At the cutting edge: the political economy of wage suppression in the Australian meat industry

Abstract

Once a well remunerated and respected trade, processing animals for meat now attracts low wages and is performed by those on the margins of Australian society. The position of meat workers sits in stark contrast with the industry's expansion - exports have increased with growing international demand and Australians are amongst the highest consumers globally. This thesis identifies and explains the drivers of the devaluation of factory workers in the red meat and poultry processing industries since the mid-1980s. Employing a socio-economic perspective on labour markets and a classical Marxist theory of competition, I evaluate meat workers’ bargaining power in the context of industry development and changing labour processes. I show that wage suppression in the meat industry is the result of four interrelated processes that in turn originate in competition between capitals, between capital and labour, and between workers. First is the concentration of capital amidst rising international competition, processes that involved both traditional price wars and the appropriation of ground rent. Second is an increasing employer militancy amidst favourable microeconomic reform. Through a novel analysis of enterprise agreement data, I show that below-average wage increases were a central component of the new industrial settlement from 1991 onwards. Third is the growing reliance on migrant labour holding temporary work visas, workers exposed to wage theft and who were employed to bypass union-negotiated wages. The fourth factor is increasing employer control over the labour process, the culmination of decades of technological change in the industry and the increasing take up of vertically integrated supply chains. Workers face considerable challenges in this new context, prompting necessary reflection on the valuation of labour within capitalist competition.