On Friday, September 2, the ABC midday news reported that 9,000 jobs had been lost in recent weeks, many of them in manufacturing. It capped off a series of disastrous retrenchment announcements by major Australian companies, including the 1,400 jobs lost in BlueScope Steel.
Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, claimed manufacturing had entered a “major crisis”. He and others commenting in the media claimed that cheap imports from China and the marked …
