Bloody Tradies!
For those looking for an excuse to use “gobsmacked.”
An X-post video clip from Tuesday: Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.”
The current unemployment rate needs to rise by 40 per cent to 50 per cent to boost the Australian economy’s productivity, Tim Gurner has said.
“In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said.
Gurner told the Summit that the cultural shift towards a more pro-employee climate had led to tradies pulling back on productivity.
“When there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude.”
Gurner has received some blowback over his remarks about “tradies.”
“Just a reminder corporate profits and CEO pay are at historic highs,” wrote Greens MP Stephen Bates. “Workers deserve a fairer slice of the pie.” (The Guardian):
The Labor MP Jerome Laxale wrote the comments were what you’d “associate with a cartoon supervillain, not the ceo of a company in 2023”.
“Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels *ever* recorded,” shot back Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
There were blunter responses.
“Couldn’t script a better distillation of why capital hates tight labor markets and full employment. Also lol at ‘Property Summit.'” replied Chris Hayes.
“Wow. Quiet part out loud. Capitalism raw and uncensored?” posted Mehdi Hasan.
Capitalism, my ass. What Gurner and his revanchist cohort represent is a pining for feudalism and an iron hand to keep the “filthy peasants” in line, a longing not unlike that of white supremacists for the good old days of chattel slavery. Like fascism, the latter went into hiding more recently. But like Michael Meyers, all three never fully died out. Like the poor they despise (and like cinematic homicidal maniacs), they are with us always and, like zombies, periodically rise to shamble again.
Gurner might have launched into an anecdote about The Lady of the Lake, “her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite” bestowing on him a sword “from the bosom of the water.”
Our American experiment in government by consent of the governed was frought from the beginning. Our unsteady truce with slavers held barely more than 70 years before erupting into civil war, the bloodiest in U.S. history.
Those who fancy themselves the ruling class know, for the most part, to keep their monarchial impulses to themselves. Instances of candor as blatant as Gurner’s are rare. They’ll otherwise cloak royalist sentiment in meritocratic clothing, in boasts of entrepreneurial genius, and in free-market fundamentalism. Occasionally, they’ll let slip a belief in genetic superiority. People such as Gurner believe themselves not exploiters of workers but “job creators” to whom their lessers owe obeisance.
Recall what venture capitalist Nick Hanauer said at TED about job creators in 2012:
Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being perceived as “job creators” at the center of the economic universe, and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from “job creator” to “The Creator”. We did not accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that calling oneself a “job creator” is both an assertion about how economics works and a claim on status and privileges.
Not just privileges, but a claim to a mandate to rule.
As it happens, I stumbled Tuesday morning across this clip from Ghandi (1982) depicting the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre during the British Raj. The YouTube clips above are satirical. This one is not.
“I was going to give them a lesson,” Gen. Reginald Dyer told the Hunter Commission after his troops fired on unarmed men, women and children. “My idea was that it should make a wide impression throughout the Punjab.”
The lower classes must know their place.