Us vs. Them
Afternoon Comrades.
It’s reactionary time, albeit with a bigger picture attached to it. Most of you will not have missed a viral speech on the usual socials this morning buy Australian property developer in which he casually and confidently says their usual quiet part out loud.
Tim Gurner are going viral on social media right now for the unusual frankness with which he discusses the inherent conflicts of interest between the working class and employers, saying workers who’ve grown lazy and arrogant during Covid need to experience economic pain in the form of unemployment to rein them in and put them in their place.
Gurner, who with a net worth of $912 million is ranked by the Australian Financial Review as the 154th richest person in Australia, made the remarks at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit on Tuesday.
“You know, tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity,” Gurner said. “They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years. And we need to see that change. I think the problem that we’ve had is that we have people who decided they didn’t really want to work so much anymore through Covid.”
It gets even “worse” throughout that speech when he says:
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50 percent. In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. I mean, there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around.
“So it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy which is what the whole global world is trying to do. The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality, and we’re seeing it. I think every employer now is seeing it.
A few points about the above before I get into the solutions to this, outside of finding large enough walls to line these bastards up to. These statements are not an exception, they are at the core the absolute basis of the economic relations imposed on us by them. Capitalism is based on exploitation and violence to maintain this exploitation. This ideology transfers from the 1% down to your shift manager, it is inherent in our relationships and utterly immoral, unethical and more importantly, man-made and thus subject to change. Additionally, as I have seen this nonsense being uttered over and over again, this is not “unfettered” capitalism ( or whatever word you would like to inject here to explain that a good version of capitalism may exist at the end of the rainbow ) - this is just capitalism, at its core and the above person felt comfortable enough to say so.
Time to change that.
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