The Federal Government has nominated reducing unemployment and helping people balance their work and family responsibilities as policy priorities. The Union Movement wants all workers to be guaranteed a `living wage'. Why doesn't the Government kill these three birds with one stone? Our unemployment problem is due to both a scarcity of jobs and a mismatch between the skills in demand and the skills on offer. Improved training opportunities have been used to address the …showed first 75 words of 1209 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1209 total…often hear the mantra that there are no easy solutions to the problem of unemployment. Perhaps solutions are easy to cook up, just hard to swallow. Unemployment is still over 8% after a record stretch of economic growth. Can we continue to bear the costs of such a high `natural' rate of joblessness? Work-sharing gives everyone a stake in sustainable economic growth. This is the sort of thing for which an explicit mandate should be sought.