Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Minimum Wage

  • AUSTRALIA

    'Single person household' slight on working poor

    • Brian Lawrence
    • 14 April 2015
    6 Comments

    A fair minimum wage has to be fair to workers with family responsibilities, many of whom are currently working poor and living in poverty. But in its 2014 Annual Wage Review decision, the Fair Work Commission  decided that the 'appropriate reference household for the purposes of setting minimum wages is the single person household'. This was the first time in more than a century of minimum wage setting that an industrial tribunal has decided that minimum wages should exclude the needs of the low paid with families.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    How super hurts the poor and middle income earners

    • Brian Toohey
    • 27 March 2015
    6 Comments

    Although the age pension will cost about $49 billion in 2017-18, it is means tested. In contrast, superannuation concessions are heavily biased in favour of high income earners. Both sides of politics pander to the wealthy and the cosseted finance sector, which want certainty that nothing will stand in the way of their super bonanza.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    What Tony Abbott owes working mothers

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 06 February 2015
    18 Comments

    The rewards of parenthood are immeasurable. But the price that women pay when they become mothers is unjust. This includes lost opportunities, gender wage gaps, and sparse superannuation savings. They really need an efficient and fair maternity leave scheme to support them as they transition from worker to working mother. Tony Abbott's 'signature' policy is now gone, and the 'replacement' families package has a big gap to fill.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Why the excluded are still waiting

    • John Falzon
    • 01 July 2014
    29 Comments

    The Government's McClure interim welfare report is predicated on the big lie that welfare is the problem and the market is the solution. The long wait of the excluded for some of the wealth and resources, for some of the hope to trickle down, is one of the most audacious con jobs in modern history. It is not misfortune. It is not a mistake. It is not the fault of the excluded. It is an attack against ordinary people who are made to bear the burden of inequality.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Letting Australian industry die promotes workplace slavery elsewhere

    • Michael Mullins
    • 26 May 2014
    9 Comments

    The Australian Government needs to be less cavalier and reticent to subsidise local manufacturers, who are obliged to be transparent about their work practices and bear the costs of this. When our politicians praise workplace efficiency in other countries, they are promoting manufacturing processes that often exploit workers.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Whose liberty matters as Dickensian budget looms?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 07 May 2014
    16 Comments

    French economist Thomas Piketty argues that current conditions have set us on track for a return to 19th century-levels of inequality. The Commission of Audit proposals suggest that the auditors and the Government are keen to expedite this neo-Dickensian era. It's all done in the name of 'incentives' toward 'personal responsibility', but this cannot remain coherent in the face of those who will be hit hard by the proposed suite of cuts and co-payments.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Don't rob the poor to pay the rich

    • Bruce Duncan
    • 04 February 2014
    14 Comments

    The budget problems are not caused by Newstart or disability pensions, which have been declining as a proportion of economic activity. Had the Howard Government not been so generous with its tax cuts to upper and middle income groups, there would today be no budget deficit.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    So much for Labor values

    • Brian Toohey
    • 14 October 2013
    9 Comments

    Amid all the post-election talk about Labor values, no one within the party has explained how the appalling behaviour exposed by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption could have occurred if senior figures took any notice of these supposedly cherished values. It is not credible that most NSW state and federal Labor MPs, and key officials, had no inkling of Obeid's behaviour while a backbencher or minister.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The public, the Church, and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Pragmatic answers to the asylum seeker question

    • Frank Brennan
    • 27 June 2013
    10 Comments

    'I want to outline the contours for a better approach — better than forcibly turning around boats, better than transporting people to Nauru and Manus Island or to Malaysia to join an asylum queue of 100,000 or permitting people to reside in the Australian community but without work rights and with inadequate welfare provision.' Frank Brennan speaks at the Australian Catholic University National Asylum Summit 2013.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Wage inequality leaving workers in poverty

    • Brian Lawrence
    • 28 May 2013
    6 Comments

    The rivers of gold into Treasury have dried up and programs that have provided some relief to struggling families are being wound back. Whether or not large cohorts of workers and their families continue to live in poverty depends on the decisions of the Fair Work Commission in the current Annual Wage Review.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Labor goes from Robin Hood to the Sheriff of Nottingham

    • John Falzon
    • 17 May 2013
    9 Comments

    You don't build someone up by putting them down. You don't help someone into employment by pushing them into poverty. By keeping the unemployment benefit low, successive governments have deliberately humiliated people rather than improving their chances.

    READ MORE