bipartisan policy. What a great step forward that would be.

Fortunately, as trust in the professional integrity of Treasury forecasts and assessments declines, the vacuum is being filled by the rise of the Parliamentary Budget Office, which has the same expertise as Treasury, Finance and the spending departments, but is independent of the elected government.

Just last week it produced a most revealing report on the sustainability of federal taxes, one Treasury would have had trouble getting published even in the good old days.

Its message is that there are structural vulnerabilities limiting the future revenue-raising potential of most federal taxes, with the main exception being income tax and that eternal standby of dissembling politicians on both sides, the supposed evil they only pretend to disapprove of: bracket creep.

This is the last thing either side would want us thinking about before the election.

After all, thanks to the budget’s chronically overoptimistic forecasts and what-could-possibly-go-wrong 10-year projections of endless budget surpluses and ever-falling public debt, they can afford to turn the coming election into a tax-cut bidding war.

Vote for me and I’ll cut taxes more than the other guy.

The budget office has punctured that happy fantasy. After the election, whomever we vote for will have to find a way to cover not just the cost of ever-growing but untouchable spending on health, education and all the rest, but also the tax system’s built-in inadequacies.

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