Manufacturing Industry in Australia and Fair Trade
The question that is being studied here is of unemployment, and this is clearly not being lost because of imports. The calculations have been made by the Australian Center for Industrial Relations Research and Teaching, and they say facts about the net changes in the rate of employment between 1988 and 1998 in a number of industrial sectors. It can be seen that there is a clear decline in employment in eight sectors of industry during this decade. There was a net loss of about 250,000 jobs and more than sixty percent of the loss was in areas where there was no competition. This concerned employers like Commonwealth Bank, SECV, State Rail NSW, AMP, and the federal public services. (Do imports cost jobs: What's wrong with fair trade?) Compared to this, the total number of people employed in sector of textiles, clothing and footwear manufacture in Australia has been 80.2 thousand as per the figures available for 1998. (Manufacturing employment) The important areas of job loss have been in the manufacture of different products with low import threats, and where the imports come from high wage countries. The exception is in the case of textile, clothing and footwear -- TCF. In the case of these products, the imports are from medium wa
But this does not seem to have helped the workers as in one case, the workers sacked by National Textiles on January 21st are still on a 24 hour picket outside their factory and that is located about 170 kilometers north of Sydney. There are 342 workers and the claimed dues are on account of entitlements which are not paid consisting of leave on a yearly basis, sick leave, long service, redundancy payments and superannuation. (Sacked Australian textile workers picket for $11 million in unpaid entitlements) Regarding TCF, the economists at Reserve Bank have stated that about one third of the jobs lost in clothing are due to low wages and that is a total of 28,000 jobs. For footwear this amounts to 6,000 jobs lost. Well this seems to support that fair trade is the main reason for the lost jobs but they have also stated "Despite this large import effect, productivity improvements accounted for about two-thirds of the fall in employment in this sector" (Do imports cost jobs: What's wrong with fair trade?) To some extent the mismatching of the Australian government timing of cutting the protection of the textile, clothing and footwear sector with the change of the global TCF industry to get into a new form of organization, the commodity chain is also responsible. Due to this change, some Australian TCF manufacturers could not continue business any longer, while the others followed a number of strategies to remain in business, and these including a change of the labor required. This has led to losses in jobs determined by age, gender and ethnicity in the skilled and semi-skilled levels of production. This has been replaced by jobs in design, marketing and management. The jobs in the factories of Australia have to the Pacific Rim. (Trade and inequality: Australia's textile, clothing, and footwear industries, 1986-1996) According to a study done by ABS in June 2002, there were 290, 000 employees hired through the employment agencies at that time. This is a 3.1 percent share of the total employment market. According to them the organizations which had a union with a closed shop had the least chance of using a labor hire agency. This is thus a limiting factor on labor hire agencies. The positive factor for a labor hire agency is an organization with an employee relations manager. These managers are knowledgeable about the different sources from where they can get labor, as also the different types of labor with them. They are more likely to use the agencies when appropriate. Yet organizations hire labor sparingly and along with other flexible forms of labor like part-time labor and casual labor. (The Growth of Labor Hire Employment in Australia) It is wrong to expect the free traders or the fair traders to really have
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1843
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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