Economics for Unionists

About

Enhance your understanding of key economic concepts and how they shape work, wages and inequality. This course explores how capitalism operates, how economic ideas influence policy, and how these dynamics impact workers and unions.

Participants will examine labour markets, productivity, finance, globalisation and environmental challenges, building the knowledge and confidence to analyse economic arguments and advocate for industrial reform and the protection of workers’ rights.

This course includes a follow-up workshop to support participants to apply their learning in practice.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Explain key economic concepts and how the economy is measured
• Describe how capitalism operates and how economic theory interprets it
• Analyse the relationship between workers, employers and labour markets
• Interpret how productivity, profits and wages are connected
• The role of finance in shaping the economy, including financialisation
• Assess the relationship between economic activity and environmental sustainability
• Explain key drivers of inequality and global economic trends
• Identify how government policy influences economic outcomes, including taxation, spending and redistribution
• Apply economic thinking to workplace and organising issues

Content

Participants will engage with the following themes:

Economics and the story of the economy

• Key economic terms
• What is the economy?
• Measuring the economy

What is capitalism? And what does economics say about it?

• Short histories of capitalism and economics
• How capitalism works
• The tools and goals of neoliberalism

Work, workers and bosses

• Why labour is different
• Forms of work under capitalism
• The asymmetry of the employment relationship

Productivity, profits and wages

• Key issues in productivity
• How economics can obscure or mask underlying realities
• Influences on wages

Finance: the real economy and the paper economy

• Money and banking
• Explain the role of finance in shaping the economy, including financialisation
• Causes of the global financial crisis

The economy and the environment

• Climate change
• Jobs, sustainability and growth
• Markets and the environment

Inequality and the global economy

• Globalisation: when, how and why
• Comparative advantage and real-world outcomes
• Measuring and understanding inequality

Government, the economy and the future

• How government supports business
• Redistribution of income and wealth
• Deficits, debt and taxation

Delivery Style

This course combines presentations from our expert facilitators along with discussion and group work to enable practical application to the workplace.

Presenters

Prerequisite

None

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