On September 12, 2023, Tim Gurner, the owner of Gurner Group, addressed a crowd at the Australian Financial Review’s Property Summit:
I think the problem that we’ve had is that people decided they didn’t really want to work so much any more through COVID and that has had a massive issue on productivity… 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.
…
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. 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 gotta kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy, which is what the whole global – the world is trying to do. The government around the world are trying to increase unemployment to get that to some sort of normality and we’re seeing it.
I think every employer now is seeing it. I mean there is definitively massive layoff going off. People might not be talking about it but people are definitively laying people off and we’re starting to see less arrogance in the employment market and that has to continue because that will cascade across the cost balance.”
Mr. Gurner was on the cover of Forbes magazine (Australia) Nov/Dec 2022 and has a net work of ~$1 billion, so this is not some nobody talking. This is an elite member of society speaking to a crowd of other elites and so we need to pay attention.
But here’s the connection that I need you to make. When Gurner says that we need to hurt the economy and that governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, he’s absolutely correct.
Do you remember when the US Federal Reserve Chairman said that exact same thing a year before? When the Fed said that we need to “get wages down” and “have unemployment rise”?
Please read: The US Federal Reserve and Class Warfare
In a press conference on May 4, 2022, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve said his goal is “to get wages down” because workers have too much power in the labor market!
Here’s the transcript published by the Wall Street Journal.
Here’s are some excerpts:
Employers are having difficulties filling job openings, and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years, …
Implications for inflation. Really the wages matter a fair amount for companies, particularly in the service sector. Wages are running high, the highest they’ve run in quite some time.
…
So I guess I would say it this way. It’s—there’s a path. There’s a path by which we would be able to have demand moderate in the labor market and have—therefore have vacancies come down without unemployment going up, because vacancies are at such an extraordinarily high level. There are 1.9 vacancies for every unemployed person; 11½ million vacancies, 6 million unemployed people.
…
So in principle, it seems as though, by moderating demand, we could see vacancies come down, and as a result—and they could come down fairly significantly and I think put supply and demand at least closer together than they are, and that that would give us a chance to have lower — to get inflation — to get wages down and then get inflation down without having to slow the economy and have a recession and have unemployment rise materially. So there’s a path to that.
This is, simply put, another public declaration of class warfare!
No conspiracy theories necessary. The ruling elite have always been very honest about their intentions.
Thanks for reading,
Notes:
Powell was first appointed Fed chair by Donald Trump in 2018. On May 23, 2022, he started his second four-year term, after being re-nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed in a landslide bipartisan Senate vote of 80-19.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-fed-chief-powells-postmeeting-press-conference-11651696613