The Living Wage

13 The belated return of an Australian living wage

Reworking ‘a fair go’ for the 21st century

Joshua Healy, Andreas Pekarek, and Ray Fells

Introduction

Australia was a forerunner in instituting a living wage. In 1907, it established a basic wage that was to enable a working man and his family to live in ‘frugal comfort’. This basic wage underpinned Australia’s distinctive system of compulsory arbitration, which served the country well for much of the twentieth century, delivering broadly based real wage growth and coordinated responses to economic downturns. In the 1980s, however, as pressure mounted to liberalize Australia’s protected economy and ‘free up’ its labour market, support for arbitration waned. With encouragement from unions ...