Australian CEO of the Gurner Group, a real estate firm, called for governments to cause "pain in the economy" to remind workers that "they work for the employer, not the other way around."
I think the problem that we've had is that we've, you know, we have… People decided they didn't really want to work so much anymore through Covid, and that has had a massive issue on productivity. You know, tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. You know, they have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.
We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 per cent 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.
I mean, there is a… there's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy. Which is what the whole global… you know, the world is trying to do. The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment to get that to some sort of normality.
It is stunning to hear someone say out loud that world governments should institute policies to hurt their economies, and deliberately throw families into economic catastrophe, in order to please one side of the employment-contract relationship.
But throwing people into unemployment seems to be the favorite policy too of the most influential economists. Last summer, former Democratic treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that the U.S. must create unemployment, putting 10 million people out of work, in order to tame inflation. (He was wrong. Inflation has gone down without an increase in unemployment.)
