The Short Goodbye

THE SHORT GOODBYE: A Skewed History of the Last Boom and the Next Bust

By ELISABETH WYNHAUSEN

Melbourne University Publishing, 2011, 219 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

From writing stories about workers being sacked during the 2009 Global Financial Crisis, Elisabeth Wynhausen, a journalist at Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, got a taste of the real thing when she was handed a pink slip of her own. When she lost her job, 20,000 a day were losing theirs in the US and 1,000 a day in Australia. She also lost $68,000 from her pension fund which, at age 62, scuttled her retirement plans just as the plummeting stock market indices and shonky fund managers were burning through the retirement dreams of tens of thousands.

The Short Goodbyeis Wynhausen’s able attempt to report the reality of the global economic meltdown, in the real economy inhabited by most of us, and the plush niche of the financial sector where the authors of economic woe were busily engaged blowing debt bubbles, pumping trillions of dollars of other people’s money into exotic and impenetrable financial instruments, but with the presence of mind to insulate themselves with fat bonuses against the inevitable explosion of toxic debt.

So, whilst 77,000 manufacturing workers in Australia were sacked in a year, nine big Wall Street banks in the US handed out $33 billion in bonuses after being bailed out with $175 billion of workers’ taxes. Whilst 35% of Australian workers who were‘restructured’ out of one job to another in 2009 had their pay cut, 29% had their hours cut and 33% lost entitlement to paid leave, remuneration went up by 19% for the 200 top companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.

The recession provided a welcome excuse for employers to sack the most experienced workers and those most likely to demand decent wages and overheads like occupational health and safety. Employers could now impose their holy grail of workplace ‘flexibility’, using labour hire firms, outsourcing and replacing full-time jobs with part-time jobs.

Whilst part-time jobs acted as a shock absorber to keep the official unemployment rate down in Australia, the reality of under-employment and unemployment was grim for those whose fate these were, including Wynhausen who bitterly sampled her new world of Centrelink and the job agencies, “places that seethed with human misery”, arcane rules and futile training courses.

As starry-eyed economists, journalists, business leaders and politicians, who had never read their Marx, celebrated the end of boom and bust before the latest bust, they also, says Wynhausen, ranted about “the threat union power posed to the economy”, keeping up the vitriol as they hypocritically talked austerity after massive public bailouts “even after the crisis proved the threat came from above not below”.

Wynhausen’s pink slip, in retrospect, is not surprising. She had always sided with the have-nots and the latest capitalist crisis allowed News Limited to revoke the license of their ‘bleeding heart liberal’ and get on with the job of turning the GFC into a footnote, cultivating their senior executive bonuses and shifting the costs of capitalism onto the working class.