(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

The sight of Scott Morrison urgently convening a meeting with major industry groups last week to address supply chain problems caused by worker shortages was one of the more predictable policy failures of recent years.

With shelves already bare of essentials like meat and toilet paper across the country, it was only now, well into the reopening phase of the economy, that it occurred to the prime minister that large numbers of infections — the consequence everyone knew would result from reopening — would pose workforce issues at a time when a number of industries were already complaining about existing employee shortages.

Supply chains have been the subject of extensive focus from the outset of the pandemic, and increasingly in 2021 as government-fuelled demand met undersupply resulting from damaged international logistics systems, particularly around shipping.

After rising more than fivefold from mid-2020, freight container rates fell back a little in late 2021 but have risen again recently; extensive lockdowns in China are unlikely to help push costs back down to 2020 levels any time soon — although China has managed to rack up record exports for more than a year, so the problems haven’t exactly been crippling.

But Australia’s supply chain problems have been due primarily to a failure to understand the continuing importance of labour in their effective functioning, despite the growing sophistication and technology of delivery and storage systems.

And as recent years have demonstrated, Australian policymakers, and most of the business community, have little interest in workers — seeing them primarily as just another cost to be minimised by any means possible. Nothing better demonstrates this mindset better than an op-ed in The Australian Financial Review last week from two right-wing industrial relations lawyers, including a former Christian Porter adviser and Coalition Fair Work Commission appointee, that argued union militancy was a serious threat to economic recovery, that some unions were “waging war”, and that employers need to push unions out of the bargaining process with workers.

This is at a time when wages growth, at 2.4% for the private sector, is well below inflation, and days lost to industrial disputes per thousand employees in 2021 is set to be the second lowest on record after 2020. Some “militancy”.

One of the sectors the two authors argued was beset by militant unions was mining, where wages growth in the September 2021 quarter was the lowest of any industry. The other sector, transport, had wages growth that was equal fourth out of all industries — and right on the average for the entire private sector.

The persistence of fantasies about militant unions driving up costs isn’t confined to right-wing lawyers. The Coalition has, as we’ve recounted so often, presided over nearly a decade of wage stagnation, and at the moment is forecasting that workers will continue to endure real wage falls. Its industrial relations policy is to open Australia’s borders to as many temporary workers as is needed to drive down wages growth, to oppose or undermine minimum wage rises and support penalty rate cuts, and to encourage precarity of work through the gig economy and greater casualisation.

Even when confronted with stark evidence of the failure of its industrial relations policies in key sectors like aged care, the Coalition has done nothing: the application to significantly increase wages for aged care workers — a sector where crippling workforce shortages are inflicting untold misery on seniors throughout Australia — remains mired in the Fair Work Commission, with no support or urgency from the Morrison government, and no allocated funding to pay for it via grants to aged care providers.

What happens when you aim to create a workforce with minimal union involvement, poor wages growth, competition from temporary foreign workers and an emphasis on increasing precarity and casualisation? You produce a more fragile workforce, one more susceptible to disruption, and less invested in the success of the industry it serves.

Follow that up with a lack of COVID testing and a lack of planning for higher levels of infection, and you get broken supply chains, empty shelves and aged care residents locked in their rooms.

It’s a costly failure for business as well. Today, major retailer Wesfarmers is lamenting how Omicron is affecting the availability of “team members”, aka employees, forcing reductions in opening hours and reducing productivity: “These issues are expected to persist while COVID-19 cases and the number of team members requiring to isolate remain elevated.”

Morrison pulling yet more stunts like crisis meetings with industry will do nothing to help a damaged workforce. That starts with seeing workers as more than just another cost centre.