GREEN JOBS FOR A GREENER HUNTER - WHAT ARE THE PROSPECTS ?

It was a great forum! There is a future for the City beyond the coalface.

Two of the speakers were Bill Mitchell Professor of Economics, and the Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE) at the University of Newcastle and Geoff Evans of the School of Environmental and Life Sciences in the Faculty of Science and Information Technology at the University of Newcastle

They talked about the recently published report, commissioned by Greenpeace, “A Just Transition to a Renewable Energy Economy in the Hunter Region”

A just transition from a coal economy could create thousands of new secure, well paid jobs in research, design, manufacturing, installation and maintenance.

The report was researched and modelled under stringent economic arguments and dispels the scare mongering that there are no employment options if there is no coal. Well I for one will be strongly advocating that the sooner we get on with accepting the inevitable demise of the coal industry the better position we will be in to capitalilise on a budding boom renewable industry.

Another inspiring speaker was Mark Fogarty a former director of the NSW Sustainable Energy Authority (SEDA) and currently a director of CBD Energy, a company that looks to implementing solar/thermal power in the Hunter. He talked of the need for certainty in policies and how they can drive change such as the feed in tariff in Germany He spoke of how progressive policy platforms can ensure security and investment. He effused of the great economic opportunity that is available as long as there is stability and longevity of policy. It was comforting to know that Greens policies can fit the bill.

Want a job?

When you get a group of Greens together you’re guaranteed the conversation will be interesting. The Hunter Regional Greens have been gathering every month to hear guest speakers on all sorts of topics. This Sunday we heard from Victor Quirk from the Centre of Full Employment & Equity.

It’s great when you hear about different ways of doing things that can work. Like giving people work, keeping their job and social skills in tact whilst transitioning between jobs. How do you get rid of a skills shortage… by training people to have skills, it seems so simple. How do you to keep developing a society that has people fully employed assisting communities to develop…you identify the jobs in the community and find people for them.

The Cof FEE approach is about giving people a Job Guarantee of the minimum wage which the Federal Government pays for. It’s so easy because in Australia we have functional finance. That is wehave a government who can create and issue money, that means the Australian government has the ability to make as much money as they want, the Reserve bank gets a credit and then it’s there.

What a Job Guarantee guarantees is that people will have a real job, not stigma. They will have a real wage not poverty and they will have meaningful community work as valuable members of their community.

Around about 1974 was the abandonment of full employment as a government policy. The Government services and utility providers who were the main providers of apprenticeships decided the private sector would pick up the skills development of the workforce.

Unfortunately it didn’t happen, what did happen was a deepening and broadening precariousness of employment, systematic disempowerment of the labour market, loss of the public sector as a net trainer of skilled workers, and coercive management of underutilised labour supply…some call it WorkChoices

The other really interesting thing Victor talked about was the “Record jobs growth” we’ve been experiencing as Australia has become one of the most casualised workforces in the OECD.
What happens when you have the casualisation of jobs and count people not hours of employment it leads to over estimating number of people in work and does not reflect how much work is being done or people being underemployed. The Government counts 1 hour of work a week as employed. Cof FEE have come up with a new measure which better reflects actual unemployment /underemployment, currently it is 9.2%.

Victor had a lot to say and it certainly resonated with the Greens employment policy, both of which are on the think links.