‘ETS means 23,500 mining jobs will go.’ So screamed the headlines.
And so said the Minerals Council of Australia. They commissioned research which ‘proved’ that Kevin Rudd’s pathetic 5 percent Greenhouse Gas Emissions reduction target by 2020 would see almost 24,000 miners lose their jobs.
In a planned and democratic society, moving 2500 workers a year away from mining into green jobs to help save the planet wouldn’t be a problem. Evidently under capitalism it is the end of the world as we know it.
The Minerals Council has a vested interest in scaremongering about Labor’s limp lettuce Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. So it has trumpeted job losses.
As if the bosses who run mining companies give a toss about jobs. Remember, BHP and Rio Tinto between them have sacked 5000 workers since the Great Recession began. What they do care about is money – lots of it.
The Mineral Council’s half-truths are aimed at convincing the Government to keep its pathetic 5 percent target and to give their members more taxpayer funds as ‘compensation’ for the Emissions Trading Scheme.
They are already going to receive billions. They want to protect their profitable niche dealing in death and to trouser extra billions from us.
But wait, there’s more. The Minerals Council has been too clever by half.
There are no job losses. Actually, even on their own study, employment in the mining industry will double over the next decade.
Here is what Tony Maher, head of the Mining and Energy section of the relevant union, the CFMEU, tells his members when they ring up about the scaremongering from the Minerals Council:
I tell them the truth. The truth is that the Council’s own predictions are that they’ll be more than doubling employment. So, at the moment they’re just campaigning for more government handouts and the sooner they stop that … the better.
We can’t trust the bosses and their crude climate change denialists in the media.
We can build green jobs, as Jonathan Neale argues in ‘Create climate change jobs and save the planet’ on this site.
And as the Mineral Council’s own figures show, we can increase the reduction target markedly with little effect on employment.
But that might run up against the stupid way we currently organise society around profit. The bosses and their system are about profit, not people.
Only overthrowing the profit system can guarantee that humanity is in a position to meet the real threat of anthropogenic global warming.