BY BRONWYN JENNINGS & TRISHA REIMERS
The collapse of insurance giant HIH, the relocation of an Arnotts factory from Melbourne to Brisbane, and rumours of plans by retail company Target to relocate its head office from Geelong to Melbourne have sparked community outrage and demands for job security. But the demands have most commonly focused on calls for greater protection for Australian companies.
Such protectionist measures include government subsidies to ailing businesses, tariffs on imports, quotas on particular goods and services and "buy Australian" campaigns. Such calls have not only come from businesses, but even from Â鶹´«Ã½ of the union movement, which believe that such protection will save members' jobs and livelihoods.
Subsidies can come in many forms — from straight-out handouts, to "research" grants, to tax breaks.
While they might seem to guarantee job security, such measures rely on faith in government and big business to do the right thing by workers. Inevitably, though, such measures do little to save jobs and only line the pockets of the capitalists.
There are numerous examples of businesses receiving government subsidies to keep their operations open, and then shutting down anyway.
In 1984, BHP received millions of dollars in direct handouts from the federal government to keep its Newcastle steelworks open. Within 15 years, the plant had been closed anyway, and tens of thousands of jobs were lost as a direct result — not because the mill was making a loss but because it wasn't making enough of a profit.
Tariffs, which are taxes on imports, don't save jobs either — rather they are simply another, if hidden, tax on workers. Imposing tariffs increases the price of imported goods, as opposed to those made in Australia, and forces consumers to pay higher prices.
Tariffs are merely another type of subsidy to big business — specifically those Australian businesses which don't rely on foreign imports. For example, protection of the steel industry was profitable for BHP, but raised costs for car manufacturers, which used steel as an input.
The debate about protectionism has re-emerged in recent years, thanks to the rise of an international movement against "free trade", the untrammelled power of corporations to buy, sell, import, export as they like, without restriction.
Some, especially in union circles, have argued that tariffs and protectionist measures can now not only protect Australian jobs but also support workers' rights and environmental sustainability in the Third World.
They call for the incorporation of measores into World Trade Organisation agreements which would raise tariffs for countries which do not comply with specified labour or environmental standards.
But punishing the people of a country for abuses committed by its government does nothing to increase the organisation of the oppressed workers of that country, which is surely the long-term solution to lack of labour rights or environmental protections.
Tariffs will only ever benefit corporations and disadvantage workers in the Third World. Further barriers to Third World goods will in turn shrink the market for those goods and cost jobs, rather than hurting the capitalists at whom the measures are targeted.
Again, calls for such protectionist measures rests on faith in Western governments to implement them "properly". But history shows that imperialist countries such as the US, Britain and Australia manipulate public sentiment to justify particular political and economic trade decisions.
At the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting, calls from the United Steelworkers to stop Chinese steel being dumped on US markets gave US President Bill Clinton a further excuse to force unequal trade positions onto China, including an end to the Chinese state monopoly on soy oil, and eliminating barriers to the free flow of US goods into China.
What union support for protectionism does is prevent the organisation of a broad-based, political campaign for higher wages, better conditions, and increased job security through public control of assets, and directs workers' anger at the wrong targets: "foreign" bosses, rather than capitalism as a whole.
While in mainstream economics, the choice of policy is presented as either/or — either protectionism or free trade — there is in fact another alternative, a real solution.
That alternative is to recognise that the cause of job loss, poverty and insecurity is not the specific economic policy, but the economic system itself, and to advance instead the goal of fundamentally reorganising society and economy.
Under capitalism, the main factor in whether or not bosses maintain jobs is whether or not they are making adequate profits. So long as that is the motive force of the system, there can be no such thing as lasting, permanent job security or an end to unemployment.
The starting point of the alternative is a policy of nationalisation, bringing companies under public control, so that the private profit motive need no longer apply.
Instead of nationalising corporate debt through government subsidies to business, while profits remain private, these companies should be placed under public control for public benefit.
When faced with factory closures or relocations, it is counterproductive for workers to argue for subsidies to the owners of that factory. Instead, unionists should argue for nationalisation of that factory.
Nationalisation must go hand in hand with a radical democratisation of the public sector. It's no good for a company to be nationalised if it's just run like any other business by the government, like Telstra was before it was (part-) privatised.
Rather, these companies need to be nationalised under workers' control. The workforce and the local community should have the final say in how the company is run.
After all, workers do collectively have the knowledge and capacity to run the production process: they run it every day. And they would be much more sympathetic to the ideals of job security, full employment, environmental sustainability and community consultation than any capitalist would ever be.
But this itself is only a beginning. What's needed is a full-scale reorganisation that changes the driving motive of society from private profit to public need, that puts ordinary people in control of society and the economy and that is organised along truly democratic lines: a socialist reorganisation on a local, national and global scale. That will ensure that jobs, income, security and happiness are not dependent on a boss's whim.