A multimillionaire Australian property developer who suggested the country increase the unemployment rate by 40% to 50% to create more productive workers has drawn a fierce reaction from the US democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Reminder that major CEOs have skyrocketed their own pay so much that the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is now at some of the highest levels *ever* recorded,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter/X, after a video of Tim Gurner’s comments were circulated online.
Gurner, the founder of Australian company Gurner Group, told a property summit on Tuesday that “we need to see pain in the economy”.
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said.
“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’ve got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy.
“We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40, 50 per cent.”
Gurner, whose company holds a portfolio reportedly worth more than $9.5bn (US$6.09bn), told the Australian Financial Review’s property summit that “people decided they didn’t really want to work so much any more” during the height of the pandemic, and claimed this caused a “massive issue” for productivity.
“Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. You know, they have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change,” he said.
Gurner also said governments globally were attempting to increase unemployment to get back to “some sort of normality”.
“There is definitely massive layoffs going [on] and people might not be talking about it, but people are definitely 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.”
In July, Australia’s unemployment rate was at 3.7% . Last month, Deloitte Access Economics employment forecasted the rate to increase to 4.5% by mid next year due to weaker household consumption.
It came after the incoming Reserve Bank governor, Michele Bullock, made headlines in June when she suggested the jobless rate would have to rise to 4.5% to tame inflation, implying about 140,000 more people would be out of work.
Gurner’s speech has drawn fierce reaction in Australia, with the Greens MP Stephen Bates weighing in with a similar reminder to Ocasio-Cortez.
“Just a reminder corporate profits and CEO pay are at historic highs,” he wrote. “Workers deserve a fairer slice of the pie.”
The Labor MP Jerome Laxale wrote the comments were what you’d “associate with a cartoon supervillain, not the ceo of a company in 2023”.
“Mr Gurner should spend more time running his company, instead of using a public forum to regurgitate his dastardly economic theories,” Laxale wrote.
It’s not the first time Gurner’s comments have come under fire. In 2017, Gurner made comments in an interview with 60 Minutes that implied young Australians can’t afford to buy property because they’re wasting money on avocado on toast and overpriced coffee.
When he was asked during the interview if he believes young people will never own a home, he responded: “Absolutely, when you’re spending $40 a day on smashed avocados and coffees and not working. Of course.”
The headline of this article was amended on 13 September 2023 to clarify that Tim Gurner’s comments related to a 40% to 50% rise in the unemployment rate, not a doubling.
