John Falzon | Corporate greed has created a cost-of-profits crisis

Now, though, it is increasingly being called out for what it really is, a cost-of-profits crisis.

As a society, we are paying the unacceptably high price of allowing free reign to those companies that raked in the pandemic profits and now continue to rake in the profits made possible by increased global demand for energy resources.

Here's a little Christmas wish then.

It's time we threw off the misleading notion markets find a "natural" equilibrium between wages, prices and profits while governments should only passively look on.

It's time we reconsidered the acceptability of obscene profits being untouchable while wages, income support payments and social spending are treated as if they are barely movable.

We are paying the price of the cost-of-profits crisis literally, with inflated prices for essential goods such as gas and electricity, and the goods and services that are in turn affected by these price (read "profit") increases. Which is why the federal government's recent energy intervention is a welcome first step.

Woodside chief executive Meg O'Neill reacted to this with the assertion "the market is working." It is working well for profiteers. But not for the rest of us.

We are paying the price of the cost-of-profits crisis through lower wages in real terms. This has been systematically achieved via: repression of unions; restriction of collective bargaining; significant impairment of the right to withdraw labour; public sector pay caps, casualisation; precarisation; sham contracting; and plain old wage theft.

Why was it so desperately necessary for capital to suppress wages? Was it because productivity had lagged behind wages growth? No; quite the opposite, the latest paper from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows.

Was it because the lazy way to increase profits is to force workers to sell their labour power for increasingly lower rates? Bingo! As the Senate Report on the Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill observed, taking one example:

"Qantas' assertion that it cannot afford to fairly bargain with its splintered workforce should be viewed in the context of its estimated $1.2 billion half-yearly profit, its recently announced $400 million share buyback, and its recently announced $4 million annual bonus for its chief executive officer, Mr Alan Joyce, which suggests Qantas may have the financial capacity to end its deliberate wage-suppression tactics."

We are also paying the price of the cost-of-profits crisis through a revenue base that is insufficient to meet the needs of the people.

Currently the starter question for the debate goes something like this: "How can we afford to increase JobSeeker when we have to pay for the NDIS and aged care?"

The question we really should be debating would sound something like: "How can we justify allowing these hyper-profits to be made and kept in the hands of very few, when the cost of this practice is being borne by the people who are denied the essentials of life: a place to live (completely denied to over 116,000 people and tenuous for the more than 640,000 households in housing stress); a place to work with good pay and safe, secure and respectful conditions (and dignity and income adequacy for people not in paid work or not in enough paid work); a place to learn; and a place to heal?

And finally, how can we not acknowledge we are paying the deadliest price of the cost-of-profits crisis through the global inertia on action to address the climate emergency?

Right now, working people are suffering enormously.

The passage of the Secure Jobs Better Pay bill is an important step in moving wages in the right direction. Similarly, the government's establishment of an Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, as proposed by Senator David Pocock, signals that below-poverty-level income support payments will also begin to move.

But there is much else to be done in these spaces. There is an urgent need to address insecure work and to regulate the gig economy, end rorting of labour hire and casual employment and end systematic wage theft. We need to prioritise a full employment framework with a social guarantee, protecting each of us from the precarity that has been engineered through the neoliberal agenda. We should be unafraid of thinking creatively about price control, progressive tax reform and public ownership and democratic control of key areas of the economy such as energy.

Working people are suffering while big business handsomely prospers.

It's time to make things fairer for workers, including those who are not currently in paid work.

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For some of us, the Christmas holiday season is a time of loneliness, an elevation of a sense of expendability and exclusion. It is also a time of great pain for those who have recently lost loved ones or who cannot be with them. It is a time when many parents feel utterly crushed because they cannot afford to buy something small for their kids, a time when some of these families are facing imminent homelessness.

The Christmas story is a kind of parable on the power that is born on the margins, a whisper from the edge that another kind of world is possible. This is really how all progressive social change happens. It is driven, always collectively, by those who urgently need the change and those who join them in yearning for it.

But to make that different world - that fairer society, possible - we need not a miracle from on high but the hard work of hope, collectively, from below.