How updated work laws will help Australians survive ‘greedflation’

CEOs earn 100 times the average Australian worker.  

Here’s another way to put it –  most of us would take 2,332 years to earn the same amount as the highest paid CEO. We may as well live on different planets.  

To add salt to the wound, CEO salaries have been on the rise while wage growth has flatlined. Inflation is at a 40 year high and yet corporate profits are at a 50 year high – this suggests that maybe something more sinister is the cause of the cost-of-living crisis. 

There’s a word for it: greedflation – and it describes when mega corporations use their costs as an excuse to put up prices, placing the extra burden onto the customer instead of absorbing it themselves. The resulting corporate profits are the main contributor to inflation.  

These major corporations would like to have us believe that wage increases are the cause of rising costs of living – but that is simply not true. In fact, Australian wages are growing at less than half the pace of inflation.

It’s not coincidental that engorged CEO wages and exponential corporate profits have aligned with the hardest few years for Australians Corporations take advantage of crisis situations – such as pandemic and war – to increase profit. This is the black heart of greedflation:  opportunistic at best and evil at worst.  

Take for example Visa and Mastercard, who increased their transaction fees despite not having any material costs caused by supply chains to justify it.  

Or the food giants making more money than ever while the number of Australians skipping meals grows as they try to keep up with hiked grocery prices.  

It is not wages that cause inflation: it is CEO greed.

What can we do about it?

The Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill is a proposed set of laws that will help ease the cost-of-living crisis. 

Some major features of the bill are set to change the landscape of work for everyday people in a massive way – through ensuring job security, tackling wage theft, and removing red tape to open up multi-employer bargaining.  

The effects of this bill could lead to $1,500 in wage increases, help close the gender pay gap, and most importantly, give the power back to workers. 

While the rest of us turn off lights as we walk out of rooms, and leave items behind at the check-out, CEO salaries are stratospheric and corporations are raking in more money than ever.   

The Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill will help even out the landscape – but time is of the essence. Write to your senator today to tell them that Australians need a pay rise to help us survive greedflation. It’s only fair.