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Gillard snubs UN on single parent welfare, The Australian (AAP), March 4, 2013 | PM’s pay to crack $500k as part of MP salary rise, Stephanie Peatling, The Sydney Morning Herald, June 13, 2013.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard defended her controversial changes which moved single parents off their pension and on to the unemployment benefit Newstart, but she accepted Newstart was “too low”.

“I am going to stand up for it as a decision of the government I led,” she told journalist Anne Summers in Melbourne on Tuesday night.

It was the second major interview Gillard had done in as many days explaining her prime ministership, its policies, her leadership battles with Kevin Rudd and issues around gender. Summers also interviewed her in Sydney on Monday night. Both sellout audiences were overwhelmingly supportive and mostly women.

~ Julia Gillard defends single parent benefit change, Gabrielle Chan, The Grauniad, October 1, 2013

Sado-workism: the new culture of work in Australia: since the late 1970s, Australia has witnessed the reinvigoration of a type of sadism in the workplace as decision-makers have restructured key socioeconomic and cultural institutions and practices.

There are important moments in history when people say ‘fuck work’ and assert their right to be lazy. The late twentieth [?] century French anarchists understood this well. They were combating the tyrannies of the new factory system and the deification by the church and state of labourers who toiled 15 hours a day for their masters. The growing parliamentary socialist movement also tried to gain respectability by creating an image of the working man as an upright, hardworking family man who obeyed the law and never beat his wife. In response, the anarchist Elisée Reclus proclaimed:

He who commands becomes depraved, he who obeys becomes smaller. Either way, as tyrant or slave, as an officer or as an underling, man is diminished. The morality which is born out of the present conception of the state and social hierarchy is necessarily corrupt. Religions have taught us that the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom, whereas history tells us that it is the beginning of all servitude and all depravity.

Shortly after, the French Socialist Albert Metin visited Australia to observe not anarchism but the new ‘working man’s paradise’. What has changed since Metin’s visit? Certainly not wage slavery. This remains the fate of most Australian employees. However, because of unemployment, today’s anally retentive employers are less likely to hear their workers tell them to ‘stick their job up their …’. Compared with before the 1980s, hours lost to strikes have also plummeted dramatically. For example, in 1994 there were 560 industrial disputes, the lowest number since 1940. A decade later, in 2003, there were 642 disputes; although this was 82 more than in 1994, this was still a very low number compared with the 2000 to 2800 industrial disputes each year between 1969 and 1976. It is not that more strikes are good in themselves; rather, they are a barometer of a whole range of aspects of industrial relations–from how organised workers are to the harmoniousness of workplaces to the general political climate (hostile or sympathetic towards striking). Australians’ working hours per week and hours of unpaid overtime are now among the highest in the OECD. Over a quarter of the workforce works more than fifty hours per week and 64 per cent of employees work either on weekends or at night. Also, according to the Job Futures/Saulwick Employee Sentiment Survey of 2002, 47 per cent of full-time employees work an average of 7.9 hours unpaid each week.

Much more, however, is at stake than mere numbers of hours worked. The workplace of paid employment is the last frontier. Significant numbers of households –though still a minority–have, in recent decades, undergone limited democratisation in terms of the sharing of tasks and decision making. In contrast, the sphere of paid work has gone backwards. It is the citadel of sadomasochism. While gender, race and other cultural signifiers remain important, paid work is perhaps the primary definer of social identity, social power, income and meaning. Everything else in Australian culture–children, art, community and love–is now secondary. For example, a recent report by Ruth Weston and colleagues on fathers, long working hours and family wellbeing found that only 33.2 per cent of the full-time employed fathers worked 35 to 40 hours (‘standard’ hours), while 21.8 per cent worked 41 to 48 hours, 23.6 per cent worked 49 to 59 hours, and 21.4 per cent worked 60 hours or more. Meek policy proposals for ‘family friendly’ workplaces are feeble substitutes for the radical questioning of the role and place of work that was common in earlier years, and is more desperately needed now.

For decades, radical socialists, anarchists and feminists were the principal critics of work in capitalist societies. After all, the sadistic heart of capitalism–money capital–cannot beat without labour power, both past and present. The labour of previous workers is stored in the machinery, buildings, commodities and infrastructure of capitalism which they helped make. Dead labour now dominates living labour as business people increasingly dispense with their workers and turn instead to the gifts of dead labour–technology. What Marx saw happening in the 19th century capitalist use of machinery was elementary compared with recent developments. A truly dramatic phenomenon is currently underway: whenever it is cost-effective and possible (in terms of production and customer relations), businesses are expelling living workers and replacing them with ‘dead labour’ (that is, new technology) or part-time labour. The great transition from labour-intensive workplaces to capital- or technology-intensive enterprises is only in its initial stages.

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