2023-09-16 03:45:35
Sometimes an individual makes a statement that sums up the thinking of an entire social class. This is the case of the remarks made Tuesday by the multimillionaire real estate developer Tim Gurner who addressed the Property Summit of theAustralian Financial Review.
In these comments, widely shared and condemned on social media, Gurner identified what he considers to be the essential “problem” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not regarding the fact that 25 million people have died and millions more are suffering from debilitating illnesses. No, Gurner “thinks the problem we’ve had is that people have decided they don’t really want to work anymore because of Covid, and that’s had a massive impact on productivity.”
He talks particularly regarding construction workers, who he faces every day in his $10 billion construction business. Gurner said they “certainly reduced their productivity. In recent years, they have been paid a lot not to do too much, and that needs to change.”
The claim that workers were “paid a lot not to do too much” is an absurd and illusory lie. According to the International Labor Organization, wages worldwide, excluding China, fell by 1.4 percent in 2022 alone, due to a massive rise in the cost of living that has eroded the level of life of workers. As for “not overdoing it”, the COVID-19 pandemic has sounded the death knell for the 40-hour week, 50-hour weeks in the automobile industry and 70-hour weeks in the railways and on docks becoming the norm.
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” Gurner continues. “There has been a systematic change: employees feel that the employer is very lucky to have them, and not the other way around. So it’s a dynamic that needs to change.”
To solve the problem of a working class that refuses to accept its status as wage slaves, Gurner offers a simple solution: “The economy must suffer. This involves “massive layoffs”, which have already started and which will lead to “less arrogance in the job market”. He continues: “We need to see unemployment rise – unemployment needs to jump 40 to 50 percent, in my opinion.”
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Worldwide, 220 million people are unemployed. Gurner wants that number to increase by another 110 million, and with it the immeasurable suffering caused by hunger, malnutrition, drug addiction and broken homes that accompany mass unemployment.
After an angry outburst online, Gurner has since said he “deeply regrets” his comments. This insincere statement may have been motivated by the fact that such display of truth has in the past encouraged the installation of guillotines.
Gurner, whose fortune is estimated at 929 million Australian dollars, or 600 million US dollars, did not speak for himself. In his remarks, delivered with the utmost seriousness, he expressed the feelings of the entire capitalist class, which uses mass unemployment as a bludgeon to ensure that wages continue to fall.
His recommendation to solve the “problem” of working class arrogance through mass unemployment corresponds, if put a little more directly, to the policy of central banks around the world. In August 2022, US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said that the COVID-19 pandemic had created an “unbalanced” labor market and that reducing inflation required “suffering.”
The implementation of this “suffering” is spreading across all sectors and countries. If America’s auto workers want to know what CEOs like Mary Barra and Jim Farley really think, they need only watch the one-minute video of Gurner’s remarks. Auto bosses plan to create mass unemployment by switching to the production of electric vehicles (EVs), which require far less labor. Wages and benefits at electric vehicle battery factories will be cut to the point of being lower than part-time temporary labor at GM, Ford and Stellantis.
Behind the auto bosses are the big banks and the financial oligarchy as a whole, who hold the whip in their hands. They dictate policies in every industry and to their political servants, those of the Biden administration and capitalist governments around the world.
The ruling class’s policy of slashing jobs and living standards and imposing even more brutal conditions of exploitation has broad social and political implications. Such measures cannot be imposed democratically. They require direct intervention by the state to repress or crush the struggles of the working class. The Biden government gave a first glimpse of this with its intervention last December to prohibit a strike by railway workers and impose on them a contract that many had already rejected by vote.
In all countries, capitalist leaders are moving toward mass repression and dictatorship and developing authoritarian and fascist movements to serve as instruments in the attack on democratic rights. In the United States, this phenomenon is embodied by the transformation of the Republican Party under the aegis of Donald Trump. Similar forces are developing in Germany (AfD), in France (Marine Le Pen’s RN), in Italy (the fascist Giorgia Meloni is now Prime Minister) and in many other countries.
Earlier this year, the TV series “Succession” showed a billionaire media family — a fictionalized version of Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News empire — turning to training fascist politicians to impose their class interests. Given Gunder’s comments, it is unclear whether this is a case of art imitating life or the other way around.
As David North, editorial chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, commented on Twitter (X): “If I may paraphrase Trotsky, ‘Not every entrepreneur can be a Hitler, but there is a bit of Hitler in every entrepreneur. Gurner says openly what business leaders say to each other in private. It gives voice to the interests of the ruling class which support fascism and the death camps.”
Tim Gurner did not address the political implications of his declaration of support for class war policies. But workers should make no mistake: behind the scenes, the capitalist class in Australia, America and around the world is preparing dictatorial measures aimed at slashing workers’ jobs, living standards and social rights. . The working class must prepare accordingly.
(Article first published in English on September 14, 2023)
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